In a leaked memo last month, Keir Starmer told Ministers not to be “overly deferential” to devolved governments. He warned it “almost inevitably creates political challenges or missed positive opportunities.”

Polls show that he’ll have both in spades come devolved elections in Scotland and Wales on May 7th.

The SNP is projected to win an outright majority at Holyrood. Plaid Cymru roundly defeated both Labour and Reform UK in the Caerphilly by-election last October, and is now set to end Labour’s enduring rule over the Senedd. And Sinn Féin already leads Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive.

For the first time in the history of devolution, the three devolved nations are on course to be led by parties whose stated long-term aim is to leave the United Kingdom. And this doesn’t seem to be a repeat of 2014 black-and-white referendum politics. The nationalist parties are bound by a deep shared frustration with the Starmer Government and with Westminster more broadly. It goes beyond gung-ho independence activism and into the realm of plain old discontent.

The three parties are coordinating on policy - from public spending and taxation to welfare and EU relations. At the least, they’re certainly set to give the embattled Starmer Government a historic headache.

But perhaps that Starmer memo shines a light - at least in part - on what’s happening here. The PM wrote that he wanted his Government to be “confident in our ability to deliver directly in those nations, including through direct spending, even when devolved governments may oppose this.”

Last winter, Starmer used legislation designed by Boris Johnson specifically to thwart devolution (the Internal Markets Act) in order to fund the Pride in Place scheme in Wales, bypassing the devolved government entirely. Understandably, it severely irked backbench Labour members of the Senedd who were set to hold their ground against a rising Plaid Cymru.

In a letter to Starmer in December, eleven backbench Labour MSs called it a “constitutional outrage.” Welsh Labour, they added, had “raised expectations” about further devolution, and accused the Government of “not only not progressing these but rolling back the existing devolution settlement.”

Scotland has seen the same pattern, just less neatly packaged into a single row. Since Brexit, Westminster has increasingly funded projects directly through levelling up and Shared Prosperity schemes, bypassing Holyrood and dealing instead with councils and local bodies. Ministers defend it as “delivering for Scotland”. But the SNP - like lots of voters in Scotland - see it as proof that devolved power exists only at London’s discretion.

The essence of this issue is that successive governments have failed to take devolution seriously. To often in Westminster it is viewed more as a pesky administrative exercise than a serious democratic project. Voters, who do genuinely care about regional autonomy from Westminster, can clearly sniff that out - and it’s not like Starmer’s made a particularly compelling or even coherent case for his philosophy on these matters.

But to focus all of this on devolution squabbles alone is to ignore the even bigger elephant in the room. Britain’s two-party political system has all but imploded. The pendulum swing between Conservative and Labour - that reliable alternation which defined the past century - does seem to be at its end. This is what comes next.

Things have already been getting weird, right? Reform UK rose from the fringes to the top of the polls, and more recently we’ve seen Zack Polanski’s newly revitalised Green Party come crashing out of the gate to win the Gorton and Denton by-election in a stunning upset. We’re in utterly uncharted waters now, but the immediate results are predictable.

People across the political spectrum are searching for alternatives. They still don’t trust the Conservatives, and they don’t trust Starmer’s Labour either. Plaid, the SNP, and Sinn Féin are offering up their pitches. You’ll notice that much of their rhetoric today has far more to do with the cost of living and specific local issues than loud calls for “independence now!”

Under the Senedd’s new - highly proportional - electoral system, the Greens and of course Reform are also expected to be competitive, with Polanski’s party set to be the “kingmakers” - potentially power-sharing with the Welsh nationalists at Plaid.

I’d put it this way: there’s long been an inverse relationship between the level of shambles in Westminster and the popularity of nationalist parties. In the eyes of many voters, they stand apart from Britain’s political establishment - the ultimate protest vote, with independence as the ultimate leverage over a distant centre.

And for that reason, I’m not convinced we are truly headed for a Disunited Kingdom should Plaid and the SNP win in May. What we are headed for is a verdict - on Westminster, on Starmer’s Labour, on Reform UK, and on a creaking political settlement that’s on its way out the door.

The politically adept answer to this moment isn’t to centralise harder or to shout louder about the Union or fear-monger about a break-up. It’s to make this union something worth being part of, something democratic and truly devolved. Something that treats its constituent nations as worthy of sharing power with, not as subjects to be controlled from on high.

The importance of Welsh and Scottish elections this May, Starmer wrote to Ministers, “cannot be underestimated.” He’s right. But probably not for the reasons that he thinks.

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The big brains at Reform UK seem to believe they’ve found their lethal attack line ahead of local elections next month. They’re running against the “Boriswave”, what Zia Yusuf calls “a legacy of Tory incompetence and Labour’s open border ideology.”

And they’ve produced a remarkably dodgy report to back it all up, which astoundingly claims that settled migrants who arrived between Jan 2021 and June 2024 will cost the UK a whopping £622bn by 2085, or roughly £20k per household.

The ‘Boriswave,’ for those fortunate enough to be unaware, describes a period of relatively liberal migration policy under Boris Johnson. The term was originally concocted by terminally online trolls in the sordid depths of Elon Musk’s ‘X.’ Naturally, it’s now a part of mainstream public discourse.

Net migration was 254,000 in 2021, 634,000 in 2022, and rose to a peak of 906,000 in 2023. By 2025 that had reduced by nearly 80% to about 204,000. It essentially describes a short-lived, though certainly significant, post-Brexit wave of migrants which were of course less likely to be white Europeans.

Nigel Farage took out an op-ed in the Telegraph on Tuesday to lament our collective doom (unless you vote for him) and the usual suspects like GB News and The Daily Mail ran the shocking figures unchallenged in scary bold letterhead.

So I’ve taken a look at their so-called report, and I’ll tell you this:

• The analysis here is completely unserious - it should have been cordoned off on ‘X’

• This entire thing is premised on a complete rewriting of the actual history of the Boris Johnson era, not to mention the fact that its accusations implicate recent converts to Reform UK.

• I think we all strongly suspect what this is actually about.

Bad Maths

If I promise to give you £1,000 in 50 years’ time, is that worth £1,000 to you today? Anything could happen by then. At the very least, inflation will have taken its toll. That’s why governments and economists say no. They use what’s called a ‘discount rate’ - a formula that reduces future values down to what they think they’re worth today.

Reform UK, however, isn’t going to let a pesky thing like basic financial forecasting get in the way of a useful disinformation campaign. They admit their £622bn figure is not ‘discounted’ - and that applying standard Treasury discounting brings it down to £154bn. Looking more manageable already.

£154bn still seems high, though, right? But that’s because the methodology problems run much deeper. Reform rely completely on their own fantastical assumptions about migrant earnings, rather than real-world data - which leads them to underestimate how much migrants actually contribute in taxes. It renders this whole exercise basically akin to guesswork.

The Government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) recently did similar research with real data from HMRC (which was also surely available to Reform). They produced a much more balanced report showing that skilled workers on visas who entered in 2022 and 23 are estimated to contribute a net £47bn over their lifetimes, and that while others may cost the UK treasury in the long term, there are “positive spillover effects.”

You’ll not get acknowledgement from Reform that a low-income migrant may be performing an essential social care role or working for low pay in our NHS. The point here is to produce a big scary number that makes you feel poorer and then angrier.

History Rewritten

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Why did this “Boriswave” actually happen? Where were the True Patriots™ when this supposed open door policy was randomly enacted?

Britain was reeling from the twin shocks of a no-deal Brexit and a global pandemic in 2021. Headlines were apocalyptic, warning of food shortages and shortfalls in staff in various industries. Who was going to save our Christmas turkey and sprouts? Johnson lowered the threshold for non-EU visa applicants to get supply chains moving again.

Then of course there were the geopolitical shocks - most notably Putin invading Ukraine in 2022. In a broadly popular move, Johnson’s Britain agreed to resettle Ukrainians displaced by the invading Russian army.

Farage and his top brass (several of whom were members of Conservative administrations in power when this all happened) seem to be caught in a feverous amnesia. Have they just plucked the term ‘Boriswave’ from an online troll pit and run with it, any semblance of self-awareness be damned?

Maybe there’s a deeper reason.

The Laundromat

Let's call this what it is. "Boriswave" is a term minted by Elon’s online Nazis to spread demographic panic. These are people who hold a fundamental belief that different cultures and ethnicities cannot (and should not) co-exist. Enoch Powell would find many of them excessive and uncouth.

And that is where parties like Reform UK come in. Their role is to channel that online vitriol into a relatively polished and politically presentable package. To concoct scary specious scenarios and then jump and shout to make ordinary people afraid.

It’s revealing that Reform politicians are currently being berated on ‘X’ for putting up “Boriswaver”(see: non-white) candidates in the upcoming local elections. And that the term is particularly popular among supporters of Rupert Lowe’s offshoot Restore Britain party, now running a zombie campaign to the right of Reform UK.

So no, this isn't a serious report. It's more of a laundering operation. It takes filthy ideas that even hard-nosed xenophobes are squeamish about expressing and coats them with just enough sugar to make them palatable. We see it for what it is. And we are calling it out. It is a shame that more of our friends in the mainstream media will not do the same.

Viktor Orbán conceded defeat this evening (Sunday), after sixteen years, after four consecutive supermajorities, after rewriting the constitution and redrawing the maps and packing the courts and calling all of it democracy. Péter Magyar - who broke with Fidesz in 2024 and built an opposition in under two years from inside Orbán’s own political network - is on course for 137 seats to Orbán’s 55, with around two-thirds of ballots counted. In one of Orbán’s final messages to his supporters, he said: “We will not surrender. Never, never, never.” Then he did.

Remember, JD Vance was in Budapest last week. He stood in front of a crowd of Fidesz supporters and called Orbán wise and smart and a model for Europe. Trump phoned into the rally and told the crowd Orbán was a fantastic man. But that message seems not to have had the desired effect on Hungary’s voters. 77% of them voted - a record since the end of communism, 876,000 more voters than in 2022. Analysts suggest the Trump/Vance intervention may have actively accelerated Magyar’s win rather than helping Orbán. But the endorsement was unambiguous, and it’s on the record. We should assume this is the new normal. Trump’s administration will go out of their way to help political allies - blatantly, forcefully and without any regard to diplomatic convention.

Winning politicians often include the line “The real work starts now” in their first major address to the people. For Magyar, this will be particularly true. He is on course to win a two-thirds supermajority - or close to it, pending final results. He needs it. Not to govern, but to begin the work of rebuilding Hungary’s hollowed-out democratic institutions.

A simple majority would not be enough to reverse what Orbán built. Fidesz won four consecutive elections, several of them on minority vote shares, because the rules were set by Fidesz. Districts were drawn to maximise Fidesz seats. State broadcasters were converted into campaign infrastructure. Advertising revenue was redirected toward loyalist media and weaponised as a tax instrument against the rest. Courts were packed. A new constitution was written. Ostensibly, every formal feature of democracy remained throughout - elections, courts, a nominally free press - but each was methodically drained of any real function.

Magyar spent the campaign telling Hungarians the country faced choices. East or West. Propaganda or honest public debate. Corruption or clean public life. He was right about the choices. He knows exactly which levers were pulled, because he spent years inside the machine that pulled them. That knowledge will matter when the legal and institutional unwinding begins, and he will need to hold on to it, for this work will take a long time. Sixteen years of deliberate capture cannot be reversed in an afternoon, even with a supermajority and the best intentions.

Some things will move quicker than others. The EU will move now on frozen funds and the €90 billion Ukraine loan that Orbán kept blocking. The Kremlin loses its most useful veto player inside the bloc. These are significant consequences. But it is in those slower-tempo tasks that our most instructive lesson lies.

The democratic situation in Britain is not as bad as the one in Hungary. Our institutions have not been captured. Our courts have not been packed. Our electoral maps have not been redrawn by a governing party to entrench its own power.

But the structural vulnerabilities are not hypothetical. FPTP gave Labour 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote last year. That same arithmetic could deliver unassailable power to any party achieving similar vote concentration in 2029, including Reform UK. Campaign finance enforcement is weak enough that money moves through our politics without serious scrutiny. The institutions that would need to resist a consolidation attempt are already under sustained rhetorical attack from the political movement that would benefit most from undermining them. And Farage has said more than once that Hungary provides a useful model for the future he sees for Britain.

Magyar is inheriting a captured judiciary, politicised regulators, gerrymandered districts and entrenched patronage networks. Rebuilding what Orbán dismantled will take years, possibly a decade, even with a supermajority. We should not lose sight of that in the midst of the euphoria that will accompany Orbán’s defeat.

The old adage about prevention being better than cure applies here. It would have been easier for Hungary to defend, strengthen and renew its democracy in 2010 than it is today. The big question is whether the British people will take the lesson from Hungary or wait and have to learn it the hard way.

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The United States today looks increasingly like the opening pages of a ham-fisted dystopian novel. The President has rarely seemed more volatile (which is really saying something), and there’s no end in sight to the blatant corruption and the ideological crackdowns of MAGA’s fanatical kleptocracy.

But in the pocket universe of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York City, a subplot is unfolding to complement America’s tale of disruption and disorder. In the Big Apple, a different kind of political campaign won out against the odds last November. Mamdani just marked his first 100 days in office, his ambitious grassroots campaign now faced with the harsh machinery of New York City’s local government.

It certainly hasn’t all gone to plan. On the campaign trail, Mamdani emphasised the importance of a strong start, but budgetary constraints (a black hole left by the previous administration, familiar to us in Britain) have set him back significantly on his bold policy platform. New York City is still not affordable three months in, and Mamdani faces many roadblocks to implementing his core policies - free buses, freezing the rent, and universal childcare.

But it is revealing that Zohran Mamdani is currently the eighth most popular politician in the entire country, whereas the Democrats are suffering from their lowest approval rating on record - somehow trailing four points behind Trump’s Republicans.

So what can Mamdani’s first 100 days tell us about what voters actually want from politics now - and how hard it is to deliver it?

1. Politics Still Happens in the Real World

“New Yorkers deserve a mayor that they can see,” Mamdani told the camera in a viral video last June. “One that they can hear, that they can even yell at.” In that clip, the Mayor-to-be walked the entire 13 mile length of Manhattan island, a non-stop meet-and-greet with fans, critics, and oblivious bystanders alike. Last week, he did another long walk-and-talk to mark his first 100 days, embracing and chatting with his constituents.

While his campaign was lauded widely for its social media prowess, the content of those videos mattered. Where Trump will amass loads of views posting AI generated images of himself as a Jedi knight, Mamdani’s videos centre real people talking to their candidate about real (often quite local and niche) issues.

While you’ll see politicians like Trump and Farage have some success using the internet to amplify abstract national political narratives about immigration or cultural grievances, there’s something to be said for meeting people where they are. For reminding them that politics can start down their street instead of with a scroll of their phone. For being there for them to yell at you when you fail to deliver, instead of insulated and far removed.

2. Moral Clarity Cuts Through the Noise

Not unlike Sadiq Khan in London, Mamdani has faced a relentless barrage of vitriol from the right-wing press. His Muslim faith, his upbringing in Uganda, and his pro-Palestinian human rights position make him an obvious target. But despite the rogue’s gallery of influencers calling him a “terrorist” and an “Islamo-Marxist,” he continues to make a robust case for the benefits of multiculturalism and unity.

People see that and - even if they may disagree - have to respect it. Politics today is starved of conviction and moral clarity, so contorted by the whims of donors, consultants and lobbyists that it’s very hard to believe what anyone is saying. Refusing to yield to the powers that be is a sort of superpower.

When asked about Trump’s Iran War recently, Mamdani did not mince words: “We are spending tens of billions of dollars to kill people. Money that could be making life easier for working people.” You’d struggle to imagine most other American politicians saying that.

3. Hope Isn’t Cheap

Mamdani’s movement, at its core, is about hope. That multicultural democracy can win out over the xenophobes and the racists. That a new social and economic contract can help squeezed families pay their bills. That people can trust politics again.

But the harsh realities of the first hundred days have made clear that hope alone isn’t really enough. To survive contact with budgets, roadblocks, and the slow grind of government requires a great deal of graft and pragmatism.

The author Ta-Nehisi Coates observed recently that different kinds of communication come at different costs. Farage and Trump can “talk on the cheap,” as he puts it, throwing words out into the world and getting just enough back to build hollow and insincere movements.

But where shooting out a tweet is cheap, “it’s significantly more expensive - mostly in time - to cook dinner for somebody, to travel to a city to see somebody, to organise a group of people to see each other,” Coates writes. To build a movement in the real world.

Mamdani’s 13-mile walks, his unscripted encounters, his willingness to be yelled at - that is expensive work. It doesn’t go viral as easily as mass-produced AI slop. It doesn’t produce a quick return on investment. And after 100 days, it hasn’t yet delivered an affordable New York.

But Coates’ takeaway is that you get what you pay for. Cheap messages produce a cheap product - movements that evaporate upon contact with reality. The hard work of getting people together produces something slower, harder, and more durable: a reservoir of goodwill that might just survive the first 100 days, and the next 100 after that.

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You might have noticed that the official social media channels of the United States government are posting like deranged basement-dwelling teenagers.

It doesn’t exactly breed confidence – in the midst of a highly consequential war – to see Nintendo Wii animations spliced with footage of lethal drone strikes. To watch bizarre montages of Iron Man, Braveheart’s William Wallace, and Top Gun’s Maverick calling you to arms. Or to witness AI-generated images of Trump riding into battle on a gigantic lion.

And yet this is what passes for political communication in 2026. The toxic and unthinking meme culture that was once restricted to dark corners of the anonymous internet has come to take on a central role in American public life. The term ‘slopaganda’ is apt: this is high-volume, high-engagement garbage – and it serves a clear strategic purpose.

There’s an obvious temptation to dismiss it all as a product of red-pilled Gen Z staffers. Or to say that it’s just the latest in the torrent of right-wing disinformation across the past decade. And those are fair points. But these videos and images serve a greater purpose – they trivialise and separate us from the realities of politics and of war. They stand in for real analysis and democratic debate, rendering people into bystanders rather than participants.

Trump’s political comms style was always more about emotional charge than informational substance. He’s the “sh*tposter-in-chief,” after all. The President’s infamous Twitter tirades gave way to early slopaganda during his first term. In 2017, Trump famously posted an old video of him tackling and punching out Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania, with “CNN” superimposed on McMahon’s head. However ridiculously, it set the tone: politics was presented as little more than a spectacle of conflict and humiliation.

But with the heightened militancy and authoritarianism of Trump 2.0 – and the advent of AI image generation tech – we’ve plumbed fantastical new depths. The admin got in quickly on the Ghiblification craze last year (a viral trend where internet users fanatically converted images to the nostalgic hand-drawn style of Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away). The White House posted a genuinely shocking image, mocking the deportation of a migrant in that same viral style.

And since Operation Epic Fury (the US and Israel’s controversial attack on Iran in late February this year) we’ve witnessed an explosion of AI-generated nonsense. People have lots of legitimate questions about this war – why it’s happening, how long it will last, what human and economic price will be paid. None of those questions are properly addressed by the administration, and the slop serves to shut them down entirely.

There’s a stark difference between this war and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. At that time, the government had to craft a comprehensive narrative to justify what they were doing. They had to offer people a justification and a plan (never mind whether any of it held true) and at least take questions from critical journalists about it. The Trump administration can instead deflect entirely, jamming our feeds and our brains with trash content designed to light up his supporter’s brain chemistry and distract the rest of us.

AI models have given the Trump regime endless fodder for the media to mull over, as well as a way to capture citizens’ attention and detach them from the material reality of the conflict. This kind of content, as ludicrous as it is, is a honed weapon. It’s a form of information warfare designed to dumb down our political debates to utter oblivion.

We see much more mundane, diluted versions of this from the UK government as well. The Prime Minister has been accused of mimicking the White House after posting several videos of himself surveying military hardware – riding in helicopters and watching jets take off – set to the Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing. It was posted at the beginning of the US-Israel-Iran war. He’s previously posted a number of videos depicting his government’s detainment of undocumented migrants.

Where Starmer’s attempts are largely met with ridicule, the hard-right nationalists are Britain’s reigning Slopaganda champions. Reform UK, Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, and the right-wing ecosystem around them have embraced AI imagery and videos for just about everything. In one dramatic case, Farage’s party posted an AI-generated image of the Hamble Valley Reform team entitled “Real People – Not Career Politicians.”

As in the States, the overarching goal is to simplify narratives. To build a fantasy world for supporters to abscond to. AI is deployed by the right to generate nostalgic and idyllic British towns before the supposed ravages of immigration, white faces as far as the eye can see. It shows fake images of Farage meeting a (non-existentent) terminally ill child as their dying wish. It portrays English knights making patriotic proclamations about blood and soil.

Joe Slater calls it “Zombie Politics” – the notion that parties like Farage’s and now Rupert Lowe’s can build themselves up from scratch (without much personnel or infrastructure) by leveraging these tools to go viral and cultivate attention. As he puts it: “An AI model can read a government data release, draft a response and circulate a press release before a legacy party has scheduled the meeting to discuss.”

But fundamentally what makes all of this so effective is not just the volume or the absurdity, but the tone. Online, everything exists in a kind of suspended ambiguity – a limbo of sincerity. It’s “irony poisoning”: a state in which constant exposure to this sardonic content erodes our ability to distinguish between what is meant and what is not. Politics begins to feel unreal, a pantomime to watch rather than a process to participate in.

This kind of content is invigorating to the small clique of right-wingers in Britain and the US looking for an AI fantasy world to inhabit. But more important is what it does to the rest of us: traps us further in a doom loop of political detachment, further and further away from true engagement and inclusion in our own political systems.

A democracy that is always reacting is not one that can truly act.

FAIR WARNING: This is an unusually long Ugly Politix piece. If you’re not the type who enjoys reading 2000 words - I’m looking at YOU, Mr Somerton! 😉 - you might want to skip this one. No offence will be taken.

I was in a chemist in Grantham the other day, and got talking to the pharmacist dispensing my prescription. It is one of the blessings of my Irish stock that I am predisposed to strike up conversations with strangers - something I have always done and something I always will. Why? Because I have lost count of the number of magical moments this habit has given rise to over the years - moments of laughter, of insight, or just of genuine and unexpected human connection. And, on this occasion, it was all three.

You see, as well as being both funny and clever, the woman behind the counter was from Kerala. She had been in the UK eleven years, was able to address her regular customers by name, and - perhaps most importantly - knew precisely what pills and potions they needed to keep them ticking. It was clear from the few moments I spent in her presence that she was part of the fabric of the place - part of Grantham - and an important part of the lives of those regulars.

I mention her because, increasingly in this country, she and people like her are seen not as essential components of our communities but - to adopt the tone of the government’s recent Immigration white paper - a fiscal liability.

Don’t worry, loyal readers, I am not about to conduct a forensic exploration of that immigration white paper. I just think that this little exchange between two strangers tells us something important - and I want to make sure you don’t miss it.

The revelation is not so much about immigration but about how political decisions are made in our country. And that, as you will know, is the subject behind virtually everything I do in my day job running Open Britain.

Let me start by asking you to ponder three statistics: 62% of the British public want it to be easier for NHS staff to come to this country. 54% say the same for care workers. And only 8% oppose immigration for skilled workers. Those are not statistics from some overly-woke pressure group with an agenda - they are the settled, repeated findings of mainstream polling. The British people, it turns out, have much more sophisticated views on immigration than they are generally given credit for.

Now let me tell you what the government is planning to do. It is planning to shut the care worker visa route entirely to new overseas recruits - a route through which more than 220,000 of these key workers have entered the country since 2020. It has already hiked the salary threshold to £41,700, and now plans to raise it further - and it intends to scrap the ‘shortage occupation list’ discount on that threshold. It plans to raise the minimum skill level to degree-equivalent, which removes roughly 180 occupations from eligibility at a stroke. And it intends to double the qualifying period for permanent settlement from five years to ten.

You might read that list and think: well, the public must have been clamouring for all of that. They were not. In fact, despite the impression given by our media, immigration is not even in the top ten topics when people are asked about their own personal priorities - the things that actually keep them up at night. It only surges into the list of top issues when pollsters ask a different question: what are the country’s priorities? That gap - between what people experience in their own lives and what they believe the nation is suffering from - is largely the product of a cynical process known as agenda-setting. It starts with certain politicians and media outlets deciding what crisis suits their needs. It involves them flooding the airwaves with exaggerated and skewed ‘news’ that drives concern in their audience. And it ensures people dutifully report it back to the pollsters as a key concern when asked a carefully framed question. Public sentiment is reduced to a pawn in the games of billionaire media owners and political power-brokers.

It’s important to point out that people do have genuine anxieties about certain aspects of immigration. They worry about irregular small-boat crossings and the lack of control that signals. They worry that dangerous individuals convicted of crimes and deported can find their way back into the UK. But they don’t worry about the Filipino nurse keeping a ward running at three in the morning, or the healthcare assistant doing observations at four. Those people are, by any honest reckoning, holding the country’s healthcare system together. And we have a dangerous lack of those people. There are 131,000 unfilled social care vacancies in England right now. 34,000 nursing gaps. UNISON has said bluntly that these sectors would have collapsed long ago without overseas workers.

And, knowing all this, the government’s considered response is to slam the door shut on this essential resource. Why?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood exposed the government’s reasoning, and it’s worth pausing on, because the framing tells you everything about the thinking behind it. She warned of “350,000 low-skilled workers and dependents” with an “estimated lifetime cost to the taxpayer of £10 billion.” Now, leave aside whether those numbers survive scrutiny and just notice what that framing does. It takes a quarter of a million individual human contributions - the carer who gets your elderly mum out of bed in the morning, the HCA who ensures the nursing home is safe and hygienic - and it compresses them into a line on a spreadsheet. A cost. A burden. Something to be managed down.

Labour MP Tony Vaughan, to his credit, put his finger on the sharpest absurdity. Under the new rules, he pointed out, a Goldman Sachs banker on a senior intra-company visa can reach indefinite leave to remain years before the care worker in that nursing home. “We cannot have a system,” he said, “where the child of a banker gets settlement after three years and the child of a care worker gets it after 15.”

And the damage is not limited to the individual. Industry analysis suggests the reforms could cost their employers upwards of £14,250 per worker in red-tape costs before permanent residence - a reported 158% increase. For the social care sector, which operates on margins that would embarrass a church fête, those numbers are not a challenge, they are an extinction event.

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So - and this is the question I kept coming back to - if the British people don’t want this, and the evidence doesn’t support it, and the sectors affected are already in crisis, then who exactly is it for?

And here is where we leave immigration behind and arrive at the thing I actually wanted to talk to you about.

It is for the swing voter in the marginal seat. Or rather - and this is an important distinction - it is for the government’s idea of what that swing voter wants. An idea shaped not by data, not by evidence, not by the 62% who’d like the NHS to be able to recruit the staff it needs, but by the distortion machine that is the first-past-the-post voting system.

You are probably all sick of me telling you that Labour won 63% of the seats in the House of Commons on 34% of the vote at the last election…but it’s an important factor in all this. That is not a mandate. It is a quirk of the distortion that FPTP brings. And it creates a very particular kind of terror for the government - the terror of the accidental majority. When your grip on power is built on sand, you do not govern for the country. You govern for the few thousand voters in a few hundred constituencies who might tip the result in your opponents favour next time. You govern for the margin.

And who is in the margin right now? Reform UK - the party projected to win 381 seats on 31 per cent of the vote at the next election. But only 6% of Reform voters believe Starmer is genuinely anti-immigration (and so are unlikely ever to put their votes behind him on that basis). The government is chasing voters it will never catch, using policies that punish people it claims to represent, justifying their actions with a popular mandate it does not hold.

This is the chaos and distortion that FPTP brings. 74% of votes cast - 21 million of them - are wasted (ignored) in the process FPTP uses to translate the will of the people into the power structure within the Commons. This is why the views of the 62% who want skilled immigration made easier end up being ignored. Because their votes aren’t in the right postcode, their views don’t matter.

Some MPs have decided not to accept the chaos and distortion, at least in this one area of policy. A hundred Labour MPs signed a letter opposing these particular reforms. Angela Rayner went so far as to call them “un-British.” The government reportedly asked the Home Office to consider the options - but the official response was that “the position has not changed.”

Here is what should strike you most powerfully in all this. It is that first-past-the-post doesn’t merely distort who gets to sit in parliament, it distorts what they do when they get there. It takes a nuanced public position that is broadly pragmatic about immigration - yes to nurses, yes to scientists, worried about disorder at the border, not remotely interested in punishing care workers - and compresses it into a single, panicked imperative: ACT TOUGH. And so governments - of whatever colour - ARE tough. On the wrong people. In the wrong way. Every time.

Under proportional representation - I know those words make some people’s eyes glaze over, but stay with me - a government would find it much harder to push a programme that didn’t reflect what the country actually thinks. It would be as unlikely that it could push an agenda of open borders as it would an agenda of forced deportation of settled immigrants. Its line of least resistance would be in pursuing an agenda for which there was broad public support and for which there was fair representation in the Commons. In this case, it would increase the likelihood that they would implement policies helpful to a care sector needing to recruit the staff it needs. It would mean an immigration system designed around evidence rather than headline management. It would mean the 62% who want NHS recruitment to work would have a parliament that looked like them, and policy that sounded like them. It would be proper democracy.

The British public already knows what it wants on immigration. It has been remarkably clear about it to anyone willing to listen. The problem is not the public. The problem is a voting system that takes a nuanced public opinion and turns it into a blunt instrument, then hands that instrument to whichever party can secure the support of the biggest minority of voters.

I didn’t ask the woman in the chemists what she thought of the government’s immigration plans, but I suspect she’d see the gap between what the people she serves actually want and what they end up being offered more clearly than most.

A change in our electoral system wouldn’t solve all these issues overnight. But it would force every government to engage with what people actually think, rather than what it is convenient to pretend they think. And that, for me, is the minimum a democracy owes its voters.

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If you’ve been on the look-out for a cast-iron example of why our political system needs a good, hefty kick up the backside, I’m here to tell you that your quest is over.

And - as is so often the case - we have Mr Farage to thank for that. Who says he never does anything good?

Think back to last year’s local elections. I know it’s hard, what with the world busy packing a decade of events into every 12 month period, but give it a go. Specifically, think back to what Farage was saying at the time about taxes.

If you’re struggling, let me help: He was promising that Reform would cut your taxes. He was pointing at the enormous salaries of the ‘fat cats’ who run our councils and the state of our pothole-ridden roads and promising that, if you only voted Reform into power, you could have silky-smooth roads and money back in your pocket to boot. It almost sounded too good to be true.

And it wasn’t a slip of the tongue after a particularly refreshing lunch either. It was a promise plastered over many of his party’s election leaflets.

In Lancashire, the Reform leaflet said: “We fight for lower council tax.”

In Kent, it said: “Reduce waste and cut your taxes.”

Across the country, in leaflet after leaflet - many bearing Nigel Farage’s smiling face - Reform UK went into last year’s local elections with a message so simple even they couldn’t misunderstand it. Vote for us. We’ll cut your taxes.

And, sure enough, they won big. Reform swept to outright majority control of ten councils. In Kent, it was a landslide. In Durham, a political earthquake. Even Darren Grimes (‘Crafty’ to his mates) got a seat. Voters who had never voted anything but Labour put their cross next to Reform, trusting a promise printed in black and white.

Then the bills arrived.

Every single Reform-controlled council in England raised council tax. Not one has cut it. Not one has even frozen it. Every single one has put it up.

Kent? Up 3.99%. Derbyshire? Up 4.90%. Staffordshire? Up 3.99%. North Northamptonshire? Up 4.99% - the maximum possible without the need for a referendum.

And then there’s Worcestershire, where Reform runs a minority administration. Up 8.98%. (That is not a typo - nearly NINE percent.) Reform’s council leaders actively sought and received special government permission to raise it that high.

Reform’s own figures claim an average rise of 3.94% across their councils. Independent analysis puts the figure at 4.32%. But I’m not here to split hairs - either way, there’s no minus sign in front of those numbers.

That is quite a journey from “cut your taxes.”

And Now, The Gaslighting

What sets this apart from ordinary political promise-breaking is not the broken promise itself. Local government finance is brutal. Councils inherit debt. Social care costs are relentless. Any honest party taking control of cash-strapped councils would have to make painful choices on tax.

The real difference is how Farage has responded.

When ITV News Meridian confronted him with the Kent leaflet - one of the ones that literally says “cut your taxes” - Farage replied: “Well, cutting taxes could mean not putting them up as much, I suppose…but I never promised cuts in council tax.”

Later, he was actually shown a leaflet with the words “cut your taxes” on it, and still he maintained he never promised to cut taxes. In the same breath, he redefined “cutting” as “raising less than the other lot would have.”

Imagine if McDonalds aired an advert claiming to have cut the price of a Big Mac when they’d actually raised the price by 10p, justifying it on grounds that Burger King had put the price of a Whopper up by 15p? The Advertising Standards Agency would come down on them like a tonne of bricks, and someone in McDonalds would likely - and rightly - lose their job.

When Channel 4’s Paul McNamara challenged him on this issue, Farage tried a different line. Those were “national policies,” he said, clearly implying that voters would be mugs to believe that the stuff on the back of the local election leaflet would have anything to do with the local elections. I’m not joking.

Why This Matters Beyond Council Tax

The council tax story is important in its own right. Real people in Kent, Durham and elsewhere made real decisions at the ballot box based on a real written promise. That promise was broken. And the man who made it is now redefining the English language to pretend it wasn’t.

But the deeper problem is the playbook it reveals.

Make bold, simple promises. Win power. Fail to deliver. Then deny you ever made those promises. (And take on an indignant air as you do it, just for the lols.)

This isn’t a one-off. It’s how Farage has operated for a decade. During the Brexit campaign, he stood in front of a poster promising to “take back control” of immigration. When net migration hit record highs after Brexit, he just said it was someone else’s fault. The Remainers screwed-up the implementation. The Tories betrayed Brexit.

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The council tax story is the same trick, played on the local stage - but this time we have better evidence with which to shine a light on it. Because this time, the leaflets are still out there. The TV footage exists. The council tax bills are still sitting behind the clock above the fireplace. The only thing that’s changed is amount of brass in Farage’s neck as he tells us that we’re the ones misremembering.

If Nigel Farage cannot be held accountable for a promise printed in ink on a campaign leaflet, what happens when he’s making promises about the NHS, about defence, about your rights at work or the rights we all depend on to hold our politicians accountable when they lie? The polls currently project Reform winning a landslide majority at the next general election - potentially on the votes of barely three in ten of those who turn up to vote. The office of Prime Minister provides a lot of power, perhaps way too much for a man who treats his own promises as first drafts.

So remember: He promised to cut your taxes. He raised them. And now he’s telling you that raising taxes is actually cutting them. And you’re the idiot for not understanding that.

And when he and his mates knock on your door in the coming weeks, ask them to explain - in REAL English - where we’re all going wrong.

Earlier this week, 3,000 people gathered peacefully in Trafalgar Square to break their Ramadan fast - a lawful public event, open to people of all faiths. Nick Timothy, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and the man who would be in charge of law and order in a Conservative government, described it as 'an act of domination' aligned with 'the Islamist agenda.' Nigel Farage called it 'a group of people attempting dominance over our capital city.'

Domination. Dominance. Two men, supposedly from different parties with different political agendas, reaching for practically the same word to describe the same thing: 3,000 peaceful people breaking their Ramadan fast together in a public square. That’s more than a coincidence. It’s conscious convergence. And we need to be clear about what’s driving it, where it will take us, and how our decrepit democratic system provides little protection for those who want a different future for our country.

When it comes to the anti-muslim agenda, Timothy has ‘form’…lots of it.

He didn’t just stumble into this latest scandal. He has spent a career building a political brand on precisely this ground. As a special adviser at the Home Office, he helped design the “hostile environment” immigration policy - the one that produced the Windrush scandal. He played a role in the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham, which a New York Times investigation later characterised as an “Islamophobic hoax”. He campaigned against Labour’s Islamophobia definition, calling it “rigged” and urging supporters to “stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws.” He introduced the Freedom of Expression (Religion or Belief System) Bill, seeking to clarify that the Public Order Act does not cover criticism of religion.

Each episode escalates on the last. Each positions Timothy as the person willing to “say what others won’t.” And each plays directly to the right-wing media ecosystem - GB News, Talk TV, The Spectator, The Telegraph - that any future Conservative leadership contender needs to win over. And it’s working (for him). Bookmakers rate him one of the favourites to succeed Kemi Badenoch when the day comes.

Which brings us to Badenoch herself - the would-be Prime Minister who chose to pour petrol on the fire.

If Timothy was just another new-intake MP naively entering a political minefield, you might expect his leader to display some appropriate contrition, give him a very public rap on the knuckles, and move to close the matter down by directing the media to an important new initiative to have the swimming baths in Huddersfield upgraded. But that is not who Timothy is, and that is not what happened.

Badenoch did not reprimand Timothy. She did not distance herself. She called Timothy “fantastic” and said the event “should never have been permitted to take place.” She then introduced a claim that women had been “pushed to the back” - a claim the event organisers called ‘totally untrue’ and for which no evidence was ever produced.

The leader of the official opposition went further than the original post. She did not merely tolerate the culture war. She accepted it, amplified it, and fabricated details to sharpen it - in the same week she launched her local election campaign.

That is a clear departure from Conservative Party history. Edward Heath sacked Enoch Powell for the “Rivers of Blood” speech. William Hague forced John Townend to apologise for claiming immigration was making Britain a “mongrel race”. And Iain Duncan Smith sacked Ann Winterton for telling a ‘joke’ that involved a Pakistani man being thrown out of a train window. Previous Conservative leaders understood there was a line. Badenoch has decided the line is the strategy.

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So, why exactly are they doing this?

Most media commentary on this issue focusses on the surface facts, and misses the underlying structural drivers.

That coverage rightly acknowledges that the Conservative Party is locked in an existential fight with Reform UK for right-wing voters. But it usually fails to mention that under First Past the Post, that fight is all or nothing. There is no mechanism for two right-of-centre parties to push their own agendas _alongside_ their political neighbours. Under FPTP, one will win the seat. The other will get nothing. So, recognising that Reform has the momentum with voters right now, the Tories face a difficult choice: either absorb Reform’s voters or be destroyed by them.

That is why Timothy’s language is indistinguishable from Farage’s. It is not ideological drift. It is a structural incentive. FPTP forces mainstream parties into a race to the bottom with their closest opponents - and the only way to win is to become indistinguishable from whichever of them appears to have the upper hand. The electoral system is dragging the official opposition toward the politics of the far right.

And once they get there, what stops them?

Not Parliament. Timothy’s post was on X, not inside the Commons. It drove a week of national debate, forced exchanges at PMQs, and positioned the entire Conservative Party - all without a single word being uttered in a place where rules, standards or accountability apply.

Not the standards system. There is no mechanism to hold a shadow cabinet member accountable for describing a lawful religious gathering as an act of domination. No committee hearing. No investigation. The only remedy on offer was Starmer demanding Badenoch sack Timothy - which she refused.

Former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve put it plainly. If the demand that such events “shouldn’t happen again” applies only to Muslims, he said, “it is an act of discrimination against them without any lawful basis. To achieve it you would have to enact discriminatory legislation targeted at Muslims. Is this what Nick Timothy is advocating?”

A former Tory law officer, spelling out that his own party’s position logically requires religious discrimination. And still: no democratic mechanism to do anything about it.

The triple system failure

This is a story about three systems failing at once. An electoral system that incentivises the race to the bottom. A democratic infrastructure that has no way of holding politicians accountable for choosing the bottom of the barrel. And a ballot box that cannot function as the last line of defence - because the same electoral system is designed in a way that presents most voters with Hobson’s choice every election.

Think about what happens when you go to vote at a general election. Millions of us are cajoled into voting tactically - backing the least-bad option rather than the candidate we actually want. In seat after seat, voting against a party’s bad behaviour is a luxury the system does not permit. And for the millions whose votes are simply discarded - wasted in safe seats where the result is a foregone conclusion - the ballot box is not a mechanism of accountability at all. It is an empty ritual.

The problem is not just Nick Timothy. Politicians will always chase votes. Ambitious ones will always court media attention. The problem is a system where chasing those votes and courting the media means mimicking the far right, where doing so carries no democratic consequence, and where even the voters who object have no reliable way to make it count.

But there’s hope…if we’re prepared to take a stand.

That is why Open Britain is fighting for fundamental reform of our democratic system. It’s a dry, technical subject, far too tedious for most ordinary people to think much about while they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their families. But, as this episode demonstrates, it is a matter of fundamental importance to everyone who wishes to have a say in their own future, or at least not to have that future dictated by small group of well-funded and well-connected extremists.

If you believe we should all have access to fair information on which to make our democratic decisions; should have fair influence over the issues in the national debate and the people who make the rules we live by; that all our votes should count so they deliver fair representation in Parliament; and that those in power should be held to the traditional rules of British fair play, then you’re on our side. Join us…we’ll be glad to have you on board.

Elon Musk took to X on 14 February with a simple message: "Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!" And, in true X-style, a flood of supportive comments followed - accounts thanking Musk for his involvement in British politics, or simply posting the Union Jack. Among them was Lowe himself: "You are a true patriot, Elon."

The exchange was typical of the online world the far-right has come to thrive in. But this time, something is different.

Other figures to the right of Reform rallied behind the new party. Advance UK, led by the former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib and backed by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, said it would consider a merger (although this has since collapsed, with Habib branding Lowe a “dictator”).

And now the party has gone one step further, formally registering with the Electoral Commission. This means the party fulfilled criteria such as outlining a constitution, setting out its structure and organisation, and showing that it has the processes in place to comply with electoral finance laws. But it’s more than an administrative milestone. Restore Britain can now stand candidates, appear on ballot papers, and compete in British elections.

So, with the party polling at 7% and boasting a membership 100,000-strong, what does this mean for future elections?

This poses a real threat to Farage's route to power. Under first-past-the-post, vote-splitting on the right could prove fatal, costing Reform seats it would otherwise have won comfortably. Cast your mind back to the last general election: Labour's majority was wafer-thin, won and lost in key marginal constituencies. If Reform finds itself in a similar position in the next election, a hard-right splinter draining votes in marginal seats could make all the difference.

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In his launch video on X, Lowe took direct aim at Reform, promising that Restore Britain candidates would “not be failed ministers, and will not be tainted by failures of the past.” Lowe’s implication is clear: Restore Britain is the real deal and Reform UK is merely establishment-lite.

So, what do Restore Britain actually stand for? Their headline policies are - to put it mildly - grim.

The party advocates a national referendum on reinstating the death penalty, and an outright ban on the burqa and niqab. Its campaign director, Charlie Downes, has stated the party’s founding ambition plainly: “an ethnically homogenous Christian Britain.” This is not just a dog-whistle. It is the open articulation of an ethno-nationalist programme - a line that even Reform UK are careful not to cross.

Then there is the immigration policy. Lowe’s 133-page mass deportation document, co-authored with senior policy fellow Harrison Pitt, proposes between 150,000 and 200,000 forced removals per year, the rescinding of asylum protections granted over the past decade, and the establishment of what the document calls “austere tent camps” for those awaiting removal. It is, in scope and language, one of the most extreme policy documents produced by any registered British political party in recent memory.

Still, it would be unfair to say Restore Britain and Reform UK agree on nothing. Both parties want to scrap the TV licence fee and defund what they call the "woke" BBC. Restore Britain go further in their characterisation, claiming the licence fee is maintained through "coercion and blackmail" and that the BBC "treats British culture with contempt." And their stances on inheritance tax aren't too dissimilar either, both parties have pledged to abolish it. Hardly surprising, perhaps, from two multi-millionaires and former bankers.

But, most importantly, Labour must read the right message from this.

If Lowe's ascendancy holds, a fractured right could hand Starmer a golden opportunity - if, that is, he's learned the right lessons. Unite the left, stand firmly behind a strong set of values, and stop allowing Farage to set the agenda. This isn't an opportunity Labour have earned. But it is one they can't afford to waste.

But it also serves as a serious wake-up call - one that speaks to the health of our democracy more broadly. As my colleague Matt recently wrote in Ugly Politix, the government's Representation of the People Bill is well intentioned and does some genuinely positive things - strengthening the Electoral Commission and extending the vote to 16-year-olds. But with forces such as Restore Britain now backed by the wealthiest man on the planet, combating dark money and capping political donations must become a priority for this government, not an afterthought.

Lowe and Farage are two sides of a very dangerous coin. But a splintered right only hands Labour an opportunity if Starmer is willing to seize it. Get his own house in order, and this could be a pivotal moment. Fail to, and the door to something far darker remains wide open.

Immediately after Donald Trump launched his lethal assault on Iran, key voices on the British right united - as they often do - to offer their unconditional, full-throated support.

Keir Starmer’s cautious middle-ground approach was condemned as cowardice, even a cynical concession to Muslim voters. For Nigel Farage, his top lieutenants, and much of the tabloid press, only one thing seemed to matter: the drums of war were sounding.

“We should do all we can” to aid the US assault, Farage argued. Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice claimed that, if his party was in power, “we would be helping the Americans and the Israelis in any way they saw appropriate.” Nadhim Zahawi said that Britain “should join the bombing,” and Zia Yusuf accused Starmer of “disgracing Britain” for not joining in full force.

But the realities of the conflict quickly set in on the public. By March 9th, 61% of Britons said the reasons for the full-fledged aerial assault on Tehran - which killed hundreds of civilians in addition to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini - were unclear. A further 59% opposed or strongly opposed Britain’s involvement in the war in any capacity.

Reform UK had begun goose-stepping to Trump’s militant mood music without considering the material reality of the conflict. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a clear strategy for the attack or its fallout - the Trump administration offered about five different conflicting rationales all at once. In the short term, hundreds of thousands of British citizens across the Middle East face turmoil and explosions. And in the long-term, supply shocks and refugee crises threaten to cause further economic and political chaos here at home.

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Essentially, this war is likely to bring to bear all of the things that Reform voters hate. It would be a disaster for the neglected towns and struggling post-industrial communities that they appeal to. It will almost certainly create an unprecedented new influx of refugees. And it associates them with a blind willingness to jump into foreign quagmires with the United States - a habit the British public is rightfully quite wary of.

And so faced with that reality - their populist fantasies meeting the cold, hard facts of war - Reform’s response was predictable. They’re now simply pretending they never said any of it. As if nothing happened, Farage, Tice, Jenrick and others have come out to say that while they agree with Trump’s motives, they don’t think getting involved in a war would be good for Britain right now. It’s gaslighting on an unprecedented scale - no apologies or even self-awareness about their blatant screeching U-turn.

In a sense, the Iran war has served as a useful test for Reform. A major geopolitical event like this one will separate the easy talk from the hard yards of foreign policy.

Once again, Reform reveals itself as a coalition of contradictions. Are they neoconservative war hawks or “Britain First” isolationists? Loyal to Trump’s geopolitical agenda or Britain’s national interest? Is this a revolt against elites or a party run by millionaire financiers promising deregulation and Thatcherite economics?

The Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right, told me once that you have to separate the “supply side” (the leaders and donors) of a movement like Reform from the “demand side” (the voters). That there is a fundamental disconnect between those two groups, the former peddling compelling narratives for the latter - even if they don’t believe it themselves.

Farage, Tice, and the rest live in a world where backing Trump is a cost-free gesture. It's a line in their ‘MAGA’ script, a way to generate a clip for GB News. They don't live in the world where the consequences land. The supply shocks, the refugee crises, the community breakdown. And when it’s clear their script isn’t well-received, they simply switch it out for a new one.

And that, I think, is the real indictment of both right-wing populism and the political system that enables it. It’s not just that Reform UK embarrassingly changed its mind on a key foreign policy decision, but that its mind was never really made up in the first place. That they hold no core or foundational principle, they can simply attempt to read the room and perform their way to success.

This is what a broken democracy looks like. Politics has become a hall of mirrors, a closed-loop system of gestures and counter-gestures.

Reform UK rode into Westminster promising to smash the consensus. But Operation Elastic Farage has revealed they have nothing to replace it with other than whatever Trump does (and no one can truly predict what that’s going to be). The right-wing populist revolution, it turns out, is just another turn of the wheel.

In 1902, the American social reformer Jane Addams wrote that “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” Over a century later, it remains one of the most useful diagnostic tools in politics. If more democracy is the cure, then anyone proposing less democracy owes you an extraordinarily good explanation of why. And if they can’t give you one, that probably tells you everything you need to know about their real intentions.

They Talk The Talk…

Reform UK will tell you they’re all about democracy. Their 2024 manifesto included a referendum on proportional representation (yet they are strangely silent on that now) and a plan to replace the Lords with an elected chamber. And Farage has long cast himself as the spokesman for an overlooked majority.

Some of this is genuine. Reform were brutally punished by the current voting system in 2024. Their 14.3% of the national vote translated into just five seats in the Commons. More than four million people voted for them and got almost nothing in return. That’s a democratic outrage, and I’ve said so consistently. Fair elections must be fair for everyone, even those whose policy objectives we may not share.

So yes, Reform have legitimate grievances. But do they act on these concerns when they get their hands on democratic power? Do these noble words become heroic acts when they get their hands on the levers of power?

…But They Don’t Walk The Walk

Start with the party itself. Until February 2025, Reform UK held the status of a limited company with Farage as majority shareholder. A political party structured as a private business, owned by one man. His former deputy Ben Habib called the party constitution “undemocratic” before flouncing out to start his own party.

The replacement entity, Reform 2025 Limited, has exactly two directors - Farage and treasurer Zia Yusuf - yet its Companies House filings claim “no person of significant control.” A party that talks about giving power back to the people while its corporate structure puts all power in the hands of two rich men.

Then look at what happens when Reform actually win elections. In Nottinghamshire (my neck of the woods), after taking 41 of 66 county council seats, leader Mick Barton imposed a full media blackout - banning all Reform councillors from speaking to local journalists. The Society of Editors responded: “they’re not just shutting out the press - they’re shutting out the public they serve.” Exactly the right point.

In Kent, Reform moved to slash scrutiny committees, eliminating oversight of social care, education and the environment, arguing that doing so would save the good people of Kent £75,000 a year. Is that a fair price for the reduction in democratic control they now have?

At the 2025 Reform party conference, journalists (including some of our friends at Byline Times) were barred from events.

And across the country, at least fifteen Reform councillors were suspended, expelled or quit within four months of being elected, some for the heinous crime of asking senior colleagues to justify their agendas.

Ban the journalists. Cut the scrutiny. Centralise control. This is Reform’s reform in practice.

Fewer Voters, Fewer Rights, Fewer Checks

If Reform have their way, this pattern would extend well beyond local government.

They recently announced they would restrict postal voting to the elderly, disabled and armed forces - stripping the option from everyone else. They’d remove voting rights from around a million Commonwealth citizens. And they will resist the government’s plans to use the Representation of the People Bill to give 16-year-olds the vote. All steps that would vastly reduce the size of the electorate and the democratic power that could be ranged against a future Reform government.

And, remember, this erosion of democracy doesn’t stop at the ballot box. Reform want to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights - the post-war framework Britain helped design to prevent democracy collapsing into unchecked majority rule. They’d repeal the Human Rights Act and abandon our commitment to the UN Refugee Convention. Every one of these policies reduces democratic accountability. Fewer voters. Fewer protections. Fewer checks on power.

When a party proposes reducing the number of people who get to participate and reducing the mechanisms that hold power to account, they’re not fixing democracy. They’re telling you they don’t want to hear your voice, that they don’t want you asking awkward questions while they’re deciding how you will be able to live your life.

The Distortion Machine That Would Hand Them Complete Control

More in Common’s most recent MRP projection estimates that, if an election were to be held now, Reform would win 381 seats - a majority of 115 - on roughly 31% of the vote. That’s 60% of parliamentary seats from less than a third of the electorate - one of the most disproportionate results in modern democratic history. And we know this is not just fanciful suggestion - those percentages are very close to the ones that brought our current government to power at the 2024 general election.

On those projections, the same First Past the Post distortion machine that crushed Reform in 2024 would turbocharge them next time. And their record - banning journalists, slashing scrutiny, shrinking the franchise - tells you exactly what they’d do with a stonking majority like that.

Two Visions for UK Democracy

There are two visions on offer right now for our future democracy.

One would have fewer of us voting, under fewer protections, with less scrutiny for those in power. Press too critical? Ban them. Committees asking awkward questions? Abolish them. Commonwealth citizens exercising a decades-old right? Strip it away. 16-year-olds - who’ll live longest with the political decisions being made right now - wanting a say? Keep them out.

The other would have more people voting, under stronger protections, with genuine accountability for those in power. Automatic voter registration. Votes at 16. A fair voting system, so Parliament reflects how people actually voted. A fair information ecosystem, so people can make properly informed democratic decisions. Fair influence structures, so the will of the people cannot be bulldozed out of the way by the wealthy and well-connected. And the whole system built on the value of fair play - so the rules apply to everyone and can be enforced by independent bodies, empowered and resourced to do the job properly.

The first uses the language of democracy to concentrate power. The second uses it to distribute power. Reform’s words would have you believe they are on the side of the former; but their actions show you that they are very much on the side of the latter.

I’m with Jane Addams: The cure for the ills of democracy is indeed more and better democracy, not less and worse. Farage needs to start explaining why he’s not with Adamms too.

It’s funny, isn’t it? When Reform UK wins a race, we’re told that the Patriots Have Spoken. Even a narrow victory on a minority of the vote is the purest expression of the people’s will. But the moment they lose, our democracy suddenly teems with fraud and “sectarian” extremism. To Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Matt Goodwin, the integrity of British democracy appears to rise and fall along with their party’s electoral fortunes.

Despite polls forecasting a nail-biting race in Gorton & Denton last week, the Green Party won decisively by more than 4,400 votes. Reform UK and Labour were both roundly defeated. And Reform quickly concocted a Trumpian narrative casting doubt on the results.

Alongside the Conservatives, they began widely circulating reports of “widespread family voting” — allegations that relatives were coerced into voting a certain way — immediately after polls closed. Those claims have been contradicted by local election officials and are rightly being examined by authorities now. But without an official verdict, they’re being used to call the results into question.

Matt Goodwin publicly questioned “the extent to which the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election is a free, fair and democratic election.” Farage claimed that British elections are “riddled with fraud, intimidation and outright cheating.”

There is a familiar paradox here: distrust in elections is stirred up in the name of protecting them.

Farage, of course, has a long history of this sort of thing – railing against postal voting (despite reportedly casting his own vote by post in 2024), and warning of widespread fraud that investigations repeatedly fail to substantiate. He’s even gone as far as backing Trump’s 2020 “Stop The Steal” conspiracies about Joe Biden stealing US Presidential election. It’s a consistent pattern: whenever Reform (or their allies) lose, the system must be rigged.

Goodwin gave the game away when he unveiled his “strategy for saving our democracy,” centred largely on tightening eligibility and restricting aspects of the franchise. Conspicuously absent, it won’t surprise you to hear, are structural critiques of First-Past-the-Post or the vested interests buying up our political system (not to mention the billionaires bankrolling his own party). The focus falls instead on tired cultural and demographic anxieties.

On LBC, Goodwin warned that “our democracy will start to look like some corrupt political system closer to Lebanon or Sierra Leone rather than a modern Western liberal democracy.” Their entire voter fraud narrative is pre-built into their existing beliefs about demographics, the true patriots hampered by the foreign-born insurgents.

But, whatever you may think of Zack Polanski’s party, the insinuation that the Greens’ victory can only be explained by coordinated “sectarian” Islamist mobilisation collapses under even the mildest scrutiny. This is a socially liberal party with a leader who identifies as Jewish and gay. Candidate Hannah Spencer spent her campaign speaking primarily about public services and the cost of living. There’s nothing wrong with running ads in Urdu or appealing to Muslim voters or any minority community for that matter – that’s just part of running an election campaign!

And the “sectarian” buzzword is particularly ironic, because if anything it’s a much better word to describe Reform UK. Goodwin ran his campaign warning about threats to the UK’s “Christian heritage.” Top advisor James Orr (a key architect of the party’s platform for Government) is himself a religious fundamentalist who supports restricting access to abortion in all circumstances. Reform politicians express their vision of politics as a civilisational battle between the Christian west and Islam.

Labour, to a lesser extent, have also bought into the framing of the Greens as an extremist threat. While Keir Starmer vaguely acknowledged that his party has “lessons to learn” from the by-election, he also criticised what he called the Greens’ “divisive, sectarian politics.” Home Office Minister Mike Tapp suggested that “voters were tricked by the extreme left” – it couldn’t possibly be that they just lost public support.

This kind of reaction, in my view, shows why a different political party was viable in a historically safe Labour seat. Ordinary people – even those who might not like their policies – do not broadly view the Green party as a nefarious fifth column of Islamic sectarianism. It’s a tough sell. Reform UK and Labour come out of this looking like sore losers, turning to desperate nonsense instead of simply conceding with grace and civility.

This melodrama around “family voting” and “sectarianism” may hold traction within the political class – which is still clinging to FPTP and the two-party system – but it feels alien to real voters who engage with politics only intermittently. Most will find this narrative condescending and irritating, politicians blaming voters for their inability to win.

What they’ve seen is a bunch of politicians and partisan pundits who can’t stand losing. They see Farage and Goodwin looking weak and whiney, scolds that complain endlessly instead of taking defeat on the chin. And they see Labour, who effectively blocked a more viable candidate in Andy Burnham, unable to admit that they’re haemorrhaging their voter base. It comes off as petty and paranoid. Beneath the dignity of people who want to run the country.

Try telling a punter in a Denton pub that their neighbour's vote was part of a dark sectarian conspiracy. Try convincing them their new MP, a former plumber who owns two greyhounds, is a secret Islamist hell-bent on destroying Western civilisation. There’s a strong chance they’ll think you’ve lost it.

For Reform UK, "democracy" is not a set of principles to be upheld. It's a results service. When it delivers for them, it's sacred. When it doesn't, it's corrupt. And their strategy is not to accept defeat, but to poison the well so thoroughly that no future loss can be accepted as legitimate either. This is the Trump playbook. Manufacture distrust. Weaponise demographic anxiety. Train your supporters to see every election they don't win as a conspiracy.

Starmer’s Labour and the media are doing a disservice by flirting with that narrative. In the proper democracy we’re fighting for, elections would be conceded without having to allege “fraud” or “tricks.” Sometimes you just lose. But you do yourself and the country no favours by blaming it on everyone else.

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Easily missed in the sea of political chaos that is Westminster today, there is a diamond in the rough: Britain actually has positive elections legislation on the docket in Parliament. Imagine that.

I’ll tell you what I like about the Representation of the People Bill (RPB, formerly referred to as the Elections Bill) - and why, given everything going on around us, I think it still needs to be a lot more ambitious.

Let’s first get our timelines straight here. This new Bill is significant, even if for no other reason that electoral reform packages like this one are staggeringly rare. In my lifetime, we’ve basically only had Blair’s Lords Reform endeavour in 1999 and then the Conservatives’ disastrous Elections Act - which broke far more than it solved.

Despite some quite significant victories in devolved Parliaments, bills that seek to reform elections across regions and nations are a precious treat indeed. And this one has some genuinely forward-looking, ambitious stuff in it.

The Good:

Votes at 16 for Parliamentary, Local and and PCC Elections: This is the Bill’s flagship policy. Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age to 16 in their devolved Parliaments in 2014 and 2021 (respectively). It seems completely reasonable to me that people who are eligible to work and pay taxes, who imminently have to build a future in this country, should get a say in how it’s run. It would be first expansion of the franchise since 1969 - good stuff.

A Big Step Towards AVR: The Bill would not quite introduce full Automatic Voter Registration (which we’re big advocates for) but it’s a big step in that direction. It tasks electoral registration officers with registering eligible people (those who don’t opt out) and actually encourages the Government to run pilot schemes testing out bolder schemes.

Beefing Up the Electoral Commission: This has been a key tenet of any serious democracy agenda for a solid decade now. The good people who run Britain’s elections watchdog - informing us about election procedures and calling out malfeasance and dirty campaign finance tricks - are doing incredibly important work. The Bill would give them stronger enforcement powers, expand their ability to issue civil penalties, and ensure meaningful fines for serious breaches - giving them a better toolbox to properly police modern campaigning and political finance.

Decent (But Lacking) Campaign Finance Reform: There is some good stuff in here on campaign finance. They’re finally bringing in a requirement for ‘Know Your Donor’ risk assessments on donations (amazingly, that wasn’t already a thing) and significantly tighter controls on donations from unincorporated associations (a key vehicle for dark money) and Limited Liability Partnerships. It’s quite good on curbing foreign financial interference (thanks to Reform’s Nathan Gill), and it’s all broadly welcome stuff. There are some big omissions here as we’ll see.

And some more good bits in the Bill:

• Stronger digital imprints regime, requiring campaigners to include clear information about themselves on electronic material;

• Requires candidates to provide identity evidence when submitting nomination papers (anyone remember Reform’s ‘ghost candidates’?);

• Common sense measures to protect candidates, campaigners, and electoral staff from abuse and intimidation;

• Early registration for young people starting at 14.

• Vastly expands the list of acceptable forms of Voter ID (way overdue!)

• Supports schools, colleges, and youth groups to roll out “practical voter and civic education”. This one would pay dividends down the line.

The Absent:

So yes, this is clearly a well-intentioned and broadly welcome piece of legislation. But it risks ending up as a historic missed opportunity. We’ve been repeating it for years and years now: we’re going to need a fundamental democratic reset if we realistically expect people to put their faith in politics again.

This is a pretty good start, but it isn’t quite that. A lot of this should be seen as the bare minimum.

So what amendments, specifically, do we need MPs who are fighting the good fight to add?

Ditch the E.C. Strategy and Police Statement (!): This short-sighted measure comes from the Tory’s 2022 Elections Act, and it basically allows Ministers to set an agenda for the all-important independent elections watchdog. It’s not something we’ve explicitly seen abused yet, but it’s the kind of thing a Trumpian Government could easily exploit to disastrous effect. (“I direct you not to worry about my dodgy crypto donors,” that sort of thing)

A Cap on Donations: The Government have really honed in on foreign interference, and rightly so, but it’s sort of distracted from the bigger picture. Yes, foreign oligarchs should not be bankrolling our elections - but should British oligarchs get a pass?

And even when it comes to the foreign billionaires and multinational corporations, we can definitively say there’s nothing in this bill that would stop (or even mitigate) Elon Musk from handing a ludicrous sum to Reform UK or whatever bizarre far-right start-up he’s into these days. And for that matter, it would also still be open season for Palantir, oil giants, cigarette companies, gambling lobbyists and arms manufacturers. Seems like a big sniff test to fail.

The Epstein Files has further exposed what people are starting to call the “Authoritarian International.” It’s a malignant network composed of some powerful and quite noxious rich people - the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels and Steve Bannons of this world - who believe they have the right to prop up our politicians to do their bidding and stream roll our democracies (ridiculously, in this humble writer’s view) to avoid pesky laws and taxes. I don’t see this bill doing anywhere near enough to guard against those existentially destructive forces.

And a major part of people’s distrust in politics is the sense that politicians are out for their paymasters instead of ordinary people. The job people most associate with economic crime is now, you guessed it, ‘politician’. Corporate donations tripled over the past three elections. While it would certainly be desirable to avoid another Nathan Gill fiasco, we also need an overall cap on donations to drive big money out of politics.

It’s the cleanest way to do it, and funnily enough it’s one of the only things the Authoritarian International are genuinely afraid of.

(Our friends over at Democracy For Sale and 38 Degrees are running a petition on a donation cap – check it out).

And finally, the big one…

A National Commission on Electoral Reform (NCER): This Government has actually admitted that First-Past-The-Post is a dysfunctional system - and they’ve got other legislation in the pipeline right now to scrap it for Mayoral and PCC elections. Yet their supposedly big, ambitious, sprawling democracy package has absolutely nothing to say about our busted electoral system.

An NCER offers a clear and decisive path to securing meaningful voting reform. Let an independent body decide whether the current system is actually fit for purpose, and if it isn’t, what should replace it. It just sounds eminently reasonable to have a bunch of smart people discuss the best electoral system for Britain. Hard to see how the Government could object without looking defensive. After all, who’s afraid of a serious, independent look at how our democracy works?

We lay out the case in more detail on our petition page calling for an NCER amendment to the Bill. Speaking of which, please go and sign that if you haven’t already.

The Opportunity:

This Bill does prove something important: bold democratic reform is indeed possible.

When Parliament gets around to it, it can expand the franchise, clean up campaign finance, and strengthen the institutions that protect our elections. That’s not nothing.

But if we’re being honest here, we should have seen most of these measures years – if not decades – ago. This is a victory only in the sense that the bar for democratic reform is so low it’s smashed through the floor. We need to dream a lot bigger than this.

Think about it in terms of all of those 16 year olds soon to be added to the franchise. What are we meant to tell them? “Welcome to democracy, children – don’t mind the billionaires buying your politicians or the broken voting system that has good odds of rendering your ballot utterly inconsequential.”

If you’ve read my work, you’ll be quite aware of my pervasive cynicism about politics today. But this Bill does genuinely give me a smidge of hope. I’ve talked to others who feel the same.

But come on. If we’re going to do electoral reform, let’s go all the way and properly seize the opportunity. The alternative is we wait around another decade or so for another one. Who knows what the world will look like by then?

The resignations of Morgan McSweeney and Tim Allan within twenty-four hours of each other have left Number 10 looking less like a seat of government and more like a chaotic crime scene. With the Prime Minister’s authority hanging by a thread, Angela Rayner marshalling a furious backbench rebellion, and now the Labour Leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, openly calling on Starmer to step down, the chaos and dysfunction appear to have reached a level where effective government is no longer possible. But to view this merely as a personnel crisis is to miss the disease for the symptoms.

The collapse of the Prime Minister’s inner circle is not just about bad political management; it is the inevitable result of a systemic failure in how British politics handles influence. The catalyst - the disastrous, short-lived appointment of Lord Mandelson as US Ambassador - forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality about Westminster. We must ask the question that Morgan McSweeney presumably failed to ask himself before advising the appointment: Why should a figure from a past era, with known and controversial ties to Jeffrey Epstein, be considered the only option for our most critical diplomatic post?

The answer lies in the “Golden Circle” of influence that is still so prevalent in British public life. This scandal has exposed a two-tier system of vetting and accountability that exists at the heart of the British establishment. In this system, informal networks and historical stature often bypass the rigorous scrutiny applied to we ordinary mortals.

When the Prime Minister sought a heavyweight for Washington, the machinery of government did not look for the most capable diplomat or the sharpest modern geopolitical mind. It looked for an insider grandee. The allure of the Golden Circle is the assumption that certain figures possess a magical combination of access and untouchability that transcends standard rules. McSweeney, the architect of the 2024 election victory, took “full responsibility” for the appointment yesterday in his resignation statement, but his error was not solely personal: it was also driven by a culture that assumes the “great and good” are too big to fail and deserve a shortcut to power.

This is where Open Britain’s concept of “Fair Influence” must be introduced to the national conversation. In a functioning democracy, influence should be transparent, meritocratic, and subject to universal standards of scrutiny. The Mandelson affair highlights the lack of transparency that currently covers too many high-level appointments and advisory roles.

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The double standard is stark. If a mid-level civil servant or a junior political aide had the same historical associations as Peter Mandelson, they would likely have been flagged by security vetting immediately and quietly dropped from consideration. They would have been deemed, at the bare minimum, a serious reputational risk. But because Mandelson existed within a privileged sphere of access - a trusted voice in the ear of the leadership, a fixture of the London dinner party circuit - the risk was minimised, rationalised, or ignored entirely. The vetting failure wasn’t a clerical error; it was a cultural one.

The cost of this cultural dysfunction is now being paid in political capital. The “clean hands” image that Keir Starmer cultivated so carefully has been tarnished, perhaps irreparably. By relying on the Golden Circle, the Prime Minister alienated his own party and the public. It is no coincidence that Angela Rayner, now unbound by collective responsibility, is leading the call for “independent scrutiny” of the vetting documents. Her demand strikes at the very heart of the issue: why was the process short-circuited, and who thought they had the right to do that on a matter of such significant public interest?

The rebellion brewing on the Labour backbenches is not just a function of the nasty factionalism that has dogged Labour in recent years. It is also a justified rejection of the closed-shop mentality so pervasive in the Starmer regime. MPs are angry at the bottleneck in decision-making and the perception that Number 10 listens only to a praetorian guard of unelected advisors and resurrected ghosts of New Labour, while steadfastly ignoring the diversity of views that exist across the parliamentary party.

To restore authority, the Prime Minister cannot simply replace McSweeney and Allan and hope the news cycle moves on. The operational void left by their departures is dangerous, but hastily filling it with more of the same will surely be fatal. He needs to make a structural shift toward Fair Influence.

This means three things. First, transparency rules regarding vetting and appointments must apply to everyone, regardless of their historical stature. There can be no shortcuts for friends of friends. Second, the informal networks that dictate policy and appointments must be brought into the light; the days of government by “nod and a wink” must end. Finally, the Prime Minister must widen his circle of counsel beyond the comfortable echo chamber of the Golden Circle.

The tragedy of this week is that it was avoidable. The “chaos” screaming from the headlines of The Guardian and the New Statesman was not, ultimately, caused by external events, but by an internal reliance on an outdated model of power. The external events just triggered its exposure. If the Prime Minister is to stand any chance of surviving this mid-term crisis - he may not - he must dismantle the Golden Circle that Morgan McSweeney tried so hard to protect, and build an operation based on competence, transparency, and fair access. The era of the “untouchable” grandee is over. The sooner Downing Street realises it, the better.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the past week struck dumb by the unspeakable crimes of the world’s elite. This latest Epstein files release is beyond eye-opening - US Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, who championed the legislation that made this possible, have achieved an unprecedented victory for transparency. But much still remains shrouded in mystery, and there is a deeper concern too: will any of the individuals appearing in the files ever be held accountable?

There are far too many revelations in the vast volume of material - reportedly running to millions of pages - to comprehensively cover here. But based on their shocking contents - and the fact that sensitive files were taken down shortly after release - it looks like we may be seeing more than the authorities are comfortable with. Officially, the takedown has been framed as a correction - a scramble to protect victims’ identities after redaction failures. Either way, it is a stark reminder that “transparency” without competence or accountability can do real harm.

It’s dizzying, really. This release drags the most powerful people in the world back into the orbit of Epstein’s crimes - including the President of the United States, whose past relationship with Epstein has long been a subject of public scrutiny and dispute. It also renews uncomfortable questions about how some of the world’s richest and most connected figures stayed close to Epstein - or sought access to his world - long after the warning signs were flashing red. And it exposes the sordid world of political lobbying, the under-the-table deals made between Governments and plutocrats to subvert democracy - the ways power protects itself, even when the stakes are supposedly moral, legal, and absolute.

So yes, these files expose a radioactive blight touching seemingly every corridor of power in the Western world. Across ideological lines, public figures are shown to have engaged in - or at least to have moved in proximity to - literally the most noxious crimes imaginable. And to be clear: a name appearing in a document is not, by itself, proof of wrongdoing. But it is proof of something else - how wide the circle of access can be, and how quickly elites learn to treat “scandal” as background noise.

And this isn’t even all of it. The Justice Department has claimed that this will be the final release, that their obligations under Massie and Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act have now been met. They reportedly delayed this release for 43 days past the deadline set out in the Act, and now they’re going to try and simply move on. They want the public to believe the file is “closed”. If that’s true, they should be able to defend what they have withheld, why they withheld it, and who made those decisions - without hand-waving, excuses, or evasions.

This ordeal has brought me to an unfortunate realisation. There’s a popular axiom that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’, that acts of transparency like this one will trigger accountability, but I feel that the decline of democratic power has rendered us little more than spectators. That axiom comes from a bygone era, before elites got to isolate themselves in parallel worlds of their own design - back when they had to live right here with the rest of us.

The Trump administration is showing, again and again, how easily power can be bent towards intimidation, distraction, and selective enforcement - but it won’t go after this world of elite impunity, especially when scrutiny could reach uncomfortably close to the centre of power. Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed over the weekend that the Department of Justice does not expect to bring new charges linked to the Epstein investigation. JD Vance, who has been vocal about the Epstein scandal in the past and generally can’t stop tweeting, has had remarkably little to say about what accountability should actually look like now.

I really do think that not so long ago, heads would have rolled for this. Just a whiff of something like Epstein’s ghoulish abuse enterprise would have led to an apocalyptic uproar. Be they Fortune 500 CEOs or peers in the House of Lords, powerful people couldn’t have simply dodged all of the rules the way they can today. This scandal reveals a huge entrenchment of wealth and power, a class that can buy its way out of democratic accountability.

Throughout my life, I’ve watched these people insulate themselves. The Wall Street bankers who gambled the global economy away and were bailed out without consequence. The COVID fraudsters and PPE profiteers who exploited a humanitarian catastrophe in plain sight. The Brexit swindlers who broke the law, trashed the economy, and still today posture as betrayed patriots. The ministers from both major parties who dismissed or downplayed credible warnings from international human rights bodies as Gazans were massacred in their tens of thousands. The donors ennobled, the contracts funnelled, the phoney promises, the scandals and the cover ups - the rules twisted and contorted to suit the whims of the Epstein class.

For anyone still not clued in about people’s grand disillusionment with politics today, I don’t think there’s a more salient example than this one. Seeing these horrific acts out in the open, and then seeing nothing happen, contributes to a pervasive sense of political despair. It fuels hopelessness, the feeling that our democracies have been inexorably hijacked by one giant perverse club.

But powerbrokers come and go. As hopeless as we may feel, this tide can still turn.

If we’re going to reclaim democracy in this decade - if the rule of law is to mean anything ever again - then sunlight alone is not going to cut it. We need to demand not only truth, but enforcement. The Epstein machine - and anyone who enabled it, profited from it, or participated in it - must be excised like the festering cancer that it is. If evidence supports it, those implicated - whoever they are, however senior, however famous - should face investigation and prosecution. And Britain must reckon with the system of impunity that’s utterly broken people’s trust in democracy.

Sunlight has done its job. Now justice has to do hers.

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Well, it’s official. Andy Burnham has submitted his application to stand as Labour’s candidate in Gorton and Denton. He did so minutes before the 5pm Saturday deadline, ending days of speculation about whether he would actually make the move. So, the question is no longer whether Burnham wants to return to Westminster; it’s whether he’ll be allowed to try and what obstacles he will need to overcome if he is.

What lies ahead of Burnham is a gruelling and uncertain political assault course, with four key obstacles.

Obstacle One: The NEC

The 2026 Labour rulebook introduced a small but significant new requirement: directly elected mayors must obtain explicit NEC permission before seeking selection as parliamentary candidates. This new rule has the potential to stop Burnham in his tracks before he’s even hit his stride.

The decision rests with 10 NEC officers, including Keir Starmer himself, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Deputy Leader Lucy Powell, and Party Chair Ellie Reeves. Recent media reports suggest a “Stop Burnham” campaign is underway among Starmer loyalists. If so, we could - could - see the NEC decide to impose an all-women shortlist or all-ethnic-minority shortlist, either of which would have the effect of blocking Burnham while avoiding the need for anyone having to explicitly vote against him.

But blocking carries costs. John McDonnell and Cat Smith have warned it would cause “immense damage.” The FBU’s general secretary said it would be a “democratic outrage.” UNISON has cautioned against “control-freakery.” And the corrosive narrative of a “London stitch-up” against a popular northern mayor writes itself (and you can be sure SOMEONE will write it).

So, the NEC faces a genuine dilemma. Permit Burnham to stand, and it opens a clear path to a leadership challenge. Block him through procedural manipulation, and it triggers exactly the kind of internal crisis it is trying to avoid - while still having to win a difficult by-election with an unknown candidate.

The decision is expected Sunday. We’ll soon see.

Obstacle Two: Local Selection

If the NEC permits Burnham’s candidacy, he must still win selection from local Labour members. The NEC controls the long-list and shortlist composition, so the process can still be shaped from above. But local support appears strong. Lucy Powell and Angela Rayner - both of whom have strong influence in the region - have publicly supported Burnham’s right to stand. Given his popularity in Greater Manchester - 67% in the 2021 mayoral election, 63% in 2024 - local members would likely back him if given the choice.

This gate looks less formidable than the first. The real question is whether he will reach it.

Obstacle Three: The By-Election

Even if Burnham makes it this far, he’s not home and dry. A by-election in Gorton and Denton is by no means a formality. Labour won the seat in 2024 with 50.8% and a majority of over 13,000. Comfortable in normal times…but these are not normal times.

In recent months, Labour’s national polling has collapsed to historic lows. More in Common’s MRP model shows Reform UK at roughly 30% in the constituency, with Labour at around 28% and the Greens at approximately 23%. And Reform has reportedly indicated it will “throw everything” at this contest - no one would expect otherwise.

Burnham’s personal brand could provide some insulation. He is not the Labour national brand; in fact, he has spent years distinguishing himself from Westminster. But insulation is not immunity. A by-election in the current climate, with the governing party in third place nationally, carries genuine risk, however popular the individual candidate.

There’s also the question of what happens if he wins. Burnham would need to resign as Mayor of Greater Manchester to take his Commons seat. That triggers a mayoral by-election - costing taxpayers an estimated £4.7 million and the Labour Party around £500,000. People will have views on that, especially in the middle of a cost of living crisis. More significantly, it hands Reform UK an opportunity to take this high profile platform, an opportunity that some Labour figures have described as potentially “totemic” for Farage’s party. That too will weigh in many people’s minds.

Obstacle Four: The Leadership Challenge

Assuming Burnham clears all these obstacles - NEC permission, local selection, by-election victory - he then enters the House of Commons as a ‘new’ MP. (Although he has been there before, the composition of the House and the Labour benches is vastly different to when he was last there.) What then?

Here Burnham’s journey becomes genuinely unprecedented. No sitting Labour Prime Minister has ever faced a formal leadership challenge. The closest parallel - Gordon Brown’s persistent unease between 2008 and 2010 - never produced a formal contest despite widespread discontent. This would be brand new territory for Labour and nothing can be taken for granted.

To trigger a challenge, Burnham would need nominations from 20% of Labour MPs - currently around 81 members. This is a high threshold, deliberately designed to protect incumbents. It requires MPs to make a career-defining decision: publicly backing a challenge against a sitting Prime Minister, with all the consequences for patronage, ministerial appointments, and future prospects that entails. Not a small ask by any means.

The Tribune Group, which includes over 100 MPs, has suggested that any challenge would “backfire” if launched too quickly. That’s in line with conventional wisdom which favours patience - establish credibility in the Commons, build relationships, let events make the case. But the May 2026 local elections loom as a potential forcing mechanism - catastrophic Labour results could shift calculations at lightning speed.

Then he’s in the hands of Labour’s membership. September 2025 polling showed 62% of Labour members backing Burnham over Starmer’s 29%. But membership has reportedly declined significantly since then - coinciding with the significant rise in Green Party membership that followed Zack Polanski’s election as leader - and those who remain may differ from those who left.

Conclusion

Looked at in the round, the rules, the numbers, and the precedents all suggest Burnham has a narrow path to the top job. Narrow, but not closed.

For those who follow Open Britain’s work, however narrow that path, there’s good reason to pay attention. As I wrote on Thursday, Burnham has positioned himself as an explicit advocate for democratic reform, not least in a fifteen minute speech during the 2025 Labour conference. In that Labour for a New Democracy event, he endorsed PR for the House of Commons and the idea of a National Commission on Electoral Reform. (One eagle-eyed reader in a position to know pointed out that Burnham had been allocated eight minutes to speak at that event, not the two I stated, but the general point I made stands.)

Clearly, these positions align closely with what Open Britain is campaigning for. If Burnham does reach a leadership contest, you can be sure he will be reminded of those commitments, by people within the Labour Party, by Open Britain and our friends across the democracy sector, and by supporters of democratic reform in the population at large.

When the NEC announces its decision on Sunday, it could end this story before it properly begins, or it could open the door - ultimately - to a fairer, more representative form of politics…and with it, a genuine opportunity to start fixing the many chronic problems currently plaguing ordinary people’s lives.

At least we don’t have long to wait.

It’s no secret that the political right in Britain largely takes its cues from Donald Trump.

They regurgitate MAGA’s culture-war talking points, recycle the same influencers and Roman-statue ‘X’ accounts, and - in Reform UK’s case - directly import disastrous schemes like Elon Musk’s DOGE. Trump says jump; they ask how high.

So it’s not necessarily surprising that they’d seek to mimic ICE - the President’s militant deportation agency. Immigration is unquestionably the defining issue of right-wing politics today, and much of the right has now fully ingested the (ridiculous) idea that Britain’s problems are primarily about racial demographics rather than policy or economics.

Trump has seemingly persuaded figures across an increasingly compressed right-wing spectrum - from Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage to Tommy Robinson - that granting vast, unaccountable power to heavily armed deportation enforcers is an elegant solution to those demographic anxieties.

Badenoch has pledged to build a new “UK deportations force” with “sweeping new powers”, modelled on the “successful approach” of Donald Trump’s ICE. Nigel Farage also looks longingly across the Atlantic, plotting out a “Mass Deportation Command” and an “Illegal Migrant Identification Centre.” And Robinson claims that “we want ICE in every European country.”

But none of these people, including Trump, ever tell their voters or online followers about the trade-off they would be making. The media largely fails to report on it. Empowering a domestic military unit like ICE comes with consequences. And once they’re entrenched, they’re not easy to hold accountable, nor to reform or abolish.

Curiously, those who complain endlessly about “checkpoint Britain” - warning of a Soviet-style “present your papers” style society - won’t ever spell out that they’re advocating for actual citizenship checkpoints or a partisan secret police force. These are framed as tough, no-nonsense policies to confront those same unfounded anxieties about racial demographics. But even those who experience that anxiety - if informed properly - might not be willing to make this trade.

So with Badenoch and Farage gleefully marching to Donald Trump’s tune on immigration, a look over at ICE might give us an indication of where they want to take Britain. What have they been up to that deserves such acclaim?

They kicked off the year by murdering a US Citizen and legal observer, Renée Nicole Good, in cold blood. The Trump administration immediately turned on the spin machine, lying about her past and branding her a “domestic terrorist.” They claimed she tried to run over the officer in question with her car, despite conclusive video evidence to the contrary.

The conflict was the culmination of a massive ICE operation in Minneapolis (notably quite far from the US southern border), in which deportation agents outnumbered local police by a ratio of 5:1. Minnesota Police Chief Mark Bruley has claimed that he’s been receiving “endless complaints” about racial profiling and civil rights violations - including many from his own police officers.

Vice-President JD Vance argues the agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good is “protected by absolute immunity.” That’s nonsensical legalese, but it holds true in the sense that ICE agents are incredibly difficult for state or local authorities to investigate or prosecute. In the case of Renée Good, the federal government actually blocked them from accessing physical evidence or conducting interviews.

And all of this is on top of what’s become business-as-usual: citizenship checkpoints, arbitrary detentions, masked officers hanging out around schools, hospitals, gas stations and grocery stores to round people up. The Government has scarcely been so directly involved in people’s lives - and they’re largely able to do so under a shroud of secrecy.

But thanks to some recent whistleblowers, we also now know that ICE’s public face is only half the story. Leaked documents last week revealed how the agency’s mission has creeped beyond deportations to intelligence operations - spying on both immigrants and citizens as part of Trump’s political war on ‘Antifa’ and ‘the radical left’ (which could include basically anyone who publicly disagrees with the President).

And this week, a leaked memo revealed that ICE had been quietly granted the (unconstitutional) authority to break into people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Who knows how much further they’ll go in 2026.

You might think that these are just quirks of America’s ICE under Trump, that a British version would be more measured or more constrained. But I’d argue that any agency tasked with identifying, detaining and removing people based on who they are cannot function without racial profiling, secrecy and coercion. To actually achieve its mandate, it has to be insulated from local oversight, granted wide discretionary powers, and encouraged to see the public not as citizens with rights but as a population to be sorted and controlled.

Once embedded, such forces inevitably expand their remit. Spying becomes routine. Whistleblowers become threats. Legal safeguards are just obstacles. And violence - whether at checkpoints, during raids, or “mistakes” - become a cost of doing business. This is what happens when the state builds a paramilitary bureaucracy whose success depends on fear, speed and impunity: you get the secret police.

Neither Farage nor Badenoch will tell you, but this is what they’re offering. They’ll gloss over the dark logistics of mass deportation, and the implicit threats to the basic liberties we all value. They’ll make it sound simple and tough. But like Trump, they are likely to build something that cannot easily be restrained, reversed, or confined to its intended targets.

History suggests that once this kind of machinery exists, it never stays pointed only at the people it was intended to hurt.

💥 NOTE: This piece was published at 2.52pm on Thursday 22 January. At around 4pm, Andrew Gwynne announced that he DOES intend to stand down as MP for Gorton and Denton. 💥

This morning, reports emerged that Andrew Gwynne MP has agreed a deal with the House of Commons that would allow him to retire on medical grounds and receive his pension. If he resigns in the coming days or weeks, it would trigger a by-election in Gorton and Denton on May 7 - the same day as local elections across England. This news has triggered a flurry of media stories stating that this could be Andy Burnham’s path back to Westminster and, eventually, to a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer.

The leadership speculation is being extensively covered elsewhere. I’m not going to add to all the tea-leaf reading about whether Burnham will run, whether the NEC will block him, or whether Angela Rayner has cut a deal to back him in exchange for a return to the Deputy PM role.

What I want to focus on is what Burnham has actually been saying - for months now - about how British politics should work…because what he’s been saying is striking, and very much in line with the democratic reform Open Britain is calling for.

At the 2025 Labour Party conference, Burnham gave a fifteen-minute speech at a rally for proportional representation organised by campaign group Labour for a New Democracy. (He was supposed to speak for two minutes. The overstay wasn’t accidental.)

He described himself as having “the zeal of the convert” on electoral reform. He explained that standing for Mayor under the Supplementary Vote system - after sixteen years as an MP under First Past the Post - had fundamentally changed how he thought about democracy. Under FPTP, he’d spent elections shoring up his base. Under a preferential system, he had to find common ground with Liberal Democrat and Conservative voters to win their second preferences.

“It changes the conversation in a way that the public has always wanted it to change,” he said, “to solutions and collaboration and ‘can’t you all work together’ and ‘can’t you take a longer-term view about these things’.”

This isn’t a vague gesture toward reform. Burnham has articulated a specific package: proportional representation for the House of Commons, a senate of the nations and regions to replace the unelected Lords, and - notably - the abolition or radical reform of the whip system, which he argues disempowers MPs by requiring them to rubber-stamp departmental positions rather than exercise independent judgement.

At the same conference, he explicitly endorsed a National Commission on Electoral Reform - the central ask of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections (which you’ll recall Open Britain was instrumental in building). His argument: a commission would “lay the ground for a new politics” and “a better conversation with the public.”

The analytical frame Burnham has developed for this - what he calls “Manchesterism” - deserves more attention than it has received.

His argument is that First Past the Post, combined with the Treasury’s crushing grip on economic policy, creates a centralised system that serves neither MPs nor places. Power concentrates in London. Vested interests can manipulate decision-making because there are so few decision-makers to influence. And because governments swing between parties with wildly different priorities, long-term policy coherence becomes impossible.

“What I think a move to a proportional system would do,” he told the conference, “is it would allow new politics to come in, where parties that can agree can set a long-term approach - so repairing the basics, building the council and social homes that we need as a country over a ten-year period.”

This is not, in other words, electoral reform as a dry process concern for political obsessives. It’s electoral reform as the essential precondition for fixing things that people want fixed - housing, infrastructure, public services. The core system that determines whether the other systems can work.

Whether any of this matters depends on things that haven’t happened yet. If Burnham stays in Manchester, these remain interesting speeches from a regional mayor with no legislative power.

But if he returns to Westminster, wins a by-election, and mounts a leadership challenge, they become something else entirely: commitments that will be tested. We need to be ready for that.

Undoubtedly, there are reasons for scepticism. Politicians have discovered democratic reform before and quietly forgotten about it once in power. Tony Blair promised a referendum on electoral reform in 1997; it never happened. Gordon Brown supported it in opposition; in government, other priorities emerged. The pattern is familiar and depressing.

But there are also reasons to pay attention. Burnham’s positioning is unusually specific. He’s not offering vague sympathy for reform but a concrete package with named components. He’s made these commitments publicly, repeatedly, and recently - not a decade ago when he was a backbencher with nothing to lose.

And the timing is interesting. The Elections Bill - which will determine the rules for the next general election - is expected mid-February. The APPG for Fair Elections is the largest in Parliament, with over 150 members, fired-up and ready to act. The May 2026 elections will stress-test the current government’s agenda in ways that could reshape the conversation about what’s possible in future.

None of this means Burnham will run, or win, or follow through. But for those of us who think the current voting system is the lock on every door to a fairer, more prosperous country, it’s worth knowing that the politician currently dominating leadership speculation has positioned himself as an explicit advocate for picking that lock.

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There’s one quite revealing statistic about Keir Starmer’s compulsory digital ID scheme. Before his announcement speech, a narrow majority (56%) of Britons were in favour. Immediately afterwards, support for the Government’s flagship scheme collapsed to under a third.

That backlash has culminated in this week’s significant U-turn. The Prime Minister announced that the new IDs will now be optional to prove the right-to-work upon their introduction in 2029. While the awkwardness of the flip-flop was mocked by many, Greens, Lib Dems, Conservatives and Reform UK all applauded the substance of Starmer’s hasty retreat.

So what are we to make of the public’s change of heart and the Prime Minister’s U-turn?

Keir Starmer is not exactly a beloved leader - he now rivals Liz Truss in terms of public polling. It’s not impossible that his very presence siphoned away some of the scheme’s popular support.

But there’s also the important question of how he chose to frame the scheme. Starmer’s announcement centred on concerns about “the level of illegal migration into this country,” on “secur[ing] our borders” and “mak[ing] it tougher to work illegally.”

It’s not intrinsically clear to many people why migrants should be blocked from working in the first place, especially when they’re being processed for asylum (the Government sees it as eliminating a pull factor). It’s less clear still how a taxpayer-funded digital ID scheme would actually solve that intractable problem. Right-to-work checks already exist. At best, it seems like it might save a bit of paperwork, and £1.8 billion is a steep price tag for that.

Predictably, the rhetoric failed to win over the people it was designed to placate. Farage, Rupert Lowe and today’s Tories favour far more expansive enforcement measures and were never likely to be satisfied by an administrative fix. They instead led the charge against IDs as a step towards ‘checkpoint Britain’ - the erosion of privacy and anonymity. While this critique is often overstated, and these actors are often disingenuous, it’s not completely irrational. Consolidated state power - like a centralised database of everyone in the UK – does have a tendency to expand rather than contract.

Privacy-focused organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Big Brother Watch have echoed those same concerns in much more eloquent terms. Liberty, a human rights organisation, has warned that “digital ID systems pose an even greater risk to privacy than they did when last proposed in the 2000.” They’ve called for the ID scheme to include “robust human rights safeguards, adhere to the strictest data privacy and security standards, retain minimal user data, establish firewalls around sensitive state databases, be unlinkable, and be voluntary.” The Government didn’t do a ton of work to mitigate those quite reasonable concerns.

And that brings us to perhaps the central point. Starmer doesn’t seem to grasp that a scheme like this one requires a significant extension of trust from citizen to Government. A centralised digital database of every citizen, in today’s world, is an extremely powerful and potentially dangerous thing. People need assurances that it can be constructed and maintained safely with both confidence and competence, restraint and good faith. No amount of buzzwords about immigration can substitute for that.

Stephen Bush, associate editor of the Financial Times, argues that the Government should have viewed this as a different kind of challenge: “How can it create something that serves the citizen well enough - and offers such clear consumer benefit - that we proactively choose ‘the government’s digital ID’ over the vast number of documents we have already to prove who we are. It is right that the government must work out how it justifies the value of digital ID to British citizens, instead of avoiding that test by making it compulsory.”

The Prime Minister’s U-turn on digital ID is a case study in the pitfalls of governing in an era of profound public skepticism of institutions. Proposals like this one must be built from the ground up on a foundation of tangible benefit and, crucially, public trust.

Starmer’s fundamental error was in treating this as a technocratic, administrative or border-security issue. By framing the scheme around the politically divisive topic of illegal work, he failed to address the core anxieties of a citizenry that’s paranoid about state overreach and authoritarianism.

The retreat to an optional model is an admission that the government failed to make its case. It could not create a system so useful and secure that citizens would willingly choose it. The task now is even harder. Having framed the ID as a tool for state control over the individual, the government must now reinvent it as a useful service.

If digital ID is ever to be a reality, it will have to move beyond “checkpoint Britain” and articulate a vision of “convenience Britain” - a system that simplifies life, protects rights, and demonstrably serves the public good. It seems unlikely that’s something this Government will be able to do.

The saga of the digital ID U-turn ultimately reveals a simple, ancient truth of governance that the digital age has only magnified: authority granted by law is brittle, while authority granted by consent is durable.

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On Tuesday, seven European leaders issued a joint statement on Greenland that reads like a masterclass in how democracies should respond to authoritarian overreach. Clear principles. Unified front. No hedging. But within hours, the White House responded by raising the prospect of military force to get their way.

So much for bullies backing down.

The statement itself was good - better than good, actually. Danish PM Mette Frederiksen, joined by Macron, Merz, Starmer, Meloni, Sánchez and Tusk, delivered exactly the message the moment required: “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

They invoked NATO. They invoked the UN Charter. They affirmed “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders” as “universal principles” they would “not stop defending.” Frederiksen went further, warning that a US attack on Greenland would mean “the end of NATO.”

This is what drawing a line looks like. It should be unremarkable - defending the territorial integrity of an ally against a fellow NATO member’s threats is not exactly a controversial position. But in an era when democratic leaders have repeatedly folded in the face of authoritarian pressure, simply saying no is notable.

The problem is what came next.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to the European statement by doubling down: “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region. The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilising the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.”

Let that sink in. Seven major democracies issued a unified defence of sovereignty and international law. The White House’s response was to explicitly raise the military option.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, was even more blunt: “Obviously Greenland should be part of the U.S.” And then, dismissively: “Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over Greenland.”

Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, said he was “not interested in talking to people in Denmark or European diplomats over Greenland.”

The HuffPost’s verdict was brutal but accurate: “Evidently, these words had no impact on the Trump administration.”

Here’s the thing that really undermines the European statement: Venezuela.

Just 72 hours before signing that letter defending sovereignty and international law, most of these leaders watched the United States launch military strikes on Venezuela and abduct its president. The same “universal principles” they invoked on Tuesday had been trampled on Saturday. And most of them had nothing to say about that.

France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot was the exception, stating clearly that the operation “violates the principle of not resorting to force, that underpins international law.” Denmark’s Foreign Minister said “international law must be respected.”

But the UK? A different story entirely.

Keir Starmer - the former Director of Public Prosecutions, the lifelong advocate of international law - refused to condemn the Venezuela operation. When the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked if he would call it a breach of international law, he replied: “I want to get all the material facts together, and we simply haven’t got the full picture at the moment.”

His official statement managed to avoid the question entirely: “The UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela. We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime. I reiterated my support for international law this morning.”

“I reiterated my support for international law.” Not: this violated international law. Just: I support international law in general.

Remember: when Putin invaded Ukraine, it took Starmer less than 24 hours to call it a “war of aggression.” When Trump invaded Venezuela and seized its head of state, he needed to “get all the material facts together.”

Home Office minister Mike Tapp was asked if it would be wrong for Trump to seize Greenland. He dismissed the question as “hypothetical.”

But no-one is buying that - not even Starmer’s own Labour colleagues.

Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said bluntly: “This is not a legal action.” She called for European leaders to collectively make clear “this is unacceptable. We cannot have law of the jungle.”

John McDonnell didn’t mince words: “When you listen to the prevarication of Keir Starmer and his ministers on a basic point of international law we need to be ruthlessly honest and recognise that effectively our country has been rendered up as a Trump colony.”

Clive Lewis was harsher still: “Trump has launched an illegal act of aggression against Venezuela. A clear breach of the Nuremberg principles - which the UK helped write. Now a Lab government won’t even defend them. This silence isn’t diplomacy. It’s the moral equivalent of a white flag.”

All of this matters because you cannot credibly defend international law selectively.

The European statement on Greenland was necessary. But when the same leaders who signed it spent the previous weekend hedging on Venezuela - when they invoked sovereignty for a NATO ally but not for a Latin American country - they handed Trump exactly the roadmap he needs.

The message sent out is not “we will always defend international law.” It is “we will defend it when it’s convenient, and find reasons not to when it isn’t.”

Trump, who claimed with a straight face that Greenland is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” isn’t going to be deterred by statements from leaders who couldn’t bring themselves to call his Venezuela operation illegal. Denmark’s Foreign Minister had to politely point out: “We do not share this image that Greenland is plastered with Chinese investments... nor that there are Chinese warships up and down along Greenland.”

When Stephen Miller says “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over Greenland,” he’s calling our bluff. And based on the Venezuela response, it’s hard to argue he’s completely wrong to do so.

So where does this leave us?

The European statement was the right thing to do. Saying no to territorial aggression is important, even if it doesn’t immediately change behaviour. Frederiksen’s warning about NATO was appropriately stark. The unified front - seven leaders, clear language, no ambiguity - was exactly what the moment called for.

But it’s not sufficient.

Democratic solidarity requires consistency. If democracies only invoke sovereignty and international law when convenient - if the principles are “universal” on Tuesday but context-dependent on Saturday - then they’re not principles at all. They’re positioning.

On Sunday, Trump told reporters to “talk about Greenland in 20 days.” He hasn’t backed down. His administration has explicitly raised military force as an option. His envoy won’t even speak to European diplomats.

The statement was a warning. Whether it becomes anything more depends on whether democratic leaders - especially the one in Downing Street - can find the consistency to match their rhetoric.

Right now, that’s the missing ingredient.

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