Martin Cruz Smith's road to Wigan pie
Why is the Church of England apparently unable to agree on a replacement for Justin Welby (Letters, 7 August)? The answer is all too obvious. There are several outstanding candidates, but they all have – in the view of all too many members of the ruling body of the church – one drawback that rules them out of the running. I believe we all know what this is.Linda EvansHinton Charterhouse, Somerset
In the photo in your print edition, Kemi Badenoch appears to be flying the union flag upside down in her ice cream stand (Conservatives not close to recognising how badly they are positioned for next election, says Gauke, 13 August). This is generally understood to be a distress signal. Is she asking for help?Dr Jenny BywatersSheffield
Thanks for offering 'champagne' in the Word Wheel on the day that our son turned 50 and our granddaughter achieved three A-stars in her A-levels (14 August).Ian and Jane WallerSt Albans
My thought for the day is: 'What is the best way to annoy Robert Jenrick?' (BBC apologises over Thought for the Day 'xenophobia' claim against Jenrick, 13 August).Ian GrieveGordon Bennett, Llangollen canal
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BBC News
19 minutes ago
- BBC News
Nigel Farage urges PM to appoint Reform peers to House of Lords
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called on the prime minister to allow him to appoint peers to the House of Lords. In a letter to Sir Keir Starmer, Farage said he wanted "the democratic disparity" in the upper chamber to be addressed, suggesting it was unfair that parties with fewer MPs were has four MPs in the House of Commons and controls ten councils in England, but currently has no appointments to the Lords are made at the discretion of the prime minister. Downing Street has been approached for comment. The House of Lords is a part of Parliament. It scrutinises the work of government and is independent from the House of Commons, where MPs sit. Members of the Lords are called peers. Like MPs, they scrutinise the work of government and recommend changes to proposed legislation. There are currently more than his letter, Farage said: "My party received over 4.1 million votes at the general election in July 2024. We have since won a large number of seats in local government, led the national opinion polls for many months and won the only by-election of this Parliament."Farage added that he was in favour of reforming the Lords, but that "the time has come to address the democratic disparity that exists in the upper house".He noted that the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) have 13 peers between also pointed out that the Liberal Democrats have 76 peers, despite winning fewer votes than Reform at the previous election. The Lib Dems currently hold 72 seats in the Commons, making them the third largest party after Labour and the Conservatives."None of this holds water any longer given the seismic shifts that have taken place in British politics," Farage said his request to appoint peers was "modest", but did not outline who he would nominate if given the opportunity to do May, Reform made sweeping gains in local elections, as well as winning the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by just six success led Farage to claim that Reform UK was now the main opposition prime minister is under no constitutional obligation to elevate members of opposition parties, but will often ask opposition leaders to nominate individuals for December, Sir Keir appointed 30 new Labour peers, including his former chief of staff Sue Gray. The Conservatives appointed six new peers, while the Liberal Democrats appointed year, MPs backed plans to get rid of hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
TOM UTLEY: I was once fiercely proud of being a Londoner born and bred. But as Sturgeon seeks greener pastures and after nine years of the Khan Terror, Mrs U and I are thinking the unthinkable...
Blow me down, who would have thought it? Nicola Sturgeon, the nationalist former First Minister of Scotland, who has spent her entire political life fighting for Scottish independence and slagging off evil England, now says she's thinking of leaving her native land. And where does she plan to move to? Unbelievably, her destination of choice appears to be... evil England! More specifically, she hints strongly this week that the ideal place she would like to escape to, at least for a 'wee while', is my own native London – capital of the kingdom she has tirelessly campaigned to leave. 'This may shock many people to hear,' she says, 'but I love London... So, yeah, maybe a bit of time down there. Who knows?' But will she really find the capital as pleasant a place to live as she seems to imagine? Or will she find that in moving from her own party's Scotland to mayor Sir Sadiq Khan 's Labour London, she'll just be swapping one nightmare terror for another? I'll come back to that question in a moment. But first, I'll let Ms Sturgeon explain why she's tempted to move. In an interview to promote her self-justifying, self-pitying new memoir, she tells the BBC: 'I belong to Scotland, it's my home. But I think being physically out of Scotland for a period might just help to reset my perspective and, to be more selfish about it, just remove me a little bit from that goldfish bowl scrutiny that I still live under in Scotland. 'I don't mean that as a complaint, it's just the reality that Scotland's quite a small country, it's quite a small body politic . . . Suffocating is maybe putting it too strongly, but I sometimes feel I can't breathe freely in Scotland.' Of course, Ms Sturgeon will hardly be the first Scot to head south in the hope of breathing more freely. Indeed, my own Scottish mother-in-law made that same move more than six decades ago, taking her five Ayrshire-born daughters with her, including the future Mrs U, who was then only five years old. Like Ms Sturgeon, she had recently separated from her husband – and like her, too, no doubt, she wanted to escape from her tight-knit, gossipy local community, where all her neighbours and relations knew or wanted to know everything that was going on in her life. Mind you, I suspect that the number of Scots who yearn to move south has grown ever greater since Ms Sturgeon's SNP came to power in 2007, and set about turning the country into an oppressive socialist stronghold, in thrall to mad, woke ideas. Thanks largely to England's generosity, we learned this week, every year Scotland now receives nearly £2,700 a head more in public funding than the UK average – an extraordinary £21,192 per person, compared with £18,523 in the kingdom as a whole. Yet in spite of this, Ms Sturgeon's party has managed to wreck Scotland's public services, including an education system that was once the envy of the rest of the UK. In 2006, for example, the nation achieved by far the UK's best results in maths, as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's rankings. By 2022, it had plunged to second worst, a long way behind England and ahead only of Wales. Meanwhile, the number of NHS patients who have to wait more than two years for treatment north of the border is almost 100 times higher than in England, while Scotland still holds the unenviable record of having the highest number of drug deaths in Europe. Indeed, Ms Sturgeon and her party appear to have tested to destruction the theory that the way to solve social problems is to hurl ever greater quantities of other people's money at them. Then there was the debacle over the former First Minister's crazy plan for gender self-recognition, which would have allowed male rapists to serve their time in women's prisons. Add Ms Sturgeon's little local difficulties with her husband and the police, and perhaps it's no wonder that she wants to make herself scarce for a while, away from the scene of all the destruction and chaos her party has wrought. But back to that question: will she really find London any better? If you'd asked me that a few years ago, I would have had no hesitation in saying it was the best place to live on the planet. I was fiercely proud of being one of the few London residents I know who was born and brought up in the capital, while most of my neighbours and colleagues were drawn to it by its job opportunities, innumerable amenities and other attractions. In the words of the wartime song, I used to 'get a funny feeling inside of me/ Just walking up and down/ Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner/ That I love London town.' But I can't say the same any longer. After nine years under Sir Sadiq Khan, in cahoots with my disastrous Labour council, shoplifters and fare dodgers abound, the streets reek of cannabis and deliveries left on my neighbours' doorsteps are stolen within minutes. Yet there's never a copper to be seen, except for those flashing past in their cars, with sirens blaring (perhaps to arrest someone suspected of tweeting something disobliging about Hamas). At the same time, driving and parking in London have become all but impossible for the rest of us, as Khan and his party's councillors carry on their war against motorists, with their Ultra Low Emission Zones, cycle lanes, Controlled Parking Zones, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – hated by all except eco-zealots. Then there are the endless road closures for minority religious festivals, celebrations of LGBTQ+ Pride, and the like. Since Tony Blair threw open our borders, it has also becoming increasingly rare to hear an English voice on the bus or the Tube, in a city where already 60 per cent of live births are to mothers born outside the UK. Meanwhile, many London schools have become battlegrounds, where teachers face a daily struggle simply to keep their pupils from each other's throats. No, the fact is that the London where I live today has become almost unrecognisable as the city I used to love. Sadly, two of our four London-born sons have already moved to the West Country, driven away from their birthplace by the hope of a better life and the impossibility of finding an affordable home in the capital. A third speaks of moving to Liverpool, and I don't suppose the fourth will remain in London for much longer. Now, for the first time in all these decades, my wife and I are seriously tempted to follow their example. The only question that remains is where, in this benighted kingdom, is the best place for an ageing couple to settle, most untouched by the blight of woke socialism? One thing's for sure. After Ms Sturgeon's long stint in power, not even the beauties of the scenery will tempt us to move to the land of Mrs U's birth.
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Child sexual exploitation victims 'not in scope' of violence against women and girls strategy
Victims of child sexual exploitation are "not explicitly within the scope" of the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy being drafted by the government, Sky News can reveal. Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSEA) is a form of child abuse, described by police as a "critical threat" to women and girls. It includes crimes such as grooming, and can involve both physical contact, such as rape, or non-physical - like forcing children to look at sexual images. Sky News has been shown an internal Home Office document presented to various stakeholders in the sector. It's titled "Scope of the Strategy... Our draft definition of VAWG", and says that while it recognises "links" between VAWG and child sexual exploitation, it is not "explicitly within the scope of the strategy". "VAWG is Violence Against Women and Girls. If you take child sexual abuse out of it, where are the girls?" Poppy Eyre told Sky News. Poppy was sexually abused and raped by her grandfather when she was four. It wasn't until she was 11, after a PHSE lesson on abuse at school, that she understood the enormity of what had happened. "I remember very vividly when the police came round and told me… this is what we're charging him with," said Poppy. "We're charging him with sexual abuse and rape. And I remember being like, I had no idea that's what it was, but I know that's really bad." Poppy's grandfather was convicted and died in prison. She questions how authorities would police crime if child sexual abuse is excluded from an umbrella strategy to tackle violence against women and girls. "Are they holding child sexual abuse at the same level of importance as they are with violence against women? You'd hope so, but potentially not, because it doesn't need to be in the figures", she said. The government has pledged to halve VAWG within a decade, by 2035. "If the government are measuring themselves against halving violence against women and girls - if they're not looking at the scale of child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation within that - that will mean we are failing many young victims of abuse," said Andrea Simon, director of campaign group End Violence Against Women. The Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, which is funded by the Home Office, estimates 500,000 children in England and Wales are sexually abused every year. 'Danger' of having separate plan Rape Crisis told Sky News that "for any strategy to be effective" it "must include all forms of gender-based violence against all women and girls", suggesting there is a "danger" in having a separate plan for child sexual abuse. Its chief executive, Ciara Bergman, said it could create a "problematic and potentially very unhelpful" distinction between victims of domestic abuse, expected to be covered by the strategy, and child sexual abuse. "Some perpetrators of domestic abuse also sexually abuse their children," she told Sky News. The government insists the strategy will include action to tackle child sexual abuse, but says it also plans to create a distinctive programme to address its specific crimes. "Sexual abuse is violence against a child," said Poppy's mother, Miranda Eyre, who now works as a counsellor specialising in trauma. "It is violence against girls… and you can't separate it out," she said. "I'm speechless to be honest… it does make me quite angry." A Home Office spokesperson told Sky News it is "working tirelessly to tackle the scourges of violence against women and girls and child sexual abuse". "These issues are complex and run deep within the fabric of society," they added.
