
Deacon's Bank restaurant review: ‘Lamb belly bites — only £7!'
But it is true that my mother was born in Derby not long after my grandparents arrived there from partially annexed Czechoslovakia so, yes, I know what you're thinking, she could have played professional cricket for Derbyshire. If they had had women's cricket then, of course, and she smoked a bit less. But she wasn't there for long. The prewar East Midlands were more appealing to my brutally deracinated grandparents than Nazi-occupied central Europe, but not as appealing as Stanmore, which is where they ended up, and spent the next 40 years. And I've never reviewed in Stanmore either, so it's nothing personal I've got against Derbyshire.
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The Independent
7 minutes ago
- The Independent
Football supporters now have a bigger say in how their clubs are run
The Football Governance Act has officially become UK law after receiving royal assent, establishing an independent regulator for English football. This landmark legislation introduces a watchdog for the top five tiers of the men's game, aiming to ensure clubs are run sustainably and are accountable to their supporters. The new regulator will possess 'backstop' powers to impose financial settlements between the English Football League (EFL) and the Premier League if they fail to reach an agreement. The Act's journey to law was prompted by the attempted European Super League breakaway and numerous instances of clubs facing financial distress and mismanagement. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy highlighted that the Act delivers on promises to fans, protecting cherished clubs and their vital role in communities.


The Independent
7 minutes ago
- The Independent
How realistic is Nigel Farage's promise to cut crime in half?
N igel Farage claims that he has a plan to 'cut crime in half, take back control of our streets, [and] take back control of our courts and prisons '. The Reform leader says that 'we are facing nothing short of societal collapse', wants to build emergency 'Nightingale prisons ' on Ministry of Defence land, and has semi-promised to send convicted murderer Ian Huntley to El Salvador (admittedly a bit of a vote winner). It's an ambitious package, but there are questions about its viability... Is Britain facing societal collapse? No. If it was, you wouldn't get back alive from the pub or be able to get petrol or bread. Is crime up? On some measures and in some places, against certain given periods of time, it is up; on other measures, it's down. The variations in the way crime is measured are one issue – it's risky to go by the number of crimes recorded by the police, because people will sometimes not bother to report them, especially the less serious matters, so statisticians treat these figures with caution. The other way of measuring crime rates, which should also be adjusted for changes in population, is by conducting surveys among the public – but not everything is included. Somewhat confusingly, Farage seems to think that the survey data is unreliable because people have given up telling the police about, for example, thefts that might affect their insurance. That doesn't make sense. Types of crime also necessarily change over time; there are very few thefts of car radios or bank blags these days, but there's massively more cybercrime and fraud. Even in London, described by Farage as 'lawless', not all crime is up; there's a long-term trend down in murder and rape, for example, and there are still plenty of tourists. So fact-checking any politician on the subject of crime is virtually impossible. All such claims need to be treated with the utmost care. What about the costings? Farage presented a 'costings sheet' that purports to show that the whole massive package – recruiting 30,000 more police, opening new 'custody suites', restoring magistrates' court operations, building prisons, paying rent for offenders deported to prisons in El Salvador or Estonia, and the rest – would come to £17.4bn over a five-year parliament: a mere £3.48bn per annum. The costings seem to be optimistic, based on some arbitrary assumptions such as always being able to cut costs to a minimum. They are not independently audited by, say, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and if it were really all so cheap to do, the Tories and Labour would surely have taken the opportunity to transform the crime scene and turn Britain into a paradise long ago. As for funding even the admitted £17.4bn, there are no specific named savings elsewhere, just some recycled claims about the (contested) cost of net zero and the supposed economic miracle wrought in Argentina by President Milei. Probably not enough to calm the bond markets under a Farage government. Is the UK 'close to civil disobedience on a vast scale'? So Farage claims. His critics say that his 'I predict a riot' remarks tend to have a self-fulfilling quality to them, as seen in the 'Farage riots' in Southport and elsewhere a year ago. Essex Police, who are currently dealing with violent unrest in Epping – perpetrated by 'a few bad eggs', as Farage terms it – won't thank him for his comments. And the anecdotes? Uncheckable, just as Enoch Powell's were in the infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. We may never know whether, for example, a former army sergeant was denied a job as a police officer because the force was 'having trouble with its quotas' or for some other reason. Reform's tactics are also reminiscent of the Trump playbook, demonstrating an obsession with incarceration and policing by fear. If Farage could build a British Alligator Alcatraz on a disused RAF base in Suffolk, he probably would. But using grass snakes, presumably. Can Farage cut crime in half in five years? It feels implausible. If he could, then presumably he could abolish crime altogether if he were given a decade in office. The 'zero tolerance' approach sounds fine, but if the pledge that every shoplifting offence, every whiff of a spliff, and every trackable mobile phone theft has to be investigated is taken literally – as he seems to intend – then even 30,000 more officers wouldn't be sufficient, and the expanded court and prison system would collapse. Much the same goes for 'saturation' levels of policing deployed on stop-and-search exercises in high-knife-crime areas. Sending many more people to jail is also very costly, but, more to the point, the recent Gauke report explains why prison doesn't work and just makes everything worse. To get crime down under Reform UK, we'd need to turn the UK into a police state.


The Guardian
7 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Keir Starmer tells MPs he wants to cut child poverty before next election
Keir Starmer said he wants to reduce child poverty by the end of the parliament, as the prime minister comes under mounting pressure to end the two-child benefit cap. The prime minister told MPs on Monday it was his aim to cut the number of children living in poverty by the time of the next election, going further than the manifesto pledge his party made before last year's election. Starmer's target will renew focus on ending the two-child cap, which poverty campaigners say is the most efficient way to take children out of poverty but would cost an estimated £3.6bn a year. Speaking to members of parliament's liaison committee, the prime minister said: 'We've set up a designated taskforce to look specifically to child poverty, to devise our strategy, and I have oversight of that, so that everybody can see it's a No 10/prime minister priority in what we're doing.' Asked by Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury select committee, whether it was his aim to cut child poverty this parliament, he replied: 'Yes. The last Labour government got child poverty down, and I want to get child poverty down.' His comments go further than the 2024 party manifesto, which promised to 'develop an ambitious strategy to reduce poverty'. But the government remains unclear on how it intends to meet the prime minister's target, with the results of the child poverty taskforce expected later this year. Starmer has previously said he wants to end the cap 'when fiscal conditions allow' but ministers said this has been made harder recently by the government's decision to abandon planned cuts to disability benefits in the face of a Labour rebellion. Child poverty rates have been rising for most of the last decade, and nearly a third of children now live in poverty, according to campaign groups. Ending the two-child cap, which was imposed by the Conservatives in 2017, would be a costly measure but one that experts say would have the most direct impact on poverty rates per pound spent. The Child Poverty Action Group says scrapping it would take 350,000 children out of poverty overnight – reducing the rate by seven percentage points. Starmer came under heavy criticism during Monday's hearing with the chairs of all 32 Commons select committees – even from his Labour colleagues over the government's record on poverty and living standards. Debbie Abrahams, the chair of the work and pensions select committee, said she had been 'ashamed' by the initial proposals in the government's welfare bill, against which she helped lead the rebellion. 'This was poor legislation,' she said. 'It was designed to save money for the Treasury by cutting support to sick and disabled people. It was so far removed from Labour values of fairness and social justice, let alone compassion and common decency. I have to say I felt ashamed.' Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Liam Byrne, the chair of the business select committee, warned that government policies were helping make the bottom 40% of households worse off. 'The bottom 40% of households, they're not going to be better off in three years' time,' he said. 'They're actually going to be £1,200 a year worse off.' Byrne urged Starmer to commit to raising capital gains tax to give lower-paid people a tax cut – something the prime minister declined to rule out. Starmer did however say he wanted to sign further deals with the EU following on from the government's recent 'reset', specifically on cooperation over medicines and making it easier for touring musicians and other artists to travel around the continent. 'They're not the only areas, but these are common sense changes that we could make to our arrangements with the EU, which have, in my view, very little to do with the vote in 2016.' The prime minister added that he had been 'quite uncomfortable' about the Afghanistan superinjunction, which hid a major data breach and secret relocation scheme. The prime minister called the scheme and the superinjunction a 'shocking inheritance' from the previous government, even though his ministers extended the legal tool twice and only lifted it after a year in power.