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New Statesman
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The Blairite Breakfast Club
Illustration by Marcus Butt / Ikon Images An army marches on its stomach and the Blairite New Labour praetorian guard of Keir Starmer's cabinet meets for breakfast club. Lunch is for wimps and dinners are too often public, so, whispered a snout, Pat McFadden, Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall and Peter Kyle gather in the early morning away from bleary eyes to chew over the state of play. The orange-juice band are tight-knit with a common orientation and interests. No plotting occurs against the Prime Minister, insists our informant, but if Starmer ever looks like he's toast, expect a united front with the other three backing Streeting. By the way, the Health Secretary is expected by colleagues to go on the chicken run to a much safer roost now Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana's new party might make vulnerable Ilford North hostile territory. Starmer is braced to go through his Highland hell bromance with Trump all over again during September's state visit. The US president's green-eyed onetime British bestie Nigel Farage must've been one of the few leaders who wished they were in the PM's shoes for the near 90-minute ordeal in Scotland. 'We're grown-up about the value of Keir's relationship with the president,' sniffs an aide. There must be an entire book in this for Starmer rather than a mere chapter in future memoirs. It can be hard to know what to do once you're no longer PM, as Starmer will discover one day. Tony Blair regularly welcomes furtive groups of Labour MPs to the offices of his think tank. Our snouts have spotted Theresa May in the big Waitrose in Maidstone, picking up essentials while Philip pushes the trolley. David 'chillaxing' Cameron continues to enjoy life after Westminster. A personal Instagram post over the weekend showed a shorts-and-polo-shirt-wearing Cameron at the ISPS Handa Senior Open at Sunningdale, Berkshire, with former taoiseach Enda Kenny. Cameron looked almost unbearably happy holding a silver plate after being part of the winning team at the tournament. With a reported net worth of £40m, Cameron may not need any more silver either. Dubbed Donald Trump's guy in Silicon Valley before Elon Musk mutated Twitter into X and Mark Zuckerberg turned two-Facedbook, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel was in town recently and held a private dinner with right-wing worthies. Thiel, waging a war on progressives, was aghast about the state of Britain. He predicted that our economy, being roughly '80 per cent services and 20 per cent manufacturing', would soon come under even more pressure. AI would ravage the services, and sky-high industrial energy prices would see off what remained of the manufacturing. Did anyone have a good response to Thiel's challenge around the table? Not according to our snout. He told the British right what it wanted to hear. Blink-of-an-eye PM Liz Truss notoriously claimed the 'jury's out' on whether French President Emmanuel Macron was a friend or a foe of the UK, and now a similar decision pockmarks the Green Party's carnivorous leadership bash. Adrian Ramsay couldn't tell LBC interviewer Iain Dale whether he liked 'eco-populist' rival Zack Polanski or not. The MP for Waveney Valley and Green Party co-leader wobbled when asked directly, subsequently clarifying he liked 'working with Zack'. Polanski, whose campaign took Ramsay somewhat by surprise, said afterwards that he was 'stung' by the hesitation. Having worked with Ramsay for years, Polanski expected better: 'I hadn't realised that Adrian didn't like me on a personal level.' Always the last to know? Defeating the Spanish Armada, Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, Wellington's at Waterloo, Winston Churchill as the grandson of a Duke, and the creation of the NHS by Clement Attlee, grandfather of a hereditary peer, were all cited in vain by Tory shadow Lords leader, Nicholas True, as reasons to reprieve hereditary bluebloods from the guillotine. 'Frankly bonkers stuff,' sniffed a Labour source. Quite. At last a glint of good news for Kendall: there are fewer vermin under Labour. After this column's snippet last week on the rodent-infested Mouses of Parliament our eyes alighted on figures recording a fall in pest control call-outs to Jobcentres and other buildings managed by the DWP. The 571 to date this year include one a piece for cockroaches and grey squirrels, 16 for wasps, 93 for birds, and 140 for rats and mice, with unspecified insects topping the bill at 288. Kendall must have shot the Tory fox, with zero cases recorded in 2025 after 13 problems with Mr Tods in recent Conservative times. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The likely formal name of Corbyn and Sultana's provisionally titled Your Party? She suggested The Left or Left Party. An emphasis on Gaza triggered one Labour hostile to float calling it Jezbollah. Snout Line: Got a story? Write to tips@ [See also: The UK to recognise Palestine if there is no ceasefire] Related
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Business
- New Statesman
Big Tech is the only winner of the Online Safety Act
Illustration by Fabien Gilbert / Ikon Images Last Friday at 6:32 am, the sitting MP for Lowestoft visited Pornhub. 'To continue,' went a pop-up, 'we are required to verify that you are 18 or older, in line with the UK Online Safety Act.' The Act, which came into force last week, was designed to protect children on the internet. Under it, most online services that host user-generated content must conduct risk assessments and take steps to make sure minors do not encounter explicit content. This means all pornography sites must have in place rigorous age-checking procedures. Ofcom found that 8 per cent of children aged eight to 14 had visited an online pornography site or app over a month-long period. Fine. But the unintentional by-product is that the most innocuous services might be the worst hit. The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's non-profit operator, is mounting a legal challenge to the bill, arguing that the changes will compromise the site's commitment to privacy and freedom of speech. 'This is not good news,' said the owner of The Hamster Forum, 'Home Of All Things Hamstery,' back in March. 'I would probably need a lawyer and team of experts to be able to fully comply with everything… I am going to have to close the forum… I'm suggesting everyone joins Instagram and follows our account on Instagram instead.' The forum's owner was quoted £2400 a year to use an external age-verification service in compliance with the Act. This is a big chunk of the average part-time webmaster's income, but nothing to corporate social media executives, who get by on paid advertising and huge initial injections of venture capital. Annual enterprise costs for Persona Identities, the service used by Reddit and LinkedIn, are reported to start in the lower six figures. The only websites with the financial capacity to work around the government's new regulations are the ones causing the problems in the first place. And now Meta, which already has a monopoly on a number of near-essential online activities (from local sales to university group chats), is reaping the benefits. Thousands of hamster enthusiasts are likely flooding onto Instagram as we speak, ready to be redirected into black holes of miscellaneous 'content' they never asked for in the first place. The exact nature of this content is of no corporate concern. The only service rendered is to advertisers, whose pleas are helpfully interspersed between posts and videos. The people running the platform do not care what you logged on for and whether you got it. Compare this to the beleaguered Hamster Forum. No venture capital is involved – the website was run by passionate hobbyists. They clubbed together with the express purpose of disseminating rodent intel to the people who searched for it. If its users really do move over to Instagram, they'll find their photos and advice trapped behind a login wall, where they will only benefit other net contributors to Zuckerberg's growing empire. Their pets will make Meta richer – cute videos are an asset if you're trying to suck consumers into an infinite behavioural loop that only benefits you. Perhaps most unfairly, the forum's hamster owners will have to live on the terms of people who are totally indifferent to the value of their time and knowledge. The sad case of London teenager Molly Russell was a major motivator in the writing of the Online Safety Act. Russell saw an algorithmic vortex of disturbing imagery on Instagram and Pinterest before her death in 2017; the vortex existed because tech stakeholders demand infinite growth at any human cost. These are morally corrupting incentives that the Act doesn't even attempt to address. If Labour mean what they say about online harm, they ought to consider the more radical option: use government policy to dissolve the tech monopolies. Give Britons a chance to eke out an online existence without having to cope with the second-order effects of a for-profit internet – invasive advertising, data collection and addiction-forming 'dark patterns.' Let nobody in receipt of public funding post from behind a login wall. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Online non-natives have another truth to reckon with: true stewardship is impossible. The government is King Canute and the internet is the unruly tide. Without 'user-generated content' there would be no World Wide Web in the first place. If we have to choose between a decentralised internet with user-generated content, or a functionally empty internet with children on it, the answer is obvious: get rid of the children. Take the onus of age verification away from the websites, and hand it to the broadband providers. Open up a competitive market for offline phones. Bring back the CD-ROM, and the paper book. The corporate force needed to keep minors safe online is the same corporate force driving everyone mad. [See more: The revenge of the left] Related
New Statesman
23-07-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
Who is accountable in privatised Britain?
Illustration by Andy Carter / Ikon Images 'New, unadopted estate.' The Hitchin MP, Alistair Strathern, pointed. Then he gestured to a building site where diggers were enthusiastically getting to work. 'New estate that will be unadopted… Unadopted estate… Unadopted estate.' During the 20-minute drive from Shefford town centre to Hitchin Station, we passed at least six examples of the phenomenon Strathern had invited me to his constituency, which straddles the Bedfordshire-Hertfordshire border, to explore: new-build housing estates their councils have refused to adopt. Much has been written about leasehold, the peculiarly British 'feudal' system in which homebuyers own a property but not the land it sits on, leaving them liable for spiralling ground rent and management fees. After decades of advocacy, some improvements were made under the Conservatives in last year's Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act, and Labour has promised to go further with protections for leaseholders in this parliament. But even when new-build homes are sold with the freehold, hidden costs can sneak in. Known as 'fleecehold' housing, the estates Strathern pointed out are those where the responsibility for maintaining the roads, street lighting, drainage and communal areas has not been adopted by the council, as it deems development not to have been completed to a high enough standard. Until a development is adopted, the residents must pay for the services the council would usually provide, in addition to council tax, via yearly fees paid to private management companies. The fees themselves may not sound large – £200-£300 a year. Or, at least, that's the level at which they start out. At a new estate I visited, fees had been hiked by 41 per cent in a year, with vague explanations. Calls and emails to the management company went largely unanswered; correspondence was limited to scarily worded 'final demand' letters. If owners refuse to pay, management companies can go direct to their lender to have the charges added to their mortgage, tanking the owner's credit rating. Residents I met spoke of finding it impossible to determine what they were paying for, or to hold the management company accountable for the work it was – or wasn't – carrying out. Fleecehold is now the norm across the country. Whereas councils used to adopt new estates, the Competition and Markets Authority has found that 80 per cent of new homes built by the 11 largest developers in 2021-22 were sold under the fleecehold system, with £260m in estate management charges paid out in 2022 alone. There are stories of owners being assured their estate would be adopted as a formality, only to still be paying fees a decade on. Meanwhile, the government is pushing through planning reform to meet its target of 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament. The problem may not be as visceral as the issues with build quality that owners of new-builds often face: cracked walls, dodgy plumbing, damp and mould. But the two are inextricably linked. Every owner I spoke to about fleecehold charges also had a horror story of how their 'dream home' had turned into a nightmare of construction faults that developers were reluctant to rectify. One showed me a brimming lever-arch folder of his correspondence with the developer – 200 pages in 20 months. The question is one of accountability. When things go wrong, whose job is it to fix them? What happens if they fail to do so? And how are they seemingly able to charge what they like, with no cap on costs or any obligation to show how the money is spent? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe You might imagine the council would step in. But, as I found out in Hitchin, cash-strapped local authorities have little incentive to ensure developments are built to standard, as adopting them means adopting additional costs. The developers, meanwhile, have little incentive to come back to complete repairs once the houses have been sold. Strathern, who worked on the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill committee, is hoping to change this and has introduced a debate in parliament on ensuring new estates are adopted on schedule. But it's hard to fix a problem most people don't even know exists until after they've bought their homes. Passing the accountability buck can be an art form. In Shefford, I visited Old Bridge Way: a 220m stretch of road through an industrial park connecting an estate of some 1,000 homes to the centre of town and a Morrisons. I stood there for ten minutes watching non-stop traffic navigate a maze of potholes six inches deep. Central Bedfordshire Council says this is not its responsibility, as it doesn't actually own that part of the road. Who does own it is an open question: the company responsible for it was liquidated in 2024, leaving it effectively ownerless. But I noticed double yellow lines along the kerbside. I asked the council if it was issuing parking fines for a road it claimed it had no responsibility for, but it did not offer an answer. A council that won't adopt a thoroughfare used by thousands of people is unlikely to adopt estates full of new homes. Strathern described both situations as 'hollowed-out councils retreating from the public realm'. To me, they resembled what the satirical science-fiction author Douglas Adams once termed a Somebody Else's Problem field, a way of concealing inconvenient things that utilises 'people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain'. For residents placed in fleecehold limbo the issues of rising fees and the lack of accountability are impossible to ignore. For everyone else, they are Somebody Else's Problem. [See also: GMB chief Gary Smith: 'Oil and gas is not the enemy'] Related
New Statesman
21-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
The decline and fall of Great Britain
Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images The truly unnerving thing about the fall of Rome (yes, I'm going there again, sorry) was that most Romans probably didn't notice it had happened. The final western emperor was formally deposed on 4 September 476 – but everyone, including the bloke who'd deposed him, assumed the place was just being run from Constantinople now, and it took a couple more centuries of sackings, plague and things breaking and not being fixed before anyone decided the empire had actually ended long ago. To those who'd lived through it, the story was more one of decline than fall. Things breaking and not being fixed – the sneaking suspicion that things might just keep getting worse – has been a theme of British life of late. In too many towns, boarded up shopfronts predominate; shops and restaurants that closed during Covid and never reopened, or did reopen, but as low-value and slightly suspect operations like vape shops or nail bars. A general air of scuzziness has crept in, as councils make their final metamorphosis from the once proud local corporations that built this country, to struggling and underfunded social care funding bodies with an occasional sideline in bins. Meanwhile, social media is awash with stories of police ignoring petty crimes, and immediately marking inquiries as closed, as if there's no value in investigating and nothing to be done. (When someone is caught expressing support for Palestine, at least, Kent police are on it.) Even in London, which for all its problems remains far richer than the country it governs, commentators whine about graffiti on tube trains, station lifts out of use due to unspecified motor faults, the year it'll take to replace just four escalators at Cutty Sark station. Such criticisms are heard most often from the right-wingers who seek to demonise the city and its liberal Muslim mayor alike – but they resonate nonetheless, because they're not entirely wrong. It does feel absurd that a city that just a few years ago was New York's only plausible challenger for the title of 'capital of the world' now can't find the parts to fix a bloody lift. Consider the sorry saga of Hammersmith Bridge, which connects two districts of plush west London. In the 1820s, the bridge took just three years to build; in the 1880s, just five to replace after a boat smacked into it. Now, it's been closed to motor traffic for six years and counting – the cars may not matter; the buses surely do – and no one has offered a timetable for when that might change. Everyone is waiting on someone else to pay. I could keep banging on about both the sense of decline and the apparent inability of our government to arrest it – I've not even mentioned, say, the looming collapse of the university sector, taking a bunch of regional economies with it, or the 20-year failure to even think about social care. But I want to devote the rest of my wordcount instead to the psychic cost of all this. For quite a while this country was blessed with a sense of, for want of a better word, progress. Many lived hard lives; for certain people in certain places, things could get worse as well as better. But if you look at the state of the nation as a whole at any point in the 19th or 20th century, you could generally rely on things having improved visibly over the previous, say, 20 years. That no longer seems to hold true. We're not significantly richer than we were in 2005, but the cost of living is significantly higher, and the cost of having somewhere to live higher still. Worse, a lot of basic state functions are in remission. We no longer trust that the police will come when called, or you can see a doctor when sick. And we have a prime minister who doesn't recognise that anything has broken. Perhaps the idea of progress was an aberration. For much of history, even the bits that didn't have Rome to look back on, the golden age was assumed to lay behind, not ahead, of the present. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But that sense that things would get better made a whole load of otherwise near impossible things plausible. You could redistribute resources, because the size of the pie was growing. You could ask people to make sacrifices, because tomorrow would be better than today. How do you do that when too many people don't have enough, and no longer trust their sacrifice will even help? How can you have progressive politics without any sense of progress? Tomorrow is not looking better than today. Thanks to a combination of demographics and economics, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, there are excellent reasons to imagine it might actually be worse. At least when the Tories were in office, we had the day that they'd lose to look forward to. Now the only plausible change in the offing is Nigel bloody Farage. The emperor isn't coming to save us. He may yet be the one to cut the aqueducts. [See also: Gaza will radicalise a generation] Related
New Statesman
16-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Thought experiment 14: The box that can change the past
Illustration by Marie Montocchio / Ikon Images In front of you are two boxes. In the first, Box A, there is £1,000. The box is transparent. You can see the money. The second box, Box B, is opaque and may or may not contain £1,000,000. You have a choice. You can either take Box B (and Box B only), or you can take both boxes. Whatever money is in the boxes is yours. But here's the catch: you have been told that there is a very good predictor, let's call her Meg, who is almost always right. And if Meg predicted that you'd take both boxes, she'll have left Box B empty. If she predicted you'd only take Box B, she'll have stuffed it with that million quid. So, what would you do? Take one box or two? I've long been a two-boxer. But the puzzle divides people. Back in 2016, Brexit referendum year, I debated it in the pages of the Guardian with a one-boxer, the Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed. Since then, he's been appointed free speech tsar for the Office for Students (the higher education regulator), and has declared that university education should be 'the intellectual equivalent of stepping into a boxing ring'. But from boxing rings back to boxes. The Guardian ran a poll and 31,854 readers voted. I moaned at the time that, as with Brexit, a slight majority (in this case, 53.5 per cent) had got it badly wrong – ie they were one-boxers and sided with Arif. I'd failed to convince readers with the following argument: by the time you're faced with the choice, Meg has already made her prediction. You cannot influence a decision made in the past by making a decision in the present. Meg has either put £1m into Box B or she has not. So you have nothing to lose by taking both boxes. Think of it this way. Imagine that Box B has transparent glass on the far side – the side you can't see. Suppose a friend on this far side, looking into Box B, was permitted to communicate with you. What would their advice be? Surely to take both boxes. If the £1m is there, and you choose both boxes, it won't disappear in a puff of smoke. It is irrational to take only Box B, because, in comparison, taking both boxes will always enrich you by an extra £1,000. On the other hand, if Meg foresees that you'll take both boxes, it appears you'll miss out on a financial bonanza. If the choice is between being rational and being rich, Arif wrote, 'I'll take the money every time.' Newcomb's paradox, just described, is named after William Newcomb, an American theoretical physicist who devised the problem in 1960. But it only gathered prominence when the Harvard professor Robert Nozick resurrected it in an article in 1969. Nozick had heard about it at a party – 'the most consequential party I have attended'. Over the years, he posed the problem to many people. 'To almost everyone it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost equally on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe We don't face Newcomb's paradoxes in real life. But it has a similar structure to a more familiar problem in theology. The 16th-century pastor John Calvin thought that God has predetermined who would and who would not ascend to heaven. There's nothing any of us can do about this. But Calvin also maintained that the best predictor of whether you're to be saved is that you live an honourable, virtuous life. So, how to conduct yourself? On the one hand, if you don't live your life in a righteous manner, it is almost certain you won't be saved. On the other hand, since either you're saved or you're not, there isn't much incentive to behave. In the year Nozick was writing about Newcomb's paradox, the Northern Ireland footballer George Best trialled behavioural restraint. 'In 1969 I gave up women and alcohol', he said. 'It was the worst 20 minutes of my life.' For two-boxer Calvinists, George Best's approach to life might make sense. In fact, through conversations with the Australian philosopher Huw Price, I've had a rethink. My key assumption was that cause has to precede effect. You can cause things to happen in the future, but not the past. However (and mind-bending though this idea is), it turns out that our best understanding of quantum mechanics requires, or is at least compatible with, backwards causation, with things in the past being altered by things in the present or future. If that's right, the paradox dissolves. 'Everyone agrees that if we can affect what the predictor did, we should one-box,' says Price. As for the charge that causation can only work forwards: 'To an old pragmatist like me, causes are just means to ends. If you want B, and doing A gets you B, then A counts as a cause of B. I want the predictor to put the £1m in the opaque box, and one-boxing gets me that. So it counts as a cause!' I could never have predicted it, but I've changed my mind about Newcomb's Box. Haven't changed my mind about Brexit, though. [See also: Thought experiment 13: The comet that destroys the Earth after our death] Related
