Latest news with #socialcontract
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Two-tier policing is the nail in the coffin for Britain's social contract
Has a British Government ever appeared so terrified of its own people? More to the point, can you think of one that deserved it more? The social contract has been shredded. You go to work and pay your taxes for a state that seems to be crumbling into disrepair. In exchange, the Government takes your money, and uses it to fund an alleged secret scheme to fly in Taliban fighters to live on your street. But don't worry – we've got a new 'elite police squad' to prevent trouble. That police unit won't be patrolling your neighbourhood to keep you safe from harm. Rather, it will be tasked with scouring social media for protest pre-crime, monitoring your opinions for anti-migrant sentiment. The police might not have enough resources to deal with shoplifting. They might not have solved a single theft or burglary, or recover a stolen bike, across a third of England. But we are to believe they have resources for what really counts: scrutinising your views for wrongthink. The current state of affairs is so absurd that simply writing it down feels almost subversive. But each element is true: we do appear to have flown unvetted Taliban members into Britain. The Government really will be watching your posts for signs of dissent. This isn't some accident, some Civil Service blunder. It's by design. It truly appears that Labour's strategy is to impose ever more restrictions on the freedoms of the law-abiding, in the hope that eventually people will acquiesce with a resigned shrug. The problem is that it isn't working. The population is fed up with being punished for doing the right thing. The hectoring about slavery, imperialism, war and all the other iniquities of history used to justify sacrificing our comforts and liberties on the altar of mass migration is no longer having the desired effect. British citizens living today did not build the empire. They didn't enslave anyone. Why should they foot the bill for housing illegal migrants up in four star hotels in central London? Why should they put up with them working in the shadow economy? Unfortunately for the Government, the previously silent majority is beginning to vocally express its frustration. MPs and ministers are fearful that the country is becoming a 'tinderbox'. But even this isn't enough to convince them that we must change course. Why? Perhaps because doing so would be an admission of past failures. For decades we were told that mass migration was an unalloyed good while critics were denounced as bigots. To concede, after all this time, that it has not come without costs – at times intolerable costs – would be catastrophically damaging to the political class. The pro-migration fanatics, who promised to control numbers while throwing open our borders, who overrode objections to impose their policies despite what they were repeatedly being told at the ballot box, would be discredited. So instead, the state appears to be passing through the stages of grief. At first there was denial that people were worried about migration at all; Brexit had allowed us to be liberals. Then there was anger after Southport, with Starmer's denunciation of the 'thugs' taking to the streets. Now we seem to have reached bargaining: if we can stop people talking about it, perhaps they'll stop caring? It was a strategy that might have worked prior to the social media era, and in particular prior to Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter. Now, even the censorship of protest videos, arrest of people for incendiary content, and threat of mass scanning of output isn't sufficient to quell dissent. And though many of the protests now cropping up across Britain are peaceful, shows of police force are not enough to deter outside agitators from hijacking them. Tiff Lynch, the head of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, last week warned that officers were being 'pulled in every direction' and commanders were 'forced to choose between keeping the peace at home or plugging national gaps'. Where do we go from here? As the costs of legal migration become apparent, with talk of labour market infusions and attracting the 'best and brightest' seeming increasingly hollow, overall numbers must be reduced. As the impact of illegal migration becomes clearer, the establishment must stop trying to guilt us into acceptance, and finally stop the influx. It's highly doubtful Yvette Cooper has the will or the way. The Home Secretary would prefer to silence opponents, by censoring and arresting those who speak out.
Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Times
16-year-olds will soon have the vote. How will they use it?
Sir Keir Starmer may have been named after the founder of the Labour Party but among his predecessors it is Harold Wilson he admires most. Like Starmer, Wilson was both a pragmatist and a progressive, famously declaring that 'he who rejects change is the architect of decay'. It is this shared ethos that explains best why Starmer intends to hand the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds; he is the first prime minister to extend the franchise since Wilson lowered the threshold from 21 to 18 in 1969. Starmer believes it is essential to restoring the 'social contract' with younger generations, whose needs and desires have been ignored by successive governments, and whose faith in democracy is lower than other age groups. He also sees it, fundamentally, as an issue of fairness. 'He's long believed that if you can serve [in the military], pay tax and reach adulthood in that parliament you should have a say,' a No 10 source said. 'Every time the franchise has been widened it has been bitterly opposed. Opponents are on the wrong side of history again this time around.' Similar arguments shaped the thinking of Wilson's administration decades ago, as the Swinging Sixties and the Mod subculture personified by rock bands like the Who gave rise to new ideas about the meaning of adulthood. Starmer's opponents see it differently, noting the trend in recent years has shifted towards raising legal age thresholds, be it getting a tattoo, remaining in full-time education or buying tobacco. Starmer, following in the footsteps of Rishi Sunak, is pushing through a generational ban on cigarettes for anyone born after 2009. Those nicotine-free teenagers are the same people he wants to empower at the next election. The UK is to join a handful of countries that have moved to voting at 16 for national elections, including Austria, Argentina and Brazil. As the veteran Labour commentator John Rentoul recently observed, the challenge for Starmer is 'to explain why voting is different from most other things, not why it is the same'. The fiercest attacks on Starmer come from the right: Nigel Farage has accused Labour of attempting to 'rig the system' and secure re-election on the back of a 'youthquake'. But to focus on this alone is to ignore a movement that first emerged 40 years ago, and which stretches far beyond the confines of Labour politics. In 1985, at a time of surging youth unemployment, drug use and crime, a fresh-faced Liberal Democrat MP sought to seize on the growing clamour for change. Aged 30, Jim Wallace, the member for Orkney & Shetland, put forward a youth charter bill to improve educational and work opportunities and to lower the voting age from 18. He argued young people could bring forward 'fresh ideas' and had put environmental issues on the agenda 'long before they gained political respectability'. Unlike the environmental movement, his bill failed to catch on. Wallace, who went on to lead the Scottish Lib Dems and served as both deputy and acting first minister of Scotland, now says that 'the lot fell on me' because he was the youngest Lib Dem in parliament. Nevertheless, the principle stuck with him and he remains, aged 70, a staunch supporter. While another three private member's bills failed in 1991, 1992 and 1999, the cause continued to rise up the political agenda and became a core policy for the Liberal Democrats. It has been in their manifesto since 1992. The SNP followed suit in 1997. The idea gained popular momentum in the early 2000s as dozens of youth and democracy organisations formed the Votes at 16 Coalition. It was around this time that a young Angela Rayner, a teenage mother who left school at 16, also began advocating to lower the voting age in her role as a Stockport branch secretary at Unison, the trade union. While the Electoral Commission advised against the move, by 2007 Gordon Brown was calling for it as prime minister. The Youth Citizenship Commission was established to try to reconnect Britain's disengaged youth with the political system. Among the new commissioners was Wes Streeting, who was president of the National Union of Students and is now health secretary. As the 2010 election neared, Labour's internal National Policy Forum had given its backing and Streeting, determined the policy should make the manifesto, directly appealed to the man Brown had tasked with writing it. 'The inclusion of votes at 16 in the next manifesto is a litmus test as to how seriously the leadership take the youth movement of the party,' he wrote in a blog post for the LabourList website. 'Ed Miliband: we're watching you.' Miliband delivered: Labour's manifesto promised MPs a free vote on the issue. Brown, however, did not, and the election of David Cameron's Conservatives doused the hopes of a generation of young activists. However, the election did prove Brown right in at least one respect: less than half of the 18 to 24-year-olds registered to vote actually did so. While the Tories had killed off the prospect of UK-wide change, in Scotland the genie was already out of the bottle. At the instigation of Alex Salmond as first minister, 16-year-olds were allowed to vote on Scottish independence at the 2014 referendum. More than 100,000 of them voted and at least half chose independence. Sixteen and 17-year-olds gained the right to vote in Scottish parliamentary and local government elections in 2016, and Wales followed suit in 2020. While low turnout among young voters is frequently raised as a reason not to extend the franchise, Wallace believes Scotland has shown the opposite to be true. 'The turnout of 16 to 17-year-olds was better than the next tranche of 18 to 24-year-olds in 2014,' he noted, citing an analysis by the Electoral Commission, which put the figures at 75 per cent versus 54 per cent. The habit stuck. In 2023 research at the University of Edinburgh found these young Scots had 'continued to turn out [at subsequent elections] in higher numbers, even into their twenties, than young people who attained the right to vote later, at age 18'. Wallace believes this is partly explained by the flurry of educational activity around the Scottish referendum, with 'almost every second school holding a hustings'. He added: 'It confirms something that I have felt for a long time, which is that the reason why people don't vote is they don't know what it's about. I think just the act of going into a polling station is alien to some people. You have to strip away some of the mystique around it.' Similar trends have been found in Austria, where turnout among 16 and 17-year-olds roughly matches other age groups. By the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016, the principle of votes at 16 had become widely accepted in Labour. Miliband and later Jeremy Corbyn were firmly committed to it during their leaderships. After the vote to leave the EU, the argument deployed by Remainers, that 1.5 million ineligible teenagers had been robbed of their future, merely entrenched the belief among senior Europhiles that it was time for change. Many, like Rayner and Streeting, would go on to take seats around Starmer's cabinet table. With the policy now set, the question is whether this new cohort of voters will alter the course of the next election. They number 1.5 million, increasing the size of the franchise by 3 per cent, but large enough to prove decisive in a tight contest. According to an analysis by The Sunday Times, there are 114 constituencies where the size of the incumbent MP's majority is smaller than the number of 16 and 17-year-olds living there: Increasingly, age, rather than class or gender, is proving the key social divide in Britain — and it is certainly true that under Corbyn, these younger voters flocked to Labour in 2017. But those assumptions can no longer be made. Labour's majority is increasingly under threat from progressive parties such as the Greens, Lib Dems and Corbyn's new, as yet unnamed alternative. It is no longer a given that the youth votes left, if recent European elections are anything to go by. When Germany gave 16-year-olds the vote before last year's European parliament elections, the populist left and right increased their vote. Sixteen per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds voted for the hard-right AfD. There was a similar pattern in France, where 31 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds backed the left-wing France Unbowed at last year's European election and 26 per cent backed Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally. President Macron's Renaissance party got 8 per cent. Here in Britain, Reform has made a concerted effort to win over millennials and Gen Z. Farage's presence on TikTok, where these voters increasingly get their news, far surpasses his Labour and Tory rivals. In Warwickshire, where Reform won the largest number of seats in May's local elections, George Finch, a 19-year-old politics student at Leicester University, is now the leader of the county council. Reform holds a commanding lead in all-age opinion polls, but surveys by the think tank More in Common consistently show younger voters are still more drawn to Labour and the Greens. This is true even among young men, although they are voting for the populist right in unprecedented numbers. There are also signs that, despite Scotland's success, apathy among the young remains high. In a recent poll by Merlin Strategy, 49 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds said they did not want the vote before 18. Only 18 per cent were sure they would vote if there were an election tomorrow. • Daniel Finkelstein: Opposing votes at 16 would cost Tories dear With so many variables, the change seems likely to have a negligible impact. According to Wendy Chamberlain, a Lib Dem MP who previously co-chaired the Votes at 16 all-party parliamentary group, the only certainty in politics now is 'the volatility of the electorate, regardless of their age or other social demographics'. The bigger problem for Starmer is the perception of other voters. More in Common's polling found 70 per cent shared Farage's view that Labour was seeking electoral advantage, and votes at 16 were opposed by 48 per cent to 27 per cent. Luke Tryl, the think tank's director, says the issue ranks well below the public's top priorities. For Wallace, these are challenges not to resile from but to confront head-on. 'It's a reason to get your argument across to young people, to try and win their vote,' he said. 'Whether it's higher education, better training and apprenticeships, the environment, young people are right to be demanding more.' Additional reporting by Dominic Hauschild
BBC News
22-07-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
People Fixing the World Being better citizens
Citizenship is a kind of social contract that exists in democracies. To function effectively, members of society need to feel like they can engage with and improve their communities. We take a look at two projects helping people do just that in Portugal. We explore a scheme that has helped 30,000 teenagers team up with politicians to transform their local areas. And we hear how another project has enlisted older people in society to train as agents in disaster prevention and spread their knowledge in the wider community. People Fixing The World from the BBC is about brilliant solutions to the world's problems. We release a new edition every week. We'd love you to let us know what you think and to hear about your own solutions. You can contact us on WhatsApp by messaging +44 8000 321721 or email peoplefixingtheworld@ And please leave us a review on your chosen podcast provider. Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporter: Alison Roberts Producer: Claire Bates Editor: Jon Bithrey Sound mix: Hal Haines (Image: Students at a school in Portugal take part in a MyPolis session, MyPolis)
New York Times
13-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?
Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife's younger brother. I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama's speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician's license. My early memories of Matt are hazy — I was mostly trying to impress his parents. Still we got along, chatting amiably on holidays and at family events. Then the pandemic hit, and our preferences began to feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn't shocked when Matt didn't get the Covid shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I'd imagined we shared. Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely. As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets. 'Work's been good?' 'Mhrmm.' My frostiness wasn't personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways? I wasn't the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, 'It's time to start shunning the 'vaccine hesitant.'' An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create 'teachable moments,' it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers' deaths. Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums. In ancient Athens, a citizen deemed a threat to state stability could be 'ostracized' — cast out of society for a decade. For much of history, banishment was considered so severe that it substituted for capital punishment. The whole point of Hester Prynne's scarlet letter was to show she had violated norms — and to discourage others from doing so. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Sun
22-06-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Nigel Farage vows to slap rich foreigners with £250k ‘Robin Hood' tax – and hand the money to poor Brits
NIGEL Farage will today pledge a Robin Hood tax to take £250,000 from rich foreigners and hand it to the poor. The Reform UK boss plans to slap a one-off fee on the newcomers and returning Brits who want to settle in the UK. The 'entry contribution' would target non-doms — high net-worth individuals who live in Britain but pay no tax on overseas income. Unlike most levies, every penny would go to the lowest-paid full-time workers, HMRC handing it out as a tax-free bonus. In a speech, Mr Farage — who has made it clear he wants Reform to represent those who 'set their alarm clocks in the morning' — will vow to restore the social contract between rich and poor. He will argue that his plan will boost the country's hardest grafters. A party source told The Sun: 'Since the 2008 crash, the Bank of England pumped billions into the economy — but the working class didn't see a penny. 'This is about repairing the social contract. 'For once, the working class should be getting the bonus.' 1 Nobody who enters UK illegally should EVER be allowed to stay – it's totally unfair on law-abiding, taxpaying Brits But the Tories last night slammed Reform's announcement as 'fantasy economics'. Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride said: 'The British public need a real plan for putting more money in their pockets. "Reform's promises are ruinously irresponsible.'
