This week, the generational smoking ban became law. For those aged 17 and under, legalised smoking will remain tantalisingly out of reach, the age restriction rising with them. Unless it unravels, and it may, cigarettes will be de facto illegal by the end of this century. The ban itself is popular. The policy had support across the political spectrum, originating in Rishi Sunak’s premiership and surviving into Starmer’s Labour government. Nearly two-thirds of the public agree with it. Opposition has largely been restricted to the tobacco businesses (and, of course, they would) and those who follow in their wake.

There are obvious practical problems with the bill. It expects the shopkeepers of 2050 to assiduously discriminate between 42 and 43-year-olds at the point of sale. Like any prohibition, it gives succour to the grey and black markets, whose agents flout the law entirely. These criticisms have been largely cast aside. So too have arguments about personal freedom and choice.

The generational ban is the product of a health lobby that believes that the harm of smoking should not just be reduced but eliminated. No one, in their view, should be permitted to trade the enjoyment of a smoke for the risk of illness or premature death. It is a coherent and serious view, but one that rests on a highly questionable premise: that the optimal number of bad things happening is zero. This approach is becoming increasingly prominent in our politics, as we sit uneasily with harm.

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International affairs this week have had a bizarrely early modern feel. The President and Vice President of the United States have drawn themselves into a war of words with the Pope. JD Vance has taken to explaining Catholic theology to the Bishop of Rome, whilst Trump has posted images of himself appearing to pose as Jesus. The most extreme accounts have suggested the US threatened the Catholic church with schism and murmurs of a rival papacy. It is a strange state of affairs, just one year into the reign of the first-ever Pope from the United States.

There is a broader trend at play here. The populist right across America and Europe is developing a strange relationship with Christianity. It champions the faith as a bastion of tradition and the basis for identity, whilst simultaneously pulling away from much of its mainstream teaching and, as this week has made vividly clear, finding itself at odds with the very institutions that have carried it through history.

The difference can broadly be seen as Christian vs Christianist. The former is the practice of the faith, rooted in its history, theology and thinking. The latter is identitarian. It takes the symbols of the faith and uses them to form a political and national identity rather than a religious one. While this might encourage some towards the faith, the overlap is limited. It is mostly performative and often oppositional, rooted in a way of thinking that sees Christianity as the basis for Western civilisation, yet shows little curiosity about the faith itself. It operates largely in an exclusionary way, defining and excluding people of other faiths rather than drawing them towards a set of beliefs.

We see this across the populist right. Tommy Robinson and his supporters have increasingly embraced Christian imagery. Reports show it is driven less by faith than by a sense that Christianity is central to Englishness, and that the decline of the former endangers the latter. The faith is embraced as a defensive perimeter rather than a set of beliefs, with the theological content ignored or selectively interpreted.

This is not confined to the fringes. Nigel Farage has long invoked Christianity as central to British identity, while elements of the Conservative right have increasingly reached for similar language. Robert Jenrick made his infamous “Psalm Sunday“ gaffe last Easter. Across Europe, from the governments of Central and Eastern Europe to the nationalist parties of the West, the same pattern repeats. Christianity gets deployed as a civilisational marker, a shorthand for a particular vision of European identity, with little engagement with what the faith demands of its adherents.

Christianism itself often becomes a confused set of symbols and beliefs. It celebrates liberalism as a product of Christian thought, particularly in Northern European countries, whilst remaining deeply sceptical of liberalism in practice. Other religions are attacked for their positions on women or gay rights, whilst Christianism frequently facilitates the same discrimination and hostility towards those groups. Rather than following any coherent theological tradition within the faith, it simply grafts half-formed impressions of Christianity onto convenient ideologies.

Christianism serves a useful purpose to the populist right. Caught between competing interests and tilting towards economic liberalism while trying to retain less well-off voters, populism often struggles to articulate a coherent ideology. Tying itself to Christianity imbues a sense of historical depth and community. Policies that might otherwise appear as a ragbag of grievances and instincts acquire, when wrapped in the imagery of Christian civilisation, the appearance of a tradition being defended rather than a movement being invented.

The trend comes as British faith continues to wane and diversify. Recent reports of a Christian revival among Gen Z were ultimately retracted due to flawed methodologies. Christian worship continues to decline, and faith-based politics remains rare. There is little religious pressure on issues like abortion or gay marriage in the UK, and where it does exist, it fails to make much of a political mark. The other awkward thing for attempts to create a religious right movement in the UK is that Christian faith is often strongest among migrant communities, whether Eastern European Catholics or Protestants from Commonwealth Nations. Indeed, Britain’s most openly religious party, the Christian Alliance, is arguably its most diverse.

It remains, however, difficult to disentangle the Christian right and its Christianist form. Partly this is because individual beliefs are hard to interrogate and criticise -- after all, we should not be making windows into men’s souls. But there is also a mutual entanglement between those of faith and those adopting its imagery. There are serious, intellectual Christians in the mix who see the populist right as a vehicle for achieving their policy goals. Danny Kruger is an obvious example. But the Christianists also need these people to give their appropriation of the faith a veneer of credibility.

The problem for the true believers is one of simple arithmetic. They are a small minority within a coalition overwhelmingly dominated by civilisationalists for whom the theological content of Christianity is largely irrelevant. They lend disproportionate credibility to a movement that does not fundamentally share their concerns, lending it intellectual and moral seriousness. Much like the Vance/Vatican dispute, they stand to get jettisoned when the political arithmetic matters.

This makes it different from previous incarnations of faith-based politics. British politics has always had religious elements. Tory High Anglicans and Labour Methodists each brought religiously informed approaches to social problems, and politicians from other faiths have done likewise. In Europe, many of the post-war developments in social democracy were driven by leaders with deep faith. Yet this pivot towards Christianism is something else entirely. It is more performative, more exclusionary. While the religious traditions that shaped politics sought to apply faith to the world’s problems, Christianism uses religious identity and heritage as an anchor for populism, with little interest in what that faith demands.

The consequences of this sort of politics are already visible in the United States, where MAGA Christianity represents the most developed form of Christianism yet seen. It has produced a politics which repeatedly invokes religious imagery without any real concept of what it means, or even where movies end, and scripture begins. A faith-inflected identity politics in which the cross functions as a tribal marker that has become dominant, and religious language is deployed to sanctify political grievances rather than interrogate them.

The greater strength and plurality of Christian denominations in the US have made this a strangely symbiotic relationship. Some churches have become more Trumpian than Christian, their congregations shaped more by political identity than theological tradition. The faith gets remade in the movement’s image rather than the other way around. While churches, like the Catholics, with a strong universalist identity resist, many more American churches are basically uncritical of Trump, and often swept up in almost worshipping the man.

The Christianist tide has not yet risen in British politics. Faith is far less strongly professed than in the US, and significantly less intertwined with politics. We remain uneasy about committedly religious politicians, while religions themselves don’t necessarily map onto partisan positions. The building blocks of something similar are emerging, however. There is a new trend in the rhetoric of the populist right, in the lazy invocations of Christian heritage, and those who find themselves in church not because they have found God but because they feel a culture under threat.

Full co-option by the radical right would be damaging for the faith. Christianity reduced to a tribal marker, hollowed of theology, remade in the image of political grievance, is not Christianity preserved, but Christianity consumed. The institutions, the traditions, the intellectual inheritance that serious believers have spent two millennia developing - these do not survive being pressed into the service of populism.

There is a deep irony in all of this. The populist right claims to be defending a civilisation shaped by Christianity, yet its relationship with the faith is more often one of consumption rather than stewardship. The institutions it claims to champion get bullied when they speak inconveniently, as the Pope has discovered. The theology it invokes gets rewritten when it proves inconvenient, as Vance has demonstrated. And the believers who rely on it for influence will find, in time, that the movement was never really theirs. What is being defended is not Christianity but a political project that has found Christianity useful. When the usefulness expires, it will likely move on without a backward glance.

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The momentum behind social media bans for young people is growing. Greece is set to introduce a prohibition on under-15s next year, while similar measures are working their way through other European legislatures. Here, the Conservatives have thrown their weight behind one, but the government has so far resisted pushes from the Lords to include one in current legislation. It certainly feels like the trajectory is towards some sort of prohibition.

Personally, I remain unconvinced. Bans are complex and blunt pieces of legislation. There are difficulties in deciding what counts as “social media” and where an age limit sits alongside other questions of competence and responsibility. There is limited evidence that bans address broader issues, particularly given the causal links between social media and poor outcomes in childhood. The idea has swept through the political system because it is emotive and popular, and has dodged a lot of proper scrutiny.

There is another reason for caution, however. Imposing an age limit feels like the sort of big-bang legislation that makes the government feel like it’s tackled the problem. It avoids discussion of the broader harms of social media at the individual and social levels. Indeed, it potentially mitigates against a broader examination of the role, responsibilities and duties of platforms by removing children from them. It safeguards the children, but endangers the rest of us.

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In the early months of 2020, a crisis was slowly moving across the globe. The first warning signs emerged in Asia, then spread to Europe. Our own government remained relaxed about it. “Business as usual” was the mantra, until it rapidly wasn’t. We all know what came next, with the abrupt turn into lockdown and the greatest challenge to our ordinary lives since the war. We also now know something else. Thanks to the recent reports from the Covid inquiry, we can see how a lack of government preparedness, seriousness, and, most of all, honesty made it far worse than it could have been.

Now the alarm bells of a new crisis – an energy shortage – should be starting to ring. The Straits of Hormuz, the route for 20% of global oil capacity, have been closed for weeks. The system’s lag is being used up, and the timelines for ramping up production remain long. Even if the war ended tomorrow, there would be a severe energy shock. Indeed – there already is one. In Asia, governments are trying to slash demand. France is reporting fuel shortages. Britain may be a month or so from running out of jet fuel. Yet our political class, and the debates around the issue, remain deeply unserious, failing to reckon with the realities of such a supply shock.

The government is telling people to keep their usage “normal”. The main policy interventions so far have been to provide financial support for the most affected and most vulnerable. The various opposition parties are calling for greater demand subsidies. The Lib Dems have called for fuel duty to be cut. So have the Conservatives, as well as urging for VAT to be removed on home energy. Reform has added a call for cuts in air travel taxes. These may be attractive to voters and align with the parties’ priors, but they are wholly inadequate to meet the challenge at hand and may ultimately worsen the problems the country faces.

In economic terms, the situation is relatively straightforward. The blockade of Hormuz means there is less energy available than normal. Globally, there is a shortfall between supply and demand. Depending on where you sit between sources and the independence of production and existing supply levels, it depends quite how that hits you. But it will hit eventually if the crisis remains unfixed. Should this happen, decisions have to be made about who gets the energy and who loses out.

Nature (or, well, the market’s) way of doing that is through pricing. Costs go up, demand falls away. The newly scarce resources go to those who either value it the most or have the resources to pay. The political challenge here is obvious. There is some energy use we can’t easily eliminate, and it’s becoming painfully expensive. Prices rise for everyone but become particularly challenging for those on the lowest incomes. It becomes harder for them to heat their homes or afford transport to work, and so on. These become compounding problems – triggering poor health, job losses, and increased vulnerability.

Demand subsidy, however, will only make this problem worse. If the government makes oil, petrol and other fuels cheaper, demand won’t fall as quickly. The supply-demand shortfall will be greater, and there is a risk of shortages. There is an obvious moral case for subsidies to the poorest. The government is sensible to lead with this approach. Universal tax cuts, however, are the worst possible way forward. They amount to a fiscal transfer to the best off and fail to stem demand. Rather than curtailing their fuel use as prices rise, people continue to consume at the same level, placing the same demand on the now-dwindling stocks. The poorest would be hit even harder by this, as they would again struggle to keep up with surging prices. They also have a global impact, making it even harder for poor countries to obtain fuel for essential uses.

In the worst-case scenario, the government will have to find an alternative way to control demand – rationing. For petrol and diesel, the government has existing plans to address supply shortfalls. These include individual purchase limits, prioritisation for emergency vehicles and relaxation of working conditions to allow tankers to move supplies more easily. These, however, become less effective the longer the shortfall lasts. They also do nothing for the more complex demands for heating and electricity. In the ultimate eventuality, a supply shock on the scale of the 1973 crisis (which is currently plausible, if not likely), the government would have to resort to more restrictive measures. The International Energy Agency is already discussing measures such as lowering speed limits, avoiding air travel, and encouraging working from home to reduce usage intensity. Proper rationing remains a possibility. In the 1970s, ration books were issued, but never used.

None of this is likely to be popular. Increased fuel prices always hit governments hard, and the events in Iran are likely to drive another round of inflation across the board. Restrictions will also be unpopular. You can see why the government doesn’t want to talk about them and is currently downplaying the risks and stonewalling inquiries about contingency measures. They also do not want to trigger a more acute crisis by encouraging people to panic-buy, or worse, stockpile under dangerous conditions. But by not properly preparing the country for the risks, the political shock will likely be greater if it does come.

The government should instead be preparing and advising people on how to use less. We need to normalise the idea that a supply shock is likely, and that if it does occur, it will not be “business as usual”. This requires educating people on the best ways to reduce energy consumption. We should show people how to avoid energy waste and encourage best practices. Give people time to adjust, both mentally and practically. Instead of distracting and specious attacks on business, the government needs to prepare the population. Likewise, opposition parties also need to get serious. The worst response to a supply shock is the subsidy of demand, especially where it is hitting the poorest most acutely.

The sooner we cut the softest bits of demand, the better. Encourage people to reduce their journeys or replace them with more sustainable forms of transport. Talk to them about vehicle sharing and combining trips. Get people tweaking their thermostats and boiler flow rates. Have businesses reduce air conditioning usage. Help people to understand the scale of the problem, the looming risk, and what they can do about it. In COVID, the government floundered partly because it didn’t trust people, yet when the lockdowns were introduced, they were generally understood and followed. The response this time is nowhere near as intense – but we do need people to start shifting their behaviour.

The core lesson of COVID was that delaying government reaction doesn’t make the worst problems go away. Nor does it stop the public reacting. Even before the government announced the lockdown, patterns of behaviour were already changing. Proper messaging allows you to optimise that change. Here, the message should be a clear one – don’t panic, don’t hoard, but be prepared for a supply shock. Think about your behaviour, start to cut demand now before it becomes a necessity. This will smooth the transition and help to alleviate the current situation. The public doesn’t need to see the full details of worst-case scenario planning, but helping them to understand the risks could promote the right changes in behaviour.

If the energy shock fully materialises, demand will have to drop. Price will be part of how we do that. The opposition parties should step back from calling for de facto subsidies for everyone and show a little crisis consensus. The government is right to target financial support where it is most needed. Universal support, whether through payments or tax cuts, will only make it harder to reduce demand, thereby increasing the challenge of supply shortages. Scarcity has to be allocated somehow, and bungs for the rich to keep driving are the worst way to do it. The government is right to ensure people don’t panic, but they should be doing more to ensure they prepare. This crisis will not be as deep or as deadly as COVID, but it will be equally resistant to pretending it is not around the corner.

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Six weeks from now, we will be digesting the results of the local elections. On the left, it is likely to be the night that solidifies the political collapse of Starmerism. The Labour Party looks set to haemorrhage votes. In towns and suburban areas, this will empower Reform as they eat up the Conservative vote and energise non-voters. In cities, left-wing opposition, especially the Greens, will be eyeing up major advances.

It feels almost a foregone conclusion that this will precipitate a leadership crisis. Being unpopular in polling is one thing – seeing it for real in the ballot box is another. Losing swathes of council seats will annoy the party faithful and make MPs restless. While the mechanisms for ousting a Labour leader are not as straightforward as those in the Conservative Party (which will likely fall into its own leadership crisis), the general rule that parties find a way to shed leaders who have run out of road remains.

As someone with no stake in Labour’s internal factions and power blocs, the Kremlinology is a secondary concern. What matters, and what the commentary has been oddly quiet about, is a simpler and more important question: who is likely to govern best? At the heart of this is another challenge – one of fiscal competence.

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A few days ago, in an update on its war against Iran, the US administration posted this video. It splices footage of missile and bomb strikes with the music and visuals of the family video game Wii Sports. It is part of a series of posts that have framed this very real conflict as if it were a computer game. None of this is a leak or a mistake, but part of the Trump team’s deliberate communication choices and the cultivation of showboating through videos like this, and the broader use of AI slop. The image it projects is deliberately cultivated yet ultimately dismissive: none of this is truly real, none of it matters, and, most of all, you are a fool for caring about it.

It is often said in the context of Russian autocracy that the real victory wasn’t suppressing the truth, but defeating the idea of truth. Flooding the zone became about telling lies not to convince, but in such a multitude that reality got lost. As one writer put it, “Nothing is True, and Everything is Possible”, becomes a mantra of surrealist political repression that makes even asking if something is true make you look like a fool. Much of Trump’s campaign has worked the same angle – but the lack of seriousness adds a deeper wave of cynicism. Nothing is serious, and caring at all is a sign of weakness.

What we’re looking at is a mode, a grammar, a way of operating in which seriousness itself is the thing being refused. The irony isn’t a coating over the politics. It is the politics. The mechanism is powerful and serves the regime’s ends particularly well. When nothing is ever quite meant, nothing can ever quite be held against you. The escape hatch is always already built in — it was a joke, it was trolling, you’re the idiot for taking it literally. Accountability requires sincerity as a precondition: you can only be held to what you meant. Refuse meaning, and you refuse the whole apparatus. This is not a bug. It is the point.

Like much of the MAGA political movement, this genealogy stretches back to the internet of the 00s and 10s. It is rooted in trolling and the culture that developed around it. Here, it is important to understand that trolling is not simply about being obnoxious on the internet. It is about baiting people. The term itself arguably comes from a form of fishing. The victory came not from being horrible per se, but from getting people worked up, making them care. It gave rise to a moral economy with a single, absolute rule: the worst thing you can be is someone who meant it.

The protagonists also used this as a defence mechanism. Irony was the hedge that protected them from social disapproval. It was an in-built defence. Say something monstrous, if it lands, mean it. If it doesn’t, you were only trolling – any complainant shouldn’t take it seriously, be so uptight, &c &c. The ambiguity made consequences harder to determine. You can never hold someone to a position that they never quite occupied. As internet culture came to shape an ever-larger share of the wider world, this dynamic spread and became a useful foil for those wanting to push the boundaries of politics.

We see the same phenomenon in the so-called “manosphere”. Irony is deployed to keep the whole thing deniable. Deplorable views are laundered through detachment. The claim comes that it is not meant to be taken literally, that it is hyperbole, for show or for performance. It resolves to the same point – taking it seriously is a sign you have been had, a sign of weakness. You’re never quite saying what you’re saying. The racist joke is never quite a racist joke. The incitement is never quite an incitement. And the person who objects is always, without exception, the humourless one.

This provides the perfect cover for those who do mean it. They can slip back and forth between this smokescreen of irony. Among friends, these things can be meant and celebrated. When faced with pushback, they can melt away and undermine the opponent’s credibility by branding it a joke. Plausible deniability faces outward. Genuine conviction faces in. It is epistemic guerrilla warfare, impervious to head-on confrontation.

There is nothing new in this. It is the classic bully’s riposte — deny the seriousness of what you’re doing, fire the blame back at the victim. Your cruelty becomes their overreaction. The wrongdoer walks: the complainant looks hysterical. None of this is sophisticated. Underneath the memes and the epistemology, it is the same dominance behaviour that has always characterised male bullying — the difference is that the internet gave it scale. The Trump administration gave it a cabinet.

The result is a government that doesn’t care about the seriousness of what it does or the enormous power it wields. Previous administrations could be myopic or callous. This one rejoices in its own cruelty. It treats caring about things as the enemy, morality as a humiliation, and empathy as a weakness. The evidence is consistent. They celebrate the aggression with pop music montages. Their contempt for Ukraine treats the seriousness of the nation and its people as embarrassing, their sacrifice as an obstacle, and their moral clarity as an affront. The war with Iran was launched without proper planning or care and is rendered as a highlight reel, packaged for engagement, stripped of consequence.

This matters beyond the US. The ironic detachment is a solvent. It dissolves the bonds that support good governance and democratic life. This lack of sincerity undermines the idea that power must justify itself, that accountability is meaningful, and that there is a shared reality against which claims can be tested. Its proponents win not by persuading the rest of us, but by miring us in nihilism and cynicism. They empower themselves and extend their domination by making it cringe to care, or risible to object. Just as authoritarian regimes triumph by dissolving the very concept of truth, they also win by making seriousness embarrassing. And Farage, through his Cameo appearances and responses to allegations of schoolboy racism, is steeped in the same deployment of ambiguity.

This framing must be rejected. The cynical gain power by demanding we join them. They want us to accept their mode of conduct. To agree that caring is for suckers, that they should not be held accountable, that there is no expectation that they wield power burdened by seriousness. If we do so, we concede the world a politics in which nothing is real, and nothing counts, and the only operative principle is the will of whoever holds power. That system has a name. It isn’t new, and it doesn’t end well.

The case for sincerity isn’t merely sentimental. It is structural. Accountability requires that someone meant something. Justice requires that someone take an injury seriously. Democracy requires, at a minimum, a shared agreement that things are real and that they matter. Cynicism and ironic detachment erode the ability to hold power to account and to build an alternative. Trump and those around him have understood and harnessed this.

The response is not to yield. I’ve long admired this defence of the moral scold. Its arguments apply to sincerity, too. The accusation of pearl-clutching, of taking things too seriously, of being the humourless one in the room operates by similar mechanisms. They police not the message but the messenger, and they work by making the cost of speaking plainly feel higher than the cost of staying silent. To mean what you say, in a political culture built on ironic detachment, is to make yourself vulnerable in a way the ironist never is. You can be held to it. You can be hurt by it. The escape hatch is closed.

That vulnerability is what makes it powerful. The ironist cannot stand for anything. Everything is reversible, deniable, and hedged. Sincerity makes a stand; it has honesty. More than that, it operates on a purely personal level. While it flows into politics, it can be borne by a thousand daily actions. It fosters a humanity that endures and cannot be taken away either. In the face of a politics built on the premise that caring is weakness, sincerity is not just a disposition. It is an assertion. It is, in the end, an act of defiance.

(Taking a bit of a break this week, so there will be a bumper selection of recommended articles next week).

A great deal of political airtime this week has been consumed by a row over banknotes. It is an unedifying spectacle, and a revealing one — a political class focused on what is printed on money rather than what is happening to its value. That this has coincided with events that could already be determining the economic conditions of the next election is not just unfortunate. It is a fairly precise illustration of the problem.

The golden rule of electoral politics remains stubbornly intact: governments don’t lose over culture; they lose over economics. Or at least the way economics feels. In 2024, ruling parties fell across the democratic world, unseated not by ideology but by inflation. In Britain, the Tory collapse was rooted in a long period of low growth, spiking prices and high interest rates. Voters didn’t need a detailed understanding of gilt markets to know something was wrong. They felt it in their pockets.

The Tory vote held up longest among home-owning pensioners, arguably the most insulated from these pressures. That is not a coincidence. In 2015, the Conservatives won largely because their core supporters felt better off and hadn’t been touched by austerity’s sharper edges. The pattern is consistent and merciless: when people feel poorer, governments pay.

The current government now face a frightening predicament. Their own faults and failures are now at real risk of getting compounded by a global economic catastrophe beyond their influence. So much now hinges on the reopening of the Straits of Hormuz. Without it, there will likely be a massive oil shock with consequential inflation, interest rate rises, and a general deterioration in economic standards. That looks like a hard thing for any government to survive, especially one which is already struggling.

Labour have little control over what happens here. For Starmer, Reeves, or whoever succeeds them, the decision-making is out of their hands. The course of the war is dependent on America and Iran. The best the UK can do is hope to lobby for a quick end to hostilities and cooperate with partners to mitigate the economic effects. Yet neither will achieve much if both Trump and the Ayatollah commit to maximum damage.

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There is, apparently, a spectre hanging over British democracy. Ever since the result in Gorton and Denton, the media, especially on the right, has been awash with ideas of sectarianism and ethnic bloc voting. The preferred take suggests the Greens triumphed because of an en masse movement of local Muslims, largely driven by concern over Gaza, exacerbated by dodgy electoral practices. This, the take goes, damaged Labour, bested Reform, and catapulted Hannah Spencer into parliament.

The most alarmist versions extrapolate from this. G&D is taken as evidence of a wider trend, of ethnic bloc voting dominated by concerns about overseas interests. It is set to spin our elections into nothing more than census-taking and the sort of sectarian division seen in Northern Ireland or Lebanon. Thereafter, a vicious cycle of escalation spins us into ethnic violence and civil war.

It is exciting, but analytically lazy. It misunderstands the concepts of ethnic voting and the realities of what is happening among the electorate. G&D was not an ethnic revolt, but the result of a Labour Party that has alienated swathes of its normal voters. There was a complex electoral realignment, driven by a host of issues. The right (and many in Labour) are ignoring this, rooted too firmly in their own priors and prejudices.

The sectarian narrative leans too far into simplistic associations about minority voters. It disregards the complexities of how competing interests drive voting behaviour. Equally, it misreads the impact of Gaza, which matters to progressive voters far beyond Muslims. The approach, especially from Reform, also focuses far too much on barely evidenced and poorly analysed allegations of electoral malpractice. The result is a narrative of fear, which doesn’t really grapple with the facts or the proper definitions of ethnic voting.

The first thing to understand is that ethnic bloc voting is different from the simple reality of ethnic minorities voting. It is a well-explored academic topic, with proper definitions and analyses. The concept fundamentally relies on ethnic identity being the primary driver of voting behaviour, cutting across other interests. Once this is established, it becomes self-reinforcing. For some group, the party becomes the party of that group, promoting their interests exclusively. Other groups find their own party, and elections become a matter of census-taking, seeing who has the larger bloc in a given constituency. Where one dominates, the competition becomes about who is the best (and usually most bellicose) representative of the group.

In practice, everyone in the UK should understand this instinctively through Northern Ireland (unless you are the former NI Secretary). In NI, save for a few moderates in the middle, there are two communities. The nationalists vote for nationalist parties, the unionists for unionist ones. You don’t switch from Sinn Féin to the DUP because the latter has a better tax policy. Instead, community parties compete to offer the best representation for their side. This is the battle the UUP largely lost to the DUP, largely because the more belligerent tends to win out. Overall, identity matters more than class or other politics.

This isn’t what happened in G&D. To start with, the maths simply doesn’t work. The Greens didn’t win by creating a Muslim bloc. They won by appealing to voters across the constituency, bringing together white and Asian voters. Equally, the latter was still split, with a third of Asian voters turning out for other parties. This is quite traditional politics, combining interest groups on a mix of class and culture. Analysis of broader voting patterns points to this. Demographic factors determine whether you fall into the left or right bloc, but your affluence decides which party you pick. In short, the Greens won as much by building a class coalition as an ethnic one.

The politics also point to this. The sectarian analysis often assumes that Labour’s problems with Muslim communities are rooted in their response to Gaza and reads this as an ethnic position. This is a misreading, and a result of how out of touch the Westminster right is with mainstream opinion on this. The plurality position among the British public is greater sympathy with Palestine than Israel, with neutrality and not knowing more popular than sympathy for Israel. Concern over Gaza is far from a Muslims-only ethnic issue but is instead widespread – especially among working-age and female voters. In somewhere like G&D, you’d expect the better-off white liberal voters to be highly animated by it.

Equally, Muslims have a much more multi-centric approach to politics than simply being outraged by wars in the Middle East. Polling from before the last general election sees around a fifth cite it as their most pressing issue. That is a lot, but it is not dominant. Most Muslim voters were driven by similar things as everyone else, and especially everyone else in their economic and social brackets. The NHS, the cost of living, and the economy were the most widely reported concerns. There is little sign these are identity-driven voters. They are like everyone else, with a range of interests that often overlap with others’.

The image of the Muslim bloc is also burnished with the idea of electoral malpractice. For years, UKIP and its successors have talked of illicit vote harvesting and unnecessary pressure. This is not entirely baseless. In places like Bradford and Tower Hamlets, corrupt practices have been discovered and demonstrated. Yet a huge amount of innuendo lingers over whether these are the tip of the iceberg, or evidence that this stuff is picked up and prosecuted.

Following Gorton and Denton, the main accusation has been around so-called “family voting” in polling booths. For those unfamiliar with electoral law, this measure is largely designed to address domestic coercion. Everyone’s vote should be private and cast alone so that no one can know or verify how they voted. The prohibition intends that even the most oppressed partner or family member can vote how they want, without an abuser knowing. It is a good rule and should be enforced properly.

In Gorton and Denton, an alarm was raised by Democracy Volunteers on the night of the vote. Yet their report is vague. The sample size is small and fails to distinguish between technical breaches (people in a polling booth together) and operative ones (voters being coerced). It is unclear whether it is sloppy practice or corrupt ones. Neither should be waved away, but the latter is far more serious. Since this first report, there has been little further evidence, and so far, no actual challenge to the result.

There has just been speculation and innuendo. Much of this has been predicated on an inherent distrust of ethnic voters and assumptions about Muslim family dynamics. This is a pattern with a long history. Since the UKIP years, Farage and his successors have cried fraud after every defeat in constituencies with a significant ethnic minority presence. They do so loudly, in the media, and then quietly drop it when no actual evidence materialises. No election court challenge has ever followed. It is not a serious concern about democratic integrity. It is a political manoeuvre, designed to delegitimise votes that didn’t go the right way. After all, the assessment lacks the fundamentals that matter – evidence that this happened on a wide enough scale to swing a result, and that anyone was directing or organising it at a level that mattered.

Much like the sectarian analysis, this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The idea of an ethnic bloc driven by overseas politics putting thumbs on the scales of democracy is provocative. It is Trumpian in its casting of aspersions on minorities and the electoral process – and in its deviation from the actualité. The narrative suits Reform because it stokes cultural anxiety, suits Labour because it externalises blame, and suits lazy pundits because it’s a simpler story than properly examining how ethnic groups are and are not voting.

The real story of Gorton and Denton remains one of a governing party losing its electoral coalition. That includes a party that has relied on minority groups for support, losing them. But to treat this as ethnic bloc politics is a misreading of that phenomenon. The Green Party’s win came from a mix of white, Asian, and other ethnicities, driven by class and culture. It is politics, not sectarianism. It fails the simple test of whether identity is the primary driver or an ancillary force.

Assuming so is actively dangerous for anyone who wants to understand what is happening. If Labour convinces itself that Muslim voters left because of ethnic conspiracy rather than the NHS, the cost of living, and a foreign policy that alienated progressives of every background, it will never make the diagnosis that might actually save it. On the right, the risk is getting sucked into their own alarmist narratives, which are increasingly divorced from reality. A politics untethered from reality tends to make costly misjudgements, talking to itself, rather than ordinary voters.

The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them.

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Over the last few years, we have got used to seismic by-elections. From Owen Patterson onwards, they marked the trajectory of a Conservative Party that was losing everyone, everywhere. Time and again, records were set for swings against the government and for historic party losses. Now, Labour has taken up the mantle, with their rapid plummet in popularity being put to the test.

Denton and Gorton was perhaps a perfect battleground for this. A seat in Manchester, where Labour have dominated for decades, was a chance to test a few theories. The first was about whether politics is really shifting into bloc mode. The second: whether Reform could really mount a challenge in Labour’s backyard. While it is important not to read too much into by-election contests, the trends on display in G&D give us some clue about where our politics stands.

On the left, the message is clear – intra-bloc competition is the name of the game. The Green win appears largely driven by Labour haemorrhaging votes to them. To achieve this, the Greens must have taken votes across a range of demographics that are normally Labour. G&D is a typical urban constituency with a combination of younger, socially liberal voters and older, more diverse, generally poorer communities. It seems like both deserted the government.

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Since the start of the year, there has been a flurry of political attention around student loans. While the post-2012 fee system and its inequities are hardly new news, they have seemingly gained new salience. While some of us have pointed out for a while that the fees operate as a tax that no one will cut, and that the rich can buy themselves out of, it has now seeped into the broader political consciousness.

The reasons offer some interesting insights into how politics works in this country. Partly, it is partisan opportunism. The current system was built by the coalition and further tweaked by the Conservatives. It is now, however, Rachel Reeves’ problem – so the right-wing press are more keen to pick it up with a stick. It also suits the anti-intellectual, and particularly the anti-Higher Education turn of the right-wing presses, to push this argument now. But there are other things at play.

The first is more practical. The first students to pay the fees are now in their early thirties. This grants the issue a particular relevance. The graduates who entered politics, think tanks, and the media are no longer just runners, assistants, or demurring junior employees. They have a little more heft to write the pieces they care about and to commission columns on issues affecting them. Thus, as a previous generation centred housing and childcare in the conversation, now the focus shifts to the student loan system.

The subjects of the system ageing into proper adulthood also change the focus. Most graduates are realistic about their finances. They expect to live in a mildly precarious way in their twenties. Save for those who jump directly into the highest paying professions, most expect crap housing, lowish wages, and months that are sometimes too long for their money. An extra government levy doesn’t change that equation much. In their thirties, expectations are somewhat different.

The first wave of high-fee graduates is now meeting the real demands of adulthood. They are getting married, buying houses, and having children – all of which are placing further financial demands on them. Furthermore, as their salaries rise with career progression, they are feeling the real bite of the fees scheme, with a perpetual high marginal tax rate that stings their income but is insufficient to pay down the debt. Much of this was already an issue for older graduates, but the fee change has worsened the situation further.

The matter goes beyond student loans. Graduate professionals have had a raw deal from British politics and are becoming increasingly aware of it. Wage stagnation since the financial crisis has blighted their whole working lives, and they are perhaps the biggest victims of wage compression. While graduate salaries in the early 2010s might have been 50-100% higher than minimum wage, the two are now converging. At the same time, frozen tax thresholds and the interaction of student loan repayments with income tax and National Insurance have produced marginal rates that would once have been associated with far higher earners. The result is a growing sense that advancement is penalised rather than rewarded.

Along with this, working conditions have worsened. The rise of technology has led to an “always on” culture, not just for managers, but from the moment you walk in the door. White-collar work has become more exacting and more pressurised. The costs of housing and childcare intensify this. The risk of stalled progression or redundancy is worse due to these demands on your income. There is less of a sense that you can coast at some future level.

Layered on top are housing markets that favour inherited capital over professional qualification, and childcare systems that assume a single high earner rather than two moderate ones. The old promise – work hard at school, take on the debt, join a profession, and you will secure a comfortable, steadily improving life – feels increasingly brittle. Meanwhile, political parties have baulked at these voters and alienated them through Brexit. There is a chance this evolves into a new political force, with the middle class rediscovering its class consciousness and becoming keener to reassert itself.

Arguably, the junior doctors’ strikes have acted as the vanguard of this. Doctors are both like and unlike the wider professional cohort. They are saddled with significant student debt and the high marginal taxes that result. They face similar pressures on housing and childcare, especially if they live in the Southeast. Their employment situation, however, is unusual. The NHS effectively operates as a monopsony employer, with wages determined by the government. Through the years of austerity, they were squeezed particularly hard, even compared to stagnation elsewhere. Yet as one of the few professions to be unionised, they can also fight back.

The result has been a surge of militancy in the BMA. Younger doctors have become more determined to fight for their own employment terms and pay, utilising the leverage they have from being able to walk out. They have become unafraid of saying, “We are highly educated, work hard, and deserve to be paid accordingly”. More bluntly, seeing a choice between being popular with the public and getting more money, they have chosen the latter, letting the government figure out the how and the why of where it comes from.

The doctors’ dispute is the most organised element of a wider recalibration. Graduate professionals feel frustrated with a system that has lured them in and let them down. A moderately good income was once enough to secure a foothold in the middle class: a house in a decent area, children without permanent financial strain, some scope for leisure and savings. Today, it often feels like a treadmill. Earnings rise on paper, but tax drag, student loan repayments, and escalating fixed costs absorb the gains. The result is not destitution, but something politically potent: insecurity among those who believed themselves secure.

For decades, Britain’s middle class did not see itself as a class. It was the assumed norm. It staffed the civil service, the NHS, universities, professional services firms, and the media. Its interests were rarely articulated because they were woven into the fabric of policy. When budgets tightened, it absorbed the squeeze with grumbling but without open revolt. This dynamic feels like it is changing.

Yet few in politics seem to care. The “squeezed middle” and the “just about managing” are phrases that have fallen out of favour. Neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party seem interested in the votes of the professionals. Indeed, the political culture of the last decade or so has rejected them. Brexit was their big political loss, and since then, politicians have used it to treat white-collar workers as inauthentic cosmopolitans. Tories have turned their backs on young City workers, while Blue Labour tendencies on the left have eschewed public-sector workers in favour of a semi-mythical manual class, whose cultural preferences are treated as more authentic and whose economic grievances are presumed to carry greater moral weight. This is despite graduates becoming an increasingly decisive voting bloc.

This is not to say that graduate professionals are impoverished or powerless in absolute terms. They do, however, see themselves as underrepresented and underserved by the government. It partly explains the leftward drift of young people in the UK, with the hope that a more activist government might deliver for them. Younger professionals are beginning to think of themselves not as the background of politics, but as participants within it. They get little back from the government yet enjoy none of the security of the very rich above them.

The rise of AI threatens to intensify this. It remains to be seen whether white-collar jobs can be properly automated; if so, it would turn these issues into a crisis. A wave of unemployment across the middle classes would have huge social and financial impacts, the service equivalent of deindustrialisation. No political party seems to be intellectually grappling with this, or even the current stagnation in the grad job market, which may be its first wave. This further undoing of the graduate classes could push them towards greater political consolidation.

There is a sharper problem here. The middling professionals present the block towards the one obvious game changer in current British politics – tax rises. The great fiscal winners of the Cameron-Osborne years were earners at just above median income levels. The rising tax thresholds shifted British taxes more towards the highest earners. Brits who earn at or a bit above average are taxed less than their peers in other European nations. Tax nimbyism makes reform politically treacherous — and deepens the sense that this cohort is being asked to pay without being asked what it wants.

This is the tension at the heart of the young white-collar anger. Professionals feel squeezed, overtaxed and underserved. Yet in comparative terms, Britain’s tax system still leans heavily on very high earners, capital and stealth mechanisms rather than on broad-based middle-income taxation. The median British professional household pays less direct income tax than its German or Scandinavian equivalent, while expecting a similar level of public provision.

For the policy entrepreneurs, there are three obvious directions of travel. The first is that broadly occupied by the Greens, redirecting middle-earner ire upwards. Ignore the shift of Britain’s tax system towards higher income and push towards taxes on the assets of the wealthiest. It is politically appealing but hard to make work in practice. The same holds for the opposite approach: seriously slashing the state. This could lower the tax burden, and even allow something to be done about student loans, but it is almost inconceivable in an era of an ageing population. And besides, part of what rankles with these voters is that under Osbornomics, they get very little back for their taxes.

The harder political sell is the one Labour is already struggling to make – something akin to European social democracy. Increase taxes, especially on the middle to top deciles, and pay it back with improved services. This addresses issues like student loan debt, where graduates feel particularly put upon, but comes at the cost of higher levies across the board. It is something that British political culture has struggled to accept and would be painful to move towards.

The junior doctors’ strikes and the student loans debate reveal a subtle but important shift. The professional middle classes are no longer politically invisible. They are a group that feels economically strained, culturally discounted and fiscally central. Historically, the middle class stabilises systems when they believe the bargain works. When that belief erodes, they do not collapse into poverty — they organise. If the political class continues to defer the trade-offs it must eventually confront, it should not be surprised if this cohort begins to negotiate more assertively for itself.

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It is difficult to move around the Conservative Party these days without defections occurring. The most eye-catching story about the Conservatives has been Jenrick’s defection, followed by Braverman’s and Rosindell’s. Each has tried to frame their jump in much the same way: the old right is dead, and the new right is on the rise, so get with the programme and take the fight to Starmer. The hope to galvanise others to do the same, an effort matched by Reform’s courting of lower-level Tories.

The trade is a simple one. Reform wants to import the expertise, networks and reassuring presence of established Conservatives. It solves two issues for them. The first is social signalling. If that MP or councillor you know is moving over, and the same name appears with a new banner, the upstart party doesn’t look like much of a risk. The second is more practical. Reform knows that their first wave of inductees was often wacky. It conforms to my first rule of new parties: because the people who first join will be very political but outside the mainstream, they are likely to have weird personalities, views, or both. By getting Tories across, Farage’s outfit hopes to get people who aren’t total loons.

In return, they seek to provide political security. Conservative MPs and councillors will be looking at the polls and feeling an unfamiliar heat. In places the party has held since time immemorial, there is a threat that a turquoise wave will sweep away MPs and councillors. The message from Farage is clear – if you want to avoid this, come aboard. It is paired with a further argument that, by refusing to crossover, you would be allowing the left in.

Given the current polls and the Conservative Party’s seeming ambivalence about its slide towards being the fourth or even fifth-place party in British politics, the appeal is obvious. What is striking is that so far, few appear to be pulled over by it. Within the parliamentary party, the wave of defections has been far smaller than the dozens who quit Labour at the dawn of the SDP. It’s even smaller than the group that jumped to the Independent Group for Change when that emerged in the Corbyn/Brexit chaos. It raises an interesting question about who is staying and why – and what that means for the Tory Party in general.

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There has been a recent flurry of stories about the gross and creepy deployment of technology. The most glaring and alarming has been the use of AI tools to generate child-sex abuse materials and non-consensual intimate imagery. Alongside them have come concerns about the filming and distribution of material that is not exactly sexual, but surreptitious and seedy. This week, the BBC ran a piece on the spate of men filming young women on nights out and uploading it to YouTube, often with sexual undertones, or to stress provocative political points. This worry has been further heightened by the emergence of glasses with filming capabilities and concerns that they can be deployed covertly to produce content that is voyeuristic in the eyes of all but the law.

Both issues pose political and legal challenges. AI-generated images and covert filming both cause harm, distress, and upset to those involved. They also tend to cause a broader public concern. That someone can do this stuff is an outrage to morality, makes people feel less secure, and generally feels wrong. It sounds like the sort of thing that should be illegal, especially when done for profit or perversion, yet the law has proven reactive rather than preventative.

Generation of non-consensual intimate imagery has now been outlawed. The law change follows a pattern in closing lacunae in the law after they become social problems. Under the last government, legislative action was brought against upskirting and non-consensual sharing of intimate images. Yet this legislative whack-a-mole approach always means that thousands become victims before the state bestirs itself to action, and that gaps often remain around the edges of new laws. For example, for several years it was illegal to take a photo up a woman’s skirt without her consent, but not to do so by looking down her top. Meanwhile, even now, using AI to generate non-intimate pictures designed to harass, distress or embarrass is probably still legal.

The evolving hodgepodge is the result partly of our overburdened legislature and piecemeal approach to legislation. It was only with the Online Safety Act that there was comprehensive engagement with the issue of non-consensual intimate images, nearly two decades after it first became an issue. There is, however, a broader, more philosophical issue here: many of the wrongs enabled by emerging technology sit poorly within our legal framework. Fundamentally, our law lacks a coherent concept for protecting identity itself.

In a broad oversimplification, most of our laws can be considered property offences, offences against the person, or public order offences. Most everyday offences slot neatly into one of these. Theft interferes with what we own. Assault harms our bodies. Public order law exists to keep shared spaces functional and safe. The wrongs enabled by technology do not necessarily fit easily within these frameworks. If an image is created algorithmically, for example, there is no direct threat to the subject. Equally, lawful possession of an intimate image may imply legal ownership, and the right to do with it what you wish, even where moral ownership clearly does not exist. Each of our attempts to legislate around these problems has had to grapple with these challenges.

The issue of “creepy” filming makes this problem even clearer. In most cases, the filming itself is lawful. British law has historically taken a robust view of public space, treating it as a place where people must tolerate observation by others. But new technologies and online platforms have changed the consequences of being watched. Footage that might once have been fleeting can now be recorded permanently, edited, and distributed to vast audiences with little effort.

The harm arises not from the act of observation alone, but from the transformation of a person into content. Individuals can find themselves turned into objects of commentary, ridicule, or sexualisation without ever knowing they were filmed. Our revulsion at this sits awkwardly within existing legal frameworks, which remain far more comfortable regulating physical intrusion than regulating the appropriation of identity. That these videos often end up in monetised formats, pushing political points and/or with highly sexualised undertones, makes them feel wrong, but they remain almost perfectly legal. Even the civil courts have been reluctant to interfere with this, with privacy expectations in public spaces confined mainly to children.

Other legal systems handle this differently. Across many European jurisdictions, there is a “right to personality”. Its existence provides greater protection for individuals against intrusions into their personal identity. In Greece, for example, even taking pictures of people in public spaces requires their consent. In Germany, the “right to free development of the personality” includes significant control over one’s image, and this right has been further strengthened by specific laws governing intimate photos. In Spain, robust data protection laws prevent the publication of images on the internet without the subject’s consent.

At first glance, these approaches appear attractive. They recognise something that British law has often struggled to articulate: that identity itself can be vulnerable to misuse. By giving individuals greater control over how their likeness is captured, reproduced, and distributed, personality rights aim to protect precisely the forms of harm that new technologies have made easier to inflict.

They also reflect a broader shift in how societies understand personal autonomy. If individuals have strong legal protections over their bodies and property, it is not immediately obvious why their image, voice, or digital likeness should be treated any differently. As artificial intelligence increasingly allows realistic replication of individuals without their involvement, the argument that identity deserves direct legal protection is likely to become more persuasive.

Personality rights can also offer clarity. Rather than relying on an awkward patchwork of privacy law, harassment statutes, and data protection regulation, they provide a more transparent framework for assessing whether a person’s identity has been exploited. In doing so, they promise a more preventative approach to harm, rather than the reactive legislative cycle that has characterised Britain’s response to image-based abuse.

Having this starting point would make it easier to legislate for new technology and new harms. We are already seeing how technology can accelerate faster than politics. The availability of generative AI has opened a raft of image and personality-based risks. So far, only intimate photos have been legislated for other types of harassing images, or impersonation of voices remains beyond the scope of the law. Equally, the use of facial recognition is becoming increasingly complex and contested, often without a clear legal framework.

Yet personality rights are not an unalloyed good. The same legal tools designed to protect individuals from exploitation risk introducing new constraints on public life, journalism, and artistic expression. In seeking to give people greater control over how they are represented, such rights inevitably raise difficult questions about who decides when observation, recording, or depiction crosses the line into misuse.

One immediate concern is the potential chilling effect on legitimate public interest activity. Documentary filmmaking, investigative journalism, and citizen recording of public events often rely on the ability to capture images without securing individual consent from every subject. While most personality-right regimes include exceptions for public-interest reporting, the boundaries of those exceptions are frequently contested and litigated. The result can be a legal environment in which recording public life becomes slower, riskier, and more vulnerable to challenge by those with the resources to pursue legal action. A number of European countries have faced scandals suppressed by such laws, including the suppression of Francois Mitterand’s health concerns while President.

There is also a risk that personality rights disproportionately benefit those already well-positioned to defend their reputations. Wealthy individuals, corporations, and public figures are often better able to enforce image-based rights than ordinary citizens. What begins as a tool to protect vulnerable individuals from exploitation may therefore evolve into a mechanism that allows powerful actors to control how they are portrayed, suppress unflattering coverage, or discourage scrutiny altogether. As a legal system already renowned for claimant-friendly libel laws and punitively deployed privacy laws, this could further entrench this privilege.

More broadly, personality rights challenge long-standing assumptions about public space. British law has traditionally accepted that public life involves a degree of unwanted visibility. Being observed, photographed, or recorded has generally been considered part of the social contract for shared spaces. Expanding legal control over personal likeness risks transforming public environments into permission-based zones, where everyday documentation becomes subject to negotiation or legal uncertainty.

There are also practical enforcement questions. Modern digital content spreads rapidly across jurisdictions, platforms, and anonymous networks. Granting individuals stronger legal control over their likeness does not automatically make misuse easier to prevent or remedy. Instead, it may create expectations of protection that are difficult to fulfil in practice, potentially shifting responsibility onto platforms and courts without meaningfully reducing the volume of harmful content. Existing legislation already suffers from this, and can be compounded with political imperatives that push against pursuit, as we seem to be seeing with the slow government approach to dealing with Twitter.

Ultimately, the debate over personality rights reflects a broader tension in how modern societies understand identity itself. Emerging technologies increasingly treat human likeness as a form of transferable data. Images, voices, and behavioural patterns can be captured, reproduced, and redistributed with unprecedented ease. From a technological perspective, identity becomes simply another dataset: something that can be processed, repurposed, and monetised.

Legal systems, however, have traditionally approached identity in fragmented ways. They protect the body through offences against the person, property through theft and fraud, and reputation through defamation. What they have rarely attempted to regulate directly is the misuse of the self as representation. Personality rights seek to close that gap by recognising identity as something worthy of standalone legal protection.

The difficulty is that protecting identity inevitably introduces friction into public life. Observation, recording, and documentation are fundamental to journalism, artistic expression, and democratic accountability. Expanding legal control over personal likeness, therefore, requires navigating a difficult balance between two competing risks: allowing identity to become a freely exploitable commodity, or constructing legal boundaries that restrict legitimate scrutiny and expression.

In practice, the strongest case for personality rights may lie in limited and carefully targeted applications rather than wholesale legal transformation. There is a growing argument for stronger protection against commercial exploitation, AI impersonation, and the creation of sexualised or deceptive imagery without consent. These forms of misuse strike most directly at personal autonomy while posing fewer risks to legitimate public-interest activity. A piecemeal approach to legislation continues to risk lacunae. Sure, it is an offence now to create an intimate AI image – but what of one that shows someone committing a crime, or something else that damages their reputation?

At the same time, caution remains essential. Public space has long required a degree of tolerance for observation and documentation. Journalism, artistic expression, and civic accountability depend upon it. Overly expansive personality rights risk shifting public life from something shared and observable into something increasingly conditional and litigated.

Technological change is forcing societies to confront questions that legal systems have long avoided. As the boundaries between individuals and their digital representations blur, the challenge is not simply how to protect identity, but how to do so without undermining the openness that public life depends upon. How liberal societies strike that balance will shape their response to the next generation of technological change.

And now for something else…

My picks from around the web this week

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There is a narrative about the voting intentions of young people, especially men, that we repeatedly hear. The story points to them falling for Farage: voting for Reform, and leaning into the party on culturally and economically. We hear young people are the vanguard of the alt-right. People point to Farage’s numbers on TikTok and the age of some of his councillors and hangers-on as evidence of a youthquake. Some even suggest that extending the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds will provide the biggest electoral boost to Reform.

This analysis can be seductive, especially for older commentators who are falling in behind Reform. The idea that young men are falling in with Farage suggests that Reform is destined to be more than a pensioners’ party, that it represents a fresh, surging cultural change, and that it promises longevity. Talking it up flatters the egos and intentions of the Boomery and Gen X-ish Reform mainstream and provides a cultural cachet – and leverage – for the younger people in the party. Most of all, it is counterintuitive, running counter to the perceived wisdom of left-leaning young people. The only problem is that it doesn’t reflect reality.

While it is true that Reform has gobbled up a large chunk of the right-leaning youth, this is just reallocation within an already shrinking bloc. As with older people, they have cut into the share that normally backs the Conservatives, while perhaps picking up some other votes along the way. Yet rather than a far-right surge, the youth vote in the UK shows a remarkable opposite trend: a surge of progressive voting, including among young men.

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If you’ve ever killed time in an airport bookshop, you’ll have noticed a curious imbalance. A few token classics cling on in one corner, but most of the space is given over to glossy paperbacks promising transformation: sharper habits, better decisions, faster success. They sit alongside the rom-coms and celebrity memoirs, quietly whispering that your n…

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In DR Thorpe’s masterful biography of Harold Macmillan, there is a curious and incisive commentary on the 1959 election. The Tory triumph, it argues, was born both of their record in government and how people identified with their vote. To vote Conservative by 1959 was to tell yourself, and those around you, that you were going up in the world. It was a mark of affluence as much as “home ownership, a car, or a first foreign holiday”. To back the government was not merely an acknowledgement that you were benefiting from it, but a form of social signalling.

While the signals have themselves changed, the underlying ideal remains as strong today. Indeed, it can often be the best explainer of voting patterns. Who you support, and indeed what you believe, is perhaps secondary to who you see yourself to be and the social group you identify with.

This idea underpins the post-Brexit notion of the Red Wall. These were voters who, until 2016, were demographically similar to those who voted Conservative elsewhere. They had broadly comparable financial interests and overlapping views, but a cultural aversion to voting for the Conservatives. It was not a thing that “people like them” did. When Brexit dissolved those bonds, creating new social identities, these people found it easier to migrate their voting patterns. Arguably, the reverse has now happened among the younger, more prosperous voters of the South East who have drifted away from the party.

Academic research supports this type of theory. Studies from various countries have shown that it matters to who “people like them” vote for. A sense of group identity shapes their voting behaviour, both positively and negatively. The opposite is true as well: if they think a party stands for something associated with a group they don’t belong to or have a negative perception of, they tend not to support it. This might jar with our hope that voters are rationally focused, but really, it makes sense. We choose everything from our supermarkets to our favourite bands on this sort of metric – so why not who we vote for?

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2025 was perhaps the year that broke two-party politics in the UK. On the right, the Conservatives barely seemed to notice their own death throes, failing to make headway against a struggling Labour government and an ascendant Reform. On the left, Labour itself haemorrhaged support to insurgents on its own side and to a vast swathe of indifference and apathy. As the New Year begins, the historic parties are polling lower than they have ever done. The question for 2026 will be whether and how that consolidates.

Labour continues to have a large parliamentary majority, yet hollow public support. The Tories are the main Opposition, perhaps in name only. Neither has found effective ways to discharge their post-2024 roles. The Conservatives remain weighed down by their record of time in office. Labour by their fiscal inheritance and internal pathologies. Both are also struggling with broader philosophical questions. Neither has a sense of who their people are – who they are representing and how it translates into policy. Both often seem actively hostile to the coalition they do have.

The momentum, by contrast, lies with challenger parties that have addressed these questions. Reform on the right, the Greens on the left, and the Lib Dems hoovering up a solid chunk of the centre. Each of these has a broader sense of who they are and who they stand for, even if they don’t channel it into governance. It may not be fleshed out into a coherent policy platform, but they are connecting with voters and garnering support from those dissatisfied with the mainstream. We are already seeing how this develops into political blocs.

The story of 2026 will be about how these surges are capitalised on. The May elections will serve as a testing ground for the poll leads. In Scotland, Wales, and the English councils, we can anticipate latent poll leads to solidify into victories. This matters in two ways: for the boost it will provide to the challenger parties and for the turmoil it will likely generate for the incumbents. How the subsequent nine months play out will be the political story of the year.

Winning elections is the bedrock of politics. For the parties on the rise, May presents a significant opportunity to translate theoretical gains into tangible outcomes. Reform had a head start on this last year, but the elections in English cities will provide a similar opportunity for the parties of the left. If they adopt it, it will deliver substantial benefits.

The first advantage is psychological. Poll leads can be explained away and rationalised by those with an interest in doing so. The sight of councillors losing their seats en masse cannot be. In 2025, the surge in Reform wins arguably drove the wave of Con-Ref defections, as has-beens and wannabes on the right saw Reform as their path back to power. In Labour, losing a suite of councillors to the Greens will make urban MPs twitchy, while more suburban ones will eye the rise of Reform eagerly. Seeing the challenge numerically represented on their patch is likely to make them more nervous and more worried about where the party is headed. For the parties that claim those seats, winning will provide a huge morale boost.

It will also deliver practical advantages. One of the persistent problems for challenger parties is converting broad popularity into campaigning action. Winning helps with that. Councillors have a vested interest in laying the groundwork in seats. They will drag their friends and families out. They provide a boost of energy for local organisations to coalesce around. Well-managed, this translates into campaigning activity, voter intentions, and groundwork for effective General Election campaigns. At the same time, it sucks these things away from your opponents, cutting energy out of their ground campaigns. It is a success that compounds- especially in areas that have been politically neglected as “safe”.

All of the challengers stand to gain this electoral momentum and use it to sustain their challenges from this year into next. For the incumbents, the problem is how to reverse this trend. Each needs to reestablish dominance within its own bloc. Doing this will yield huge electoral gains if the other bloc remains divided. That task now looks very different for the government and the opposition, however.

For Labour, being in power offers the best opportunity to address this. Their track record, however, points towards the challenges in doing so. This year will be a vital transitional year for them – one where they should feel the relentless pressure of time. This may seem an odd thing to say three years before a likely General Election date, but Labour need to realise it isn’t. Delivering things that improve lives and win support takes time. Legislation is slow to progress through the Commons, and programmes take time to implement. Results take even longer. If Labour has initiatives that are likely to move the dial, unless they get them underway this year, they will not be noticeable by election time.

To get this right, the party needs to recover its sense of strategic purpose. So far in government, it has seemed listless. The party’s programmes have not been aligned, producing confusing outcomes. They have also failed to understand to whom and for whom they are speaking. Such an error is fatal in bloc politics, and it is proving so for Starmer’s government, as it fails to win over voters from the right while losing them to the left. The party needs a clearer sense of whose lives it wants to improve in 2029, and a strategy to achieve that.

Their job will be made more complicated by international affairs. This year has already been marked by further chaos from the Trump administration. The ongoing claims to Greenland are at best going to prove an additional distraction, at worst, the greatest schism in international politics since the Second World War. At the same time, the war in Ukraine continues. Whether it inches towards a ceasefire or not, Starmer will be spending considerable time on international coalition-building. This is a problem for domestic politics. Doing it effectively requires the focus of a PM, or a clear strategy and system that can operate without one. So far, Labour has demonstrated neither.

For the Conservatives, the problem remains as before, but it is more difficult. They enter 2026 in a worse position than they did 2025. The party is less popular with the public, and the Reform Party has had a good year of consolidation. Farage’s outfit has picked up councils and the advantages that come with that incumbency. They have also capitalised on media attention and are gradually winning over bits of the wider right-wing establishment, especially the press. They will seek to use this year to establish themselves as the de facto opposition.

The Conservatives need to find a way of addressing this. The first is determining whether they really want to fight Reform, an internal struggle that still seems in its Phoney War stages. Much like last year, a swathe of the right seems pretty content to become a junior partner to a Farage government. That is the sort of attitude that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and ultimately spells the surrender of the world’s oldest and most successful political party. Those who reject it must win the internal battle and also have a plan to reverse the facts on the ground that give rise to this fatalism.

If they have the fight, they must then choose which voters to take it to. Like Labour, the party needs a clearer idea of who it is standing for and what it is offering them. This work helps differentiate them from Reform and attract voters who have been lost to both the right and other directions. It also needs to reinvigorate and rebuild the electoral machine to capitalise on its remaining strengths and to give it a chance of surviving beyond May’s electoral cycle. Without this, the longstanding benefits of incumbency will ebb away.

Taken together, this suggests that 2026 is unlikely to bring any clean resolution to Britain’s current political uncertainty. Challenger parties will continue to build organisational strength and normalise multi-party competition at local and devolved levels. In contrast, the major parties remain caught between the need for long-term renewal and the short-term demands of leadership, media cycles and internal management.

Labour needs to regain an understanding of what constitutes successful government and to deploy it. By both failing to deliver and alienating many existing supporters, they have diluted their own presence in the left bloc. Correcting both may restore it, but it only works if there is a fully fledged plan focused on who they want to feel good in 2029. The Conservatives need to decide whether they wish to respond to Reform and, if so, what that response will be. There’s every chance each party will react to May by changing leader, but even if they do, these fundamentals will remain similar.

There is, in short, no obvious mechanism by which the system returns to stability in the short term. If neither party can rebuild coherent coalitions, restore local organisational strength, and translate authority into visible improvement, fragmentation will cease to appear as a temporary disruption and begin to resemble the normal condition of British politics. That does not mean constant crisis, but it does mean thinner mandates, more contested authority, and governments operating with less political capital to spend. In that sense, 2026 is less likely to be remembered as the moment things changed than as the year it became clear that they already had.

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Thank you, readers, for another year of your attention. It’s time to test, however, how much attention you have been paying. To keep you amused this Christmas time, I’ve put together another quiz. 50 questions, across a range of topics - from the nation’s news to political facts and figures. Answers can be found via a link at the bottom - no cheating.

A…

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“…until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” address is perhaps the most famous peroration in British politics. It is also often misunderstood. With the triumphalist hindsight of the post-war period, it became symbolic of plucky Britain’s determination to win out. Yet the actual words show far less confidence. The most famous section describes not victory, but a defiant retreat. You only fight on the landing grounds if you have lost on the beaches, in the hills, only when you have been driven from defeat. The final line, quoted above, carries a tone that is anything but triumphant.

Though Britain may fight alone through the darkest days, victory, it posits, is only possible if the United States wakes up and enters the war. Now, Churchill believed this would happen and, in part, advocated that she do so. But he was also admitting the new reality of the world: the European Empires, and most of all the British ones, were a spent force. The US had become the world’s superpower, and Europe was now dependent on it. America would be more prosperous, stronger and ultimately dominant.

He was not wrong. US materiel and manpower proved essential for winning the war in Western Europe. They shouldered the most significant burden of the war in Asia and developed the nuclear bomb, which ended it. In the post-war world, Europe would rely on the United States for both economic rebuilding and security. As the Cold War developed, the extent of this relationship became clear. European security became increasingly dependent on American men, technology, and taxpayers.

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Keir Starmer has so far made one memorable speech as Prime Minister. It was a regrettable one. It was, indeed, one he himself regretted – later distancing himself from his own rhetoric and turns of phrase. It points to a paucity of advocacy, but one which is hardly unique. There have been a few memorable speeches in recent years, or from recent politici…

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The Budget has turned out to be a bit of a fudge. Rachel Reeves has dodged both of the hard decisions she faced. With the option of raising taxes and cutting spending, she has done a little bit of both, but not enough to really change the trajectory of this government. The threshold freezes will irritate people, but will not raise cash as much or as fairly as rate increases. The difficult decisions on public spending have been kicked down the road until the fag end of this Parliament – when politics means they are unlikely to be taken.

Britain is likely to stay on the same course as it charted in the latter years of the Conservative government: historically high taxes, combined with struggling public services. It is a situation that arises because of politicians and our discourse remaining mired in an air of unreality – disregarding demographic trends and the challenge of continued low growth. On the left and right, parties fail to accept the extent of the change and hanker after the politics of the past. The problem is that these relied on something we no longer have: the demographic sweet spot.

The sweet spot is a phenomenon that has shaped much of our recent history. Put simply, as birth rates and life expectancies change with the advent of modernity, the sweet spot sees you with a large cohort of workers and few dependents, as a group that had high fertility and shorter lives is replaced by one with better health and fewer children. This gives you a good shot at sustained growth for decades. Until it doesn’t.

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