So first off, a little announcement:
At the end of July, I will be driving to Ukraine. I’ll be part of a convoy delivering vehicles for medical evacuations at the front line. I’ll be driving across Europe, from the UK to Lviv.

I’m currently fundraising for the trip - aiming to raise £7,000. This money will purchase the vehicle, fund modifications, and the costs of getting it there. Any surplus will fund other equipment, like drone detectors and medical equipment.

Any support his hugely appreciated and will make a difference. You can donate here.

Thank you!

John Healey’s resignation yesterday was a shock but not a surprise. The Defence Investment Plan is long overdue. It was easy to infer that the delay was the result of tussles between the MOD and the Treasury over how much money would be found, where it would come from, and when it would appear. It was also likely that Keir Starmer would defer to Reeves on the Fiscal Rules and the tax pledges, leaving the Defence Secretary in an untenable position. In many ways, it is the Starmer government in microcosm – tied up in its own mistakes, unable to deliver on its own promises.

It is not simply this government’s failure, however. The same issue occurred under the Conservatives and will probably haunt the next PM too. Quite simply, Britain has a political will problem when it comes to funding defence. All governments are aware of the issues. They see the worrying trend in world events, and they understand the importance of defence and deterrence. Politically, however, they are reluctant to prioritise it.

Ever since the war in Ukraine began, it has been starkly clear that Britain needs to adapt to a new defence landscape. There is a real possibility of a widening conflict in Europe. Developing our military is a vital part of deterring it and is essential preparation for if we ever have to fight it. None of that happens without money or a clearly communicated strategy that provides direction for defence companies and investors. Politicians have reacted to this with promises, but have failed to convert them into a plan. Increased spending has been kicked off into the middle distance, as the gap between our aspirations and ability grows.

There is a grim political reality to this. Defence is a relatively low priority for voters. It falls even lower when it is in direct competition with something more urgent and obviously apparent. Spending on defence this year delivers few direct, tangible impacts. Indeed, arguably the best defence spending, which serves as a deterrent, goes unused. While it may be popular in the abstract, defence spending loses out in head-to-heads with other priorities, whether that is health or keeping taxes down.

An effective strategy in anything requires choosing what to do and what not to do. Prioritisation is an action, not a statement. It means undertaking the necessary trade-offs and bearing the costs to achieve what you want. Successive UK governments have quite simply prioritised other things, often driven by short-term electoral incentives. Ministers like defence announcements and photo ops. They do not like picking up the bill or deciding where the money will come from. The result is what we have seen for the last half-decade: incremental changes and the big jumps deferred until later in the timetable.

There is little political punishment for this. Few votes are swayed by the state of the armed forces, our security or defence readiness. Other things matter more in the short term. This makes a particularly counterproductive dynamic. Investment in defence should compound. Actions taken today ought to be allowed to mature, creating a base you can develop from should a crisis escalate. Instead, Britain is deferring investment into the future, where it remains vulnerable to cuts and is less likely to deliver lasting returns.

Failing to resolve this political question leads us to ignore an even bigger strategic one around what we actually want from the MOD. The country has long nursed various pretensions about the level of power it ought to be able to protect. There are aspirations to be a Tier 1 military power. There is a very strong case for remaining a nuclear state. We are an island nation with an obvious interest in maintaining maritime power. We also aspire to be a serious European land force. With enough funding, we would probably be able to maintain all those ambitions. Yet we are as reluctant to abandon any of them as we are to properly spend on achieving them.

Instead of actively choosing a course, Britain has defaulted on all those commitments. By deferring hard decisions, we have ended up implicitly salami-slicing everything. Across domains, we are plagued by long-term procurement problems, ongoing mechanical issues and shortfalls. Our deployable division (25,000 troops) is largely illusory, lacking both the manpower and the logistics to back it up. The Marines can’t deploy proper amphibious and littoral strike capabilities. The list goes on, with most of these shortfalls the result of failing to decide how things should be replaced or refitted, rather than consciously committing to what we think our capabilities need to be.

The rise of global risks has exposed the pitfalls of this. Britain must face up to a real risk of war in Europe, as well as deteriorating global security. The time for a defence strategy padded out with hopes, prayers and good intentions is over. There needs to be a real national discussion about what we are prepared to afford and what we think it should buy us. We have to consider our role, our commitments, and what technology and personnel levels deliver it. These should be rooted in strategic decisions, not simply the maths and budget balancing of the Treasury. Most of all, it requires honesty about resource allocations and the political choices the country can make.

These decisions are further complicated by Britain’s being unmoored between Europe and the USA. The less willing we are to fund full-spectrum defence ourselves, the more we will have to specialise and the more reliant we become on allies. Our ambiguity was historically covered by American largesse. Now that seems seriously imperilled. The US is at best weak in its commitments to European security. MAGA seems actively hostile to us, more focused on arguments about migration than the threats we anticipate from Russia. Even after Trump is gone, it is unclear whether America will continue in an isolationist trend. The self-inflicted wound of Brexit has worsened things in the other direction, pushing us away from many European structures and conversations.

None of this gets resolved without a political class that shows some will. The public understands, on some level, the extent of the threat. They see what is happening in Ukraine and remain supportive of our ally there. People also see the fallout from Hormuz, how it hits their expenses, and understand some of the costs of insecurity. But politicians fail to take the argument further, to challenge Treasury thinking, to explain the trade-offs, and to advocate for paying them. This requires a sustained strategic seriousness that so far, we have lacked.

Healey was honour-bound to leave the government at this latest impasse. That doesn’t, however, mean that doing so will force the reckoning that is needed. Starmer is unlikely to change his mind now and will probably be replaced soon anyway. There is little sign that any successor will break free from the same political calculus that has mired our strategic thinking over the past decade or more. Whatever our approach is, it requires making decisions and sticking to them, not mere declarations of intent. Rising instability is already here, and we are not ready.

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Tony Blair’s recent intervention on the state of the Labour Party has launched plenty of responses. This is, thankfully, not one of those. But one point of his prompted a broader thought about how failing to update our mental models of the world undermines our politics. It exposed how a combination of motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, and frankly intellectual laziness conditions us to persist in certain views of the world. Failure to accept what has changed leaves us making decisions that are not informed by the present and therefore inadequate for it. It is a fundamental failure mode in our politics.

For Blair, this was obviously apparent when talking about the US. He urged Starmer to cleave closer to Trump, framing the current disputes as a “reckoning” rather than a “rupture”. In doing so, Blair seemed blind to the obvious realities. He skipped over Trump’s threats to Greenland and Canada, or his softness on Russia or disdain towards Ukraine. He paid no heed to the administration’s expressed desire to undermine liberal democracy in Europe in favour of the populist right. These arguments were not refuted or rebutted – but simply unacknowledged.

It makes sense for Blair to approach it this way. He ultimately staked his entire political reputation on Anglo-American relations, a bet that he has already lost in the court of public opinion. For America to be an unreliable ally, perhaps even an agitator, would show it all – his own legacy, the deaths of British soldiers, the damage to Iraq and the wider Middle East, to have all been for nought. It is a failure almost too weighty to contemplate, so he doesn’t. Instead, he holds to a worldview that is no longer supported by the facts.

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One of the recurring questions I hear now around UK politics is about whether the left and right blocs will come together through pacts. It is a sensible suggestion. First-past-the-post is deeply suboptimal for both voters and parties in a fragmented electorate. Splitting your own bloc can easily concede ground to the other one, even if you outnumber them overall. This was the fear among the left in Gorton and Denton, for example, that left-leaning voters would split evenly between Labour and the Greens, allowing Reform to win with maybe a third of the poll. Both blocs have the same issue in Makerfield, with Labour worried about leakage to the Greens and Reform increasingly concerned that Restore will spoil the right vote.

In these circumstances, a pact makes a lot of rational sense. Agreeing with the other parties in your bloc to divvy up the country can maximise your chance of winning overall. Such a “progressive alliance” has long been mooted on the left. The idea is that rather than competing, Labour, SNP, Plaid, Greens, and maybe even the Lib Dems could formally coordinate to play to their strengths and lock out the right. Now, some on the right are mooting the same sort of deal, especially an allegiance between the Conservatives and Reform, to avoid splitting each other’s vote.

The current electoral situation should make deals more likely. Politics is fragmented like never before, and there is a huge benefit to be gained by whichever bloc unites first. Yet such pacts remain unlikely. However rational the polling numbers suggest that they might be, they remain difficult to form in practice. This is partly because of the unpredictable behaviour of voters, but also because of the positions the parties themselves take, blind to their own weaknesses and unwilling to cut deals at the prevailing market price. As ever, difficult politics often override impeccable logic.

The first problem that pacts run into is that they require political parties to be brutally honest about where they sit in the batting order. Both Labour and the Conservatives are used to being the winning party across hundreds of seats. Whilst they understand you write off ones where your vote share never ticks above 20%, those aren’t the ones that matter in an electoral pact. The difficult decisions lie in the seats where you think you have a decent chance of winning.

This issue is sharpened by the electoral shift since the last election. Both historic main parties were dominant in their bloc in 2024. Now they are not. That means there is a huge disparity between the seats they currently hold and those they might win today. Doing a deal with their intra-block opposition would mean giving up seats they already hold or that they fancy their chances of winning. Accepting this is difficult for any party used to being the predator rather than the prey, especially when it means abandoning sitting MPs. Sure, there’s a chance you could persuade the Conservatives to let you have a free run at Wigan, but they would be unwilling to include Broxbourne in a deal unless they really felt the squeeze. Likewise, Labour is very unlikely to surrender current MPs to an impending Green wave.

The same dynamic works in reverse for the insurgent parties. They know their power from looking at the polling and will want to press their advantage. Neither Reform nor Greens will be happy with scraps when they have a sense that they can eat the other party’s lunch. The chance to gain dozens (for Polanski) or hundreds (for Farage) of MPs is worth more to you than anything the more traditionally powerful party is willing to give you. There is a mismatch of expectations largely driven by the irrationality of the incumbent parties. The only real pact that has ever emerged, that between Conservatives and the Brexit Party in 2019, was largely the result of the latter realising it would never achieve more than being a spoiler for its own political objectives.

Underlying this is the broader issue – the voters get a say. The by-elections and local elections in this parliament have already demonstrated that voters are efficient at tactically sorting themselves around a preferred outcome. In both Gorton and Caerphilly, the left bloc you’d expect to dominate the seat allocated itself effectively, punished Labour and avoided a Reform victory. Likewise, Farage’s party basically swallowed the old Conservative vote in these seats whole, with the party crashing to deposit-losing levels. Similar sorting can be seen at the local level in many places through the council elections this year and last. The truth is that the parties don’t really need to work to optimise the bloc votes; in most places, the voters can do it.

This dynamic also shows the limits of what is possible. Much to the consternation of observers, voting blocs are less coherent than you might expect. The electorate is not made of pieces of Lego that can be slotted together into whatever arrangement party chiefs prefer. A bloc is often less than the sum of its parts, and people have odd second preferences or none. It cannot be assumed that Conservative voters will prefer a Farage-led government to a Labour-led one, for example. Indeed, at the current state of play, you would expect the voters who are left voting Tory to be the ones least amenable to backing Reform – otherwise they would likely have switched already.

The exact nature of the fragmentation also leans against the formation of pacts. Our electoral contests are no longer simple left vs right fights. They instead resemble a series of regional contests between incumbents and the strongest opposition party. In urban centres, for example, there is a choice between Labour and Green. In parts of outer London and very rural constituencies, the main choice is between Reform and the Conservatives. In towns and suburban seats, it is mostly Lab vs Ref, and of course, the independence parties play a major role in Scotland and Wales. A national pact sends a message which clashes with this. The Conservatives doing a deal with Reform in the north would further hamper them in contests against the Lib Dems; likewise, Labour looking allied with the Greens would motivate Reform voters against them in places like Doncaster. A pact designed to win everywhere ends up being the wrong message almost everywhere.

The geography problem is compounded by something even more fundamental: any pact worth having requires parties to agree on what they would actually do with power. This is a huge problem to coordinate, as parties will both want to maximise their individual chances of winning and those within the bloc. They will want an offering that pleases their electorate, but also reaches out to floating voters, often in very different contests. A Lab-Green pact, for example, would need an immigration policy that is competitive in Runcorn and Rusholme – and if that existed or was easy to find, our politics probably wouldn’t be fragmenting.

Ultimately, if pacts were easy, there wouldn’t be any need for them. Even within broad electoral blocs, there is disagreement over policy, and appeals are made to different types of voters. These have developed because it is becoming increasingly hard to offer a successful national platform. But the dynamics between these parties make conciliation even more difficult. They themselves want to fight for dominance within the bloc, both to maximise their own power and because of cultural and identity differences. Many Green voters *want* to stick it to the Labour Party, and activists even more so. Reform aims to replace the Conservatives, even if the latter haven’t reckoned with it yet.

Voters are already performing the sorting that electoral pacts try to manage, and appear to be doing it effectively. Parties are unlikely to agree on the terms when this has created a mismatch between their incumbent power and the threat posed by the next election. Quite simply, the two historic powers hold too many seats they would be reluctant to give up, and the insurgent ones see the gains for pressing on as too valuable to be bought off. Finding a mutually agreed price for the pact is highly improbable. Whatever sense it may make on paper, the blocs officially teaming up is fraught with difficulty and a doubtful prospect. First past the post might be unsuited to our political fragmentation, but until the structures of UK politics adjust to this new dynamic, each side is likely to be trapped in this sub-optimal game-playing.

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Last week’s local elections unleashed a whirlwind in the Labour Party. The polls crystallised Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopularity and created a real crisis for his leadership – unresolved at the time of writing. That was entirely expectable. The party had slumped in the polls, and the local electoral geography, along with the elections in the devolved nations, was poised to expose it. Lo, Labour took a battering, and the leadership speculation began.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the reaction has been very different. There are no calls for change in the Conservative Party. No letters to the 1922 Committee. Indeed, the mood is something like optimism. The party itself boasts of strong results, while the leader talks of the green shoots of recovery. There’s an element to which they have to say that, of course, but there hasn’t been much internal opposition to the core message that these results were decent for the party. The question is whether, deep down, that is a sign of confidence or a message that the party has just given up. After all, these results were actually terrible.

The party lost 563 council seats. It was defeated in 41% of the wards it was defending. You would have a greater chance of survival in first class of the Titanic than as a Conservative councillor last week. The party’s projected national vote share was just 17%. Better than this time last year, but still massively down on even the 2024 general election result. In an excellent and damning thread, Dylan Difford sets out just how numerically destructive this was: the second-worst results in living memory for an opposition party.

Sure, the results were better than last year. But that was mostly a product of what was up for re-election. The 2025 map was terrible for the Tories. The 2026 skewed towards harming Labour. This should not be allowed to obscure the reality. The party is not recovering; it is not pushing towards government. It is, just about, not going very far backwards.

Even the few bright spots are misleading. The Tory gains in London were not the result of a surge of votes in the capital. Rather, the party went backwards, but just not as much as everyone else. In Wandsworth, the Conservative vote share dropped from a half to nearly a third. They won out because the left fragmented, while the right did not. They held because these areas remain impervious to Reform, likely too affluent, too liberal, and too multicultural to tolerate Farage, while the left vote splits.

Comparisons with Conservative history really draw this out. Iain Duncan Smith was ousted in the aftermath of the “underwhelming” performance in the 2003 locals. In those, the party polled 31% and gained 556 seats, almost as many as it lost this time. In 2006, when the party was truly showing green shoots of a return to power in Westminster, they came top in London and won 14 councils. Right now, they are suggesting that holding four was a success – really, last week’s results were proof of how sidelined the party has become.

These results show the Conservative Party are painted into an electoral corner. No longer nationally competitive, they are holding on only where Reform is demographically and culturally too weak to challenge them. The London Boroughs point to this. Winning Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Wandsworth, Bexley, holding up in parts of places like Croydon and Enfield, this marks who is sticking with the party rather than Reform. In short, it is the Farage-averse right-wingers. Well off enough not to be tempted by populist grievance politics, metropolitan enough to be queasy about some of the immigration rhetoric and policy, and in places where the Lib Dems have no real foothold to compete from. That is who is remaining Tory.

Outside of London, there is a similar dynamic. Reform failed to break through in places like West Oxfordshire, or Hart, or Three Rivers. Councils with decent chunks of affluent commuters, where the Conservatives have remained the main anti-left option. By contrast, in the seats of the semi-urban north, Reform surged forward, adding to their gains from last year in the less affluent Tory rural areas. This is not a party fighting back; it is a party besieged in its strongest of redoubts.

These results were an improvement on last year but that is about all that can be said for them. They point to a Conservative Party that is no longer a national force but a regional one, relegated to a rump of affluent, educated (and older) right-wing voters that is insufficient to sustain much more than local success. Even then, if the left hadn’t been so fractured, it would have performed even more poorly.

Obviously, election results will also be subject to a certain amount of spin and expectation management. The danger for the Conservatives is that they seem to believe their own optimistic framing. Everything about last week should have been taken as a huge warning. On its current trajectory, the party will be reduced to even fewer MPs at the next general election, pushed into third-party territory, with a few strong areas but nothing more. Starting from any sort of analysis other than that is likely to lead to bad decisions and poor strategy. By not acknowledging the worst-case outcome, you make it more likely.

These results are not necessarily destiny. Politics shifts, and the return of the Conservative Party to power remains an underpriced option. Being unrealistic about results, however, leans towards learning the wrong lessons. The Conservative Party must understand that, for it to survive, these results have to change, and that the status quo, in which it has gone backwards since the general election, is not giving it the momentum it needs. If the party wants to survive, it must fight for it.

That begins with honesty about its state. The trajectory from 2022-24 was evidence of both the power and the costs of denial. The Conservative Party spun itself into thinking it had a chance, rather than shoring up its damage limitation. Now it risks making the same mistake, but in a much worse position. These are not the results of a party on the brink of power. They are not where the Tories were in 2007. They are not even where they were in 2024. They should be taken as a real warning. Not green shoots, but the bulldozers moving in to clear the wreckage.

The ease with which this outcome has been spread into positive points raises two possibilities. Either the party and those around it remain delusional, unable, once again, to recognise the tsunami coming their way. Or worse, they have given up, resigned to fighting no further, instead succumbing to being snuffed out. Both lead to the same trajectory: failing to properly reckon with reality, build a strategy and implement it in ways that might change things. Denial will only bring further failure.

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There has been a new mood in parts of the Conservative Party for the last few months. One that has almost tipped dangerously close to optimism. It is framed in part by Reform’s slight stutter in the polls, but also by a growing public fondness for Kemi Badenoch. Her improved performance, along with the defection of some of the most Reform-y elements, has headed off some of the plotting that was rife a year ago. She may even survive another disastrous round of local election results, especially if a collapsing Labour Party steals the headlines.

The Kemi-ssence has an element of truth to it. Badenoch’s personal poll ratings have steadily improved over the last 12 months or so. YouGov’s favourability ratings show a jump from 16% favourability to 27%. That might sound unimpressive, but it needs to be reckoned with the current context of British politics, where everyone hates everyone. Her net position (-25) is better than Farage’s (-39) and Starmer’s (-48). On favourability alone, she is arguably the most liked politician in Britain. Measured head-to-head, she vanquishes all comers. If this were a purely presidential system, the money would probably be on her. Unfortunately for the Tories, it isn’t – and the Badenoch bounce is yet to be replicated in the party’s numbers.

The Conservative Party has seen no such improvement. Its polling has been basically flat since last year’s locals. As I write this, the party is likely losing swathes of council seats, repeating the historically low performance a year ago. This presents a puzzle: why, if Kemi is proving so popular, is it not translating to the party as a whole?

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The sun is shining, the evenings are getting longer and lighter, and the flowers are starting to bloom. Spring is in full swing, and with it comes everyone’s favourite annual observance – local government elections. This year’s polls promise a new excitement. The fragmentation of our politics looks to affect Labour as well as the Conservatives. Across the country, insurgent parties are taking their place, with Greens set to surge in the cities, and Reform in suburban and rural areas.

The rapid rise in the fortunes of both challengers also means a likely unprecedented turnover of councillors. Thousands of new people will be thrust into roles running local authorities. Their success or failure depends on the thoroughness of selection and vetting – and both Greens and Reform appear to be failing at this. Each has been beset by a flow of allegations and unmasking of candidates. The former have struggled particularly with charges of antisemitism, the latter with more general racism, homophobia, and obnoxiousness.

Standing candidates is an essential task for growing your party and gaining presence across the country. This can be a challenge even for established parties. To run a decent slate at local elections, you need thousands of people. Few people these days are members of parties, and fewer still want to put their names forward for election. You end up taking a punt on people you don’t know much about, and everyone gets caught out. But established parties have developed antibodies.

They have well-defined vetting systems. Strength in depth also limits the risk - sitting councillors, long-standing members, people who have been through the mill and are willing to be put up time and time again. Most of all, they have an inbuilt knack, honed over years, of spotting people who are going to be more trouble than they are worth. A good local association can spot the charlatans, the egoists, and the offensive and gently deflect them away from getting too involved.

Insurgent parties have none of this. They lack the antibodies that other parties have built up. They are also a prime target. What I’ve jokingly called my First Law of Political Parties holds that new parties will always be a magnet for cranks. This is because when a party starts, the first wave of people drawn to it will be people who are *very* into politics and especially getting elected, but have not been able to accommodate themselves into a mainstream party. This is usually because of some combination of odd views or an odd personality that puts them beyond conciliation within ordinary politics.

This does not hold for everyone. People are drawn to politics at different points in their lives, for different reasons and with different intentions. But most people who are new to it and are broadly sensible hold back. Often, you must cajole them into the very thought of standing or getting more involved. The cranks are the opposite. Many come prepared to insert themselves into everything, hardened from their disputes in the parties they have already burned through. Fully versed in the rules of games that ordinary people didn’t even know were being played. Others, who have never joined politics before, might still have an egoism and fervour that push them forward, while better people hold back.

The volatility of politics has made this more important. There have always been people on the fringes who jumped between political parties. Most councils have seen someone pinball between left, right, centre and independent depending on their own ambitions and the political environment of the day. Generally, they were kept to the edges and stopped from wielding real power. That becomes a lot harder in an environment where you can flip from having no councillors to taking charge of an entire authority.

Reform have already proven this point. Since the success in last year’s local elections, they have shed dozens of councillors. Some of these have been over offensive posts and comments, others through personal clashes. A handful have moved on because of disappointment with their own party. It is a remarkable attrition rate, however, and far greater than you’d expect from one of the major parties. The consequences extend well beyond internal embarrassment. These are people elected to run local services, scrutinise budgets, and represent constituents who, in many cases, voted for change in good faith. Electing cranks generally means the job is done less well, damaging local governance and faith in democracy. The party will be embarrassed, but the public will be let down.

Both upstart parties are battling with the challenges this year. Reform candidates are already being probed for allegations of racism and calls for political violence. The Green Party is possibly facing an internal legal battle over antisemitism and the peddling of conspiracy theories, whilst also picking an active campaigner against its own policies. Both Farage and Polanski have downplayed the scale and severity of the allegations. That is the politically advantageous thing to do, but it indicates a lack of seriousness about the risks that can come from insurgent parties empowering the cranks that are drawn to them.

It is understandable that rapidly growing parties might struggle with this. But it is important to take it seriously. The instinct to be defensive, to undermine the severity of it, is a bad one. Political parties play an important role in cultural signalling. We (rightfully) have few legal constraints on who can run for political positions, so instead parties are left to decide who is fit for office. That signals to the world the sort of views and actions which are acceptable, and which are beyond the pale. If political parties fail to police themselves properly, then it breaks down the boundaries between extreme and normal debate, normalising the outrageous.

Voters themselves will struggle to provide a check on this. There is a portion that don’t care. Indeed, part of the challenge with upstart parties is that they want to distance themselves from the established ones, and to signal to voters with similarly fringe views that they will stand for them. Many more won’t notice, voting on broad themes of local and national politics without much feeling for the views or personality of the individual named on the ballot paper. It is an unreasonable expectation to place on them.

This set of local elections may yield an unprecedented number of new councillors. Many of those have already unravelled in the campaign stage – but may be elected, nonetheless. It is likely that more will be exposed or embarrass themselves over the next twelve months. For the parties involved, it is humiliating. If it builds up enough, it becomes discrediting. But there is a political temptation to bat away the allegations that the cranks represent a broader problem. Both party leaders want to deflect criticism and present themselves as under attack from the establishment. That pressure tends towards letting the cranks in, without realising the consequences.

Unless parties are stern with this stuff, proper vetting, rapid disciplinaries and effective action, they risk tolerating far too much. This becomes an electoral weakness, eventually, but also a societal problem. Political parties provide a form of endorsement for people and their views. If those people have crank tendencies, they become legitimised, spreading unpleasantness within the discourse. It also undermines the offices they are elected to. Those who perform badly or get booted out and isolated both undermine the work of councils and other bodies, furthering dissatisfaction with democracy. It reflects poorly if the person you vote for calls a by-election within a few months, or limps along as an unloved independent before disappearing in four years.

A bigger hazard lies in the middle-distance. Both insurgent parties are eyeing big gains in the next general election. They will be standing larger slates of candidates than at previous national polls, with a good chance that many more of them will get elected, and even into government. This could amount to hundreds of new legislators and a generational shift in parliament. Get it wrong, and it could further advance the sharp-elbowed cranks who play the system well. That in turn would bring greater chaos in parliament, but also a rehabilitation of previously unacceptable views, and a platform for those who espouse them.

The 2019 intake was already notorious for how it pushed forward politicians who were low on thoughtfulness and high on volume. 2029, with populist surges on both sides of the aisle, could repeat this on a larger scale. Parties can be forgiven for being sucked in by the occasional odd person, but they need to be resolute about their hygiene. It matters not just for their own prospects, but for those of democracy more broadly.

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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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