The Burnham government could be very dangerous indeed – here’s why
By MARCUS STEAD
The mainstream media narrative surrounding Andrew Burnham’s journey to Downing Street has been utterly absurd to anyone who stops and thinks.
Exactly the same people who, a little more than two years ago, were telling us that the nation’s ills would be solved by Sir Keir Starmer are now insisting that if we swap him for Mr Burnham, everything will get better.
Thinking is an uncomfortable experience for many. Stepping outside a “groupthink” consensus actually frightens a lot of people. But I urge you to try it.
Do you really believe that things will get better by swapping Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves for Andrew Burnham, the foul-mouthed fishwife Angela Rayner, Louise “I’ve lost my phone” Haigh, and the “Net Zero” obsessed oddball Ed Miliband? Come on, stop being silly.
Mr Burnham and Sir Keir do not disagree on anything important. There are differences in style and priorities, but that’s about it.
Constitutional vandalism appears to be very near the top of Mr Burnham’s priorities. If this happens, there will be changes to the way this country operates that any future serious, conservative-minded government will find hard to undo.
Back in 2022, former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown penned a little-known document that Labour Party insiders pretty much fell in love with, but, for the most part, had the good sense not to talk about too much in public, because it was so radical and its implications so widespread.
The document was called A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy, and you can read it by clicking here.
The document proposes getting rid of the House of Lords and replacing it with a new 200-strong second chamber, representing the ‘regions’ and devolved nations. The voting method used for its elections is not disclosed, but it’s a safe bet to say it would be a form of proportional representation.
The continuation of the Supreme Court would be constitutionally embedded and its powers enhanced – the phrase used is ‘constitutionally protected status’. In other words, unelected judges would have the power to invalidate laws passed by a democratically elected parliament.
All future governments will be faced with a series of new ‘social rights’, from free healthcare and education to ‘entitlement’ to ‘social assistance’, and to ‘decent accommodation’. What this means is that a future government that sought to reign in public spending, shrink the size of the state, encourage personal responsibility and promote traditional family life will be told it cannot do so by the Supreme Court.
One of the biggest changes to Britain in the last 50 years has been the way in which the judiciary, once regarded as crusty, stuffy and conservative, has been replaced by radical leftists in the mould of, for instance, Lord Justice David Bean (there are plenty of other examples I could have used).
Lord Justice Bean is a former treasurer of the Society of Labour Lawyers and chaired the Fabian Society in 1989 and 1990. He was also – with Sir Anthony Blair’s barrister wife Cherie – a founder member in 2000 of the left-wing Matrix Chambers, whose members include the current attorney general, Lord Hermer.
Last year, Lord Justice Bean was the judge who ruled in favour of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in the Epping migrant hotel case
Under Mr Brown’s plan set out in the document, the devolved nations and local government will be handed significant new powers and much more independence of action, thereby further weakening the House of Commons, whose status has already been vastly diminished.
For those of you living in England who may not fully grasp what “devolution” means, look at the case of Wales. Since 1999, the work that was previously done by the Secretary of State for Wales along with two junior ministers and a sensibly-sized civil service is now carried out by 96 members of the “Senedd” (Welsh Parliament). Each of those 96 “Senedd” members has a minimum of three full-time staff, and each member has an annual staffing budget of £141,993.
The Welsh civil service is also three times the size it was in 1999. There are lots of “non jobs” aimed at the graduate classes. Many of these roles are essentially about keeping the different policy areas in a permanent state of reorganisation and of slowing down the decision-making and policy delivery process.
There’s a certain logic to it that leftists like. By radically expanding the size of the state, they can make unemployment appear far lower than it actually is, especially among young graduates. It also creates a “cowed culture”. As they are on the public sector payroll, the mortgage is being paid, they’re getting their two holidays per year, and they can afford to eat out among their own kind in the trendy restaurants of Pontcanna. They are unlikely to rock the boat too much, and they can be relied upon to vote for the pro-Welsh establishment parties (Labour, Plaid Cymru and, at a push, the Liberal Democrats).
They may well believe they’re doing good, particularly once they’ve been on a few Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) seminars. Look out for the rainbow lanyards and the pronouns listed on their email signatures. Also look out for people who were once good fun becoming transformed into sullen, woke bores.
But the cowed culture goes beyond the civil service. In Wales, and particularly in Cardiff, there are a number of businesses that are, in theory, part of the private sector and run by entrepreneurs, but in reality, they are heavily-dependent on the Welsh Government for lucrative contracts, so they and their staff also become very conformist and pro-Welsh establishment.
In light of how much bigger the Welsh public sector has become since the start of devolution, you could be forgiven for thinking that it has become a well-run paradise. But the bitter truth is that Wales has the worst-performing NHS of the four UK nations. It gets worse still. According to the Less Survivable Cancers Taskforce, Wales frequently ranks lowest globally for some of the deadliest forms of the disease. For instance, Wales ranked 32nd out of 33 comparable nations for stomach cancer survival and 31st for lung and pancreatic cancers.
When it comes to education, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests taken by 15-year-olds, Wales historically scores the lowest among the four nations in mathematics, reading, and science.
According to the Education Policy Institute, Wales struggles with higher rates of young people aged 16-18 classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) compared to the rest of the UK.
Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes that while England has maintained strong, above-average results relative to the rest of the G7, the other home nations, particularly Wales, saw concerning declines in core skills.
In Scotland, there was a time when a Scottish education was regarded as something to be cherished as it was of a particularly high standard, but that has certainly not been the case for the last two-and-a-half decades. Scotland has been the drugs death capital of Europe for the last seven years in a row.
Devolution has also been horrendous for the social cohesion of the United Kingdom. Our English, Welsh or Scottish identities used to sit comfortably alongside our British identities, but the “othering” of our neighbours has increasingly been seen as acceptable. Nationalist parties have used devolution as a means of constantly demanding more powers – independence via salami-slicing, while at the same time demanding huge subsidies from Westminster (ie the English taxpayer) to fund their failed policies. When things go wrong, they routinely play the “blame Westminster” card.
The pandemic brought many examples of the Welsh Government applying different rules to England for the sake of being different (or should that be difficult?) at a time when the population needed clarity and cohesion.
Comically, or perhaps disturbingly, Mr Burnham doesn’t appear to understand the devolution he advocates very well. Earlier this month, his team distributed an article for publication in media outlets in Wales, Scotland and London which were very similar, with the place names changed to fit the relevant area. The article talked about taking action on housing, business rates and education…which are three policy areas that have been devolved since 1999.
Earlier this week, Mr Burnham repeated his error on a visit to Cardiff where, in the city centre, he held a stage-managed “sit down and ask him a question” event. Again, he answered a series of questions for which the policy area had long since been devolved. To make a similar mistake twice in such a short space of time is very careless indeed, especially since he claims to be a strong advocate for far wider devolution.
There is little doubt that Mr Burnham will quickly become unpopular. We are told that he sorted out the bus services in Manchester – I haven’t been there for some years so I can’t comment on that, but operating on the national and international stage requires a completely different skillset.
We know he doesn’t respect Brexit so he is unlikely to want to seize the freedoms, flexibilities and opportunities that Brexit brings. We know he is keen on the “man-made climate change” agenda, Net Zero and serving his globalist masters.
But have a read of that grizzly old socialist Gordon Brown’s document, A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy, and you’ll see what Mr Burnham is really up to. I hope it’ll also make you wake up to its dangers.
What has happened to the left’s moral compass?
By MARCUS STEAD
At just after 6am this morning, the news broke that Ann Widdecombe had died at the age of 78.
My initial reaction was probably much the same as yours – I was a tad shocked, since I had seen her on the Jeremy Vine and Mike Graham shows in the recent past, but those feelings were mixed with a sense that, while I thought she could well still be around for a good many years yet, hers was a life well-lived and that she can’t have been ill for very long or suffered very much.
Ann converted to Roman Catholicism in middle age and was serious about her faith. With that in mind, we could take comfort from knowing she has today received her reward in the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed, in light of subsequent horrific developments, we can still do so.
I admired and respected Ann as a woman of courage and conviction. She knew what she believed in and wasn’t afraid to rally against fashionable opinion. She remained courteous on panel programmes when those around her were being crass and rude. She dealt with oafs like Jimmy Carr and Iain Lee very well, and remained dignified throughout.
Ann also had a tremendous sense of fun, as we saw on Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Fit Club and Celebrity Big Brother, and in plenty of other places, too. I well remember her hosting a short-lived but enjoyable gameshow for Challenge called Cleverdicks, and there was a series for BBC Two where she was parachuted into people’s homes to deal with domestic squabbles of one sort or another. Then there was a series where she and a group of other “celebs” were made to live and work in Victorian conditions for a period of time. Wonderful stuff.
Cards on the table – I agreed with Ann in about 95% of what she said and believed. Others take a different view. That’s life.
Today, I thought back to how I felt when Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered a decade ago. I agreed with her on very little, I doubt we’d have been one another’s cup of tea, but nevertheless I was horrified that she had been murdered and greatly saddened that a mother and a wife had died in such circumstances. I was 100% unequivocal in my condemnation of her murder.
All decent people condemned Jo Cox’s murder. The only ones who celebrated it were those with neo-Nazi sympathies, people on the very fringes of society.
Contrast that with the reactions we saw this morning, when it was thought Ann had died in natural circumstances. The comments sections of news websites contained loads of remarks about how they were glad she was dead, they hoped she suffered etc. I’m not going to dignify them by republishing them on here.
Instead, I’ll share this Facebook post from Boom Radio presenter Roger “Twiggy” Day, who used to live in Maidstone, the constituency Ann represented for many years.
Unlike the right, where wishing ill-will and death on opponents is confined to the very fringes, on the left, such sentiments are far more widespread and tolerated.
Yes, there are lots of decent people on the left who are clear and unequivocal in their condemnation of Ann’s murder. I believe Sir Keir Starmer was sincere in the words he expressed this afternoon. I also believe Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood meant what she said in her statement – as a woman with a clear moral compass, I am in no doubt she will do her utmost to ensure Ann’s killer is brought to justice.
Decent leftists like David Blunkett will mourn her – Ann was his opposite number when he was Home Secretary, and I well remember him sending her a good luck video message when she was competing on Strictly Come Dancing. They battled hard at the despatch box, but they had a mutual respect for one another.
But there is another strand who behave very differently, and they’re by no means a small minority. At the root of it is a mindset that they are so absolute in their beliefs that they are prepared to kill those who take a different stance, or, at least, are not going to discourage those who do kill.
At the time I write this, all we know is that a 26-year-old man has been arrested in connection with Ann’s murder. We know nothing about his motivations, and it would be wrong to speculate. I politely ask you not to do so in the comments section.
Despite how little we know at this time, we can be sure that the sewer of social media will be awash with people celebrating and praising this individual. It was the same when Charlie Kirk was murdered last September. Social media was really grim, and an element among Gen Z took to the streets to celebrate in a highly unhinged way.
I fell out with Nigel Farage two decades ago and I actually think Ann made a rare mistake by joining Reform UK, but he is right to take seriously the threats to his safety. The key point about this strand of the left is that I don’t trust their “jokes”.
It’s not a new phenomenon for the social media age, but it has heightened and intensified, and it’s particularly common among the under-30s.
The supposed comedian John O’Farrell is a popular fixture on BBC/Channel 4 panel shows, and he appears as a ‘talking head’ on all sorts of programmes when they want a funky, metropolitan opinion. There’s a really nasty side to O’Farrell. In 1998, O’Farrell, already in his mid-30s and old enough to take responsibility for his actions, wrote a book titled ‘Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter’ in which, referring to Margaret Thatcher and the IRA-planted Brighton Bomb during the Conservative Party Conference in October 1984, he wrote: “In October 1984, when the Brighton bomb went off, I felt a surge of excitement at the nearness of her demise and yet disappointment that such a chance had been missed. This was me…..wishing that they had got her. “Why did she have to leave the bathroom two minutes earlier?” I asked myself over and over again.” He goes on: “I just hated her so very, very much.”
Also in the book, O’Farrell states that he wishes Britain had lost the Falklands War, which is an appalling insult to the troops who fought, and in some cases died in battle, as well as to the inhabitants of the islands, who would have been subjected to the tyranny of General Galtieri had Argentina won.
Let’s be clear: O’Farrell didn’t write this as a throwaway remark. He was a mature adult, who had already established himself in fashionable left-wing literary circles and as a regular on the Thatcher-hating BBC, especially on snide panel quizzes. The book would have been proof-read, edited, and checked by lawyers, and he would have had numerous opportunities to amend or remove his remarks before publication.
It’s bad enough that he didn’t delete these remarks at the time out of shame and embarrassment, but far worse is the fact that he has, at no time, apologised for making them in the years since. Labour, under Ed Miliband’s leadership, allowed him to stand as their candidate at the Eastleigh by-election of 2013.
You can be sure that there will be plenty of people within the mainstream media classes – presenters, reporters and producers, who will feel similar sentiments towards Ann Widdecombe today. Most will have the sense to wait until they reach the wine bar this evening before saying them out loud.
A few clues could be seen on Sky News earlier this afternoon. The newsreader, Matt Barbet, was interviewing Sky’s former political editor, Adam Boulton, about Ann. They expressed sadness at the manner of her death, but there was an undertone of, “Yeah, but she was controversial.”
Just after the police had issued a statement requesting that people didn’t speculate on social media, Boulton said on air that it probably wasn’t a political murder, and it was probably a case of somebody knowing she lived in a rural area and had valuable things in her house. What a crass and irresponsible thing to say!
There are a lot of very nasty people on the left, and we should say so more often. Yes, there are many decent people on the left who are clear and unequivocal in their condemnation of Ann Widdecombe’s murder. But there is a difference between the way the left have reacted to Ann’s murder and the way those of us on the right reacted to Jo Cox’s murder a decade ago.
I was absolute in my condemnation of Ms Cox’s murder. There weren’t little caveats like, “Yeah, but she supported the Remain campaign” or, “Yeah, but she had lots of trendy, leftists opinion.” No, her murder should not have happened, and it was wrong. No ifs, no buts.
Contrast that with the little caveats a substantial portion on the left are now inserting into their condemnation of Ann’s murder.
What motivates them to behave in this way? As I have already stated, at the root of it is a mindset that they are so absolute in their beliefs that they are prepared to kill those who take a different stance, or, at least, are not going to discourage those who do kill.
This manifests itself in other ways. It’s not that uncommon for leftists to express admiration for Che Guevara or Fidel Castro. When you point out their grotesque human rights abuses, they launch into an often-aggressive defence of them (they refer to them affectionately as “Che” and “Fidel”). If a right-wing leader had carried out similar human rights abuses, they’d be quick to condemn it. If Israel went even a fraction as far, they’d soon take to the streets in large numbers.
Ann’s brutal death may well have come years before her time. Let this be a watershed moment for this country. Yes, there is a place for the sort of old-school Labour leftism that was rooted in Christian morality.
You may already be familiar with the phrase, “The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than Marxism.” It’s often attributed to Harold Wilson, but it was actually originally stated by Morgan Phillips, General Secretary of the Labour Party between 1944 and 1961.
There is a place for that strand of leftism. I may well disagree with much of what they have to say, but their viewpoints are legitimate and they’re underpinned by a strong morality.
But we must differentiate between them and the cancer and the mentally warped thinking of that “other” strand of the left, represented by O’Farrell and the vile sentiments we see on social media.
Ann was a direct and fearless debater. We should learn from her example in calling out this nastiness and amoral behaviour from certain elements on the left, whenever and wherever we encounter it.
Enough is enough. Henry Nowak’s murder must be a watershed moment for Britain’s institutions
By MARCUS STEAD
People throughout Britain and well beyond have been shocked by the details and graphic camera footage of Henry Nowak’s murder.
His killer, Vickrum Digwa, is without doubt a thoroughly nasty piece of work. It goes without saying that he in no way represents the vast majority of the Sikh population. Indeed, he had previously been barred from the Southampton gurdwara (Sikh temple) due to concerns over his behaviour.
Yet serious questions need to be asked about the state of policing in this country. How did this catalogue of failures happen?
Let’s look at this from a different angle, one that I haven’t seen properly explored in the column inches written in recent days.
Ask yourself this question: do you know of at least one person who, years ago, was a good friend, great company on a night out and had a wicked sense of humour who has transformed into a sullen, po-faced, woke bore in more recent times?
Yes, of course you do. We all do. And we know why. Working in the modern-day public sector does that to you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the civil service, the police, local government or the social services. Working in any of these sectors means you will have attended lots of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) seminars. They long ago replaced Christianity as the “public sector religion”.
It’s not just the DEI seminars. One of the best pieces of advice you can give any person, particularly any young person, is to be very careful with the company you keep, because it affects your behaviour and your attitudes more than you realise.
You begin to think that the “normal” within the goldfish bowl in which you live is everyone else’s “normal”. To go off on a brief tangent, it largely explains why the BBC has lost its way. For many years now, it has more-or-less been a broadcast version of The Guardian, with the same world view, attitudes and prejudices.
From the time the modern-day BBC journalist leaves university, to the sad day they are taken to the crematorium in a box, they will seldom meet, let alone understand the mindset of anyone from outside the goldfish bowl in which they operate.
As for those working in the police and local government, you can tell the signs that they’ve been part of their goldfish bowl for a long time. The first sign normally comes when you tell a joke in their company, and, where they would once have laughed with you and said something witty, they instead look at you solemnly and tell you, “You’re not allowed to say that anymore”.
The next sign is a bit more subtle, but if you’re listening carefully, you’ll pick up on it. In conversation, where you or I would make a reference to “both genders”, they will say “all genders”. Can you name more than two? This is where these DEI seminars gets you.
It goes beyond that. Homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967. A stupid law that should never have existed in the first place was got rid of. I have no desire to bring it back, neither do most other people. I will, however, defend the right of people to say that they believe homosexual acts are immoral and do not align with their religious or ethical views. That does not, however, mean that anyone has the right to hurl abuse at homosexuals in the street or attack them, and they should be treated with respect and courtesy in the workplace and public spaces.
But the growth of the Pride movement has become absurd. Police cars, ambulances, council buildings, banks, supermarkets and lots more are covered in rainbow flags all year round, while the latest version of the flag flies from their buildings throughout the month formerly known as June, now called “Pride Month”, and on other specific occasions throughout the year. By the way, it’s now called the LGBTQIA+ movement. Without cheating, do you have the faintest idea what the “IA+” stands for? No? Me neither. And the “Q” stands for a nasty word that ceased to be acceptable in polite society long ago. So why is the movement using it? For the same shallow reason we’re told that the “black community” are “reclaiming” the equally horrible “N” word?
No, thank you. If a word is unacceptable, it should be equally unacceptable to ALL members of society.
The basic point of public institutions (and private businesses) endorsing the Pride movement is that a quiet tolerance is no longer enough. You now have to actively approve, and be very publicly seen to be approving. The movement keeps pushing the boundaries every year. It’s no longer about treating homosexuals with the same courtesy and respect with which we’d like to be treated ourselves. It’s been stretched to include cranks who wish to self-identify and enter women-only spaces and those who engage in all kinds of strange proclivities. Some of the costumes people wear on Pride marches are perverse and deviant (bondage gear, chains and leads etc). Taxpayer-funded organisations whose role it is to serve the public should distance themselves from such occasions.
It’s become noticeable in recent years how many regular, likeable people who happen to be homosexual are now distancing themselves from the “Pride” movement and Stonewall, among them the TV writer Gareth Roberts and broadcaster Simon Fanshawe. When I meet up with my gay friends, here’s what happens – we talk about the weather, politics, our families, music, football and so on. If that sounds familiar, it’s because they’re much the same conversations I have with other friends, too. Homosexuals are not a separate species. When in the company of my gay friends, I consider their sexuality a not-very-interesting and not-very-important side issue. For the most part, I have nothing much to say on the matter, and neither do they. I certainly don’t sense they want me to wave the ever-more-complex rainbow flag as they walk down the street or drape it from my window.
What does any of this have to do with the horrible murder of Henry Nowak? Well, the modern-day police have been captured by DEI seminars and wokery in much the same way as local government, the universities and the civil service.
We like to pretend that the police forces of old still exist, but it’s a false comfort. If, like me, you’re a fan of The Bill, you’d probably want your Police Constables to resemble say, a Dave Quinnan or a Tony Stamp. You want your Sergeants to be like Bob Cryer – if he arrested you, it was a fair cop, if he’s your custody sergeant, you’ll be treated firmly but fairly – you won’t be beaten up, you’ll receive your meals, you’ll get everything you’re entitled to in terms of a solicitor, and so on. All of these characters believed in policing without fear or favour, and in treating everybody the same. Their job was to uphold and enforce the law.
Can you imagine PC Stamp or Sgt Cryer donning a rainbow police hat and prancing in the street on a Pride march? No, of course not.
How and why did our public institutions get into this mess? In 1948, Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, made a speech to undergraduates at Cambridge University. He told them not to waste time selling the Daily Worker on street corners, but to get degrees that would enable them to infiltrate the civil service, the top tiers of the legal profession, the judiciary, the police, higher education and the media, and to impose their ideas from within. They duly did so (I think Pollitt made a similar speech to Oxford students around the same time, but no official record of it appears to exist).
They were far, far cleverer than the Soviets. They did not smash churches or destroy old buildings. But their mentality did take over the key levers and institutions that shape society. The lawns on the campuses of our leading universities are neatly mown, and the old buildings are lovingly restored. The same applies to our great cathedrals such as St Paul’s. But what goes on inside the buildings has changed massively to fit in with the “new establishment”.
The fact that very few people have even heard of Harry Pollitt is merely a measure of his success in fundamentally changing this country’s institutions.
Fast-forward 42 years to 1990, and the late, great Christopher Booker attended a “job interview” lunch at the Garrick Club with the Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne and his deputy Frank Johnson with a view to him becoming a columnist. They asked Booker, “how do you see Britain’s future?” Booker replied, “sinking slowly into a sub-Marxist fog.”
That may have sounded like an extraordinary thing to say at a time when Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for 11 years, but the point being, as Booker understood perfectly well, was that the institutions of this country had been captured by culturally Marxist thinking (by the way, Booker got the job, and he remained a Sunday Telegraph columnist until his death in July 2019).
The process was sped up from 1997 onwards by the Blair government’s “reforms” of the civil service (or more specifically the politicisation of it) and its influence extended to the police rather quickly. Going back to The Bill, from the programme’s start in 1984 until 2000, the Chief Superintendent was Charles Brownlow, played by Peter Ellis (who celebrated his 90th birthday just the other day). He was regarded as a slightly dull figure, who spent much of his time behind his desk and liked tidy paperwork. Beyond that, he enjoyed golf, theatre and was heavily involved in Freemasonry. But he was a decent, fair-minded man, and he commanded the respect of his officers.
Fast-forward five years into the mid-2000s, and it’s hard to imagine he’d still be in the job, even if he was a bit younger. He would’ve been regarded as stuffy, small “c” conservative and pompous. Come to mention it, it’s hard to imagine any of the great officers from The Bill, from any rank, dressing in the modern police “uniform” of a black t-shirt and a baseball cap.
The video footage of the Henry Nowak murder is highly disturbing, but in terms of the police officers’ mindset, we can grasp what has happened – they regarded the false accusation that Mr Nowak had racially abused Digwa to be more serious than dealing with the reality that Mr Nowak had been stabbed and required urgent medical help. Their priority was to handcuff Mr Nowak as he was bleeding to death.
It takes a certain type of warped mindset to behave in that way, but that’s where DEI seminars and spending too much time in the company of others who think in the same way can get you.
The Henry Nowak case should be a watershed moment for policing in this country. There’s a growing sense that police officers would rather crimes went unsolved than they be accused of racism.
If we’re honest, we know that they ceased to be fit-for-purpose long ago.
The culturally Marxist mindset of which Pollitt would approve first took root during Roy Jenkins’ first spell as Home Secretary between 1965-67, when he fundamentally changed the principles of policing from “on the beat”, to motorised, “responsive” policing.
There was no debate in parliament over this change, let alone a vote on it, but its implications were enormous.
To understand it, let us make a comparison with the fire service. Fires are, thankfully, far rarer than they used to be, and we see far fewer fire engines out and about than we once did. A very large amount of the fire service’s work is nowadays centred around fire prevention. In turn, household items, from electrical appliances to furniture, is far safer than it was several decades ago.
From Mr Jenkins’ reforms onwards, policing went in the opposite direction. “On the beat” policing, where officers would be on foot patrol, operating from local police stations, acted as a deterrent to wrongdoers simply by their presence in the street. Low-level disorder was kept under control, a visitor to a town could ask an officer for the time, and distressed children who had been separated from their parents in a shopping area would soon be reunited.
The change was gradual, but the police are now “responsive”. That, in itself, is a failure of policing, because they are reacting only after a crime has taken place. It took a while for the Jenkins reforms to fully take effect. Foot patrols were gradually reduced from the late 1960s, though they remained relatively common until the early 1990s.
Police stations went from being something most of us lived within walking distance of, to something that may well be several miles away.
Reporting crimes has gone from something you could do over a desk at a local police station, but when they closed, the police non-emergency number, 101, became the easiest way. In the last couple of years, it’s close-to impossible to get through to anyone on the 101 number once you’ve navigated their options menu, and you easily reach a dead end. They prefer you to use the online facility, which is cumbersome and seldom leads to any kind of response.
In 1970, there were 91,307 police officers in England and Wales. By September 2024, for all the talk of “police cuts”, there were 146,868. There are plenty of police officers still around, but they’ve become ever more remote and nowadays they prefer it if the public don’t disturb them.
Just imagine if the facts of the Henry Nowak case had been the other way around, namely a black man had been stabbed but as he lay on the floor dying, the police had handcuffed him because the white man who stabbed the victim had accused him of racism.
Under those circumstances, we know full well what the likes of David Lammy and Angela Rayner would say. We would also see serious disorder on the streets. Let’s not forget that when George Floyd was murdered in May 2020 in Minneapolis, some 4,000 miles away in Bristol, all pretence of Covid lockdown conditions were abandoned as people gathered in huge numbers, some black, but also many from the hard left, to protest and demand the police be defunded. They also tore down a statue of a local philanthropist who died well over 300 years earlier and threw it in the river, because of his links to the slave trade. All this at a time when the rest of us were not visiting family members in hospital, not visiting elderly relatives in care homes and not attending funerals of people we were close to, all in the name of following the pandemic restrictions. The hypocrisy was grotesque.
Yes, George Floyd’s death was horrible. It should not have happened, even though he was a serial criminal with a dreadful track record. Henry Nowak’s death was equally horrible, but unlike Floyd, he had no criminal record, and had only consumed a moderate amount of alcohol on the night he was murdered. But there will be no footballers taking the knee in his name, and the far left will not be taking to the streets in huge numbers.
Mr Nowak’s family have behaved with incredible dignity in recent days. This is not a time for attacking the Sikh religion, which has many good qualities and whose followers are overwhelmingly decent people.
But this is a time to properly reflect on the state of the police and other public institutions in this country.
The blunt truth is that the police are no longer fit for purpose, and radical action needs to be taken. The institutional mindset is rotten to the core.
A courageous government needs to start again from scratch. Train up a network of new police forces up and down the country that are committed to upholding and enforcing the law without fear or favour – colourblind policing.
They also need to look the part – shirt, tie, tunic, helmet, rather than tattooed, baseball-cap wearing types who look like something from a naff American action movie. Once the “new police” have been properly trained up, we can get rid of the existing, woke, useless but dangerous police entirely.
Henry Nowak’s death should act as a wake-up call to us all.
The (almost) forgotten Whit Weeks
By MARCUS STEAD
I hope you enjoyed the bank holiday and the bright sunshine of this week. This time of year used to be marked much more profoundly than it is now.
Last Sunday was the festival of Whitsun, once understood by all and celebrated by many. As an aside, it provides one of the best examples of how the King James Bible is superior to the sanitised, bureaucratic, non-poetic versions often used nowadays. Acts 2:2-4 says: “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
“And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
“And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Compare that to the alternatives – ‘the blowing of a mighty wind (NIV), or ‘a strong wind blowing (Good News)’.
The fading away of Whitsun as a major public festival came about due to the very un-conservative Heath government. Whit Monday was officially replaced by the fixed Spring Bank Holiday in 1971. Instead of fluctuating annually according to the church calendar, the bank holiday was permanently moved to the last Monday in May.
Because the date of Whitsun is tied to Easter, the holiday previously fell on varying dates between mid-May and mid-June. To create a more consistent schedule for businesses, banks, and public planning, the government passed the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971, cementing the Spring Bank Holiday on its current, fixed day. A Christian festival with deep meaning and purpose was replaced with a secular bank holiday. Indeed, what could be more secular than a bank?
Good Friday and Easter Monday are still fluctuating public holidays, so why not Whitsun? Good Friday was once observed as the most solemn day of the year, a day of sober quiet and reverence, that was treated as such by believers and unbelievers alike. Nowadays, it is sadly all too often treated as a day of shopping and boozing.
The Heath government’s other ‘achievements’ in this regard include the New Year’s Day bank holiday. In effect, an unofficial festival of Heathmas was created – a long, grey, empty holiday that makes it pretty much impossible to get anything done for nearly two weeks after Christmas. The Scots have their own historic good reasons for wanting to celebrate the New Year, and for them it has a deeper meaning. For the rest of us, it falls a week after Christmas, but completely fails to recapture its warmth and spirit.
It was good fortune that this year’s Spring Bank Holiday coincided with Whitsun. It is a good opportunity to reflect on what has been lost as a result of the Heath government. For the big industrial towns, the factories wouldn’t just close for the day, they would remain shut for the entire week, known as ‘Whit Weeks’.
Church pews would be loaded onto the backs of lorries and children would be taken for day trips to the seaside or the fairground (imagine what the ‘elf ‘n’ safety brigade would make of that nowadays!).
For workers, there would similarly be coach trips and other fun activities to enjoy.
It was also the time of year when the poor would traditionally buy new clothes. Many people chose to arrange Christenings and weddings around Whitsun. These occasions feature much wearing of white (hence ‘Whitsun’).
Philip Larkin captured what Whitsun meant to people in his poem, The Whitsun Weddings:
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
You don’t have to be a Christian to realise that we’ve lost something important with the abolition of Whit Weeks, but it probably helps.
Larkin’s poem also tells us of the Britain we’ve lost in other ways: the sense of release upon being temporarily freed from the rigid work ethic that was the norm for most people back then, Pullman steam trains, cooling towers (we’ve lost most of them in a relatively short space of time due to ‘Net Zero’ madness), the quaint pleasantness of village cricket (captured very well by Sir John Major in his ‘Back to Basics’ speech).
Could such a poem be written about a ‘Spring Bank Holiday’ in 2026? Where would you start? A newly-nationalised ‘Great British Railways’ train pulls into your station, with livery that looks like it’s been borrowed from GB News.
Your train goes into the countryside, but there’s no cricket match because ‘Travellers’ have parked their caravans on there and tarmacked over the pitch.
The elm trees are long gone, but so have lots of the fields, thanks to the widespread policy of bolting huge new housing estates onto the edges of villages.
There are few cooling towers left, but you’ll see lots of wind turbines – ugly, unreliable and a menace to wildlife.
The train journey itself won’t contain the dining options of the Pullman that Larkin travelled upon. You’ll be lucky if the trolley selling light snacks comes around at all.
Your carriage may be taken over by boorish drunks or the calm spoilt by an unruly child whose parents look and sound like Angela Rayner, vulgar tattoos on full display, vape in mouth, and terrible taste in music blasting from their smartphone speaker.
For all the technological and scientific progress of the last 60 years, much has been lost. A happy Whit Week to you all.
David Jacobs – remembering Questions on TVS
By MARCUS STEAD
Today would have been the 100th birthday of David Jacobs. Plenty has already been written by others about his rich, varied life in radio and television.
His was a life well-lived. When you heard his voice on the radio, particularly when presenting his “our kind of music” programmes, he gave a reassuring sense that all was well with the world.
His life was marred by several tragedies – in 1971, his 19-year-old son was killed in a car crash in Israel, and four years later, he survived a car accident in Spain in which his second wife Caroline died.
Those who were fortunate enough to know him and work with him overwhelmingly describe him as a charming gentleman with a great sense of humour.
It’s well-known that he was the host of BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? between 1967-1984. Less well-known, particularly beyond southern England, is that from around the time he stood down from Any Questions?, and for several years afterwards, he hosted a TV programme with a similar format called Questions.
The programme aired on TVS, the then-ITV franchise holder for south and southeast England. There are obvious comparisons with the already-established Question Time on the BBC. But there were important differences. Prior to 1989, Question Time was studio-based and came from London. Questions on TVS travelled around the region, often coming from village halls or large function rooms attached to pubs.
Like Any Questions and Question Time, the programme had four panellists each week. One of the main reasons Question Time has declined so much in recent years is that the programme now has five panellists rather than four, and as a result, they make a series of statements rather than engage in debate. The other reasons for its decline is that not enough effort is made to balance the panel or the invited audience, and host Fiona Bruce is frequently shown to be out of her depth.
But back to Questions on TVS. The programme had a catchy, jovial piano theme, and during its first few years, the opening title sequence featured cartoon caricatures of the leading political figures of the day.
By 1987, the opening titles had been changed. While the familiar music remained, the sequence now featured the pages of a book being turned, with leading politicians and other familiar figures of the day taken from previous episodes of the programme.
What really strikes you as you watch it is that most of the figures, whether from politics or elsewhere, are instantly recognisable 40 years on, and, agree or disagree with them, were worthy of our time and attention (with the notable exception of the odious Cyril Smith).
Here are some screenshots of the people featured. You will not need me to label them. Many have since died, but their legacy is such that you can still remember them with ease.
Compare and contrast that to the calibre of person in public life today. How often do you watch Question Time and ask yourself, “who on earth is he/she?” as the panel is being introduced?
The names from Harold Wilson’s cabinet in the mid-1970s still run off our tongues easily – James Callaghan, Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Shirley Williams, Denis Healy, Barbara Castle, Roy Jenkins, Roy Mason, Peter Shore and others.
How many of Sir Keir Starmer’s current cabinet can you name? Or Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet? Can you remember six names from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet of just a few years ago?
The calibre of person in public life these days is very poor, and we are all paying the price for it.
Here are some screenshots from that 1987 opening title sequence of Questions. You should be able to name most of them, you may even be able to name all of them. Thank you to TV Ark for providing the clips.
Welsh Labour let the people down, now they will pay the price
By MARCUS STEAD
It has been a long time coming, but on Thursday, a century of Labour electoral dominance in Wales will almost certainly reach an end.
Even if the results are as disastrous for Labour as the polls suggest, it is entirely possible that they will remain in power as the junior partner in a Plaid Cymru-led administration. The D’Hondt voting system, being used in Senedd elections for the first time, makes it close-to impossible for one party to obtain an overall majority.
The last 27 years have taught us that Labour and Plaid Cymru like to pretend to fall out before elections, but they soon kiss and make up when the results come in and they form some kind of agreement to maintain their grip on power, whether a coalition or a less formal arrangement.
The people of Wales have been pushed to the limit by Labour’s unbroken rule since the start of devolution in 1999. The preceding referendum saw the “Yes” to devolution side win with 50.3%, well within the margin of error, on a turnout of just 50.22%.
Enthusiasm for devolution remains lukewarm. At the last Senedd elections in 2021, turnout was 46.6%, which is actually a record high. To many people in Wales, the Senedd is a distant irrelevance, one they neither engage with nor feel connected to.
There has been a growing gulf between the Labour representatives in the Senedd and the people who live in the party’s traditional valleys heartlands.
In the pre-devolution era, whatever ideological differences we may have had with Labour MPs holding Welsh seats, many were, nevertheless, good people who were embedded in their communities and had a sincere desire to improve the lives of those they represented. Many had worked in heavy industries and were influenced by the Nonconformist Christianity of their upbringing. At their core was a strong work ethic, a commitment to family, along with a belief in the self-improvement of their communities through measures like free libraries.
Since the start of devolution, the calibre of Senedd member on all sides of the chamber has, with a few honourable exceptions, been poor.
The Labour side predominantly consists of people from middle class, public sector orientated backgrounds: former teachers, university lecturers, probation workers, trade union reps, lobbyists, and people employed by charities that are reliant on government funding for their existence.
Their narrow range of experiences means they have seldom encountered the private sector, let alone understand what it means to run a business or create wealth. At worst, they are hostile to and suspicious of the private sector.
In 2019, former minister Lee Waters, in one of his better moments, let the cat out of the bag when he said: “Nobody knows what they’re doing on the economy. Everybody is making it up as we go along – and let’s just be honest about that.
“We’ve thrown all the orthodox tools we can think of at growing the economy in the conventional way, and we’ve achieved static GDP over 20 years.”
Beyond that, 27 years of unbroken Labour rule has given Wales the worst-performing NHS and lowest educational attainment standards of any of the four UK nations.
Labour’s approach to running Wales has, at best, been “managerial”. They have plodded along, blaming a lack of funding from Westminster for Wales’s problems while conveniently finding plenty of money for vanity projects along with grotesque levels of waste, such as the £157m spent on preparing for an M4 relief road that was subsequently scrapped.
They had no clear vision or sense of ambition for the sort of Wales they wanted to help create. The result is a country that is less prosperous, more bureaucratic and less at peace with itself than it was in 1999.
The disconnect between Welsh Labour and their valleys heartlands is fundamental. At UK level, it has often been said that in the modern era, Labour is the party of Islington. The Welsh equivalent is the Cardiff district of Pontcanna, where the chattering classes congregate – the political establishment, the academic sector and the mainstream media.
They are keen on identity politics, uncontrolled mass immigration and they consider Brexit a problem to be navigated rather than an opportunity to be seized. By contrast, the down-to-earth people in the Welsh valleys who until recently could be relied upon to vote Labour are often pro-Brexit, acutely feel the negative effects of uncontrolled mass immigration and find identity politics baffling and absurd.
To put it simply, for the last 27 years, Welsh Labour has positioned itself as the party of the middle class progressive rather than the ex-miner or steelworker.
Next Thursday, Labour might hold on to the vote from the bearded hipster walking through Cardiff of a lunchtime, rainbow lanyard around his neck, on his way to buy his kale and avocado sandwich, but those in the working class communities ten miles up the road in the valleys will largely look elsewhere, if indeed they bother to vote at all.
The pandemic was the last straw for these communities. There was a sense that the then-First Minister, Mark Drakeford, was drunk on power. When the Welsh public needed clear, simple rules, Drakeford was being different from England for its own sake. The rules were more complex and more absurd than across the border. At their worst, the supermarket aisles selling kettles, saucepans and children’s toys were sealed off, all in the name of protecting public health. It defied any kind of logic and achieved nothing.
Drakeford’s draconian measures led to private sector businesses closing, children’s education being ruined and a surge in people experiencing serious mental health problems.
For decades, Labour has taken Wales for granted. The party may yet cling on to power as a junior partner following Thursday’s vote because the electoral system being used favours the Welsh establishment parties.
There is little room for immediate optimism. A Plaid Cymru-led government would be like Welsh Labour on steroids. But the tectonic plates have shifted. Labour had 27 years to change Wales for the better, and they blew it.
Senedd Elections 2026 – three days to go
By MARCUS STEAD
With three days to go before polling day in Wales, there’s a bit of “reading between the lines” to be done in terms of sussing out what’s really going on with the polls. Bear in mind I don’t like any of the parties, so I’m not biased at all. Here’s what I take from it:
* Reform UK are doing somewhat BETTER than the polls are suggesting. The mainstream media in Wales can tell you the results of any given poll, but they don’t seem to know how to interpret data. There are various factors you need to consider when “weighting” the data. The biggest, in the case of Reform UK, is the reality that a lot of people won’t want to tell a stranger that they intend voting for a party led by Nigel Farage, and that may well lead to problems in work if they admitted to supporting them, not to mention difficulties with neighbours/friends/family members. Add a few percentage points to Reform UK.
* The mainstream media in Wales have done, and will continue to “big up” Plaid Cymru. The links between the mainstream media in Wales and Plaid Cymru run very deep. We’ve probably seen enough cosy interviews of Rhun ap Iorwerth eating chips while being asked about what’s on his bedside table, what he watches on Netflix or the obscure rock band he was in during his youth, but expect the pro-Plaid Cymru clickbait to be ramped up in the days ahead.
* Roughly half the Welsh electorate aren’t engaged with the process at all. They couldn’t name, say, three of the party leaders. For whatever reason, they’re choosing not to get involved.
* The number of people who understand the D’Hondt voting method is low, and I mean REALLY low. For the most part, people don’t understand it and aren’t willing to take five minutes to properly educate themselves on how it works. This isn’t a wish list to Father Christmas. It’s important to use D’Hondt to prevent what you DON’T want.
* The fact that there have been difficulties in sending postal votes to people in Cardiff and possibly elsewhere will cause serious controversy if Reform UK and the Conservatives fall narrowly short of the number of seats they need to form a majority. Postal voting tends to be for older people, and they’re the ones most likely to vote for Reform UK or the Conservatives.
* Daytime counting should make us all suspicious. We’re told that it’s so that the counters can feel “fresh”. Millions of us have to work night shifts from time to time. For quite a few of us, it’s a regular part of life. Requiring counters to work overnight isn’t a big ask. We should be suspicious of ballot boxes being left lying around for the best part of 12 hours before the count even begins.
Can we trust Reform UK to protect our liberty?
By MARCUS STEAD
Every once in a while, the YouTube algorithms come up with a quirky gem that really grabs your interest.
A few weeks ago, this video was uploaded, containing the edition of News at Ten broadcast on 13 October 1994.
This is a video where the familiar meets the unfamiliar. It’s from the era after the programme’s revamp in 1992 where it became closer to an American-style news programme and was presented by a single newscaster, ditching its long-established double-header format.
The edition was presented by John Suchet, who more often could be seen anchoring the ITN Lunchtime News or Early Evening News in that era, but on this occasion, he’s deputising for Trevor McDonald, as he did from time to time.
The glory days of ITN are still intact at this point. The programme has the feel of a mid-market tabloid. Nowadays, News at Ten exists in name only. Night after night, we’re treated to Tom Bradby’s little homilies, his mixing up of “fact” and “opinion”, and him putting on his “concerned” pose when they return to the studio after a sad news item.
Actually, Mr Bradby does appear in this 1994 edition, but as a correspondent in Belfast delivering a report package followed by a live piece to camera in a balanced and impartial way. How times change!
But what really caught my attention came nine minutes in, when the then-ITN Political Editor, Michael Brunson, delivered a report from the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth, where the keynote speech had been made by the Home Secretary of the day, Michael Howard, who was to become party leader around a decade later.
Mr Howard’s delayed Criminal Justice Bill was at the core of the speech. The audience consisted to quite a large extent of the wartime generation who began to leave us in big numbers towards the end of the 1990s, and have now largely passed on.
Mr Howard is pushing for identity cards to be introduced as a measure in helping police to fight crime (sound familiar?), yet he offers no real explanation as to how they will actually help.
People who value individual liberty should never support identity cards. They were compulsory in this country during World War II and for the years immediately afterwards. There’s no real evidence they helped the war effort, they merely became a tool for busybodies and the police to bully people and to act in an overly officious way.
Identity cards could’ve been handy for the Nazis if they’d invaded this country – they could’ve identified the Jews and rounded them up much more easily.
Why are they called ID cards? What does the ‘D’ even stand for? And, in the present era, how on earth will they stop the boats, as its current supporters claim?
Yes, the government has official data on you, but in each case, it’s for a specific purpose, and a specific purpose only – a driving licence, your National Insurance, your NHS number etc. People found after the second Churchill government formally abolished identity cards that their number on that mysteriously became their NHS number.
In a free society, the government has to prove itself to YOU, not the other way around.
And yet, during Mr Howard’s speech, what’s really extraordinary is how many people in the audience from the older generation are wildly supporting their introduction. Indeed, Mr Howard’s suggestion that a driving licence could “double up” as an identity card (something that has unofficially happened to a large extent in the years since) is heckled by the audience for not going far enough.
What is behind their enthusiasm for it? Let’s turn the clock back a bit further to the Margaret Thatcher era for a likely explanation.
For all Mrs Thatcher’s very real achievements (and they were many), the Iron Lady had some very glaring ‘blind spots’ that affected her judgement. In her mindset, certain sections of society could do no wrong, namely police officers, the military, and people working in the City.
Her inability to grasp that all three of those sectors were flawed and were capable of corruption and serious wrongdoing was to tarnish her legacy later on.
In the case of the police, Mrs Thatcher’s belief in the police being jolly fine chaps who were incapable of wrongdoing led to poor judgement in terms of her not properly investigating serious wrongdoing at Hillsborough, Orgreave, in the Metropolitan Police and in Northern Ireland.
A lot of the people in the Bournemouth audience that day in 1994 may well have had the same failings as Mrs Thatcher. The police were never “perfect” and their authority should always be properly accountable, but many of those people would have grown up in an era where the Dixon of Dock Green “on the beat” policing was the norm.
What changed? During Roy Jenkins’ first spell as Home Secretary between 1965-67, he fundamentally changed the principles of policing from “on the beat”, to motorised, “responsive” policing.
There was no debate in parliament over this change, let alone a vote on it, but its implications were enormous.
To understand it, let us make a comparison with the fire service. Fires are, thankfully, far rarer than they used to be, and we see far fewer fire engines out and about than we once did. A very large amount of the fire service’s work is nowadays centred around fire prevention. In turn, household items, from electrical appliances to furniture, is far safer than it was several decades ago.
From Mr Jenkins’ reforms onwards, policing went in the opposite direction. “On the beat” policing, where officers would be on foot patrol, operating from local police stations, acted as a deterrent to wrongdoers simply by their presence in the street. Low-level disorder was kept under control, a visitor to a town could ask an officer for the time, and distressed children who had been separated from their parents in a shopping area would soon be reunited.
The change was gradual, but the police are now “responsive”. That, in itself, is a failure of policing, because they are reacting only after a crime has taken place. It took a while for the Jenkins reforms to fully take effect. Foot patrols were gradually reduced from the late 1960s, though they remained relatively common until the early 1990s.
Police stations went from being something most of us lived within walking distance of, to something that may well be several miles away.
Reporting crimes has gone from something you could do over a desk at a local police station, but when they closed, the police non-emergency number, 101, became the easiest way. In the last couple of years, it’s close-to impossible to get through to anyone on the 101 number once you’ve navigated their options menu, and you easily reach a dead end. They prefer you to use the online facility, which is cumbersome and seldom leads to any kind of response.
In 1970, there were 91,307 police officers in England and Wales. By September 2024, for all the talk of “police cuts”, there were 146,868. There are plenty of police officers still around, but they’ve become ever more remote and nowadays they prefer it if the public don’t disturb them.
There are institutions in this country whose reputations ride largely on past glories. The BBC is one such example, the police are another.
The Jenkins reforms of the 1960s were in part a consequence of something else. In 1948, Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, made a speech to undergraduates at Cambridge University.
He told them not to waste time selling the Daily Worker on street corners, but to get degrees that would enable them to infiltrate the civil service, the top tiers of the legal profession, the judiciary, the police, higher education and the media, and to impose their ideas from within. They duly did so (I think Pollitt made a similar speech to Oxford students around the same time, but no official record of it appears to exist).
Jenkins may not have been present at a Pollitt speech, but he nevertheless endorsed the cultural Marxist mindset during his long political career.
They were far, far cleverer than the Soviets. They did not smash churches or destroy old buildings. But their mentality did take over the key levers and institutions that shape society. The lawns on the campuses of our leading universities are neatly mown, and the old buildings are lovingly restored. The same applies to our great cathedrals such as St Paul’s. But what goes on inside the buildings has changed massively to fit in with the “new establishment”.
The fact that very few people have even heard of Harry Pollitt is merely a measure of his success in fundamentally changing this country’s institutions.
Sermons in Anglican churches and cathedrals often resemble Guardian editorials rather than Holy Scripture. Cultural Marxist thinking and “cancel culture” has infected our universities more and more with every year that passes. The BBC has for many years been, in effect, a broadcast version of The Guardian. One of the biggest changes of all has been in the judiciary, which 50 years ago was perceived as crusty, conservative and reactionary, and is now, at its highest levels, dominated by culturally Marxist thinking.
In terms of policing, this mindset has also had a deep, profound change. The old premise that the purpose of a police officer was to uphold and enforce the law without fear or favour has been replaced with a mindset that they are more like social workers whose job is to mediate between criminal and victim.
But going back to those people in the hall in Bournemouth at the 1994 Conservative Party Conference, they were “slow on the uptake” in terms of how much policing had changed, and the reasons why it had happened.
The police “got away with it” for a long time because, despite the profound changes to their duties, their uniforms remained broadly the same until relatively recently.
The tunics and helmets were replaced by the NATO jumpers and the flat caps from the mid-1990s. Then, in the mid-2010s, they were replaced by the baseball caps, t-shirts and stab vests that we see nowadays (when, indeed, we see police officers at all). This made it easier for the public to discern that the police “of old” were gone. They now looked like something from a naff American action film rather than a calm authority that upheld order.
But it has gone further still in the years since. Police vans, such as this, now contain rainbow flag colours and messages in numerous minority languages. They don’t even try to mask the fact they are highly politicised nowadays. Unlike the vast majority of people, I live quite near a police station, and for a substantial portion of the year, the latest, ever more complex version of the rainbow flag flies from the pole on its roof.
The Conservative Party, while largely a dead loss following Mrs Thatcher’s removal in 1990, effectively endorsed the Blairite agenda from 2001 onwards, and especially so from the time David Cameron became leader in 2005. He was, in effect, a continuation of the Blair project, and a lot of the damage to modern-day policing, in terms of politicisation, the change in uniform and the endorsement of woke political causes, has happened on the watch of the Conservatives.
The British public now widely regard the Conservative Party as a busted flush. So now what? A word of warning about Nigel Farage and Reform UK. I knew Mr Farage some 20 years ago when I was a member of UKIP between the spring of 2003 and the autumn of 2006.
There was a very real opportunity for UKIP to replace the Conservatives as the main centre-right political force in Britain in the period following the party’s success in the European Parliamentary elections of the summer of 2004. However, the party was prevented from developing, largely due to Mr Farage.
No other poppy is allowed to grow too tall with Mr Farage. He regards people of talent as a threat. His track record of falling out with colleagues in UKIP and now Reform UK is appalling.
Reform offers little in terms of “substance”. Its track record of the local councils it runs in England is hugely unimpressive. The party’s policies consist of simplistic solutions to complex problems. There is little intellectual depth to their policies. Last month, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice said: “We’d be helping the Americans and the Israelis in any way they saw appropriate.”
In doing so, Mr Tice effectively set Reform UK up as a subservient vassal to the Trump administration. Furthermore, the calibre of the party’s candidates standing in next week’s elections is often substandard.
As we all know, a number of high-profile Conservatives, including failed ministers from the last government, have joined Reform in recent times.
Let’s return to the News at Ten report from Michael Howard’s speech in October 1994. Who’s that on the podium, 10 minutes and 25 seconds into the video? Yes, it’s a 27-year-old Nadhim Zahawi (the caption spells his name incorrectly), who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the last Conservative government and is one of the most high-profile defectors to Reform UK.
In this 1994 speech, where he is a Conservative Party delegate from Putney, Mr Zahawi says, “The thugs attacking our police yesterday will fear identity cards, the innocent have no fear of identity cards.”
The young Mr Zahawi endorsed the mindset of the elderly delegates in the hall that the police were jolly fine chaps and that if you had nothing to hide, you had nothing to worry about with identity cards.
Thoughtful people can see the very serious, indeed dangerous flaws in that mindset. Has Mr Zahawi gained wisdom with age, or does he still hold these views?
Those expecting a Reform UK government to be the friends of liberty and traditional British values are setting themselves up for a big disappointment.
In defence of GMT
By MARCUS STEAD
Here we go again. For the next seven months, every clock, from the one in your town hall, to the bedside alarm, will be lying to you. Because tonight is the night when clocks go forward by one hour, for no discernible reason whatsoever.
In recent weeks, we’ve had the lovely, gradual process of mornings getting lighter and the evenings drawing out. From today, the early mornings will be jolted back into darkness for some weeks to come. In the evenings, parents will be struggling to get their children to go to bed when it’s still light.
The defenders of this absurd annual farce really need to grasp that not a single second of daylight is gained by fiddling with the clocks. The amount of daylight available remains exactly the same, whatever the clocks say.
It is unnatural, irritating and pointless. We’ll be told, as we are each year, that it’s good for the economy, saves fuel, or boosts tourism, or cuts road accidents, without there being any substantial evidence to back up the claims. The evidence of it is as flimsy as, well, the man-made global warming cult that is rapidly leading Britain to economic ruin.
Midday is not just a set of numbers on the clock. It is the time at which the sun is at its highest point in the sky. But until late October, we’ll be told it’s midday when it’s actually 11am.
How did this farce come about, and how did it gain political traction? Its origins can be traced to George Hudson, a New Zealand bug hunter, whose working shifts meant he had lots of time to pursue his interest while most people would’ve been in work. He wanted to spread his passion to others, and began arguing his case in 1895.
Next came a building tycoon called William Willett. Early one summer morning in 1907, Willett was out riding his horse near Petts Wood, Kent, and was disgusted to see the blinds of houses still drawn while the sun was already up. As a passionate golfer, he was frustrated that his evening round was cut short by sunset.
There are straightforward, logical answers to both men: Hudson needed to grasp that we’re not all the same. Willett needed to be told to let other people live the way they want to, and to, erm, start his round of golf a bit earlier.
If you ever have the good fortune to take a flight from Siberia to Alaska in an early morning, you will be travelling backwards through the international date line and will arrive at your destination the previous afternoon. It’s the most powerful available lesson to teach a person the difference between “official time” and “real time”.
Midday, sunrise and sunset are all real events, dictated by the position of the sun to the exact part of the planet you are in. The margins upon which it operates are a strong case for belief in God, so fine are those margins that it’s implausible for them to be a random accident.
No amount of fiddling with the clocks will change these events, nor will they alter the amount of daylight available. The very term “Daylight Saving” is fraudulent.
The British parliament had resisted the fads of Hudson and Willett for many years, but this all changed during the First World War. When Germany’s Kaiser Wilheim II ordered clocks to be moved forward to help the war effort in April 1916, within a month, British MPs had, in a panic, done the same. Records of parliamentary speeches of the time show extraordinarily little in terms of logic and evidence to support the change.
Wars and crises always provide opportunities for cranks and fanatics. In the space of just one week during the early stages of World War II in Britain, some 750,000 domestic pets were put to sleep in the name of helping the war effort. It was pointless and very cruel, but people went along with it because they wanted to be seen to be “doing their bit”.
As for the clocks, When British Summer Time ended in October 1940 the clocks were not put back an hour, meaning that the country remained one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) until spring 1941. In that spring, the clocks were still put ahead one hour. The pattern continued until the end of the war, meaning the country was on “Double British Summer Time” (BST) from the spring to the autumn. The benefits to the war effort and to wider society have never really been explained.
Just a few years ago, the British population, by and large, complied with all kinds of ludicrous and illogical measures in the name of protecting public health during the Covid pandemic. They believed that by obeying absurd rules, they’d be keeping themselves safe and would be protecting the wider public.
Let’s remind ourselves of how daft this became: a trip to the shops or on public transport meant wearing a face covering that would be deemed too loose to be of any use in a medical environment such as a hospital or dental surgery.
We were told we could take our face masks off when sitting at a table. Did that mean the Covid virus only spread when we were standing up? On trains, there was a phase when you did not have to wear a mask when in England, but upon going under the Severn Tunnel, an announcement would be made to put your face covering on to comply with Welsh regulations. It’s as though we were being asked to believe that the virus behaved differently the moment you moved into Wales.
When donating blood, the exact opposite applied. Blood donors in England were required to wear their face coverings in the name of public safety. In Wales, they were specifically told to remove them as mouth expressions were a way that staff could tell if the donor was about to faint.
People walked around the street, in fresh air, wearing these loose face coverings for no particular reason. It became a silly habit. Incredibly, some people are still wearing them six years later.
Of course, we can take lessons from this. As and when the governments of the United Kingdom come up with another pretext to introduce daft rules, we can look back on the absurdities of the pandemic and take a more cynical view next time. But will lessons be learned, or will people put up with more nonsense to be seen to be “doing their bit”, and because, actually, they quite like being ordered about, particularly if they think it means they’ll be safer as a result, even if there’s no real evidence to back it up.
The changing of the clocks each late March is a hangover from a similar illogical panic that set in during the First World War.
In 1940, General Franco shifted Spain from GMT to Central European Time (CET) as a favour to Hitler. Seven decades later, it’s still in the wrong time zone. Spain has a “late night” culture as a result. The evening meal is eaten far later than in other countries. Football matches don’t kick-off until 9pm, sometimes later. The best prime-time TV programmes don’t air until 10pm.
Here in Britain, the European Union decided the dates upon which the clocks went forwards and backwards from 2001, and put pressure on our country to move to Berlin time. They stopped doing both in 2019, shortly before the UK gained independence from the EU.
But every summer, and early autumn, during BST, we hear calls to “leave the clocks where they are”. People older than me will recall that this has been tried before, between 1968 and 1971, and was widely hated. During the winter months, the morning commute and the school run took place in the dark. In Scotland, proper daylight did not arrive until mid-mornings. The experiment was dreadful, and MPs voted overwhelmingly to abolish it.
The mild jetlag in the weeks after the clocks go forward does us no good. The sleep loss and change in circadian rhythms results in an increase in heart attacks that peaks on the Monday after the change. Figures show heart attacks jump by as much as 24%. Road accidents, caused by sleep deprivation, increase in number for several weeks afterwards. Fatal accidents typically increase by 6% on the Sunday of the clock change. There’s also a huge spike in workplace injuries in the days and weeks that follow.
What about the other cliched arguments for the change? No, it doesn’t help the farmers. Cows don’t care what your clock says. Much work cannot begin until the sun has burnt the morning dew off the fields in any case.
British Summer Time serves no meaningful purpose and the reasons behind it are not based on logic. It’s time to confine it to the dustbin of history.
Marcus Stead 
The modern left’s true colours
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By MARCUS STEAD
Six years ago, Cardiff Young Labour tried to prevent Cardiff University Conservatives from hosting a webinar conversation with the late Ann Widdecombe during lockdown.
Cardiff Young Labour accused Ms Widdecombe of making comments that “caused severe hate against multiple marginalised groups”.
Typically of such smears from the modern left, they failed to provide a single example of such a thing. Not one.
Yes, Ms Widdecombe held socially conservative views on the definition of marriage in line with her Roman Catholic faith. But there are no examples of her expressing “hate”. The truth is she not only employed homosexuals among her personal staff, she counted many homosexuals as personal friends. Iain Dale has very publicly testified for that following her murder.
Actual truth, honesty, freedom of expression and real tolerance aren’t high priorities for “university campus” leftists.
Can anyone provide a single example of anything Ms Widdecombe said, at any time in her political life, that any reasonable, fair-minded person could class as “hate”?
But by “hate speech”, the modern, intolerant left classes anyone who dares to deviate from their ever-more-barmy mindset. Morgan Phillips, General Secretary of the Labour Party between 1944 and 1961 once said, “The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than Marxism.” That may well have been true of the traditional, rugged, working class left that put a great deal of emphasis on family life, self-improvement and discipline. But it bears little relation to the Labour movement of 2026, especially among its younger generation.
Things the modern left classes as “hate speech” includes statements such as:
Saying any of these things will cause the left to try and get you “cancelled” from university debates, driven out of your job, no-platformed in other public spheres, and subjected to smear and ridicule.
But why does this tweet matter, nearly six years after it was posted? Those members of Cardiff Young Labour would’ve graduated by now, and will have fanned out into the civil service, the teaching profession, the NHS, social services, the media, the legal profession and so on. Some of them may even be Labour councillors on Cardiff Council.
Look beyond the fake smiles, the rainbow lanyards and the “be kind” mantra. These are people who are capable of great spite, intolerance and cruelty. If you believe in free speech and engaging in a civil manner with your opponents (as Ms Widdecombe did), you cannot trust them an inch.
Written by Marcus Stead
August 21, 2026 at 7:03 am
Posted in Politics, Comment, Opinion
Tagged with Ann Widdecombe, Cardiff University, Cardiff Young Labour, Cardiff University Conservatives