Great Yarmouth was described by Dickens as a kind of paradise. David Copperfield lived there in an upturned boat with Peggoty. Proof, if it were needed, that the town has not only seen better days, but better centuries. Now it is something else entirely. The archetypal decayed seaside town: slot machines, one-armed bandits, and not … Read more
If you wanted to design a policy that looks like it fixes the NHS workforce crisis without actually fixing it, you might end up with something very like the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026. The Act requires the NHS to prioritise UK-trained doctors when allocating foundation and specialty training posts. In plain English: British graduates … Read more
Last week, YouGov retracted a poll suggesting church attendance was rising in the UK. The results, it turned out, had been distorted by bots or AI. This is disappointing given that the research was published last year, and got a lot more attention than the retraction did. To understand why that matters, it helps to … Read more
Small boat crossings have fallen again. They are down around 30% for the first three months of 2026 compared to the same period last year. There was a similar fall between August and December last year, down 30% year on year , and down roughly 50% from their peak in 2022.. At this point, it … Read more
The 10th anniversary of Brexit is a few months away. Between now and then there are local elections, where Reform—formerly the Brexit Party—hope to make significant gains. I’ve spent the last few weeks travelling up and down England’s east coast, photographing and visiting places where Reform has already won, and places where it hopes to. … Read more
Foreign influence in British politics is no longer theoretical. Last month I wrote about some unusual patterns of political funding flowing into Reform. British electoral law doesn’t allow foreign donations, but Reform appeared to have found a way around this—using UK-registered companies as a kind of front. It turns out I may have been too … Read more
At long last, the student loan system is being debated seriously. It should be. Few policies impose marginal tax rates that politicians would tolerate anywhere else: 37% on incomes over £25,000, 51% over £50,270, and 71% over £100,000, before you even factor in interest and postgraduate add-ons. The Conservatives have proposed scrapping interest rates of … Read more
I was working in Leeds when I first started seeing adverts for WKD. Billboards, TV spots—loud, garish, and oddly confrontational. They didn’t look like advertising as we understood it. Traditionally, advertising sold aspiration. Buy this and you’ll be better, cooler, more successful—more attractive, even. WKD did the opposite. Its campaign—“Have you got a WKD side?”—didn’t … Read more
The latest immigration data slipped out last week with surprisingly little noise. It should have been a big political moment. Net migration has fallen to 204,000 in the year to June—less than a third of the previous year’s level. That’s not a marginal shift. That’s a collapse. It’s now so sharp that it risks tipping … Read more
By-elections are supposed to be strange. Low turnout, odd swings, protest votes. But every so often they tell you something real about the direction of travel. This one did. Start with the Greens. On the face of it, good news. They can clearly mobilise a vote and, in the right conditions, win. But their real … Read more