The Mirror Crack'd

As Prince observed, "parties weren't meant to last", so why are we saddled with political parties no longer fit for purpose? I was musing on this question having read that yet another Labour councillor has resigned the party whip on Oxford City Council following Sir Keir Starmer's injudicious remarks on LBC Radio about Israel's right to cut off supplies of electricity, water, fuel and food to Gaza. Cllr Barbara Coyne is the ninth Labour councillor to resign in Oxford, the twenty-second nationally so far, and her resignation means that Labour has lost its majority on the council.  Cllr Coyne has, however, informed her ex-group Leader that she will not join another party and will continue to vote with Labour in council in support of its manifesto commitments. I empathise with Cllr Coyne having myself, when a Labour councillor in a London borough, resigned the whip to sit as an Independent while continuing to vote with the group on the manifesto on which I had been e...

When a Tory government claims it is embarking on “the biggest reform to the welfare system in a decade” we can expect the worst. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy 'rhymes with' Hunt, is promising wide-ranging reforms to the Universal Credit system to 'encourage' hundreds of thousands of claimants into work or to take on more hours. To be fair (if I must) some of his proposals ahead of what he is ominously calling his "back to work Budget" have been cautiously welcomed by campaigners and union leaders, especially his scrapping of the controversial Work Capability Assessment for disabled people. He also proposes paying childcare costs to those on Universal Credit in advance, rather than in arrears, while the maximum amount people on benefits can claim for childcare will be increased by several hundred pounds. So far so (possibly) good but, to paraphrase the adage, beware geeks bearing gifts. This is a Tory Chancellor we're talking about and he's far mo...

Respected independent social change organisation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), has just published the fourth in a series of reports into extreme poverty, Destitution in the UK 2023.  The Foundation's website states: "...ending poverty in the UK is a moral cause: to ensure dignity and respect for everyone, and to address exclusion and powerlessness." The fact that such an organisation, and such a report, is needed in the first quarter of the 21st century is a shocking indictment in itself but, given that the UK government is unwilling to change the status quo  and, in fact, seems set on making the situation worse, thank goodness JRF exists to challenge it. The study reveals that approximately 3.8 million people in the UK experienced destitution in 2022, including around one million children. This is almost two-and-a-half times the number of people in 2017, and nearly triple the number of children. Therefore, the need for urgent action to tackle destitution in the ...

My ambivalence about Sir Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party is a matter of record but I have been willing to tolerate him (with gritted teeth) as the only viable option for ousting the Tories after thirteen years of misrule. However, my tolerance has been tested once again by his maladroit (one might say cackhanded) comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict. In an interview on LBC Radio he appeared to suggest that Israel had a right to cut off water, electricity, fuel and food supplies to the Palestinian Gaza Strip. As a lawyer one might have expected him to understand that what he was apparently advocating was contrary to international law. Okay, so he's a barrister but is obviously not an expert in international jurisprudence and appears not to have read Article 33 of the Geneva Convention (how many of us have?). But, at a human level at least, he should have realised that what he was saying was unconscionable. If he was unsure he should have prevaricated, or better...

Over the summer I went to visit the Ragged School Museum in Mile End, a short and pleasant canalside walk from where I live in the East End of London.  The Museum had recently reopened after a prolonged closure for a much-needed refurbishment enabled by a £4.8m Heritage Lottery Fund grant. I was keen to see it and was not disappointed; the display boards were informative and moving, even disturbing, and the collections fascinating. Located on the evocatively Dickensian-sounding Copperfield Road, the Museum recreates the school for poor East End children set up in 1877 by Dr Thomas John Barnardo (he of the children's homes) in a former warehouse on the Regent's Canal.  While there, I had the pleasure of talking to Museum Director, Erica Davies, about the project. During the course of our conversation she stressed the importance of understanding the concept of destitution as distinct from poverty. I understood it to refer to grinding poverty, of course, but hadn't really cons...

Despite what former Tory Home Secretary, later Conservative Party Leader, Michael Howard, asserted in 1993, the evidence for the effectiveness of imprisoning more and more people convicted of crimes is ambiguous at best. In 1993, the average prison population was 44,542. According to a paper published by the Cambridge-based Bennett Institute for Public Policy in May this year "A ratchet effect has followed as politicians competed with each other to appear tough on law and order. In May 2023, the total prison population stands at 84,940. Current government policy will see the prison population projected to hit 106,300 by March 2027."   Recent figures for England and Wales of 88,852, with judges being asked not to impose prison sentences and plans to send foreign prisoners (around 10,000) home and to rent foreign prison places don't seem to suggest that Michael Howard was right in his assertion. The fact that the UK has the third highest prison population in Europe, after t...

As I write Israeli forces have yet to go into north Gaza but they inevitably will and hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans are heading south in anticipation of this towards the city of Khan Younis and the (currently closed) Rafah crossing into Egypt.  The pictures coming out of Gaza are almost biblical, with horses, donkeys and even camels being used to transport refugees, and the few belongings they have managed to salvage, along the Salah al-Din Road towards hoped-for safety in the south of the Strip. When they arrive, however, conditions in this already overcrowded area are appalling, and even there they are not free from Israeli bombardment. Egypt is currently refusing to open the Rafah Crossing, fearing a potential refugee surge of more than one million Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula. That fear is justified and may be a gross underestimate as it seems clear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's unstated objective is to drive all 2.3 million Gazans out of...