But it is also a case about which consensual injuries the criminal law is willing to tolerate, and which it treats as too dangerous, deviant, or morally incomprehensible.

Decided in 1993, 26 years after the partial decriminalisation of sexual activity between men in England and Wales, Brown concerned a group of gay men engaging in consensual sadomasochistic sexual activity in private.

The case continues to shock—and confuse—law students because the relevant participants in the events I am about to describe were treated as having consented.

The five appellants were part of a larger group of gay men who participated in consensual sadomasochistic activities over roughly ten years.

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In his book, McBride writes: “Because law is, at base, all about a conversation about what sort of society we should live in, the one immutable rule for lawyers is: Express yourself clearly or die. Let’s call this the iron rule of lawyering: If you cannot express yourself clearly, there is no room for you in the law.”

In McBride’s words, this is the “iron rule of lawyering,” and it’s an idea with a serious philosophical pedigree — most notably in HLA Hart’s work. In Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals, Hart calls clarity a “sovereign virtue in jurisprudence,” with the important caveat that clarity on its own is not enough when looking at what the law is. Hart went further still in his engagement with Lon Fuller’s “principles of legality,” accepting that a legal system worthy of the name should be free from contradictions, ambiguities, and obscurities. For Hart, clarity wasn’t just good style — it was close to a precondition for something counting as law at all.

That same problem shows up the moment law leaves the seminar room and enters a courtroom. The threshold for legal clarity matters in every corner of the profession. Courts will frequently ask themselves if the text is clear when interpreting a statute or a contract. When the answer is yes, that is usually the end of it. But what happens if the answer is no? Then the courts need to look at other evidence to form an opinion and to account for the clarity which is missing — and the drafter has effectively handed control of the outcome to someone else’s inference.

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It’s this same problem that every student is training to avoid every time they pick up a pen. Good legal writing is difficult to achieve for this very reason. In law, clarity has two important parts. The first is the linguistic facet, i.e. is the text easy to read, are the sentences short, does it make grammatical sense? The second is the legal facet, i.e. does the text give a clear answer when applied to a specific case. Often, you can have one without the other. A judgment can be very well written but leave the legal test undetermined. A statute can be short and blunt but very difficult to apply in practice. Good legal writing has to hit both. When you study law, the hope is that the legal facet will follow the linguistic facet eventually, but this isn’t always the case.

As a student, you need to learn the art of being precise and clear about the law at every stage of your writing and be extremely disciplined about it, even to the point of sickening yourself. Leave no space to be misunderstood. Importantly, clarity can only be achieved when you understand what you are talking about. This means understanding the law clearly, remembering the case law, being able to recall why the judges in that case made a particular decision. The clarity that comes from this knowledge is almost euphoric. Once something is crystal clear for you, you can relay it so.

Express yourself clearly or die is therefore about so much more than it initially seems. And it is a skill that is only learn through time, practice and knowledge.

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Angela Rayner has promised a bed for every rough sleeper before Christmas. But is that promise feasible? And, even if it is, does it actually do enough to address the crisis of so many people sleeping rough on our streets? Let us look at the data.

The data

There were 4,793 people estimated to be sleeping rough in England on a single night in autumn 2025. That represents a 171% increase since 2010. However, this figure should be treated with care: it is a snapshot estimate of people sleeping outside or in places not designed for habitation. It does not capture people who are sofa-surfing, staying in hostels, sleeping in hidden locations, or moving between the street and insecure accommodation.

The statutory homelessness data is even starker. On 31 December 2025, 134,210 households were living in temporary accommodation in England. Of those, 176,130 dependent children were living in temporary accommodation. The data suggests a much wider crisis, of which rough sleeping is only the most visible symptom.

The figures also reveal an imbalance. While the number of households newly assessed as needing homelessness assistance eased in the latest quarter, the number of households trapped in temporary accommodation remained at record levels. The system may be slowing the inflow marginally, but it is failing to create enough settled exits from temporary accommodation.

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Why does homelessness persist?

There are several central reasons.

1. A shortage of affordable and social homes

This is perhaps the simplest and most important explanation. The share of households living in social housing has fallen from roughly one third in the 1980s to around one sixth today.

When an affordable tenancy ends, there are too few alternatives. There is a shortage of social housing lets and too few private rentals available to people on low incomes, benefits, insecure work, or with rent arrears. While councils have statutory homelessness duties, they lack the housing stock and resources needed to find permanent homes for rising numbers of people.

2. The private rented sector as a gateway

Homelessness often begins in the private rented sector. In the final quarter of 2025, the end of an assured shorthold tenancy was the largest single cause of prevention duties: 11,020 households, or 32.8% of those cases. The recorded reasons included landlords wishing to sell, re-let, or end tenancies for other reasons.

The wider annual picture is equally significant: 51,240 households were owed a prevention duty in 2025 because their private assured shorthold tenancy ended.

Typically, rent increases or tenancy insecurity make an existing home unaffordable or unavailable, and the household approaches the council. The council may attempt to prevent homelessness through negotiation, a discretionary payment, or assistance to secure a new private tenancy. But if there are no affordable alternatives, the household becomes homeless and is placed in temporary accommodation, often at considerable cost. It then remains there for a significant period because there are too few settled housing options.

This explains why the Government reformed Section 21 “no-fault” evictions. However, removing one eviction route is not the same as ensuring that households have somewhere affordable to live when a tenancy ends.

3. Poverty and the gap between income and rent

The disparity between living costs and incomes has a profound impact on households that are already barely making ends meet. The government’s strategy records that 4.5 million children were living in relative poverty—900,000 more than in 2010/11. It also reports that 71% of private renters in the lowest-income group spend more than 30% of their income on rent.

There is therefore little fallback after a job loss, a benefits delay, reduced working hours, illness or injury, domestic abuse, energy debt, an unexpected bill, or a rent increase. Homelessness is often the result of low incomes, insecure work and the absence of a meaningful financial safety net.

Many of us are closer to homelessness than we would like to believe.

4. Relationship breakdown and domestic abuse

The most frequent immediate reason for relief duties in 2025 was that friends or family were no longer willing or able to accommodate the household: 51,660 households, or 29% of relief duties.

This category reveals the difficult reality behind many apparently personal causes of homelessness. Sofa-surfing with friends or family can be the last buffer before street homelessness, especially for a woman with children.

Domestic abuse is also a substantial driver of homelessness and instability. Between October and December 2025, it accounted for 6,780 relief duties, or 15.9% of all such cases. A person fleeing domestic abuse is not simply someone who requires housing. They may technically have accommodation available, but cannot safely return to it—sometimes because of the risk to their children as well as to themselves.

5. Rough sleepers often have overlapping needs

Rough sleepers do not simply need a bed. They often have overlapping needs, including addiction, disability, poor mental health, trauma, offending histories, insecure immigration status, and severed family networks.

The government’s strategy reports that 84% of women and 65% of men who had slept rough in the previous year had experienced at least three other issues alongside homelessness, including substance-use problems, mental-health difficulties, domestic abuse, and contact with the criminal justice system.

Burnham’s promise of a bed for every rough sleeper before Christmas is therefore essential, but insufficient. A bed may offer immediate safety and protection. But it must be accompanied by targeted support, access to treatment, benefits advice, tenancy support, and realistic routes into stable work and permanent housing. Without that, emergency accommodation risks becoming another temporary intervention rather than a route out of homelessness.

6. Institutional discharge and fragmented services

Homelessness is also produced through transitions that the system can see coming: release from prison, discharge from hospital, leaving care, departure from armed forces accommodation, and the end of asylum support.

Government data records that almost 34,000 households became homeless after leaving a public institution in the preceding year. Between October and December 2025 alone, 2,200 prevention-duty households and 3,670 relief-duty households were linked to a requirement to leave Home Office asylum support accommodation.

The Institute for Government’s analysis is particularly important. It argues that the increase in duties associated with people leaving asylum accommodation and institutional settings accounted for nearly half of the rise in homelessness duties between 2019 and early 2025. It also identifies a system moving away from prevention and towards crisis response, with more households receiving assistance only after they have already become homeless.

7. The temporary-accommodation trap

Temporary accommodation is both a necessary response to homelessness and a mechanism by which it can persist. The data for December 2025 is revealing:

• 50,410 households were living in nightly-paid self-contained accommodation, up 17% on the previous year.

• 43,040 households were placed outside their home local authority area; 82.3% of those placements originated in London.

• Of those out-of-area households, 28,960—or 67.3%—were in nightly-paid accommodation.

The problem is not merely that temporary accommodation is imperfect. It is that local authorities are increasingly using expensive emergency placements for periods that disrupt education, employment, healthcare, family ties and recovery from trauma. Households may receive a roof, but not the sustained support or settled accommodation needed to escape the system.

The government is clear about the fiscal cycle: £3.7 billion was spent on homelessness in 2024/25, including £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation. B&B and nightly-paid accommodation expenditure rose from £309 million in 2023/24 to £620 million in 2024/25. These costs can crowd out the upstream work—rent-arrears prevention, mediation, tenancy sustainment, Housing First support, and social-home development—that could reduce future demand.

The Institute for Government makes a similar point from a local-government perspective. Councils spent £3.8 billion on homelessness in 2024/25, while the proportion of temporary-accommodation costs met directly by councils rose to 50.6%, partly because subsidy arrangements remain tied to much older rent levels.

What Burnham is actually promising

The Burnham government has announced a £442 million package intended to offer everyone sleeping rough who needs it “a route off the streets” this winter, drawing on the pandemic-era Everyone In approach. The package combines emergency accommodation with housing, health and other support. £340 million previously announced for settled accommodation is supplemented by £102 million for immediate winter routes off the street and related support.

The plan also includes:

• More than 1,000 settled homes over the next three years

• A first national rough-sleeping summit in the autumn

• £8.4 million of new funding for the Ending Homelessness in Communities Fund, contributing to £47 million for 100 projects over three years

• Guidance encouraging accessible, women-specific and trauma-informed provision, including for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse

What the plan can achieve

The plan could make a genuine difference this winter:

• It could reduce preventable deaths, illness, violence and exposure.

• It could bring services into contact with people who avoid or distrust statutory systems.

• It could provide routes to healthcare, benefits, addiction treatment, immigration advice and tenancy support.

• It could prevent rough sleeping from becoming prolonged and entrenched.

• It could demonstrate that street homelessness is a policy choice, rather than an inevitability.

What it cannot achieve alone

Providing a bed is not the same as ending homelessness. A credible long-term response also requires:

• Emergency placements to be followed by settled, genuinely affordable homes.

• Sustained support for people once they have been housed.

• Effective planning to prevent people leaving prison, hospital, care or asylum accommodation from becoming homeless.

• A much larger supply of social and affordable housing.

• A shift in spending from expensive crisis accommodation to prevention and permanent housing.

Conclusion

The government recognises that rough sleeping cannot be solved overnight. Yet it is increasingly distressing to see government announcements that appear designed to secure headlines without always confronting the scale of the underlying problem.

Offering every rough sleeper a bed before Christmas would be an important and humane intervention. It could save lives. But it is not, by itself, a solution to homelessness.

The UK does not have a homelessness problem because it fails to understand the importance of emergency shelter. It has a homelessness problem because too many people cannot afford secure homes, too many households live on insecure incomes, social housing is scarce, and enormous sums are spent managing the consequences rather than preventing them.

The real test is not whether the streets look different on Christmas Day. It is whether fewer people enter homelessness in the first place; whether families spend less time in temporary accommodation; whether fewer people are placed far from their communities; and whether emergency beds are followed by secure homes, support and a realistic chance to rebuild a life.

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Why is there a prison-capacity crisis?

In September 2025, the prison population in England and Wales hit a record high of 88,521, prompting warnings that male prisons would run out of space entirely. In 2025, the average prison population was 87,116, with a crowding rate of 25%. This meant that 21,516 prisoners were held in crowded conditions and over 99% of those prisoners were held in accommodation designed for one person.

Around 72% of prisons in England and Wales were considered overcrowded in recent years. A Public Accounts Committee report published in March 2025 stated that, despite early releases already carried out, prison capacity was still forecast to run out again in early 2026.

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I always thought there was something fishy about her at first glance, and then, one day, she posted some photographs which were clearly taken by herself with the “Elle Russia” logo in the corner. She claimed that she was invited to do a photoshoot for the magazine, but due to the pandemic, the photographers could not travel to her and vice versa, so she took the photos herself. The article which would have been published alongside the pictures was never featured in her Instagram feed. Then I began noticing other odd things and stuff which did not add up on her Instagram, such as that she was claiming to be married to a man with whom she is almost certainly in a relationship with, but there was no evidence of them being married. So, I googled her. And there it was, in black and white…

She was being investigated for fraudulent activities after people donated money to her charity but the money was kept by her. The fraudulent activities came to light because, in that part of Europe where she lives, parents with children who have life-threatening illnesses or disabilities usually fundraise to be able to afford treatment. One such family had let Ella use their story and pictures to fundraise on their behalf online, and after many months of pleading and asking her for the money, she finally blocked the family and seemingly pocketed the money.

It also came to light that she was not a surgeon. As a matter of fact, Ella never even finished medical school and dropped out in the first year. This particular revelation meant that she was no longer invited on TV, shows and other productions to sing or to act.

I always knew that Ella was a liar. From a young age she was posting photos of other women pretending to be her, and in general her persona just did not come across as genuine. When the story broke with regard to Jason Arday’s lies and plagiarism, I saw some stark parallels. Above all, I remained puzzled by one question. Why do people lie? Especially when being found out is so easy. Surely the cost of embarrassment and shame is too great to feed the narcissism within? I have finally been able to answer my question.

Jason Arday’s Rise and Fall

On paper, Jason Arday’s rise was truly extraordinary. He became the youngest ever Black professor in 2023 at the University of Cambridge. His narrative was built around overcoming severe dyslexia and autism, not speaking until the age of 11, and some other harrowing events. This narrative finally collapsed.

He stands accused of plagiarism in his PhD dissertation, and there are also allegations regarding his published work since then. This is not simply academic misconduct — it is much more than that, due to the sheer range of unrelated, checkable claims that also turned out to be false. He claimed to have published (and been paid £1.4m) for a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, supposedly published by Palgrave Macmillan — this book was abandoned by the publisher years earlier and never released. He listed honorary or visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University — both universities confirmed that he had never held such positions, despite the claims appearing on his college’s website. There are many more lies which have been uncovered by the media — too many to write about here.

Cambridge initially dismissed these suspicions. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday his PhD, claimed that an internal review did not uphold the claims of plagiarism. This position changed when the Telegraph published revelations about the fabricated book, which prompted Cambridge to open a formal investigation into Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments. Days later, Arday resigned with a letter which seems to have been written by AI (I shall forgive this one — my last resignation was also written by ChatGPT!). But it does make the whole story even more ironic. Nonetheless, Arday’s resignation letter rejects that he is a liar. He insists that he was accountable for genuine errors but framed the broader scrutiny as coordinated and racially inflected attacks. The Good Law Project published an open letter which was signed by more than 10,000 people and argued that the plagiarism allegations were “entirely false” and a product of right-wing media smear.

This split reaction between those who see a clear pattern of dishonesty and those who see a disproportionate takedown of a high-profile Black academic is in itself instructive for anyone examining why people lie. Denial, minimisation and framing oneself as the victim of persecution are among the most common responses once deception is exposed.

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We are living in the age of cognitive decline. Everything is one scroll, click or swipe away. The content that we overwhelmingly consume is short form. We always listen to something and try to multitask, or compound tasks for optimisation by listening to a podcast or an audiobook when driving, walking, working out or even doing tasks on the computer.

We all know by now that to have a strong body when we age, we need to be lifting weights to ensure that we do not become frail with age and that our knees, spine and shoulders are able to support us. Mix yoga or any other exercise which teaches you both how to stretch and to keep balance, and your mobility in old age is almost guaranteed.

The same applies to cognitive ability. Our brain is a muscle (metaphorically speaking - it adapts and improves with use). A major 2026 study published in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology, found that people in the top 10% of lifetime cognitive enrichment (undertaking scholarly activities such as reading, writing, learning languages and other intellectual pursuits) had a 38% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and a 36% lower risk of mild cognitive impairment compared to those in the bottom 10%. The difference is developing Alzheimer’s at the age of 94 versus 88, or mild cognitive impairment at 85 versus 78.

For me, personal self-development literally became a matter of life and death. Of an easy and a hard old age. So here are the seven things I have done to keep my brain, and my body, engaged.

1. Physical exercise

Fittingly, given how this piece opened, exercise is the strongest of all activities one can do, not only for better health but for a better mind. It is the same discipline that keeps your knees, spine and shoulders functional in old age, doing at least as much for your brain as any book, language or instrument on this list.

A meta-analysis of over 250,000 people found physical activity was associated with a 20% lower risk of all-cause dementia and a 14% lower Alzheimer’s risk, with the protective association holding even 20-plus years later, addressing concerns that inactivity is simply an early symptom of decline rather than a cause. Alzheimer’s Society UK cites regular exercisers as up to 20% less likely to develop dementia across a combined analysis of 58 studies.

Everything that follows is, in a sense, the mental equivalent of the gym.

2. Structured learning

A 2025 study led by Duke University’s Hanzhang Xu found that later-life learning, such as courses or training programmes, was associated with better cognitive function over time regardless of race, ethnicity or how much formal education someone had earlier in life. For example, the cognitive function of a 71-year-old engaged in later-life learning resembled that of an average 65-year-old. This suggests that learning in a structured environment with outcomes is not simply an advantage in itself but is literally making our brains younger.

Of course, this is not why I did the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL). But it was part of the reason why I took on the challenge, and it may some day be the reason why I do a PhD. The research doesn’t tell us whether motivation changes the benefit, whether learning driven by career necessity confers the same cognitive reserve as learning pursued purely for stimulation, but I suspect the brain doesn’t much care why you showed up, only that you did, and that you can evidence what you learnt.

This summer, I also decided to research some free online courses. I took one class on coding from Harvard University and found plenty more to keep me occupied should I get bored. Money is not an excuse for not pursuing something new. In the past, I have done an art course for around £300, combining both learning with creativity, which I also think provided excellent benefits long term.

3. Read, read and read every day

Reading is proven to preserve cognitive function, but it is also so much more than that. I have seen online that there is a recent trend of reading The Count of Monte Cristo, a French novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialised between 1844 and 1846. It is a book over 1,000 pages long. I must admit I have not read this book, but someday I will. However, I have read plenty of other long reads, and here is what long books teach you:

• Firstly, patience. You need to be patient with yourself to sit through what is an extremely long book, and also patient with either the plot if you are reading fiction or the main thesis if you are reading non-fiction.

• Commitment. There are some long books out there which can be read in a short period of time. However, there are some complex books you simply cannot read fast, and you are forced to take your time. Being committed to one book when you have other things to do or to read in your life is training one of the most important muscles we have. Learning commitment, literally sitting down and getting on with it, is something you can only do by being committed to something.

• You are going to memorise the book forever: the quirky anecdote or the moment that made you tear up. But most importantly, the way the book made you feel and what it taught you (all good books teach us something).

Some of my favourite long reads in recent years outside of law books include Volume 1 and 2 of the Authorised Margaret Thatcher biography by Charles Moore. It is exceptionally well written and very detailed, and I am hoping to read the third and final volume soon. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (around 500 pages). The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (around 800 pages), a book I actually read twice and would probably benefit from reading a third time. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara at around 700 pages, a book that broke my heart, so I do not want to say anything else about it.

Reading every day, or at least most days, is also an extremely positive habit. It engages multiple brain networks simultaneously, such as language, attention, memory and imagination, which strengthens cognitive reserve over time. It is, of course, a good hobby to have too. As a side note, when you read around young children and encourage them to read from a young age, they also develop a lifelong love of reading.

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4. Learn a new language

I speak three languages fluently and two other languages intermediately. During my time working in Parliament, I had begun learning French because I wanted to learn something new. I had done so for two years, mainly using Duolingo, and unfortunately had to stop shortly after beginning my GDL. I hope to return to it one day. The other languages I intend on studying are Italian and German.

Language learning is thought to work by increasing grey matter density and preserving white matter integrity in language and executive-control brain regions, and by forcing constant switching between competing language systems, which exercises the same executive-function circuits used in multitasking and inhibition. It supports the same cognitive reserve. In short, learning a new language helps cognitive function in much the same way as reading or further education does. The caveat is that the strongest effects are thought to be achieved through “active bilingualism.” A 2025 study found lifelong bilinguals have stronger connectivity between certain brain regions, letting the brain tolerate more damage before symptoms appear, similar to the cognitive reserve mechanism seen with education and reading.

Alongside this, learning a new language also teaches you patience, resilience and, most importantly, keeps you humble. You will make a lot of mistakes, and there is nothing like remembering that in life, making mistakes is the only way in which you learn.

If you only speak one language though, why not learn another one just to know if you can?

5. Write

Alongside having this Substack and doing a lot of writing for my law degree, I am at peace knowing that I have always written. Before I had any precise outlet, I wrote for me. I wrote short stories, poems and, once, even a book.

A 2025 systematic review of writing-based interventions found journaling, poetry, calligraphy and structured memory notebooks improved memory, attention and executive function in people already diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or dementia. This means writing is one of the few activities with evidence for both prevention and rehabilitation.

Most importantly, though, writing teaches you how to eloquently express yourself, which also translates orally and in in-person interactions.

6. Art and music

There is more than one way to look at the arts, broadly meant to include anything artistic. Firstly, you could learn about it. I got a membership to a museum in London, and it has benefited me to see more exhibitions and learn about art. It has also inspired me to paint.

I do not paint often, but I did when I needed to develop my creative muscle. Creativity helps with all manner of things in real life, and it is generally a good muscle to have. This is another thing I abandoned when doing my GDL, because I was already working my creative muscle to the max within the context of studying law, writing essays and so on.

There is positive research linking lifetime musical engagement, particularly playing an instrument, with better memory and executive function in older age, independent of many other factors. Piano shows the strongest effect, and continuing into later life provides greater benefit than stopping. Anecdotally, I know an elderly relative who learnt to play the piano in his seventies and is still cognitively strong in his late nineties. It is an ambition of mine to learn piano in retirement too.

In short, music and art have similar positive benefits on cognitive function to reading, writing and learning a new language. However, music has the strongest mechanistic evidence, because playing an instrument simultaneously engages motor coordination, auditory processing, memory and executive function in a way few other activities replicate.

7. Meditate

Once, for roughly six months, I meditated twice a day, morning and night. It is probably the most consequential thing I have ever done for myself.

Firstly, I became significantly calmer. This is because my fundamental approach to life changed. I stopped worrying and began letting things resolve themselves. I discovered that if I had a problem and I didn’t think about it, it would resolve itself. If I wanted something and I was calm, not anxious or worried, I got what I wanted. Meditating so much also developed my intuition. I started having a much better sense about people and which direction to take. Finally, because I became less anxious, it made it easier for me to make decisions. If something felt good, I just followed that feeling. This led me to many possibilities and opportunities in life.

Most importantly of all, meditating made me less prone to intrusive thoughts and more comfortable doing activities I would have otherwise found dull. It is an excellent tool because by sitting still and trying not to think, or acknowledging thoughts and letting them go, you learn how to just do things without thinking much about it, which helps with reading, exercising and learning something new. It is a tool of resilience. There is evidence to suggest meditation helps with stress, sleep and mood, which are separately known risk factors for cognitive decline.

Would I ever go back to meditating daily? One of the things I learnt after meditating so intently for a prolonged period is that I often find myself meditating anyway. I can sit for a long time with no thoughts in my mind, and more often than not I find myself preferring to do something in silence, allowing myself the space to meditate. Occasionally, when I am in need of a longer session, I still find it enormously helpful.

Conclusion

We live in a world where increasingly things are easy to have. Groceries arrive in ten minutes. Entertainment is infinite and frictionless. Answers to almost any question are a voice command away. None of this is inherently bad, but it removes the very friction that used to build us, the patience of finishing something difficult, the discipline of showing up when we didn’t feel like it, the humility of being bad at something new before we got good at it.

That is the thread running through everything on this list. Exercise, learning, reading, language, writing, art, music and meditation are not seven unrelated hobbies I happen to enjoy. They are seven different forms of the same discipline: choosing difficulty on purpose, in a world that no longer asks it of us. The Neurology study I opened with wasn’t really about reading or writing or Alzheimer’s risk percentages. It was about what happens to a mind that keeps choosing to be challenged, versus one that doesn’t.

I don’t do any of this because I’m certain it will add years to my life, or because I’ve calculated the exact cognitive dividend of an hour of piano practice against an hour of scrolling. I do it because it has already changed how I think, how calm I am, how patient I’ve become, and how much more I notice in a piece of writing or a painting or a conversation in a language I’m still learning. If any of it also happens to keep my brain sharper at ninety, that’s a bonus I’ll take gladly. But the real reward has been now, not later.

Putting our bodies and minds through challenges of sorts will always be beneficial. The only real question is whether we choose that challenge deliberately, or wait until life forces it on us.

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Today, the subject is Palestine. This is a topic that is deeply personal to many people. It is not one that has ever held the same personal significance for me personally. Middle Eastern politics was never an area of particular interest. Yet it is also a subject that attracts extraordinary levels of anger, tribalism, and abuse. For that reason, this article will sit behind a paywall, even though a free one-off claim remains available.

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Sam, a 31‑year‑old professional who lives in Manchester, clicks on the app and stares at the numbers. Gross salary: £3,750. Income tax: £541. National Insurance: £216. Net pay: £2,993. We will pretend he doesn’t have a student loan. That is another conversation, for a different article.

Sam is “on forty‑five”, as his colleagues say. In theory, this is a decent income for a single person living in a major UK city. However, by the time Sam has paid rent, council tax, utilities and the quiet taxes embedded in everyday life (VAT), he is not left with a whole lot. This makes Sam wonder: how much tax can the British person take?

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The payslip vs the State

Let’s begin with what happens to Sam’s salary before he receives it.

On a £45,000 salary in the 2026 tax year, HMRC gives Sam a £12,570 personal allowance – taxed at 0%. It then applies the basic 20% rate to income up to £50,270. The online calculators are clear: Sam pays about £6,486 in income tax and £2,594 in National Insurance contributions, leaving £35,920 net.

Put differently, one in every five pounds Sam earns goes straight to the state before it reaches his bank account. Sam takes home roughly 79.8% of gross, or £2,993 per month.

And these are only the visible deductions. The OECD’s “tax wedge”, which includes employer National Insurance and other payroll charges, puts the UK’s burden for an average single worker in the high‑20s to low‑30s percent of labour costs, meaning that nearly a third of what Sam’s employer spends on Sam’s labour is seized in tax before Sam even has the chance to pay for coffee.

This is the starting point: a decent salary already shrunken by a state that claims a fifth of gross pay on the employee side and roughly a third of total labour cost once the hidden employer contributions are counted.

The roof over your head

Sam lives in Manchester. The city now renowned for No. 10 North.

Latest rental data suggest the average rent in Manchester is about £1,294 per month, with a typical one‑bed flat around £1,100–£1,150. Sam’s direct debit is £1,100. Council tax on the flat, banded somewhere in the lower middle, adds another £110 per month – roughly £1,300 a year. Gas, electricity, water and broadband take £170.

The first half hour of Sam’s working month pays for the landlord, the council and the utilities. Out of the £2,993, £1,380 is gone. This leaves him with about £1,600 to cover food, commuting, insurance, clothing, necessities, savings, the occasional drink and anything else that comes up.

The £1,600 is not tax‑free either. Almost everything Sam is going to buy this month – clothes, electronics, a flat white or a pint after work – attracts 20% VAT, with a handful of essentials, such as most supermarket food and children’s clothing, zero‑rated. Every transaction is a reminder that the state is still taking a cut of what’s left.

Now, for the fun of it, let’s move Sam to London. To keep costs down, he squeezes into a small one‑bed in a not‑especially‑fancy block: the average monthly rent for that kind of flat sits around £1,500–£1,600, with many boroughs comfortably above that. Keep council tax and utilities similar, say £130 and £180. Housing and local taxes now eat roughly £1,800 of Sam’s £2,993, leaving barely £1,180 before Sam opens the fridge or taps in on the Underground.

On paper Sam is doing well. In the lived arithmetic of rent, council tax, bills and VAT, Sam is just treading water.

Young couple trying to build

Now zoom out from a single professional to a young couple.

Aisha and Tom are both 33. They live in London. Each earns £45,000. Their combined net pay is around £71,840 per year, just under £6,000 per month between them. To the ordinary Labour MP or even Gary Lineker, they are the success story and an incredible cash cow: dual earners, decent incomes, the kind of couple who should be making babies and buying homes.

Their housing reality is more prosaic. Unlike Sam’s small one‑bed, Aisha and Tom need a two‑bed flat in a reasonable part of London, and that now easily rents for around £3,000 a month. Not a luxury new build, but a safe area and building with a commute that an ordinary Londoner can do in a normal amount of time. Council tax falls around £160 per month. Utilities are roughly £230.

Housing, local tax and basic bills therefore come to about £3,390 a month. Out of the £6,000 take‑home, this leaves just £2,610 for two adults – and soon, a baby – to cover food, commuting, nursery fees, debt repayments and any money that might resemble a deposit or an emergency buffer.

From an international perspective, Aisha and Tom are not the worst off. Looking comparatively at OECD data suggests that double‑earners with children in the UK face an effective tax wedge in the high‑20s percent of labour costs, only slightly lower than singles and broadly similar to the average across advanced economies. In some European countries, child allowances and joint taxation favour families more generously, but total labour taxes on work are higher than in the UK.

However, looking at it comparatively does not help Aisha and Tom. They look at their budget and see that a combined £90,000 gross is eaten away by the landlord, council tax and the revenue authorities. They are, in the lived sense, one broken boiler away from real financial worry.

Who is the tax paying for?

I think, while an uncomfortable question, this is a fair question to ask in a high‑tax country.

The official answer is stark. The Office for National Statistics’ “Effects of taxes and benefits” analysis shows that in the financial years ending 2023 and 2024, around 52–53% of individuals lived in households that were net recipients – i.e. they received more in cash benefits and benefits‑in‑kind (NHS, schools, social care) than they paid in direct and indirect taxes. The remaining minority, roughly 47–48%, were net contributors.

Earlier work by think‑tanks charted the same tipping point: around the late 2000s and early 2010s, the share of households receiving more from the state than they paid in climbed above 50% for the first time.

Sam, Aisha and Tom are almost certainly on the contributing side of that line. They pay income tax, National Insurance, VAT, fuel duty and council tax. Their direct use of public services is relatively light while they are young and healthy. They are paying for pensioners’ incomes, for disability benefits, for universal credit in low‑wage households, for the hospitals and schools that they may use only lightly for now.

The structure is not inherently unjust. Rich and middle‑income households have always subsidised poorer ones, and inter‑generational transfers are part of any welfare state. The question our characters pose is simpler: when more than half of households are net recipients, how much more can the net‑contributing minority be asked to pay when they cannot themselves reach basic milestones like secure home ownership?

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The national picture – high tax, low trust

The numbers at the macro level amplify the unease.

OECD Revenue Statistics put the UK’s tax‑to‑GDP ratio at 35.3% in 2023, up from 32.7% at the turn of the century and above the OECD average of around 34.1%. That makes Britain a high‑tax country by its own historical standards, though still mid‑pack rather than extreme among advanced economies such as France, Italy and the Nordics, which routinely collect over 40% of GDP in tax; the US, by contrast, sits nearer the low‑30s.

Recent work has pointed out that many countries with higher tax levels than the UK enjoy stronger real wage growth and higher average disposable incomes, challenging the idea that Britain is uniquely over‑taxed in any objective sense.

Here is where perception and statistics part company. For years, survey data have shown that the cost of living is the top issue facing UK households and that the vast majority of Britons think the government is handling it badly. Britons look at their rising tax burden, their frozen personal allowances, their energy bills and their rents, and compare them to deteriorating public services: long NHS waiting lists, overstretched social care, weak policing and limited support in the courts.

Sam, Aisha and Tom inhabit that gap. They pay what now looks like Nordic‑ish levels of tax as a share of national income but feel they receive southern‑European levels of services and Anglo‑American levels of housing insecurity.

Burnham’s new taxes for care and homes

Into the picture walks Andy Burnham, the latest Prime Minister, promising “substantial change” in social care and housing. Let’s take a look at it.

Burnham has long advocated a National Care Service to sit alongside the NHS, funded by what he calls “fair contributions” from those with greater assets (well, from who else?). Earlier in his career he backed a “death tax” – lovely. Now the civil service is looking at developing proposals that would require workers to make a mandatory contribution to a new privately managed fund to pay for their care in later life – essentially a 1.8% levy. I won’t waste any more time talking about it without any real proposals, and given the frequency with which Prime Ministers change.

He has also backed proposals to scrap council tax and stamp duty and replace them with an annual proportional property tax of around 0.48% of a home’s value. Under the Fairer Share campaign model he has praised, a £300,000 house would incur around £1,440 per year in property tax instead of a one‑off SDLT hit and a banded council tax bill. Interesting. For renters, the property tax would be passed through in higher rents.

Every element of these new tax packages is still in its early proposal stage. But for our friends here, the direction of travel is clear.

If Sam never escapes renting, the reform would not spare Sam; it would change the label on parts of the rent as landlords factor in annual property charges rather than SDLT and council tax. If Aisha and Tom stretch to buy, they will face a lifetime of annual property levies alongside their mortgage, in a country already very close to historic highs in the overall tax burden.

And when they die, the social‑care settlement Burnham wants may still expect their estates to pay again for the privilege of frailty.

My question then is: if you are the kind of citizen who pays more in tax than you receive in benefits and who struggles to accumulate assets in the first place, how fair does it feel to be told you must now pay more to fix social care and housing?

The breaking point

So, let me now answer the rhetorical question I pose in this article – how much tax can the British person take?

A lot, if the bargain feels fair. If higher taxes purchase secure homes, dignified care and a public realm that works, then paying out feels like an investment into community. What Sam, Aisha and Tom are telling us is that the bargain, as currently structured, does not feel fair. They are taxed when they earn, taxed when they try to secure a roof over their head, taxed when they live their lives and taxed when they attempt to pass on modest wealth.

At some point, they look at the numbers and then at their lives and they stop asking how much tax they can take. They ask instead why this system, with all it claims, gives them so little in return.

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Burnham’s first announcement was a pledge to deal with homelessness. Now, perhaps it came as a shock to a man more used to living in Manchester that homelessness is rife in London, particularly around Parliament and on Victoria Street. If you stay parked long enough behind the shops near Westminster Cathedral, you can easily see drugs being exchanged, which plainly contributes to the problem and, in some cases, sustains street living.

Of course, this is not unique to that area—it is stark across London and in many other parts of the UK. But as someone often in and around Victoria and Westminster, and having lived there for around five years, I have seen just how much worse the issue has become. I even remember seeing a man who appeared to have died on Victoria Street, very close to Westminster Abbey. It was a bitterly cold day and I was hurrying to Parliament. To my surprise, Sir Patrick Vallance seemed to be among those trying to work out what had happened and trying to help the man who was not responsive.

It would not be an exaggeration to say most people would like to see no homelessness on our streets. Not only does it contribute to anti-social behaviour and make certain areas feel less safe, but from a basic humanity perspective, it is simply a bleak state of affairs.

Now, I will not be as harsh as some publications have been on Burnham for wanting to tackle rough sleeping. Yes, it is an ideological pledge, and yes, at present it lacks detail. It is also fair to say that similar ambitions have proven difficult to deliver in practice at a local level such as when he was the Mayor of Manchester. However the Labour Party rewards failure and he is now in a position where, in theory, he could effect broader change. It is an immensely complex problem, and without further detail it is difficult to say much more—other than that one hopes he succeeds.

Burnham has also announced plans to fast-track oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. One suspects this is at least partly political signalling, perhaps even internationally to Donald Trump who has praised this move. There is a wider debate to be had here, but in purely economic terms, it is likely to generate revenue, which will appeal to many.

Meanwhile, the proposal to return to a £2 bus fare cap will likely irritate an already struggling bus sector. The shortfall will not vanish, it will be absorbed by government. This policy is clearly aimed at passengers rather than operators. It is a difficult balance: many relying on buses such as children, the elderly, and commuters, depend on them heavily, and service disruptions can have disproportionate effects. Service disruptions are often caused due to a lack of bus drivers. It is an endless circle of hell. Thankfully, the Department for Transport has Heidi Alexander to deal with this complex area (sarcasm intended).

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Turning to the cabinet, there are some positive and negative surprises. Let’s start with the positives—Lammy and Reeves are out. In my view, both performed poorly in their previous roles, and I doubt many will miss them.

John Healey is now Chancellor—a figure strongly associated with defence priorities. He does have Treasury experience, and, frankly, the fact that he is not constantly in the headlines may count in his favour.

It is also, on balance, good news that Shabana Mahmood remains the Home Secretary. She is one of the more capable figures in the Labour parliamentary party and has shown a degree of independence that is not always common among other Ministers. She has also not brought the Labour ideology into the department which is required to do a good job.

Yvette Cooper has been moved to Health—no easy brief but still a demotion. Cooper has proven herself to be incompetent in all other Government roles. The DHSC is extremely important, particularly because MPs receive endless constituent communication on health related matters. I would have preferred to see someone more clearly rooted in health policy take on the role and I do not think it is likely that Cooper will succeed in this role either.

Wes Streeting to Defence is an odd move. Bridget Phillipson, a disastrous Education Secretary has finally been demoted to Equalities role - a none job. Her replacement, Lucy Powell, does not exactly inspire confidence either—her public communications alone raise questions. Perhaps some remedial English lessons would not go amiss. A reminder to staffers to confiscate your MPs X account and not let them tweet. Ever.

Rayner returns to Housing always felt inevitable. She remains politically significant within the party, whatever baggage she may carry, and Burnham was unlikely to sideline her. That being said, she is a woman with many skeletons in her closet and always a political liability.

Alex Norris (not legally trained) is now Justice Secretary. Who? Exactly. Jess Phillips let loose in the recent Electoral Dysfunction episode that there weren’t any takers for this role. This perhaps explains the appointment. I remain confident that nobody can be worse in this role than Lammy and the legal sector will be glad Lammy is gone. Burnham by the way is expected to reverse jury trials proposals that Lammy was working on.

The only other elephant in the room is of course Louise Haigh who is now the second in command in the country as the First Secretary of State! A convicted fraudster will not be heading the fraud division of the Cabinet Office though. The Labour Party of course rewards failure so Haigh was always going to come back as a close ally to Burnham. I do think it is fair to say that if a convicted fraudster had been appointment as the second most senior Minister, secondly only to the Prime Minister, in the UK, by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party would have something to say.

Finally, I do genuinely wish Andy Burnham the best of luck. The country is not an easy place to live in at the moment. It would be refreshing if someone, at last, managed to make it even slightly better.

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Britain’s Welfare State: The Numbers That Should Alarm Everyone

For the first time in British peacetime history, the government is spending more on welfare than it collects in income tax. In 2025-26, the social security bill stands at £333.7 billion.1 Income tax receipts are £331 billion.2 The gap is not a rounding error. It is a structural crisis that has been building for decades and accelerating since 2020, and it now touches almost every aspect of national life: productivity, housing, youth unemployment, public health and the long-term fiscal position of the state.

This piece sets out the data. The numbers are large enough that they can become abstract, so it is worth trying to keep them grounded throughout.

The Scale of the Problem

Twenty-four million people in the United Kingdom claimed some combination of Department for Work and Pensions benefits in February 2025.3 That is roughly one in every three people in the country. Of those, 6.5 million were on out-of-work benefits as of August 2025. This is a historic record, exceeding even the pandemic peak of 5.9 million and up from around 3.6 million in 2018.4 More than 15% of the entire working-age population is now economically supported by the state outside of employment. This is a staggering statistic.

Universal Credit alone covers 8.3 million people, up from 7.2 million just twelve months earlier - a rise of 1.1 million in a single year.5 Of those 8.3 million claimants, approximately 4 million have no work requirements at all.6 They are not expected to look for work, to attend job centres or to engage with any employment programme. They receive their payments unconditionally.

Total welfare spending is projected to reach £374.3 billion by 2030-31.7 Working-age health and disability spending alone is forecast to rise from £35.6 billion in 2019-20 to £63.7 billion by 2028-29.8 For context: the entire NHS budget in 2024-25 was £204.7 billion.9 The state will spend, within this parliament, roughly a third more on benefits than it spends keeping the health service running.

The Disability and Sickness Explosion

The fastest-growing and most contested part of the welfare state is health-related benefits. There are now 4.2 million working-age people - one in ten - claiming at least one health-related benefit, up from 3.2 million (7.9%) in 2019.10 The Institute for Fiscal Studies projects this will rise to 5.4 million by 2028-29 and potentially 5.8 million if current award rates continue.11

Three million working-age people were in receipt of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) in 2024-25, at a direct cost of £21.8 billion.12 By January 2026, the figure had risen to 3.9 million claimants in England and Wales alone.13 DWP’s own forecasts show PIP expenditure rising from £21.7 billion in 2025-26 to £44.7 billion by 2030-31, with the caseload growing from 2.5 million in 2017-18 to 5.4 million.14 That is a doubling of both cost and caseload within roughly a decade.

New PIP claims are currently being approved at a rate of approximately 1,000 per working day, the majority for mental health conditions.15 Psychiatric disorders are the primary condition listed by 39% of all current PIP claimants.16 In July 2025, 633,000 people were claiming PIP specifically for anxiety and mood disorders - a record high, up by over 44,000 in the year since the general election.17 During the first year of the Labour government, an average of 250 people per working day were awarded PIP with anxiety or a mood disorder as their primary condition.18

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The Mental Health Driver

The mental health epidemic among young people sits at the centre of several connected crises: the NEET problem, the disability benefits surge and the long-term threat to labour supply.

In 2023, approximately one in five children and young people aged 8 to 25 had a probable mental disorder.19 In 2017 the figure was one in nine. The rate among 17-to-19-year-olds stands at 23.3%.20 Young people are now more likely to experience a common mental disorder than any other age group in the population, which is a complete reversal of the pattern seen two decades ago.21

The pandemic accelerated trends that were already worsening. Peer-reviewed research published in 2024 found that “the pandemic occurred in the context of already worsening mental health of children and young people in the UK, with anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide all increasing before 2020.”22 Rates of probable mental disorder among 8-to-16-year-olds were 12.1% in 2017. They reached 20.3% by 2023.23

The long-term fiscal cost is not hypothetical. Research published by the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre in 2025 found that children and young people’s mental health conditions lead to reduced lifetime productivity, increased benefits spending and persistent school absences, costing the economy over £1 trillion in lost earnings across a lifetime cohort and the government £1.17 billion per year in immediate public services.24 Those are not forecasts. They are costs already accumulating.

Economic Inactivity: The Core Problem

Economic inactivity means being of working age but neither employed nor looking for work and it is the structural mechanism through which poor health, family circumstances and benefit design translate into lost economic output.

The UK’s economic inactivity rate was 21.4% in the first quarter of 2025.25 Before the pandemic it was 20.6%. That gap - a little under one percentage point - represents roughly 700,000 additional people outside the labour market compared with early 2020.26 Those people are not unemployed in the technical sense. They are not registered as seeking work. They are simply not in the workforce.

Long-term sickness is now the most common reason for economic inactivity, accounting for 28% of the total.27 In absolute terms, approximately 2.8 million working-age people - 7% of the working-age population - are currently out of work due to long-term sickness.28 Over 53% of those inactive due to long-term sickness report depression, anxiety or bad nerves as their condition.29

The government’s own Keep Britain Working review, commissioned by Sir Charlie Mayfield and published in final form in November 2025, was blunt: “The UK has been sliding into an economic inactivity crisis driven in large part by ill-health and by barriers to work faced by disabled people.”30 The review found that the growth in the number becoming economically inactive for health reasons is nearly ten times the growth rate of the working-age population itself.31

The Youth Crisis

If the long-term health picture is troubling, the youth employment situation is closer to a structural emergency.

The number of 16-to-24-year-olds not in employment, education or training (NEET) exceeded one million in early 2026 - the highest level in over a decade.32 A major review led by Alan Milburn, published in May 2026, warned that the figure could rise to 1.25 million by 2031 - one in six young people - without urgent intervention.33 The UK currently has three times as many NEETs as the Netherlands and double the rate of Ireland.34

More than half of NEETs are inactive rather than unemployed.35 They are not looking for work. Of those, 28% are inactive due to sickness or disability - more than double the proportion seen in 2005.36 The number of under-25s claiming out-of-work sickness benefits has jumped 52% since 2020 to a record 235,000. The number of 16-to-24-year-olds in England and Wales receiving PIP or Disability Living Allowance has more than tripled to 411,000 by August 2024.37

The Milburn review produced a headline statistic that deserves to be widely repeated: the government spends 25 times more on benefits for young people than on helping them into work.38 For every £1 invested in youth employment support, approximately £25 is spent on out-of-work payments. 84% of NEETs say they want to be in work or training.39 This suggest that the issue is not necessarily motivation.

How So Many People Ended Up Here

The Pandemic as Inflection Point

The pandemic was the most significant single disruption to the benefits system in modern history. New PIP claims more than doubled: rising from approximately 15,300 per month before Covid to 35,100 per month in recent data.40 New claims for young people aged 16-24 tripled, from 2,967 to 7,857 per month.41

Before the pandemic, incapacity and disability benefits attracted around 20,000 new claims per month each. By November 2022, those figures had risen to 51,000 and 43,000 respectively.42 The share of people in the UK reporting a disability increased by 5 per 100 during the pandemic years - roughly two and a half times the average increase seen across EU member states over the same period.43

The NHS Waiting List Question

Long NHS waiting lists are frequently cited as a driver of benefit claims. The NHS waiting list grew by 67% between November 2019 and May 2024, from 4.6 million to 7.6 million people awaiting planned treatment.44 41% of health-related benefit claimants say they are on an NHS waiting list for their condition.45

However, the relationship is more complicated than it first appears. A significant IFS study published in April 2025 found that NHS waiting times are not a primary driver of rising health-related benefit claims. Regions with larger increases in NHS waits did not experience larger increases in benefit claims.46 The researchers estimated that NHS wait times might explain only 6-7% of the increase in mental health disability claims and 7-8% of musculoskeletal claims.47 The waiting list is a real problem, but it is not the main explanation for the benefits surge.

What is harder to disaggregate from NHS performance is the more fundamental question of whether the working-age population is genuinely less healthy than it was. The IFS concluded in 2025 that it is.48 The number of working-age people reporting a disability in the UK rose from 5.9 million in 2012-13 to 8.9 million in 2022-23 - a 51% increase. 49The Resolution Foundation’s analysis is direct: “Britain is becoming older, sicker and experiencing more disability.”50 No single policy can reverse that trend.

The Fit-Note Crisis

One largely under-reported mechanism accelerating inactivity is the fit-note system. 93% of fit notes issued by GPs declare individuals “not fit for work” without exploring phased return, adjusted hours or workplace modifications.51 The Keep Britain Working review described fit notes as acting like “a force field” between employers and their staff, creating a default route out of work rather than a managed path back to it. Over 300,000 people are estimated to leave the workforce entirely each year due to ill health.52

When Benefits Pay More Than Work

A central controversy in the debate concerns the extent to which benefit generosity discourages work. The numbers here are striking.

By 2026, a full-time worker on the National Living Wage earns approximately £22,500 after tax. An economically inactive claimant receiving Universal Credit for ill health, average housing benefit and PIP at standard daily living rate will receive around £25,000. Those on enhanced PIP receive approximately £27,500.53 Here, I will add that my first salary was £20,000 when I was living in London battling a constant battle with my overdraft. This is a sacrifice which many people make in hope that hard work will eventually lead them to a higher pay.

Approximately one million claimants currently receive a combined benefit income that is at least £2,500 more than a full-time minimum wage job. That gap is projected to widen further by the end of this parliament. The Centre for Social Justice has warned that “out-of-work families can receive far more than the take-home pay of those in full-time employment”, and that expanding the benefit system without simultaneously reforming work incentives risks embedding this disparity permanently.54

This is not an argument that benefits are too generous in isolation per se. Many disabled people have significant additional costs that the benefits are intended to reflect. But it is a genuine structural problem when the financial case for working - especially part-time or in low-paid work - is negative for a large subset of the population.

Housing: The Welfare State’s Overlooked Crisis

Housing costs are where the failure of welfare policy connects most visibly to planning failures, the financialisation of property and the absence of long-term social investment.

Total spending on housing support stands at £37.3 billion per year.55 Between 2024-25 and 2028-29, the government will pay an estimated £73 billion in housing allowance to private landlords.56 Over the same period, it will spend £11.5 billion on affordable housebuilding.57 The New Economics Foundation has described the result: the state will spend five times more subsidising private landlords than on its entire Affordable Homes Programme.58

The IFS described the doubling of the housing benefit bill since the early 2000s as “the very expensive canary in the coalmine - a symptom of a failure to build enough social housing.”59 The housing benefit bill doubled not because the government decided to be more generous, but because rents rose, social housing stock declined and more people were left with no option but private renting at market rates.

1.34 million households were on local authority social housing waiting lists in England at 31 March 2025 - up 10% in two years and the highest level in over a decade.60 In London, 336,366 households were on waiting lists, a 32% increase since 2014.61 England recorded a net loss of 650 social homes in 2023-24: 20,560 were lost primarily through Right to Buy, while only 19,910 were delivered.

The homelessness figures are by some measures the most alarming of all. As of March 2025, 131,140 households were in temporary accommodation, a 15.7% increase year-on-year.62 Households with children in temporary accommodation reached 83,150.63 Local councils spent £2.842 billion housing homeless households in 2024-25 - a 25% rise in a single year and a 118% increase over five years.64 Crisis research found that 299,100 households experienced acute homelessness in England in 2024.65 Just 2.4% of private rented properties in England are currently affordable for households on housing benefit.66

Fraud and Error

The benefit system is losing approximately £9.5 billion per year to overpayments from fraud and error - 3.3% of total expenditure in 2024-25.67 Fraud alone accounts for 2.2% of expenditure, or £6.4 billion.68 The net loss after recovery efforts is 2.9%, or £8.4 billion.(76) The Public Accounts Committee has accused the DWP of a “dangerous mindset” on fraud and error, calling the levels unacceptably high for a system processing payments to 24 million people.69

The Economic Consequences

The fiscal arithmetic is straightforward and damaging. For the first time, the Labour government is spending more on welfare than it raises in income tax.70 Working-age health and disability benefit spending is projected to rise from £48.5 billion in 2024 to £75.7 billion by 2030 - an increase from 1.7% to 2.2% of GDP, comparable to current defence spending.

The productivity cost extends well beyond the welfare bill itself. The government’s own calculations put the lost economic output from health-related inactivity at a minimum of £130 billion per year.71 The Keep Britain Working review, taking a broader definition that includes NHS treatment costs, puts the annual cost to the state at £212 billion. Workforce sickness and attrition is costing UK employers £85 billion per year on top of that.72

The OECD projected UK GDP growth of just 1.0% in 2026, noting explicitly that implementing “pro-work reforms to the welfare state” is important to support labour supply.73 UK labour productivity was 0.2% lower in the first quarter of 2025 than a year earlier. A country cannot sustain rising welfare costs and stagnant productivity simultaneously without eventually confronting the consequences in its credit rating, its debt servicing costs or the services it is able to provide.

In some places the concentration of dependency is extreme. 27% of working-age adults in Blackpool, 25% in Birmingham and 23% in Liverpool are on out-of-work benefits.74 In specific postcode areas of Glasgow, Blackpool and Grimsby, more than half of working-age residents are on out-of-work benefits. These are not pockets of unemployment. They are communities where paid work has, over generations, ceased to be the default condition for adults of working age. New generations are being born whose default is to seek benefits.

The generational dimension matters too. Children in workless households are over six times more likely to be in absolute poverty. They are twice as likely to fail at every stage of education.75 In 2024 the number of children in long-term workless households reached a nine-year high of 9.4%, approximately 1.2 million children.76 The evidence shows that the welfare state as currently designed is not breaking cycles of dependency. In many cases it is reinforcing them.

The Reform Picture

The government has acknowledged the scale of the problem. The March 2025 Pathways to Work Green Paper set out reforms expected to save £4.8 billion by 2029-30, primarily through tightening PIP eligibility criteria and cutting the Universal Credit health element by 50% for new claimants from April 2026, with a £1 billion investment in employment support alongside the cuts.

Following parliamentary opposition, the government backtracked on applying new PIP criteria to existing claimants. The IFS estimates the revised package will save only £2.5 billion - less than half the original target. The IFS described the outcome as creating “a large difference in treatment between people with similar health conditions depending solely on the date of their diagnosis.”77 The Trussell Trust warned the original proposals would push 440,000 people in disabled households into severe hardship by 2029-30.78 The Resolution Foundation estimated a net effect of at least 300,000 people entering relative poverty even with the reforms, while projecting that the full package might bring between 38,000 and 57,000 more people into paid work through benefit cuts, plus a further 23,000 to 48,000 through employment support.79

A December 2025 package of further changes is expected to save £1.9 billion by 2030-31.80 Total welfare spending continues to rise regardless.

Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working final report called for shared responsibility for workplace health between employers, employees and the NHS, with reform of the fit-note system and a new “Healthy Working Lifecycle” framework. It stopped short of recommending benefit cuts, warning that restricting access to health-related benefits risks “pushing more people into jobs that aren’t sustainable.” That tension - between fiscal necessity and genuine health need - sits at the heart of every serious reform proposal, and it has no easy resolution.

Footnotes

The £5m gift at the heart of Farage’s trouble

Earlier this year, Nigel Farage received a £5m gift from Christopher Harborne, a UK‑born but Thailand‑based crypto billionaire and long‑standing supporter of Reform UK. The money arrived shortly before the 2024 general election. It should be noted that even ahead of elections, any such generous donation could raise red flags, and it did. UK banks reportedly filed suspicious activity reports to the National Crime Agency over the transfer. Their concern was about possible money laundering or the provenance of the funds. Separately, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an investigation into whether Farage breached the Commons Code of Conduct by failing to declare the gift in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Nigel Farage’s defence is that the £5m donation was a purely personal gift and not related to his parliamentary or political activities and therefore is exempt from the register.

The rules Farage is trying to skate around

The Commons Code at play here is not supposed to catch Members out. Newly‑elected MPs must register gifts, benefits or hospitality received in the 12 months before the election if they relate to parliamentary or political activities. The point of this code is to ensure that voters, colleagues and the press can see who is bankrolling whom (ideally, no one is bankrolling an MP, by the way!).

Of course, there is an exception to this code for gifts that are strictly personal and unconnected to political activities. Farage is relying upon this exception. If Harborne’s £5m is simply a generous gift, then it does not need to appear on the register. Indeed, may we all have friends like that. However, if it is support for a campaigner whose profile or party leadership gave the very friendship itself its value, then there needs to be transparency.

The powers of the Standards Commissioner

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards considers evidence that an MP may have breached the Code, reaches a view and, in some serious cases, reports to the Committee on Standards. Minor breaches can end in a quiet correction of the register and a formal note. More serious findings can lead to a recommended sanction, such as an apology on the floor of the House, withdrawal of access to parliamentary facilities, or suspension.

Suspension is the biggest penalty for misbehaviour because if the House agrees to suspend a Member for more than ten sitting days, local electors gain the right to sign a recall petition. If enough do so, a by‑election is triggered. In other words, standards findings can force an MP into a by‑election. This is precisely the mechanism Farage has taken it upon himself to pre‑empt.

What is the point of resigning?

It is fair to say that it was unexpected that Nigel Farage chose to resign his seat and run again. Constitutionally, MPs cannot resign; they accept an “office of profit under the Crown”, usually the Chiltern Hundreds or the Manor of Northstead, to vacate their seat.

He presents this as a bid to clear his name and let the people decide. The effect of this move is to freeze the standards process at an early stage and swap the relative obscurity of the Commons inquiry for the glare and theatre of a local election in which he has no credible opponents (no offence, Count Binface). Instead of arguing his case to the Code of Conduct’s committee, Farage would rather argue his point on doorsteps that he is a victim of a witch‑hunt by Labour, the media and the establishment.

This is by no means a new trick, but it is certainly a rare one. David Davis MP resigned his Haltemprice and Howden seat in 2008 to fight a by‑election on civil liberties and Labour’s counter‑terrorism agenda, framing his campaign as a constitutional protest. Farage’s manoeuvre is different in kind. His trigger is not a policy dispute but an ethics probe into undeclared support and a flagged £5m transfer.

What happens to the investigation?

The simple answer is that resignation does not make past conduct vanish. The Commissioner’s jurisdiction is tied to membership of the House, but a member who vacates and then returns by the same route is still, in law and practice, subject to the same standards regime.

While the by‑election is underway, the investigation into the Harborne gift is paused. Once, or if, Nigel Farage is re‑elected, the Commissioner can pick the case back up and the process will resume with all the usual possible outcomes: no breach, minor correction, or a finding serious enough to justify a recommended suspension and recall. However, if Farage is defeated, then there is no need to continue an investigation into a former MP. It does not mean, though, that the underlying financial questions evaporate. The National Crime Agency and other bodies may come to their own conclusions.

So, in conclusion, the Commissioner is not under any duty to abandon the case simply because Farage forced a by‑election and then won it.

The real nature of Farage’s gamble

There are three elements to Farage’s gamble.

First is the timing. By resigning, Farage stops the Commissioner from getting quickly to a conclusion and any recommendation of suspension while he is still securely an MP. The immediate threat of a recall petition is moved offstage while he seizes the initiative.

Second is the optics. The by‑election allows him to recast a technical question about the registration of a gift as a moral question about who runs politics: regulators and suspicious bankers or ordinary voters. If Clacton re‑elects him, he will claim that the electorate has endorsed his version of events. When, in due course, the Commissioner reports, any sanction can be denounced as defiance of the people’s will.

The third element is all about exit. If he loses the by‑election, he is no longer in Parliament. Suspension and recall are off the table. Whatever verdict the Commissioner reports, if he chooses to report at all, will only affect Farage at a reputational level. In this scenario, he takes a gamble to argue that the system chased him out and that continuing to look into his financial affairs is petty and vindictive.

It should be noted that there is no scenario where success depends on the Commissioner quietly walking away from the Harborne case after Farage’s re‑election. It is likely that the mandate Farage gains in Clacton, should he gain one, will only matter politically, especially in making the investigation look like an attack on that mandate, which will likely blunt the impact.

A useful historic throwback

David Davis’s 2008 by‑election is the obvious comparison. Davis resigned over the erosion of civil liberties and the extension of detention without charge, seeking a clear popular endorsement of his stand. The campaign was framed around principles, not personal finance. There was no standards investigation shadowing him, no question about undeclared gifts.

Farage borrows this structure – voluntary resignation, self‑summoned by‑election and an appeal to “the people” – but reverses the polarity. Instead of asking voters to weigh a policy principle, he is asking them to bless his handling of a large, opaque gift from a billionaire. Instead of putting the government’s counter‑terror legislation on trial, he puts the standards regime and its enforcement on trial.

The question mark over how his constituents will act towards a constitutional device being used not to elevate the debate but to sidestep scrutiny remains to be answered.

What this tells us about the system

The Code and the Commissioner are meant to provide a neutral, rules‑based check on behaviour; recall is meant to give constituents a say when sanctions reach a certain level. A determined politician can flip that logic, turning recall and by‑elections into plebiscites on regulators rather than on his own conduct.

There is also a wider lesson about money and politics in the age of crypto wealth. A single transfer the size of Farage’s gift can move across borders quickly, filtered through complex structures, and land in the account of a party leader who then argues it is “purely personal”. The traditional language of “gifts, benefits and hospitality” starts to look naive when set against that kind of liquidity.

Farage’s gamble is therefore not just a local drama in Clacton. It is a test of whether the Commons’ standards machinery, designed for dinners, trips and side incomes, can cope with a world in which a donor can wire millions to a political figure and expect it to be treated as private support.

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Believe it or not, the same applies to party politics. The Labour Party could resurrect Clement Attlee and he still would not last in government. Why? Because the Labour Party is full of backstabbers.

I have written recently about the danger of winning landslides in this day and age due to the nature of MPs elected: young, naive, selfish, and completely lacking any tribal alliance or loyalty. Altogether, and alongside a love of drinking, briefing, and causing Westminster drama, it is a recipe for disaster. The same people who brought the Conservative Party to its knees—having been elected as MPs when Boris Johnson won a landslide—are now in the Labour Party, just with different ideologies and, for some reason, bobs.

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Andy Burnham could be Christ reincarnated, have the charisma of a Kennedy, and the political mind of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher combined, and still he would not succeed whilst governing a party of amateurs who have no respect for public service or loyalty to their own party. It took the Conservative Party 14 years to end up in this political mess. It has taken the Labour Party two.

The same fate awaits Reform UK if they win a landslide election, and even the Conservative Party if they manage to recoup the electoral success they once had. I am especially concerned that so many former MPs who played a key role in bringing the Conservative Party to its knees are seeking re-election (or planning to stand for Reform).

One may very well argue—and indeed I share the sentiment—that Keir Starmer was a disastrous Prime Minister. Despite the political gravitas carried by Boris Johnson, I also remember the negative elements of the Conservative Party during his tenure, an important one being the poor attitude towards sexual misconduct and bullying within Parliament. That being said, no one is talking about the role ordinary backbench MPs have when it comes to making the government, and therefore the country, more unstable. The trend we are seeing in the Labour Party is the same one we have seen in the Conservative Party in the past, and it is likely that we will see it time and time again until reasonable measures are taken to ensure that backbench MPs stay in line and do not have the power to bring consecutive governments down.

One of those measures is straightforward. There needs to be an election called each time a Prime Minister resigns. Yes, we have a parliamentary system and the electorate does not directly elect Prime Ministers. However, it is not true to assume that the person in charge of the party, and therefore due to become Prime Minister, does not play a role in the vote which the electorate casts. Having a man who was not even an MP a month ago lined up for the most important job in the country without an election borders on the unacceptable. However, the Labour Party compares it to the “Gordon Brown effect”.

An election whenever a Prime Minister is forced to resign would serve as a deterrent, given that many of the same MPs causing trouble would have their jobs on the line. In any event, trying to hold a seat—one which may have been won by chance—is not a job so demanding that it detracts from conspiring with colleagues and briefing journalists.

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That being said, I have never seen any politician as quirky as Zack Polanski. Polanski seems to have come out of nowhere into the political mainstream. Not long after, it came to light that Polanski used to run a hypnotherapy clinic in Harley Street (very comrade‑coded, by the way) and took part in a media experiment run by The Sun (not the natural friend of the Green Party) in which he tried to increase a female journalist’s breast size with hypnotherapy. Something that anyone else might have laughed off as a bit of banter, Polanski later apologised for – somewhat admitting the misogyny behind this “experiment.”

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It is tempting to put this down to incompetence, or spinelessness, or the malign influence of lobby groups. After over five years of working in Parliament, I know the truth to be both simpler and more unsettling: Britain is structurally trapped. The forces driving immigration into this country are not, in any meaningful sense, under British control. To understand why, you have to look at who is coming, where they are from, and why the system cannot stop them, even on the rare occasion when it tries.

The Numbers

Let’s start with the scale. In the year ending June 2023, UK net migration reached approximately 906,000, a figure not seen since the age of the Tudors, as one commentator put it.¹ Even after a sustained crackdown by successive governments, net migration stood at 171,000 in the year ending December 2025, still the lowest since 2012, but representing 813,000 total arrivals.²

Asylum claims are at record levels. A total of 111,084 people claimed asylum in the year ending June 2025, the highest figure since records began in 1979.³ The asylum system cost the British taxpayer £4.8 billion in 2025.⁴ A record appeals backlog of 80,000 cases has accumulated, nearly doubling in a single year, as more initial refusals are challenged.⁵

These numbers represent a system under profound and structural stress.

The Brexit Paradox

The single most counterintuitive driver of the immigration surge is Brexit itself. When the UK left the EU and ended free movement at the end of 2020, there was a widespread assumption, on both sides of the debate, that overall immigration would fall. The opposite happened six years later.

The post-Brexit points-based immigration system was, by design, considerably more open to non-EU nationals than the system it replaced. Health and social care sectors were opened to entry-level workers; salary thresholds were set at levels accessible to a wide range of occupations. The result was a wholesale reorientation of immigration flows. Non-EU workers increased to roughly 225% of their 2016 level by 2024, and Brexit is estimated to have generated approximately 992,000 additional non-EU employees by that year.⁶ The European Parliament’s own analysis concluded that “deliberate choices by its own government have led to a significant increase in net migration.”⁷

Britain swapped large-scale EU migration for even larger-scale non-EU migration. EU net migration is now negative, meaning that more EU nationals are leaving the UK than arriving.⁸

Poland: A Wave That Changed Britain

The story of Polish migration to the UK is, in miniature, the story of how quickly mass movement can become irreversible. When Poland joined the EU in May 2004, the UK was one of only three EU member states to immediately grant Polish citizens the right to live and work without restriction. Within years, approximately 841,000 Polish-born residents were living in England and Wales, making Poles the largest single EU national group in the country, at roughly 21% of all EU-born residents.⁹

Why did they come? The economics were simple and overwhelming. Even at half the average UK wage, a Polish worker could earn dramatically more than in equivalent work at home.¹⁰ The UK’s labour market, with its insatiable demand for construction workers, food processors, hospitality staff, and care workers, was a perfect match. An existing diaspora from earlier post-war migration waves, and the relative accessibility of the English language compared to German or French, reinforced the pull.

The Polish wave demonstrates an important mechanism that immigration policymakers rarely discuss: once a diaspora reaches critical mass, migration becomes self-sustaining. Community networks lower the risk and cost of moving; the next generation moves to join family already established. Government messaging becomes irrelevant.

Post-Brexit, the pattern has shifted. The number of Poles leaving the UK now exceeds arrivals by more than three to one.¹¹ Poland’s own economy has grown, narrowing the wage differential. But around 131,000 Polish nationals still hold only pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme, and face a legal cliff-edge if they do not upgrade.¹²

Romania: The Last Great EU Wave

If Polish migration was the first great post-enlargement wave, Romanian migration was the last and in some respects the most dramatic. Romania joined the EU in 2007, but the UK imposed transitional restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian workers until 1 January 2014. When those restrictions lifted, migration surged.

The numbers are striking. Romanian-born residents in England and Wales grew from approximately 83,000 in 2011 to 558,000 in 2021, an increase of around 570%.¹³ Current estimates of the total Romanian population in the UK range from 342,000 to over one million, depending on methodology.¹⁴

The economic logic mirrored Poland in 2004 but was even more extreme. Research showed that even earning half the average UK wage, a Romanian worker could earn five times more than in comparable work at home.¹⁵ Family reunification and social networks amplified the initial economic migration, as they always do.

Unlike Poland, the reversal has not come. Romania’s wage gap with Western Europe remains wide, its population is ageing and shrinking through emigration, and the structural push factors have not dissipated.¹⁶ Romanians are now the most commonly refused nationality at UK borders post-Brexit, around 5,600 were turned away in the year ending September 2025, suggesting that some are still attempting to enter under arrangements that no longer exist.¹⁷

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Pakistan: Persecution, Politics, and the Pull of the Diaspora

Pakistan is now the top nationality for asylum claims in the UK. In the year ending June 2025, 11,234 Pakistanis claimed asylum, more than any other single nationality.¹⁸ Over the whole period from 2002 to 2025, Pakistan ranks among the top five nationalities for asylum claims.¹⁹

To understand why, you have to look at what is actually happening in Pakistan.

Pakistan is in multiple simultaneous crises. The February 2024 general elections were marred by systematic political repression, with Human Rights Watch documenting “widespread crackdowns on freedom of expression and association.”²⁰ Pakistan’s own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances recorded 125 new cases of enforced disappearance in the first half of 2025 alone.²¹ Security forces in Balochistan continue a documented policy of extrajudicial killing: the US State Department’s 2024 human rights report described a “kill and dump” practice in which dissidents are kidnapped, tortured, and killed.²²

Religious minorities face acute danger. Violence against the Ahmadiyya community escalated in 2024, with at least three Ahmadis killed, including one lynched after Friday prayers.²³ Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which carry the death penalty for certain offences, are routinely weaponised against Ahmadis, Christians, and other minorities.²⁴ Militant groups including Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and the Islamic State of Khorasan Province killed at least 757 people in 2024, the majority civilians.²⁵

None of this is hidden. It is documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the EUAA, the US State Department, and the UK Home Office’s own Country Policy and Information Notes. The UK is not dealing with unfounded claims. It is dealing with people fleeing a country that its own government describes as dangerous for specific groups.

The pull of Britain in particular, as opposed to Germany or France, is explained by history. Pakistan gained independence from Britain in 1947. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani men, many from Punjab, came to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to fill post-war labour shortages, under rights granted by the British Nationality Act 1948.²⁶ The result is a Pakistani diaspora of approximately 1.6 million in the UK.²⁷ For a Pakistani Christian or Ahmadi facing persecution, the first call is not to an immigration lawyer, it is to a cousin in Bradford or Birmingham.

Somalia: A War That Never Ends

The UK hosts the largest Somali community in Europe.²⁸ Between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, the number of residents identifying as Somali in England and Wales increased by 230%.²⁹ This is not a recent phenomenon: Somali migration to Britain has roots in the colonial period, when Britain administered what is now northern Somalia, and accelerated sharply when civil war broke out in the late 1980s.

The drivers of Somali asylum claims today are not mysterious. Al-Shabaab and affiliated groups remain in active, ongoing conflict across south-central Somalia, accounting for 62% of all security incidents between April 2025 and March 2026.³⁰ The EU Asylum Agency described Somalia’s situation as “highly volatile and regionally fractured,” with 2025 recording a peak number of fatalities compared to the three preceding years.³¹ Over 1.1 million people are internally displaced in Mogadishu alone, with more than 150,000 evictions recorded in 2025.³² Approximately 13.2% of Somalia’s entire national population have become refugees or asylum seekers abroad.³³

There is also no credible route to safe return. The Home Office maintains a moratorium on forced returns to Somalia, recognising that the country cannot be safely deported to in most circumstances. This creates a structural impasse: people who cannot be granted protection cannot be removed either. They accumulate in a legal limbo that costs the Home Office money and creates exactly the visible backlog that politicians then point to as evidence of “failure.”

The Somali community in Britain is the product of colonial ties, decades of conflict, and the same social network dynamics seen in every other group. London, Leicester, Bristol, and Bolton have established Somali communities that function as destination anchors. The UK does not attract Somali asylum seekers despite its toughening policies, it attracts them because of the people already here.

The Labour Market Trap

Asylum seekers attract headlines, but they represent a relatively small fraction of total immigration. The bigger driver, less emotionally charged and less politically useful is structural labour market dependency.

The NHS has depended on overseas workers since the day it opened. In 1971, 31% of all doctors working in the English NHS were born and qualified abroad.³⁴ By 2022, half of all secondary-care doctors registered with the General Medical Council in England had received their primary medical qualification overseas.³⁵ Currently, 16.5% of the entire NHS workforce are not British nationals, rising to 27% of nurses.³⁶ Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee has reported 152,000 vacant social care roles even with high immigration.³⁷

The government’s response has been to tighten the screws. In 2024, the Conservative government banned direct care workers from bringing dependents. The Labour government went further, halting international recruitment of care workers entirely from July 2025.³⁸ The immediate result was a collapse in care worker visas from 105,000 in 2023/24 to 44,000 in 2024/25 with sector organisations warning of “extreme workforce shortages” and harm to older and disabled people.³⁹

This is the labour market trap laid bare: the UK has spent decades not training enough nurses, care workers, and junior doctors, and has filled the gap with migrant labour. Removing that labour does not produce a sudden surge of British applicants to care jobs. It produces a care crisis. The choice is not between high immigration and low immigration. It is between high immigration and failing public services.

The Ageing Population Trap

Underlying all of this is a demographic reality that no rhetorical commitment to control can change. Britain’s population is ageing. Without migration, the working-age population will shrink, making pension funding progressively unviable.⁴⁰ The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the average migrant arriving at 25 and living to 80 will contribute £341,000 more to public finances over their lifetime than they draw down which is more than the average British-born citizen.⁴¹

One analysis found that achieving zero net migration would cause the Old Age Dependency Ratio to increase at twice the pace compared to a net migration level of 245,000 per year.⁴² Another researcher calculated that maintaining the current working-age support ratio would theoretically require net migration of around one million people a year, a proposition that is socially and politically unworkable, but which illustrates the scale of the demographic bind.⁴³

Governments know this. They just cannot say it out loud. The gap between what is publicly claimed and what is privately understood is the space in which the entire immigration debate operates.

Deportation: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What the Headlines Get Wrong

If immigration cannot be stopped at the gate, can it be reversed after the fact? Can the UK simply deport people who arrive without permission or have their claims refused?

The short answer is: to a limited extent, yes, but far less effectively than politicians suggest, and for reasons that have almost nothing to do with human rights law.

Total returns from the UK in 2025 reached approximately 39,000, the highest level since 2016, and 14% higher than the previous year.⁴⁴ This included around 9,900 enforced returns and approximately 5,600 removals of foreign national offenders.⁴⁵ These are not negligible numbers. But with over 100,000 asylum claims made each year, tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers awaiting removal, and an estimated hundreds of thousands of people in the UK without valid leave, 9,900 enforced returns is a fraction of those technically removable.

Public discourse about deportation is dominated by the claim that the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly Article 8, the right to family life, is blocking mass removal. This is, to a substantial extent, a myth sustained by misreporting.

The actual data is stark. Between 2018 and November 2021, 922 foreign national offenders successfully challenged deportation before the First-tier Tribunal on human rights grounds. Approximately 645 succeeded specifically on Article 8. During that same period, thousands were deported. The number successfully blocking deportation via Article 8 was approximately 2.5% of the number actually deported.⁴⁶ Since 1980, the European Court of Human Rights has found against the UK in only 13 removal cases in total, of which just four involved family life.⁴⁷ The Court has issued emergency injunctions against the UK in only 15 cases out of 660 requests since 2017, around 2% of all requests, or an average of two per year.⁴⁸

Oxford researchers have found that around 75% of UK media coverage of the ECHR focuses on immigration, and that it includes “frequent misreporting” of tribunal cases, including outright fabrications about deportation being blocked for trivial reasons.⁴⁹

The real barriers to removal are structural and logistical:

Travel documents. Many source countries are slow or simply refuse to issue travel documents for their nationals who resist removal. The government’s November 2025 policy paper Restoring Order and Control acknowledged that some countries “delay for months or even years” or “fail to cooperate at all.”⁵⁰ Without a travel document, a flight cannot be booked. The government has proposed visa penalties for non-cooperative states but diplomatic leverage over countries like Somalia, Eritrea, or Afghanistan is limited.

Country moratoria. The Home Office maintains a list of countries to which forced returns are suspended on safety grounds. Somalia is on that list. Afghanistan is on that list. This means that most failed Somali and Afghan asylum seekers cannot be removed for example, regardless of the outcome of their claims, regardless of what any court says. They must be supported at public expense.

Legal challenges and further submissions. Under the current system, failed asylum seekers can make unlimited further submissions to the Home Office raising fresh grounds, including new Article 8 claims, without paying fees. The government argues this is routinely used to frustrate removal. The Restoring Order and Control paper proposes requiring failed applicants to follow the same fee-paying process as all other migrants, to close this route.⁵¹

The backlog itself. A First-tier Tribunal hearing wait of over a year means that a person cannot be removed while their appeal is pending. The longer they remain, the stronger their Article 8 private life claim becomes. Delay creates the very entitlement it was supposed to prevent.⁵²

Leaving the ECHR, the policy favoured by Reform, would not resolve any of these problems. The UK would remain bound by the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and customary international law, all of which impose non-refoulement obligations.⁵³ The enforcement mechanism would change; the substantive obligations would not. Somalia would still be too dangerous to deport people to. Countries would still refuse to issue travel documents.

Why Nothing Works

So why can’t Britain escape the trap? The answer is not a single failure but an interlocking set of structural forces, each of which reinforces the others:

The post-Brexit immigration system, designed to replace EU free movement with a skills-based points system, ended up being more open to non-EU nationals than the system it replaced (which it did mean to do), producing a surge in migration from South Asia, Africa, and beyond. The collapse of EU migration was replaced by non-EU migration at greater scale.

The UK’s ageing population and chronic underinvestment in domestic workforce training have created inescapable demand for migrant labour in health, care, construction, and hospitality. Reducing this supply does not generate domestic workers; it generates vacancies and service failure.

Wars, political repression, climate breakdown, and religious persecution in countries such as Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, produce people with nowhere safe to go. These forces operate entirely outside British control.

Colonial history and established diaspora communities create social network gravity that policy cannot sever. People go where their families are. Decades of Pakistani and Somali and Polish and Romanian migration have wired Britain into those communities as a destination, regardless of what the Home Office announces. Britain has never been just for the British.

Deterrence does not work. Research consistently shows that asylum seekers are guided by social networks and smugglers, not by scrutiny of asylum policy. Making conditions harsher has, at best, a modest and temporary effect on flows.⁵⁴

The legal floor of the 1951 Refugee Convention means that genuine refugees, people fleeing genuine persecution, have a right to have their claims considered. Many of them will succeed, because they are genuinely fleeing genuine persecution.

And removal, though increasing, is constrained by the practical reality that you cannot deport people to countries at war, you cannot deport people without travel documents, and you cannot deport people fast enough, at current rates, to make a material dent in the numbers remaining.

Britain is not failing to control immigration because of weak politicians or insufficient willpower. It is failing because the forces driving immigration are structural, global, and largely beyond the reach of any single government’s policy levers. The “trap” is not a trap that was set by accident. It is the accumulated consequence of economic decisions, foreign policy, demographic trends, colonial history, and legal obligations, most of which were chosen, by British governments, for good reasons, over many decades.

Understanding that does not make the debate easier. But it might make it more honest.

Sources & Notes

1. Office for National Statistics, Long-term international migration provisional estimates, 2023.

2. ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025 (May 2026); Statista, UK migration figures 2025.

3. Home Office, How many people claim asylum in the UK? Year ending June 2025 (August 2025).

4. European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), AIDA Country Report: United Kingdom — Update on 2025(April 2026).

5. Migration Observatory, University of Oxford, The UK’s Asylum Backlog (April 2026).

6. UK in a Changing Europe, The impact of Brexit on immigration to the UK (March 2026); Encompass Europe, Non-EU immigration to UK confounding expectations.

7. European Parliament Research Service, The Brexit paradox: How leaving the EU led to more migration (2025).

8. Migration Observatory, EU Migration to and from the UK (February 2026).

9. Migration Observatory, EU Migration to and from the UK (February 2026).

10. MigrationWatch UK, Options for Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in 2014.

11. TVP World, quoting ONS data (December 2025).

12. Migration Observatory, EU Migration to and from the UK (February 2026).

13. Migration Observatory, EU Migration to and from the UK (February 2026); ONS Census 2021 data.

14. UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, Romanian migrants in the UK: how many have arrived and are they different? (October 2025).

15. MigrationWatch UK, Options for Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in 2014.

16. Prague Process, Romania Country Profile (January 2026).

17. Migration Observatory, EU Migration to and from the UK (February 2026).

18. Home Office, How many people claim asylum in the UK? Year ending June 2025 (August 2025).

19. Sky News, Where are the UK’s asylum seekers from? (August 2025).

20. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025: Pakistan (December 2024).

21. Amnesty International, Human rights in Pakistan, annual report.

22. US Department of State, 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Pakistan (August 2025).

23. Home Office, Country Policy and Information Note: Ahmadis, Pakistan (March 2025).

24. Amnesty International, Human rights in Pakistan; Development Policy Centre, Faith under siege (January 2026).

25. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025: Pakistan (December 2024).

26. Ashford Place, Migration history (community history resource).

27. Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UK and Commonwealth profile.

28. Somali Migrants in Europe, statistical compilation (January 2026).

29. ONS, Somali populations, England and Wales: Census 2021 (October 2023).

30. EU Asylum Agency (EUAA), Somalia: Reports highlight country’s volatile security situation (May 2026).

31. EUAA, Somalia: Reports highlight country’s volatile security situation (May 2026).

32. EUAA, Somalia: Reports highlight country’s volatile security situation (May 2026).

33. Vatican Migrants & Refugees Section, Somalia country profile.

34. CHPI, The NHS’s workforce shortages illustrate the UK’s dependence on migrant labour (2019).

35. Migration Observatory, Migration and the health and care workforce (June 2023).

36. PMC / NHS workforce data, Reliance on migrant healthcare workers in the United Kingdom (September 2025).

37. Best for Britain, Six reasons why the UK needs immigration (June 2026).

38. Work Rights Centre, International recruitment of care workers has ended — the impact may be disastrous (August 2025).

39. Work Rights Centre, International recruitment of care workers has ended (August 2025).

40. ONS Blog, The UK’s ageing population — what role does international migration play? (June 2019).

41. Best for Britain, Six reasons why the UK needs immigration (June 2026).

42. ONS Blog, The UK’s ageing population (June 2019).

43. Foreign Policy Centre, Immigrants get older too (November 2017).

44. Migration Observatory, Labour’s pledges on migration: the data (June 2026).

45. Home Office, How many people are returned from the UK? Year ending June 2025 (August 2025).

46. UK in a Changing Europe, Does the ECHR stop foreign criminals being removed from the UK? (September 2025).

47. Oxford University, Misrepresentations around human rights and immigration fuelling calls to quit ECHR(September 2025).

48. UK in a Changing Europe, The UK’s ECHR record: how common are Rule 39 orders? (April 2024).

49. Oxford University, Misrepresentations around human rights and immigration (September 2025).

50. Home Office, Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (November 2025).

51. Home Office, Restoring Order and Control (November 2025); EIN, Sweeping asylum reforms detailed (November 2025).

52. Right to Remain, Breaking down the government’s new asylum proposals (November 2025).

53. Constitutional Society, Fact and Fiction: the European Convention on Human Rights (November 2025).

54. UK in a Changing Europe, What are the pull factors for those seeking asylum in the UK? (February 2026); EIN, Hotels and employment aren’t major pull factors for refugees (August 2023).

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“To be fair, the Cabinet are not all traitors and deserters; some of them have been loyal—loyal and incompetent. Hands up if you think that the Education Secretary is doing a good job—[Interruption.] Even she does not think she is doing a good job, Mr Speaker—[Interruption.] Oh, someone did. For those who raised their hands—the two people who raised their hands—yesterday, a poll found that 0% of teachers think that the Education Secretary is doing a good job. She taxed private schools to pay for more teachers, but the number of teachers has gone down. It turns out that appointing a spiteful class warrior as Education Secretary was a disaster. Does the Prime Minister agree that he has been let down by her incompetence?”

Pictured: the Education Secretary’s reaction to the Leader of Opposition criticising her.

Reportedly, following PMQs, the two ran into one another. After Phillipson said something to Badenoch, Kemi replied: “I will never stop fighting you. You are destroying the lives of children.”

I know that Kemi is right.

Recently, I spent far more time than the ordinary person thinking about Bridget Phillipson. While handling education casework during my time working in Parliament, I saw firsthand how her department operated. Phillipson wasn’t just dodging scrutiny; her office was actively running away from meetings with Conservative colleagues, deliberately scheduling them for times when MPs were locked into speaking in the Chamber, forcing cancellations. When responses did arrive from the Department for Education, they were the same boilerplate formulas they had always been. The ministers had changed, but the civil servants hadn’t; what had changed were the directives and the boilerplate responses we received made it painfully clear that ideology had overtaken practical governance.

Phillipson’s sweeping reforms have been truly heartbreaking for families. The 20% VAT on private school fees had an immediate, devastating impact. During my time in Westminster, I read email after email from parents explaining why they had made the choice to opt out of the state system.

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With Keir Starmer preparing to exit the stage and hand over to a largely unknown successor, now feels like an appropriate moment to reflect on yet another troubling Labour policy: the proposed 22% tax on interest within Stocks and Shares ISAs.

This policy has been widely misunderstood. It does not impose tax on standard Cash ISAs. Instead, it targets interest earned on uninvested cash held within a Stocks and Shares ISA, an anti‑avoidance measure designed to stop savers sidestepping the government’s decision to reduce the Cash ISA allowance from £20,000 to £12,000 for under-65s.

On paper, that may sound neat. In practice, it creates something far more problematic.

For the first time in over a decade, savers holding uninvested cash within a Stocks and Shares ISA will face a tax drag. But this is not simply about closing a loophole, it cuts directly across how ordinary investors actually behave.

Investors do not hold cash in these accounts out of ignorance or inertia. They hold it deliberately and temporarily: while waiting for market opportunities, after selling positions, or as dividends accumulate before reinvestment. This is not avoidance, it is basic portfolio management.

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The result is a system that penalises patience. Investors who pause, reassess, or manage risk conservatively are taxed for doing so. What was once a flexible and efficient wrapper now comes with a built-in disincentive to hold cash even briefly.

That leads to a second, more troubling consequence: coercion.

By taxing uninvested cash within an investment wrapper, the government is effectively pushing individuals further into the market than they may wish to go. If you are not ready to invest, your options narrow quickly. Either accept a 22% tax on your cash interest or navigate the complex rules of money market funds, which the Treasury has already restricted to prevent their use as a full cash substitute. The result is a tax regime that does not merely nudge behaviour; it actively micromanages it. Crucially, it also forces savers into an unappealing trade-off regarding the safety of their capital. Uninvested cash enjoys the absolute certainty of the state’s £85,000 FSCS deposit guarantee, a protection that is stripped away the moment a saver is coerced into market-based instruments like Money Market Funds just to outrun the taxman. By locking investors into the market and legally banning them from transferring their capital back into a dedicated Cash ISA, the Treasury has effectively pulled up the drawbridge on financial flexibility.

Compounding this is a stark generational divide. The reduced £12,000 Cash ISA allowance applies only to those under 65, while older savers retain the full £20,000 shelter. The effect is to protect established, asset-rich cohorts while placing tighter constraints on younger, working-age individuals trying to build savings, whether for a home, retirement, or basic financial security.

For more experienced investors, this is an irritation. For ordinary retail savers, it is a headache. The simplicity that made ISAs attractive is being steadily eroded.

There is also a more practical, unintended consequence. Administering a flat 22% tax on fluctuating, transient cash balances is operationally complex. Faced with that burden, many investment platforms may simply stop paying interest on cash held within Stocks and Shares ISAs altogether. In attempting to tax the margin, the policy risks eliminating it, removing any incentive for platforms to offer competitive returns on cash buffers in the first place.

All of this raises a broader question about direction of travel. This is no longer just about tax policy, it is about how much control individuals are permitted to retain over their own financial decisions.

Rachel Reeves economic approach continues to raise serious concerns. Policies like this risk undermining confidence among those who engage responsibly with saving and investment. Rather than encouraging participation, they complicate it.

The optics, too, are striking. The Treasury has reportedly engaged financial influencers to help communicate and normalise the policy, with figures such as Mia McGrath invited to Downing Street discussions. To her credit, she has spoken about the issue without endorsing it, but the reliance on such a strategy speaks volumes. Sound policy rarely requires this kind of promotional scaffolding.

There is also the issue of complexity. Even those familiar with Stocks and Shares ISAs may need to pause to understand how this measure applies in practice. For newer investors, the picture will be even less clear. All of this appears to be in service of relatively modest revenue.

If Labour is serious about economic credibility, it would be wise to ensure that future fiscal decisions are grounded in a proper understanding of how markets and investors actually behave. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

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I use the word “stuck” deliberately. Many feel caught between the prestige of the role and the reality that most alternatives offer the same, or even lower pay, without the status. That tension can be paralysing. It makes the decision to leave very hard because the benefits of working in Parliament are unmatched in every other profession.

Working in Parliament can feel euphoric. If you have good colleagues and a supportive boss, it is a job unlike any other. You are offered tickets, invited to receptions, and brought into rooms and conversations that most people never access. Your social and professional lives blur: friendships form quickly, stories accumulate, and the pace is intoxicating. For a time, it is extraordinary. I certainly experienced that in my first year.

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Rupert Lowe, Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth and leader of the “Restore Britain” party, personally initiated and promoted the Independent Rape Gang Inquiry to give victims of these crimes a platform to share their stories. The Inquiry describes itself as independent and was funded by more than 20,000 members of the public. Whatever one thinks of Lowe’s politics, the report that has emerged is unapologetically survivor‑centred and makes claims that are as disturbing as they are politically explosive.

What the Inquiry says happened

According to the Inquiry report, organised “rape gangs,” group‑based child sexual exploitation (CSE) networks, have operated across at least 149 districts in England and Wales over several decades. The primary victims identified are vulnerable, predominantly white British girls, often from working‑class backgrounds and frequently in care or on the edge of care. The report estimates that “at least” 250,000 girls have been victimised and stresses that this is likely a conservative figure given chronic under‑reporting of sexual abuse. The patterns described involve serial and multiple rapes by groups of men, trafficking between towns and cities, extreme violence, forced pregnancy and abortion, and sometimes trafficking abroad.

Survivor testimony in the report is harrowing. Many describe being groomed from early adolescence, introduced to alcohol and drugs, then raped repeatedly by multiple men over months or years, often while still attending school. Victims recount being filmed, blackmailed, threatened with death or harm to their families, and in some cases trafficked around the UK or abroad, including under the guise of religious marriage. The Inquiry documents long‑term consequences: chronic PTSD, self‑harm, suicide attempts, addiction, homelessness, relationship breakdown, and loss of children through care or adoption. Across these accounts runs a consistent theme of profound mistrust of police, social services and courts, born of being disbelieved, blamed, criminalised or ignored when they sought help.

Offender profiles and contested claims

The report’s most controversial claims concern offender profiles and motivation. It asserts that the overwhelming majority of convicted offenders in group‑based CSE cases have “distinctively Muslim names” and estimates that around 87% of such offenders are Muslim, with some sources suggesting the true proportion is closer to 95%. It identifies a recurring pattern of Pakistani and other Muslim‑background men targeting non‑Muslim girls, particularly white British girls, described by perpetrators as “white trash” or “kuffar” and treated as sexually exploitable “out‑group” property. The Inquiry links this offending to a mix of patriarchal clan structures, honour/shame dynamics and particular interpretations of Islamic theology around non‑Muslim women, sex and marriage, and concludes that race and religion were not incidental but frequently “motivating and organising factors” in victim selection and network structures.

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These conclusions are highly contested and sit alongside official audits that paint a complex, localised picture. Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group‑Based Child Sexual Exploitation, for example, noted that nationwide data collection has historically been poor and “dodged for years”, but that where local data was comprehensive it revealed stark disproportionality. In Greater Manchester, official figures showed that around 52% of suspects in multi‑perpetrator exploitation networks were recorded as “Asian” (predominantly Pakistani), despite South Asian communities making up roughly 21% of the local population, while approximately 38% were recorded as White. By contrast, broader Home Office research on child sexual abuse as a whole – not just street‑based grooming networks – finds that perpetrators come from all backgrounds and generally reflect wider national demographics. But whether one accepts the Lowe Inquiry’s national extrapolation or prefers the more localised official figures, these claims are central to its account of what went wrong and why.

Institutional failure on a national scale

On policing and criminal justice, the Inquiry concludes that there has been “systemic dereliction of duty”. Police forces are said to have repeatedly failed to investigate credible allegations, downgraded or “no‑crimed” reports, and treated exploited children as offenders (such as criminalising them as “child prostitutes”) rather than as victims. Evidence was frequently lost, destroyed or simply not pursued; in some cases, officers are alleged in survivor evidence to have been perpetrators themselves or to have colluded with offenders.

There was also a widespread reluctance to record or analyse perpetrator ethnicity and religion, hindering pattern recognition and national learning.

Local authorities and safeguarding agencies do not come out any better. Social services, schools and care homes in multiple areas are described as having failed to act on obvious risk indicators, repeated missing episodes, much older “boyfriends”, sudden sexualised behaviour, taxi pick‑ups from school or care, STIs, pregnancies, direct disclosures, over prolonged periods. Children were sometimes removed from protective family environments or placed in unsafe placements rather than authorities confronting perpetrators and networks. Information‑sharing between agencies was inconsistent and often obstructed by data‑sharing anxieties, organisational silos and lack of leadership. The Inquiry characterises these safeguarding failures not merely as negligence but, in some instances, as wilful blindness driven by institutional culture and political considerations.

Politically, the report argues that fear of accusations of racism and a desire to maintain “community cohesion” contributed to a reluctance at local and national level to acknowledge the ethnic and religious dimensions of offending. It criticises national and local political leaders for minimising or denying the scale of grooming gangs and for failing to commission or act on robust, data‑driven inquiries over many years. In some areas, it suggests that electoral dependence on certain local Muslim voting blocs created political disincentives to confront group‑based CSE where Muslim‑background men were over‑represented among suspects. London, particularly the Metropolitan Police and the Mayor’s Office, is singled out as a “hub of denial”, accused of downplaying or failing to pursue evidence of grooming‑gang activity.

The Inquiry’s overarching claim is that grooming gangs are a national phenomenon, not a chain of isolated local scandals, with similar patterns of offenders, victims, methods and institutional responses across multiple towns and cities. It points out that the UK still lacks comprehensive, standardised national data on group‑based CSE, especially in relation to offender ethnicity and religion, and argues that this has hindered prevention, accountability and honest public debate.

Recommendations and what comes next

On the back of these findings, the report calls for sweeping changes. Its recommendations include mandatory recording and publication of offender ethnicity and religion in group‑based CSE cases; robust national data collection with independent oversight; dedicated national units for investigation and prosecution; enhanced powers and ring‑fenced funding; tougher sentencing (including whole‑life terms) for the worst offenders; and expanded use of deportation for foreign‑national offenders. It also advocates centring families in safeguarding practice, expanding specialist survivor support, establishing a national compensation scheme, and introducing criminal sanctions for officials who knowingly fail to act on credible evidence of group‑based CSE.

Against that backdrop, the forthcoming statutory, Government‑backed inquiry into grooming gangs will now have to decide whether to adopt, refine or quietly sidestep these findings. Given that many of the victims who contributed to Lowe’s Inquiry may also give evidence to the official process, the dissonance or alignment between the two reports will be telling.

A social‑media ban as “solution”

While this report was being released, the Government’s headline child‑protection announcement was not about any of this. Instead, it trumpeted a ban on social media for under‑16s as the flagship measure to “keep children safe online”.

It is profoundly jarring to present this as the definitive answer to child protection when a report like the Rape Gang Inquiry is describing decades of offline abuse, institutional failure and political denial.

Set against the realities documented in that report, a social‑media ban looks less like a serious safeguarding strategy and more like a neat, headline‑friendly intervention – one that avoids the far harder work of confronting what has happened in families, communities and public institutions.

It is also poorly matched to how children and teenagers actually use the internet. Most teenagers today are far less interested in Facebook or X than their parents’ generation. Their digital lives centre on YouTube, Snapchat, private messaging apps and gaming platforms, in closed group chats, DMs and semi‑private servers, in ways that the legislation barely contemplates. Much of the grooming that leads to child sexual abuse material now happens in precisely these spaces: end‑to‑end encrypted messaging services, disappearing‑message platforms and in‑game chat lobbies, far from the public timelines that politicians like to talk about.

Even if one accepted that a blanket ban on mainstream social apps was necessary, it is likely to push many young people towards other tools and websites that are harder to regulate and monitor, not safer. It risks driving their online lives further out of sight without addressing the routes through which abusers make contact.

Nor does it touch the changing nature of child sexual abuse material. A large and growing proportion of online CSAM now originates from material created on children’s own devices, often self‑generated under pressure, coercion or grooming. This is not “child pornography” in any meaningful sense of consent; it is abuse captured in digital form. Banning under‑16s from using a subset of public social media platforms does little to disrupt the dynamics that produce this material, or the adults who solicit, store and distribute it in private, encrypted channels.

Who, then, is this legislation really going to protect when children are being groomed and exploited both offline and in spaces that sit outside the scope of the ban?

Why this matters to children now

For many young people, especially those who are isolated, who have moved countries, or who sit between cultures, online spaces are lifelines. Social media can be the only way to stay in touch with old friends, to maintain continuity of relationships, and to find communities when they feel they have none locally. For children in that position, a blanket social‑media ban is not just an abstract policy; it is the sudden cutting off of the one channel through which they feel seen and connected.

A social media ban offers a simple, satisfying “solution” to a problem rooted in family vulnerability, institutional failure and cultural denial, precisely the areas successive governments have chosen not to confront. Until those deeper causes are faced honestly, measures like this will remain what they are: gestures towards safety, rather than justice for the children this country has failed.

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On its face, it is the kind of statement that instantly triggers outrage. Mothers are not supposed to say things like that. They are not supposed to leave. They are not supposed to choose themselves, especially not when a child is involved. And yet that is exactly why what she said is worth paying attention to.

Liz’s explanation, in essence, is that she no longer wishes to remain trapped in what she describes as an abusive and coercive dynamic. According to her, she has been blackmailed with her child. She says she has been pushed into an intolerable position, one in which reunion with her son is made conditional on submission. She has decided she will not submit any longer.

That decision will strike many people as monstrous. It may also strike some women as deeply familiar, as the kind of choice that feels impossible either way.

The easiest way to read a story like this is as a morality play about motherhood. A woman leaves a child behind, therefore she has failed at the first and most sacred test of being a mother. That reading is emotionally satisfying, but it is also shallow. It tells us almost nothing about coercion, almost nothing about power, and almost nothing about the ways in which motherhood itself can become the mechanism through which a woman is controlled. Motherhood can be the most powerful tool of all when it comes to controlling a woman.

There is a long history of women staying in intolerable situations for the sake of their children. There is also a long history of society praising that endurance as virtue. Endure more. Swallow more. Stay longer. Be patient. Be strategic. Be the good mother. In practice, what this often means is simple. Remain available for manipulation for just a little longer. Accept one more condition. Tolerate one more humiliation. Keep negotiating with the person who is using your child as leverage.

That is the part of Liz’s account that is hardest to dismiss. Not whether every factual allegation is right, and not whether she has handled everything perfectly, but the underlying claim that a child can become the instrument through which coercion is maintained. Once that happens, the mother is placed in a trap. If she stays in the fight, she remains inside the mechanism that is hurting her. If she leaves, she is branded unnatural. Either way, she pays. The sacrifice is ultimately hers all along.

The law has no elegant language for this kind of decision. It does not recognise “walking away” as a category. It recognises residence, responsibility, consent, jurisdiction and status quo. Once a child is settled in one country, with one parent doing the day‑to‑day care, the practical and legal advantage begins to harden around that arrangement. The parent abroad may still retain parental responsibility in theory, but distance, money, immigration rules, local procedure and the sheer force of continuity all work against them. Major decisions such as relocation depend on consent from those with parental responsibility or court approval, and the law is not designed to treat parental withdrawal as a neutral act.

That is why “choose yourself and walk away” may be emotionally legible but legally devastating. A woman may be preserving her sanity, refusing blackmail, or breaking a generational pattern of submission. But the legal system is far more likely to interpret the visible reality than the invisible coercion beneath it. One parent is there. One parent is not. The child’s life continues in the place where they remain. Over time, that reality can become extremely difficult to dislodge. Almost no one is trained to see subtle manipulation and the use of children as blackmail for what it is: a powerful tool designed to control and hurt women at their core, as mothers.

The more unsettling question is not whether a mother should ever leave. It is what kind of world produces that decision in the first place. What kind of legal and emotional landscape makes a woman conclude that the price of staying close to her child is continued submission to coercion.

We are still far more comfortable condemning mothers who leave than asking what they were being asked to endure in order to stay. The stigma remains fierce. Mothers who leave children are still widely cast as defective, selfish or broken, even where the surrounding facts are far more complex.

Perhaps that is why Liz’s words have had such force. They do not simply describe one woman’s choice. They expose a possibility most people would rather not think about at all. For some women, staying and fighting is not always the brave choice. Sometimes it is simply the price of continued captivity.

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