A NEET-eye view:

“To say that my adult life didn’t shape up how I thought it would is an understatement. I have been out of work for just over a year and it’s tough. It has been the single most soul crushing experience of my life so far.

“Sites that I was told are good and reliable places to look, such as LinkedIn and Indeed, are now riddled with scam postings. [There’s] listing after listing where you spend hours perfecting the cover letter, rewriting the CV, giving them a picture off you, the blood of your first-born child and a lock of your hair, and they never get back to you.

“It no longer feels like getting a job is possible, even one that’s not perfect or just something to pay the bills. It’s like being employed is something that happens to other people. Meanwhile, one has to go onto benefits just to survive while you send application after application after application.

“It feels like there’s no longer anything I can do to fix the situation I’m in.”

The toll on young people’s lives from these struggles, and from our aggravating culture of mindless carping, is enormous.

The game terrain

‘NEET’ officially refers to 16 – 24-year-olds. But the tribulations experienced by young people seeking employment frequently extend beyond into their late 20s and early 30s.

UK unemployment is at a 5-year high of 5.2%. Job applications are heavily oversubscribed, with 2.4 jobseekers for every vacancy and graduate jobs typically receiving up to 140 responses per advert.

Young job seekers are caught in a catch 22. Employers now seek an average of 2.5 years’ experience for many entry level jobs. As a result, 33% of applicants are rejected because they lack sufficient experience.

Being a UK graduate NEET: “Exposes a common lie about our education system which we … hear from parents and teachers – that a degree in the right subject, or from the right institution, or with the right grade is a recipe for success.”

The employment Hunger Games have also shifted fully online. As our first NEET above observes, days are filled with endless applications in an anonymous screen-world, devoid of face-to-face human interaction and with rejections deduced through silence.

Businesses won’t touch real paper CVs and buildings that say ‘Job Centre’ are not actually job-finding centres.

Additionally, large language AI has triggered a fall in demand for human input, with the UK’s service sector concentration leaving us particularly exposed to large-scale job displacement.

AI constitutes a double insult to NEETs. It not only adjudicates their online applications but is also soaking up swathes of NEET employment opportunities.

Limbo

The NEET job-seeker’s challenge currently looks overwhelming. Instead of reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood, they find themselves in an unstable limbo, endlessly performing the “humiliation ritual” of chasing work that has the seeming rareness of hens’ teeth.

Aspiration is deeply strained – only 48% of young people believe anyone can succeed in Britain if they work hard enough.

Alan Milburn’s recent NEETs report distinguishes between NEETs actively looking for work, (39%) and inactive NEETs (61%). A proportion of ‘inactives’ have never worked, but it’s worth noting that others in this cohort may have been active but eventually gave up precisely because there’s a limit to human endurance.

Try harder

As NEETs wake to face another round of application checking, the continuing online silence is broken only by the steady thrum of government and society urging them to try harder – ‘you just need to get more savvy at working the system’; ‘your problem was that you didn’t put enough freelance projects and student society leadership positions on your CV’; ‘try doing (yet) more volunteer work to stand out’ (assuming you can find it), ‘tell AI what’s special about you’ (even if you don’t feel special after months of failure).

This thoroughly undermining ‘advice’ tells NEETs they aren’t doing quite the right thing, as if the right thing can somehow even be done – anymore. It’s a grotesque pantomime testing the endurance of even the wiliest.

Getting work, rewarding or otherwise, is now random, rare, and has very little to do with how hard you try.

Stop slacking

When society isn’t delivering ‘advice’, it’s busy caricaturing these Hunger Gamers as snowflake scroungers. Since their brains, it’s presumed, have been melted by social media and ‘me’ culture, they lack the ‘gumption and fortitude of their forefathers and allow themselves to fall lazily into the pernicious habit of exploiting our hard-pressed benefits system’.

Here, NEETS again fall under society’s mindless sledgehammer: ‘If that kid is fiddling the system, you must all be’. But it’s the critic’s reasoning here, not ‘youth’, which is lazy where it slithers, as it so often does, from ‘one / a few’ to ‘most / all’ without reflection or hesitation.

Waking up on day X of your dogged ‘job seeker’ marathon to hear that you’re a ‘feckless loafer robbing the state’ is just the ticket for compounding pre-existing mental health issues, or, frankly, even creating them.

PIP

The growing number of youngsters claiming Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for neurodevelopmental or mental health disorders has only amplified society’s indignation. But are these PIP claims surprising? Applying for PIP is a notoriously stringent, protracted and demanding process. But, after failing repeatedly to find employment, plenty start feeling they don’t fit into society, that there might be something wrong with them. ‘Neurodivergence’, if nothing else, floats an explanation to NEETs and their judges for ‘feeling dysfunctional’ and for a predicament they feel helpless to change.

Of course, PIP is sometimes exploited by the work-shy. But, again, we should pause before making assumptions since the reasons are nuanced.

Some NEETs use PIP as protection against the caprice they experience in the world of Universal Credit. 20–24-year-olds are twice as likely to experience a benefit sanction as 30–34-year-olds. And the reasons can feel unfair. Perhaps it was because they missed a UC meeting as their bus was cancelled; or because they couldn’t face attending a job interview for nightshift work cleaning toilets a 1.5 hr train-ride away. Sometimes reasons for sanctions are too buried in red tape to discern.

Harried by the government’s shrill promise to ‘make life (even) harder for UC receivers’, NEETs live under the constant threat of waking up skint. And, in our atomised society, they don’t invariably have a ‘bank of mum and dad’ as last resort. So, who can blame them for seeking a PIP safety net that protects them from mercurial UC decisions, and provides certainty about their next meal, in a world where ‘if you work your socks off, you’ll gain security’ is a promise that simply never materialised?

The future

Andy Burnham plans to reduce NEETs by revolutionising education in ways that help engage young people with work. But this is only a solution if there’s work to be had.

There is a fundamental contradiction in our NEETs narratives – we believe people’s lives should be orientated around work and that young people should be encouraged with carrots and sticks to find it. But we are simultaneously moving towards a world where employment opportunities are disappearing.

In one school of thought, the AI revolution, as per past tech revolutions, will ultimately generate sufficient alternative forms of human employment. But this assumption is hotly contested. The National Foundation for Educational Research, together with Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI division, Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist) and prominent economist, Daniel Susskind, all argue that we’re moving, at the very least, towards a world of dramatically reduced human labour, with AI “creating massive unemployment”.

Plumbers and electricians look safe. But Susskind predicts that “task encroachment will displace workers” from a wide range of jobs across most blue- and white-collar sectors. Economics and employment are de-coupling, creating the novel spectre of “jobless growth”.

Beyond the work gospel

We aren’t preparing young people for this fast-approaching new world of significantly reduced work. Instead, we’re foisting an old model on them that they can see withering before their eyes. 

There’s a parallel here between NEETS and Thatcherite deindustrialisation. In neither case was the promise of life-long, regular work and security honoured, or preparation made for the consequences of trashing those promises. Then and now, the neo-liberal assumption was that market forces will kick in, driving people to find other work, by relocating, if necessary.  This ‘try harder’ diktat no more fitted reality then than it does now. Are Thatcher’s lost northern towns, still stuck in poverty and disillusionment, a metaphor for our future youth?

So much is premised on the value of work as life’s provider of structure, meaning and security. Yet young people are facing a future where this prop is shrinking. Faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and the prospect of their Hunger Games only getting harder, NEETs are losing faith in the “gospel of work”, disengaging wholesale from the point of it. Depression, suicide, crime and drug use will all increase unless we give young people aspirations for worthwhile lives that are no longer noosed to employment.

To this end, education will need to build the kind of value, purpose and meaning into young people’s lives that enables them to cope in a ‘work-lite’ world. We may need a universal basic income; but education must also cultivate stronger moral and societal responsibility, together with other specifically human endeavours such as creativity, physical life, and the rewards of human interaction.

Instead of looking backwards to an obsolescent model of work, making empty promises to young people, and feeding the NEET mental health epidemic, we must equip them with the skills, confidence and imagination to flesh out this potentially exciting and culturally advanced new world for themselves as adults.

Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass.

Image credit: HelenCobain – Creative Commons

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Reform has confirmed that it has suspended Reform supporter and board member Tim Montgomerie after he accused Yusuf of behaving “like a child”.

Speaking on The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast, Montgomerie also said Yusuf “did not talk to me” for three months after he discovered he had helped ex-Tory frontbencher Robert Jenrick defect to Reform.

“A lot of people are on not-speaking terms with Zia and it’s nearly always Zia who initiates it,” he said. “It needs to end. You cannot behave like a child in politics.”

Montgomerie, who founded blog site Conservative Home, also criticised the Reform home affairs spokesperson for calling former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace “a traitor to Britain” last week.

He said: “It was unprecedented for Farage to criticise him last week, but did he take down the tweet that Nigel criticised? No. He wouldn’t. He’s loyal to Nigel as he has to be if he wants to succeed him, but in terms of being able to really play as a team player…”

Yusuf called Wallace “a traitor” specifically for allowing thousands of Afghans who had served in the British army to seek refuge in the UK following a data breach that compromised their safety. 

At the time, Nigel Farage also said Yusuf’s language was “too strong”, adding: “I shall give him a ticking off”. 

Montgomerie also said that Yusuf had “consistently freelanced” on X, for example, on accepting Conservative candidates including Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, who were “being wooed” to join Reform at the time.

“It was his way of trying to undermine that policy,” Montgomerie said.

On the show, he also said he thinks “Nigel [Farage] has fallen out of love with Zia”. This comes after a Reform source had told The Daily Mail that Farage had “fallen out of love” with “out of control” Yusuf, and that he might be sacked.

The suspension also comes after Montgomerie had previously criticised Farage’s handling of questions about the £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne.

Speaking to BBC Politics Live back in June, Montgomerie said that Farage “cannot hide away” from the issue of his £5 million gift and that he would need to come up with “better answers” to questions about it. 

Former Reform chair David Bull, who was replaced by Reform MP Lee Anderson in May, recently said Farage should “take a break” from politics.

A Labour source said: “Tim Montgomerie dared to say what we’re all thinking – Nigel Farage should have declared his secret £5 million gift. If Farage had nothing to hide, why is he being so defensive? What a snowflake.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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Under Keir Starmer, the government began bringing passenger rail services into public ownership with Great British Railways.

However, private rolling stock companies still own trains and lease them to rail operators.

In 2024/25, the cost of leasing trains from the three main rolling stock companies (ROSCOs), Eversholt Rail, Porterbook and Angel, was a staggering £4.1 billion.

The three ROSCOs are owned by asset management funds, with Porterbrook owned by investment funds including Allianz Capital and Allianz Group and Angel owned by AMP Capital, the investment arm of Australian financial services conglomerate AMP Group. 

Cayman Islands-registered company CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd owns Eversholt.

ASLEF has today launched a campaign to get the government to take public ownership of all new rolling stock. 

ASLEF’s general secretary, Dave Calfe, said: “Huge sums of money are being taken out of our railway in profits and dividends by private rolling stock companies. A lot of it ends up in offshore tax havens.

“We need to keep that money on the track, not send it offshore.”

Calfe said that ROSCOs took £2.9 billion out of Britain’s railway in the last five years alone.

He said “there is another way”, pointing to how, in Liverpool, Labour Mayor Steve Rotherham has bought new Merseyrail trains using public funds.

“This has allowed them to specify the design of the trains to best suit the region and the passengers,” Calfe said.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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As the UK emerges from its fifth heatwave so far this summer, and is set to have a sixth next month, Tice said at a press conference yesterday “when it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it.”

Tice said that “the smarter thing to do is to adapt to it [the extreme heat]” rather than “think arrogantly that you can stop it”.

The Reform politician said people should focus on the benefits of a warmer climate, such as better English wine. 

“I think when it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it. And if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better then fantastic, that means we can take on the French. Fantastic,” he said.

He added: “Let’s celebrate some of these things rather than just be doom and gloom about it.”

Responding to Tice’s remarks, Danny Gross, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “If Richard Tice wants to live in a world of make believe, that’s his call. But telling people to enjoy the heat after the scenes we’ve seen in the last week… how out of touch do you need to be?

“Homes burnt to a cinder and the military drafted in after wildfires raged uncontrollably. Farmers at their wits end because weeks without rain have made for yet another brutal harvest. 

“And the more than 1,000 lives needlessly lost during this summer’s heatwaves thanks to global heating. It’s an insult – particularly to their loved ones – to suggest the weather extremes we’re seeing are cause for celebration.

Gross also noted that Tice’s comments are at odds with Reform supporters’ views. 

He said: “Last week, our polling showed 87% of people think the UK is unprepared for extreme weather events like heat and drought – including 81% of Reform UK supporters. Failing to acknowledge the real-world consequences of our changing climate may not be as easily forgiven as he thinks.” 

Bridget Phillipson, the Labour Party chair, called the Reform MP’s comments “tone deaf”.

“Wildfires are affecting people’s lives. Drought threatens our water supplies and food security. All the while, Richard Tice is having a laugh.

“These comments raise serious questions about his judgement and expose where Reform UK’s interests really lie.”

Campaign group Labour Future wrote on X: “Kids sent home because classrooms were boiling, public services under pressure, water shortages and wild fires, harvest failures-  but we should do nothing about all that according to Reform. Just sit back and enjoy.

“Ridiculous and frankly mad.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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Reform’s finance spokesperson, Robert Jenrick, set out the proposals in an article for the Telegraph yesterday.

Reform has said that if it won power it would scrap Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and the health element of Universal Credit, and replace it with a “health security allowance”, a single, regularly reviewed payment.

Jenrick also said that Reform will ban foreign-born households from claiming universal credit, housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, free childcare, free school meals or disability benefits.

Jenrick claimed paying benefits to non-British people was “plain immoral”, even though many would have paid into the tax system through working.

He also wrote in the Telegraph over the weekend that the amount spent on disability benefits was “not generosity … it is suicidal empathy”.

Amnesty said that it was “grotesque” to call providing disabled people with benefits “suicidal empathy”.

Reform has claimed that the cuts to PIP would save £21 billion a year, while barring foreign nationals from claiming benefits would save £20 billion a year. The party has said its wider package of cuts will save £50 billion.

Responding to Reform UK’s £50 billion proposed cuts to benefits, Jen Clark, Amnesty International UK’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Director, said: “Cutting support for people with disabilities and people out of work isn’t welfare reform – it’s a rollback of rights the UK has committed to protecting.

“Calling that ‘suicidal empathy’ is grotesque. Pip isn’t generosity, it’s what lets people eat, pay for the equipment they need to stay alive, live with dignity and take part in society – and taking it away doesn’t save money, it shifts the cost onto people’s health, sometimes their lives.

“The same goes for people permitted to make this country their home. The minority who claim social security do so on the same basis as other taxpayers. Stripping their benefits isn’t fairness, it’s scapegoating – and it’s built on the same premise: that some people’s rights matter less than others.

“That premise is wrong, and it’s not just wrong, it’s a breach of the UK’s human rights commitments. The right to an adequate standard of living isn’t a policy choice, it’s a legal obligation – and Reform’s plans would put the UK in breach of it.

“You don’t fix a welfare system by punishing the people who need it most.”

Pro-EU campaign group Best for Britain has told The Guardian that denying benefits to those with indefinite leave to remain would tear up Britain’s EU withdrawal agreement.

Jenrick has confirmed that Reform’s proposal would require renegotiating the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU, potentially meaning that British people living in the EU could lose equivalent rights.

Commenting on Reform’s plans, Mothin Ali, Green Party Deputy Leader, said: “Once again, the establishment parties are all trying to outdo each other when it comes to who can be the most xenophobic, who can punch down the hardest to the most vulnerable in our country, and who can cut the most support from disabled people.

“It is cowardly to take from the most defenceless when we should be taxing the super wealthy including those who are in the privileged position of accepting £5m donations.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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Farage is being urged to sack Reform’s home affairs spokesperson after he called former defence secretary Ben Wallace “a traitor to Britain” last week for allowing thousands of Afghans who had served in the British army to seek refuge in the UK.

Yusuf’s inflammatory comment led to him getting a “ticking off” from the Reform leader.

Farage publicly distanced himself from Yusuf’s remarks, telling the Sun that they were “over the top”. 

“That is too strong a language. I shall give him a ticking off, don’t worry,” Farage said.

Yusuf snubbed Farage by refusing to delete the post on X in which he called Wallace “a traitor to Britain”.

In an article published on Saturday, the Mail reported an unnamed source as saying: “Nigel has fallen out of love with Zia, who is out of control. I think his days are numbered.”

Neither Farage nor Reform have confirmed the source’s account that Yusuf is at risk of being sacked.

Responding to the Daily Mail’s reporting, Yusuf bizarrely claimed that the Daily Mail was trying to get him sacked to pave the way for a Tory-Reform electoral pact. 

In a post on X, Yusuf wrote: “The Daily Mail is campaigning hard for a “pact” between Reform and the Tories.

“So the Tories can then suffocate us.

“They will keep coming for me with this nonsense, quoting the same “anonymous” source because they think I will die before I let that happen.

“They are correct!”. 

This isn’t the first time an internal row between Farage and Yusuf has broken out. 

Last June, Yusuf quit and then returned to the party just 48 hours later after Reform MP Sarah Pochin called on then prime minister Keir Starmer to ban the burqa. 

Yusuf had criticised Pochin’s intervention, calling it “dumb” and arguing that Reform was not committed to such a policy.

When Yusuf resigned, he said: “I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office.”

As well as being Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, Yusuf is also a Reform donor. In 2024, he donated £406,000 to the party. 

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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Lennon secured nominations from 11 organisations affiliated to Labour, including the two largest UK trade unions – Unison and Unite. 

Mainstream, the centre-left Andy Burnham backed group, also threw their support behind Lennon.

She was also nominated by Katy Clark MSP and MPs Brian Leishman and Euan Stainbank, 

However, she fell short of getting the backing of three MPs and three MSPs needed when nominations closed at 10am this morning. 

Candidates were required to obtain at least three nominations from organisations affiliated to Labour, and three nominations each from Scottish MPs and MSPs. 

This means that Lennon, who was regarded as the more left-wing candidate, will not progress, while Michael Marra and Joe Fagan have secured the necessary nominations to run. 

It also means that the contest will be all-male, which Scottish Labour women raised concerns about over the weekend and issued a last-minute plea to get Lennon on the ballot ahead of the nomination deadline. 

Lennon said Scottish Labour is “stuck in the past” after she failed to secure enough nominations to stand in the race triggered by the former Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar stepping down to take up a ministerial role in Burnham’s government. 

In a statement, Lennon said: “Scotland’s young people deserve a Scottish Labour Party who will stand up to billionaires and the wealthy elite. Their future is on the line. 

“Our planet is burning and hope is fading. Punching down on trans people and other minorities is not acceptable. Do better, lead with decency and act with courage.”

Lennon stood against Sarwar in the 2021 Scottish leadership election, and came second, picking up 42.4% of the vote.

Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, said he was “incredibly disappointed” that Lennon is out of the race.

He said Lennon had “a vision for our party” that was embedded in “real Labour values”, adding that the party membership has “been denied a genuinely broad debate and that is very sad”.

Leishman added: “The trade unions who are essential to our movement have also been denied the robust debate that Scottish Labour must have.

“We have seen so many good people leave the Scottish Labour Party these last few years and a socialist candidate being denied the opportunity to stand for leader is not likely to entice people back.”

An X user commented: “If parliamentarians keep @MonicaLennon7 off the ballot despite her very strong labour movement backing that would narrow and weaken the debate at precisely the time Scottish Labour ought to be facing up to the severity of its problems.”

Voting will open on 28 August, and Scottish Labour members will have until 17 September to cast their ballot. The new Scottish Labour leader will then be announced on 19 September.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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Appearing on GMB on Friday to discuss the Clacton by-election result, Zahawi appeared to attribute Count Binface winning almost 10,000 votes to a supposed £180,000 donation from philanthropist and Labour Party donor Dale Vince.

On the show, host Kate Garraway said: “9,455 people wanted Count Binface.”

In response, Zahawi said: “Yeah and he got, by the way, he got I think £180,000 from Dale Vince, who is a big Labour supporter.”

The former Tory MP added: “He got activists from the Conservative Party and from Labour going out to try and knock on doors for him.”

Binface issued a rebuttal on the social media platform Bluesky yesterday, correcting Zahawi’s “untrue” claims.

Binface, the alter ego of comedian Jon Harvey, wrote: “This is untrue. Dale Vince has never donated any money to me, and at no point have I asked activists from any other party to knock on doors for me.

“If anyone did so, it was not at my direction and was of their own volition.”

He added: “I am sure Mr Zahawi will want to correct the record at his earliest convenience.”

Vince offered to fund Binface’s campaign against Nigel Farage, but the intergalatic space warrior candidate did not accept any money.

Online, people noted the hypocrisy of the Reform figure targeting Count Binface over large political donations.

Farage forced the Clacton by-election by resigning as an MP on 7 July amid the deepening scandal over the £5 million donation he received from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne and failed to declare. 

One Bluesky user wrote: “Nadhim Zahawi, if you’re going to tell egregious lies, do you really want to make them about political influence being bought through large donations? Do you really want to go there right now?”. 

Good Morning Britain issued a correction on the programme this morning. The presenter clarified that while Vince had offered to donate money to Binface he never accepted any, and that he had never asked Conservative and Labour activists to campaign for him.

Zahawi has faced his own financial scandals. In 2023, he was forced to pay a £5 million settlement to HMRC after failing to pay capital gains tax on the £26 million sale of shares in YouGov, the polling company he co-founded.

The shares were sold in 2018 by Balshore Investments, an offshore fund which YouGov described as “a family trust of Nadhim Zahawi”.

In the same year,  Zahawi and Zahawi, the UK property company controlled by Zahawi and his wife, received unsecured loans of £26 million from an undisclosed source.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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Manchester – birthplace of the first industrial revolution – is now poised to help shape the course of the fourth. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has committed his political economy of “Manchesterism” to “putting more power in people’s hands” – defying a four-decade settlement in which “political power was centralised and economic power was privatised”.

Burnham has only begun to articulate what this means for technology policy. He inherited a government that made important progress in unleashing technology’s potential for the economy and public services, but never arrived at a coherent vision of how this should feel in people’s everyday lives.

His new government appears to be taking a fresh look at assumptions that have been entrenched since major technology platforms emerged two decades ago. These assumptions are: that innovation will unlock abundance; that this is best achieved through the economies of scale and scope characteristic of technology markets; and that the resulting concentration of wealth and power is an unavoidable price of progress.

Over the past year, progressives on both sides of the Atlantic have embraced elements of this ‘abundance’ narrative. They argue that technology can eliminate artificial scarcity – that by building infrastructure and accelerating innovation, governments can grow the economic pie and make everyone better off. Often, they suggest, the state simply needs to get out of the way and let the market deliver.

This philosophy has merit but neglects something important. Technology, adopted inclusively and productively, could bring prosperity and power to every postcode. But this depends on who controls what is produced, who captures the benefits, and who determines the terms of access. 

The current risk is that artificial scarcity is traded for artificial subjugation. Power is flowing away from people, communities and elected representatives, to companies and governments beyond UK democratic control.

This challenge is often described as “technology sovereignty”. But the term can mask what is at stake: the government’s ability to act independently in citizens’ interests, and the ability of people and local businesses to act for themselves and their communities. More than an academic argument about ownership, it has real consequences for the security and resilience of our economy and public services, and our ability to make technology a force for good across the UK.

The UK relies heavily on a small number of large international technology suppliers. These companies can stifle domestic innovation and raise prices to protect their commercial interests. And recent geopolitical tensions have exposed more serious risks. Last year, Donald Trump sanctioned British International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan in retaliation for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email account as a result. 

Losing access or control over foreign-owned technology products could prove catastrophic for the UK economy, public services and national security. The recent loss of 300 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover, following cyber security failures, shows how essential technology is to the economy.

This power imbalance also constrains domestic policy and limits governments’ ability to address technology’s wider harms. In June, President Trump threatened to impose 100 per cent tariffs on imports from countries imposing digital services taxes on US companies, and platforms themselves have withdrawn services from countries to protest regulation. Companies are driving labour-market disruption while bearing few of its costs, and their platforms continue to amplify harmful content and misinformation.

Breaking out of this dependence will not be easy. Britain cannot realistically build or own every part of the technology supply chain. It must instead pursue strategic autonomy: developing domestic strengths while building leverage to use foreign-produced technology on its own terms. 

Manchesterism could breathe new life into this agenda. Some of this is already underway through the Industrial Strategy and Sovereign AI Unit. But now technology production, backed by strategic public investment, could support reindustrialisation – bringing opportunity to every region Democratic accountability and profit-sharing could help ensure AI Growth Zones and citizen data benefit local communities, not just technology companies. Stronger ownership rules and technical standards could rebalance power in public services. Britain could influence globally and benefit locally by forging stronger relationships with middle powers, including the EU.

The new administration has made an excellent start – announcing government backing for chip production in its first week.  But delivering on this promise will require renewed focus. The government must now define a technology sovereignty strategy, backed by clear priorities and incentives, so people across the country have a say and a stake in their digital future.

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In the end, he didn’t even show up to the count. At a cost of some £250,000 to the taxpayer, Nigel Farage’s re-election in Clacton – at a by-election he called by resigning as the area’s MP in a rambling televised address railing against journalistic scrutiny – might just prove to be the most expensive bin day in history.

The Reform UK leader appears keen to claim the result (of one of the most surreal exercises in democracy of recent times) as an uncontestable triumph; a resounding victory of the supposed will of the ‘people’ over the nebulous ‘establishment’.

Speaking overnight, at an event dubbed ‘Farage Fest’, he thanked the supporters he termed “my beloved people’s army” and declared that the voters of Clacton had “stuck two fingers up to the entire political establishment”.

On paper and in numerical terms, Farage is irrefutably the winner of this by-election. With 22,239 votes to the 9,455 secured by his only real challenger, the self-styled intergalactic space warrior Count Binface, portrayed by comedian Jon Harvey, his majority is now more than 12,700 votes. A vote share of some 62.8%, to Binface’s 26.9%, and an increase on 2024’s 46.2%. The 32 remaining candidates (of the record 34, who lined up in a somewhat hallucinogenic array of costumes) did not hit the threshold to avoid losing their deposit money. 

But those are the numbers. The vibes? Those were entirely different. The way the contest played out suggests something else is going on here; a changing narrative emerging, blinking into the daylight over Clacton Pier.

Ultimately, with all mainstream parties – as well as Rupert Lowe’s far-right Restore Britain – declining to field candidates, Farage may have fought the election on his turf – but in no sense on his terms.

Rather than operating squarely within his comfort zone, denouncing what he so often dubs “the uniparty”, Farage was forced, as former Chancellor Rachel Reeves memorably put it “to spend the summer arguing with a bin”. His critique of this monolithic blend of progressive and centrist parties, politicians and voters, alongside a slippery sense of establishment stitch-up – a liberal-woke-BBC-academia smoothie of grievance – was so much harder to land.

It’s tough to look or sound dignified under these circumstances, as any seagull could confirm, while wrestling fish and chip wrappers out of a dustbin. But Farage may face deeper trouble yet.

Clacton, when viewed through the lens of politics as two competing blocs, is an overwhelmingly right-leaning constituency; a faded seaside resort on the Essex Sunshine Coast, and home to some of the most deprived corners of modern Britain. And the voters of this bloc, as expected, came out to back him.

What today’s result also reinforces, is that dynamic operates – equally strongly – in the other direction. As we saw in Makerfield, at the Senedd, in Gorton and Denton, centrist and left-leaning voters will coalesce – eagerly – around the candidate most likely to stop Reform UK – and Farage.

Even, and national polls suggest perhaps especially, when that candidate is dressed as a waste receptacle. With some 1 in 4 voters opting to cast their ballots for Binface, the strength of opposition, even in his own backyard, is palpable…  

Then, there was Farage’s mysterious absence from the declaration stage. His lack of attendance meant he avoided – as so many political figures before him have politely endured – the mild indignity of standing on stage and exchanging pleasantries with his array of cartoonish opponents. In a peevish show of less-than-geniality, he even derided them as “nobodies”.

In the wake of former Conservative MP turned Reform UK spokesperson Anne Widdecombe’s murder and the very real prospect of threats to politicians – on all sides – Farage’s claim of safety concerns cannot and should not be entirely dismissed. All such risks must be taken seriously. But the statement from Essex Police that no candidates had been advised not to attend prompts obvious question marks. 

What’s more, looking beyond Clacton, as Reform UK will, or should, doubtless be doing today, the picture for Farage – long viewed as the Teflon man of British politics, is shifting. As expected, the Parliamentary standards investigation into whether Farage should have declared the £5m gift he received from the crypto-billionaire Reform UK donor Christopher Harborne, has been swiftly reopened.

The resumed investigation, the prospect of a recall petition, and the potential for a second by-election. Far from a clear path across the chessboard, Farage’s way remains littered with pitfalls, and hamstrung with tripwires. He is no longer facing an unpopular, even resented, Prime Ministerial opponent in a scolding, head-masterly Sir Keir Starmer.

Instead, Andy Burnham’s honeymoon period, his easy manner, positive and relaxed communication style and the ‘Burnham bounce’ in the polls, which has seen Labour overtake Reform UK, pose a very different and substantial set of challenges, as reflected in the party’s teetering performance.

Farage’s anti-immigration narrative has long proved divisive. His financial scandals, the conduct of those around him, and the profound and instinctive questions of fairness, for his carefully construed man-down-the-pub persona, could be destructive.

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