Witch Hunts, Welfare Cuts and Whitehall in Manchester

Reform wants disabled people working for £1.50 an hour, racism is becoming normalised and Britain’s media has forgotten that its targets are human.

Good morning, all.

I hope everyone’s Sunday has started really rather brilliantly, especially considering that we no longer feel like we live in Satan’s arsehole the whole time. Everyone, along with me, will have noticed that the weather has gone to a delightfully cool, normal temperature.

I am particularly grateful for that because this has, so far, been the hardest summer to actually stay cool that I have ever experienced, including the ones I grew up with in South Africa.

A lot of you guys have messaged me over the month of August, a bit concerned that I have not been posting as much as I usually did, which, to be fair, was prolific.

The reasons for my relative absence are multifactorial, as these things ever are, but largely came down to a combination of me turning 40, me hitting my three-year writing-and-shouting-at-the-internet anniversary, and, generally speaking, a feeling of being completely gatvol¹ with politics.

The big thing that’s happened, obviously, in the last month, just under a month ago, is that I entered my 40s. I jokingly said that I needed to figure out what my midlife crisis was going to be. I suggested a couple of things, among them a sleeve tattoo, which, by the way, I did get. It looks fantastic. It features a bear, if anyone was wondering.

But I digress.

What my midlife crisis actually turned into was a bit unplanned. On the 30th of July, which was the three-year anniversary of me opening my Twitter account and becoming this weird shouty voice on the internet, a man pretending to be a bear and shouting at politicians.

I was going to do a big post about how much I’d achieved. One issue with that being that I had deleted my Twitter account because Twitter is obviously a rancid cesspit of toxicity that I just can’t abide anymore.

But, looking back at the time I’ve been doing this, I realised that I had not actually taken a full break from writing since that point. For three years, I have been writing, commenting and engaging nonstop.

I realised that that’s probably not normal. In any job, if you had to tell somebody that you had not taken a break in three years, they would have taken you into the wellbeing corner, put the leave booking app in your hand and told you to book some time immediately.

That is ultimately what I did.

I essentially created a couple of weeks of absence, though you’ll have noticed that I did write a little bit throughout. That’s just because there were still things that happened and things that were worthy of my attention. Largely speaking though, I was just trying to recalibrate.

My life for the past three years has been waking up anywhere between 4.30 and 5.30 in the morning, making a cup of coffee and sitting on my sofa with my fur daemon.

I would read through everything that happened the previous day, after I’d already read through all of that the previous day anyway, and listen to two podcasts, generally speaking The News Agents, The Rest Is Politics and a few others like Page 94 and Oh God What Now².

I would then have all my notes. I’d start writing at about 7.30 and, in between work and everything, complete a draft and generally publish as early as I possibly could.

Then I would start going through comments. I was able to do that through work because I am exceptionally good at multitasking, but I also realised that it had become a bit of a largely unpaid 15-hour day because I would usually not turn off until late in the evening with trying to keep abreast of what was happening on social media, and in general being completely glued to my phone.

That is not healthy. I have to admit that, and a lot of you guys, to be fair, over the last couple of years, did tell me: look, be careful. Don’t get pulled in too deep.

And I did get pulled in too deeply.

Anyway, I’ve taken August, for the most part, to be off, and it has been surprisingly very good. I did tell myself: okay, do one post a week, and I’ve generally been sticking with that.

The big thing I’ve noticed during this self-imposed vow of semi-silence is that, because I’m not consuming news at the rate that I was, my stress levels have dropped precipitously. I really do not feel nearly as anxious as I previously did.

I did spend three hours this morning reading the news, catching up on everything that’s happened, reading the analysis and going through everything that happened this week, which we’ll get to.

But it wasn’t nearly as fraught and frantic as it’s been for the past few years, and I wasn’t constantly finding links to other things that were happening. That could be a good thing. That could be a bad thing. Ultimately though, it has helped to calm my mind and my nerves as well, which were run taut.

Now, I have to stress, this post this morning is in no way to say I am giving up on politics or writing or that I’m some born again “I just don’t read the news” dickhead - I don’t think I could do or be those things if I tried. Politics is far too important to me and important to all of us because it affects so much of our lives.

However, I am going to try, going forward, to be a bit more responsible with how I not only consume the news, but how I convey it, and what I write about as well.

Because, as you will know, one of the most tragic things out of the past two weeks has been what happened to Professor Jason Arday from Cambridge. I was shocked and appalled.

By virtue of not being so incredibly engaged with the news as I have been, I didn’t follow it very closely, however, even from that distance, it immediately felt like this was a witch-hunt in full swing.

It was, of course, a very helpful witch hunt to especially the right wing and the right wing press because they had the perfect target. They had someone who was an ethnic minority, who was found to have allegedly done something wrong, who was in a high-profile position and who was, for better or worse, in the public eye, in public life.

And they went for him. They went for him so, so hard.

I do have to say here that we don’t know the cause of death for Jason Arday, so I don’t want to speculate on that.

But, the point remains, a man lost his life. He lost his life on the back of intense, insane media scrutiny, with hundreds of articles being written about him, attacking his character, attacking his history and attacking the entirety of his life over hundreds of articles, columns and opinion pieces over the course of just a few days.

Even while it was happening, I did not engage with it in the way that I may have previously because I felt it was icky. I felt this was going so wrong, so quickly.

Then, obviously, we got the news towards the end of last week that he had passed away. Again, we don’t know what happened there.

Ultimately, it made me look at the media ecosystem in the UK and ask: what is going on here? It is just such a toxic, unregulated, dangerous environment - and that’s not even speaking of social media, which is, of course, what has traditionally been my bread and butter.

I think there’s a question of responsibility there as well. And just a question of humanity. Even with the most right-wing person possible, what I do, and what I should try to do, is remember that there’s a human being behind there.

They may be misguided. They may say awful things, but there is still a human being who may be loved by someone, who may be someone’s child, someone’s mother, father, daughter or friend.

There just does have to be that measure of humanity before we go into this massive, vicious pile-on that we saw happen with Jason Arday.

There were a couple of other things that happened this week where I really did have to pull myself back from instantly jumping on my old MacBook and tapping out of heat. I’ll touch on them very briefly.

Reform’s Reforms.

The first of which is, Reform’s welfare reforms. That was delivered, not ironically, by Robert Jenrick, a man best known for painting over children’s murals because we wouldn’t want traumatised refugee children to feel welcome or calm or anything like that.

So it was entirely apt that he was the one doing the announcing.

The thing that I noticed most about this, for lack of a better word “policy”, is that this was, first of all, very punitive.

Yes, the welfare bill is growing at a rapid pace. Total social security spending, welfare spending, in 2025–26 is due to be £322bn.

What wasn’t gone into was that around £177.7bn of that goes to pensioners, and rightly so. No one should be saying that pensioners should not get a pension, and pensioners should get a better pension at that when we consider our European standing.

Working-age and children’s welfare is £145bn. Reform’s rhetoric around welfare, however, has treated the entire total as though it were unemployment support.

Health and disability benefits cost about £77.1bn this year, or are projected to. Again, this includes children and pensioners. DWP’s 2026 evidence pack puts working-age incapacity benefits at around £32bn and working-age extra-costs benefits, mostly PIP, at £25bn.

I do have to, again, explain to everyone in the back PIP is not an unemployment benefit. It compensates for additional disability costs. It is not means-tested and it can, very importantly, be claimed while working.

Cutting PIP, really, in no way or form, can be counted as getting people back to work without a completely separate pack of evidence.

Looking at the numbers, as of March 2026, there were about 3.5 million people on UC Health. Of these, about 2.8 million, or 78%, have been assessed as having limited capability for work and work-related activity. Another 430,000 had limited capability for work, and 330,000 were awaiting a decision with accepted medical evidence.

Now, 43% of UC Health claimants were aged 50 or over, and only 7% were under 25.

This really does completely destroy that picture that these people who are claiming benefits are just feckless young adults who are doing nothing.

Working-age PIP/DLA covered about 3.34 million people in 2025–26. Around a quarter had someone receiving Carer’s Allowance or the UC carer element, meaning that the severe cut could also destabilise unpaid care.

That just sets the picture of who Reform are looking at here.

They are not looking to catch a “scrounger” who’s sitting on benefits. They are looking at somebody who is dependent on that money to actually survive.

I’m not even going to go into a massive amount of detail for the sums because, as with everything Reform does, it was just completely made up, but one thing I do want to touch on is the 20 hours a week that people will be expected to work, at approximately £1.50 per hour per placement.

On top of this, the work that is being done would be under the condition that the person doing the work would not be treated as an “employee”, and would, by doing so, not have any access to any of the current employment rights and protections that everyone else has.

On top of that, these people will be working for councils and they’ll be doing council work, which means that they will be taking jobs from people who are actually doing those jobs. Which, to my mind, doesn’t seem to help unemployment very much - it just replaces people who are employed with what is, in essence, indentured slavery.

It’s utterly stupid, and it’s not something that we, in any way or form as a country, should ever get behind.

Sadly, however, the country being as it is, there are people who will be gagging at the bit to get these reforms from Reform.

I don’t think this “policy” will particularly survive any sort of contact with reality, it very rarely does, however, that also depends on us not letting Reform get into power.

Racism is Finally Noticed

On that front, there has been some interesting news in the form of Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, who has recently actually said, or at least acknowledged, that we are becoming more racist and more misogynistic, saying that:

“I think we’re seeing that in terms of attitudes towards women, and I think we see that in terms of attitudes around racism.

My family came to this country from Ireland. Nobody questions my identity because I’m white – but apparently it’s fine to call into question the identity of people with a different colour skin and question whether they’re British. I find it disgusting, and we are normalising racism.”

There is something important here, that quite a senior Labour figure has, what feels like, broken ranks with Labour to go: listen, there’s actually a problem here.

The significance of this is completely overshadowed by Labour’s last couple of years of using migrants as scapegoats, just as the Tories did before them, and painting migration as an issue to be solved instead of a consequence of piss-poor planning and investing in this country for nearly half a century, but that just might be me.

Migration numbers have been high, but they have, again, been high for a reason.

There was a huge influx of non-EU migrants who came into the country between 2020 and 2023. That’s because we needed them. They were replacing what we had through the free movement that we had with the EU.

Everybody should know my stance on migration by now.

Yes, the numbers have been high, however, the fact is that we will probably need relatively high numbers of migrants coming to the UK when we take into consideration that we have a very low birth rate, at about 1.4 babies per woman, where it should be 2.1 just to sustain the population.

We are declining in natural population growth, and last year, we had the first year where deaths outstripped births. We as a country are rapidly heading for a massive population emergency in the 2030s and 2040s, and part of the solution is going to be migration.

It’s not the only answer, mind you, because the issue is multifactorial, not the least of which the fact that there needs to be a helluva lot more investment in making it possible for people to take time off work to have children, not just women but men as well.

There needs to be massive reform in the way that we think about how we fund children, having kids and having families, which, up to now, just hasn’t happened, which is evident in the fact that we still treat children and young people as a burden on society and groups to be sneered at instead of uplifting and helping to achieve their full potential.

I digress again, but the point stands that, while Bridget Phillipson saying, “Yes, we have a racist problem,” is a good thing, it’s a step in the right direction.

Is it big enough? Probably not, and especially not if we’re not talking about the massive, systematic changes that are desperately needed in society.

No. 10 in the North

Then, just to my last point, the thing that I really, really wanted to write about this week, but held myself back on, was Andy Burnham’s plan for Number 10 in the North. I will say that I do like the plan, but I do also worry that it’s just shifting Whitehall to Manchester³.

You actually have to devolve a significant amount of power to these regions to self-govern and make decisions themselves.

I don’t know if you would know this, but traditionally, the English have not been very good at devolving power.

Generally speaking, they tend to like holding things in Westminster and Whitehall. But I might be misunderstanding things. That’s just the sense I’m getting.

If this is a change that he wants to see, it’s going to be a significant one. It’s going to need significant investment. It’s going to need significant political capital - and I do hope he has it.

On that note, a couple of people have asked me why I’ve not written about Andy Burnham very much yet. The key word there is “yet”, because I don’t really know who the man is.

He came into power in the parliamentary recess, where everything goes a little bit weird anyway. A lot of people say things, but actual things happening become less because there’s no legislation being passed. There’s no real parliamentary work happening. Not until at least September.

At the moment, what we have is an Andy Burnham show, where he’s saying a lot of lovely things⁴, but nothing is being tested in Parliament. Nothing is being tested in debates.

Everything is being played out in the media, and Burnham can be very entertaining, but it doesn’t actually translate into anything.

I am holding fire on saying exactly what I think about Andy Burnham until I can see whether he can pass legislation, whether he can really put some weight behind the changes that he wants to bring in, and whether, in the Budget that John Healey is going to be doing on 28 October, there is actual funding for these things.

I’m sceptical about a couple of things. I like a couple of other things. But, ultimately, it is a wait-and-see game.

Now, I have gone on long enough, and I feel like I did just want to do this because I haven’t written in a while, but I hope that everyone understands that the time I’ve taken off hasn’t been because I’ve lost any sort of interest in politics, or that I don’t care about my community.

It was just time for me to have a break, and it has been a very welcome, very overdue break. The plan is I’ll be back fully in September, and I’ll be fully fired up.

I just wanted to end this ramble by saying thank you to everyone for the messages, for the constant support and for actually being such a great community.

I definitely couldn’t have done any of this without the thousands of you guys who have been following me, supporting me and sending me messages.

Just a huge thank you for that.

On that note, wishing everyone an absolutely fabulous weekend, and I will chat with you guys next week.

1. Gatvol - to be fed up so much your rectum is literally filled to bursting.

2. If there was ever any doubt that I was a raging lefty, I suspect my listening habits would put that to rest - at least according to Reform voters.

3. Sidenote here - I have spent a lot of time over the past year in Manchester, and it is, without a doubt, my favourite city in the country.

4. And a few rather stupid things, but that’s for a whole post on its own.