Author: Miles Donavan

“The status quo is not neutral. Every day that we fail to build enough housing, we are choosing to deepen inequality and stifle opportunity.” Christopher Worrall is a housing columnist for LFF. He is on the Executive Committee of the Labour Housing Group, Co-Host of the Priced Out Podcast, and Chair of the Local Government and Housing Member Policy Group of the Fabian Society.  Across Britain, we are living through a housing crisis of devastating proportions. Rents are rising, house prices are soaring, and young people are being locked out of home ownership while others struggle with insecure tenancies. Yet the…

While MPs continue to make up their minds on whether to support the legislation, new polling has revealed what the public think about it. The private members’ bill on assisted dying is due to have its second reading in parliament on Friday 29 November. The legislation, which has sparked intense debate in Westminster would allow adults who are terminally ill with less than six months to live take their own life at the time of their choosing. MPs will be given a free vote on the legislation, meaning they won’t be instructed on how to vote by their parties. While…

Without guardrails, PR becomes ‘anything goes democracy’ which is ultimately no democracy at all but just a child with a handgun. Trump’s win has sent shockwaves through the heart of liberal democracy, and the voting systems designed to protect it are now a burning issue. In this regard, advocates of proportional representation (PR) argue that first past the post (FPTP) could put Reform UK into power on a minority vote. In Part 1 of my exploration of PR and far-right extremism, I agreed we should push for PR as a fairer, more representative voting system than FPTP. But I also questioned PR’s…

Splitting responsibility between district and county councils creates inefficiency, duplication, and confusion Gavin Callaghan is the Labour leader of Basildon Council It’s probably a stretch to describe it as a media buzz, but it’s rare that local government makes the leap from the pages of trade journals like the Municipal Journal and the Local Government Chronicle into the Times. That the impending English Devolution White Paper has done so is testament to the scale of the change that looks set to be proposed in places like Essex. I’m hugely excited about what I’ve heard so far. It’s proof that the…

The public overestimates the amount of money being paid in Personal Independence Payments but don’t think it is too high New polling suggests that only a tiny fraction of the UK population think that benefits paid to disabled people are too high. The poll – from Savanta for the i newspaper – has found that just 12 per cent of Brits think that the payments are ‘much too high’ or ‘slightly too high’. That’s in contrast to the 30 per cent of people who think they are ‘much too low’ or ‘slightly too low’. This is despite the pubic significantly…

The news has triggered renewed calls for public ownership. South West Water received £450 million in government subsidies at the same time as it paid over a billion pounds to shareholders, it has been revealed. According to data obtained by Democracy for Sale through a Freedom of Information request, the firm has been given an annual subsidy of £40 million per year since 2013. Over that period, over £1.5bn was paid out to the firm’s shareholders in dividends. That subsidy has been used to pay the first £50 of customers’ bills. Despite this subsidy, South West Water’s bills are the…

They’re calling for the government to “reverse the increase in the fare cap so that buses remain affordable for communities across the country.” In this year’s budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves announced that the cap on bus fares in England will remain in place, but that it will increase from £2 to £3 in January. At the time, that decision was highly controversial, with thousands of people signing a petition in advance of the budget calling for the £2 cap to be kept. Now, the government is facing renewed pressure to abandon the planned increase as dozens…

The climate impact alone should make it easy for a decision-maker to reject airport expansion. But there are other good reasons too Claire James is Campaigns Coordinator at the Campaign against Climate Change For Heathrow lobbyists, such as Parmjit Dhanda, the sky’s the limit when it comes to extravagant claims of the benefits of airport expansion. Using the figure of £147 billion economic benefits, for example. This was published by the 2015 Airports Commission despite its own advisory panel warning it was unreliable. It was quickly dropped at the time by the Department for Transport, who instead used an estimate of a…

Musk promotes far-right yet again… Tech billionaire and avid Trump supporter Elon Musk is once more being condemned for promoting the far-right, this time for promoting a documentary by Tommy Robinson. Musk has faced much criticism for allowing X, formerly Twitter, to become a social media platform on which fake news and extremist content can be shared without consequence, and also previously shared fake news on the site himself. In the latest incident, he quoted an account praising a documentary by Tommy Robinson, the founder and former leader of far-right English Defence League. Shaun Maguire, the account in question, shared…

The report also calls for a clampdown on dark money in politics and a requirement for social media companies to be transparent about how they handle ‘legal but harmful’ content, including disinformation. MPs from across the political divide have come together to issue a cross-party call for Britain’s First Past the Post voting system to be scrapped. The new All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections is calling on the government to establish a ‘National Commission for Electoral Reform’ to allow citizens, alongside experts, to recommend a fair and democratic replacement for First Past the Post. Campaign group Labour…