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The Spectator

Evening Blend

By Lucy Dunn

‘Uh oh. There’s trouble in paradise as Reform UK has suspended four councillors on Kent county council after a leaked video revealed a rather lot of infighting in their ranks. Councillors were captured complaining about ‘backbiting’ and being ignored by leader Linden Kemkaran – formerly of this parish – who fumed that they should ‘f***ing suck it up’ if they didn’t agree with her decision making. Oo er.’

What surprises me – and it may yet happen once the dust settles on these initial suspensions – is that the foul mouthed leader of the Reform group and Kent County Council, Linden Kemkaran, hasn’t herself been formally censured by Reform.

Despite having the video evidence before them, the council leader currently remains unpunished for one of the greatest taboos – using foul language in a formal meeting, bullying at least one member in that meeting by muting their microphone and loosing control of the meeting by allowing members to talk over one another.

Perhaps the illicit source of the video means that Reform’s rules don’t allow such evidence to be used. However, should any member who attended the meeting, lodge a formal complaint with the council’s Standards Board, Reform will find it difficult not to respond formally.

However, Reform has a wider issue to deal with than one bunch of incompetent civilians playing at being elected members.

Since the recent local government elections, there are eleven other county councils under the control of the Reform Party. Kent County Council was supposed to be Reform’s flagship council.

If this is the best Reform can do, then they are in danger of seeing their current lead in the polls go down faster than it went up.

I agree with virtually everything Ben is saying. However, if we accept that Brits are either too lazy, or unwilling to reduce their stand of living to that of a migrant worker – working anti-social hours, on minimum wage, long hours, remote work locations, maybe using own transport they can’t afford to run, or shuttled about in a grubby mini-bus, then we have to accept that Labour’s new approach will have longterm impacts.

Where will the shortfalls in these workers come from if not from other countries? The list of challenges currently faced by the care sector and the staff they employ, is pushing it towards a cliff edge now.

So how will Labour even begin to up-skill the current cohort of the unemployed to fill the void, unless the pay and conditions are somewhat better than being unemployed?

For those calling this a reset, I’d also what about those that are already here and have absolutely no interest in integrating. Indeed, those in the various versions of the Islamic community seem intent on the longterm subjugation of the British nation into whatever their version of a community is.

What is Labour’s plan for dealing with this issue? Future controlled immigration will have no impact on this already growing threat to our way of life. Ensuring the new arrivals can speak the language just makes it that bit easier for those with ill intent to advance their cause.

Even if you accept that the majority of immigrants that come here bear us no ill will, that still doesn’t mean they want to become integrated. Even when they’ve been here for 10 years there’s every chance they’ll still be getting by with the most basic understanding of English and remaining almost exclusively within a community of their own kind.

If the birthrate within the native population in this and other European countries continues to remain stagnant, or even turn negative, immigrants may well get to inherit the UK and other European nations by default.

Tuesday May 13 2025

by Ben Kentish

Brits avoid the jobs migrants are doing – and I have the proof

Brits don’t seem to want to be bricklayers, or fruit pickers, or HGV drivers (Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty)

Immigration crackdowns are like those portraits above the 10 Downing Streetstaircase: every prime minister has one. You would need to go back many years to find a British leader who hadn’t at some point looked down the lens of a camera, adopted an expression somewhere between pained and angry, and promised to take back control of our borders.

But while every recent government understood the political advantages of pledging to reduce immigration, none have actually managed to do it. This mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality is one of the main reasons why trust in Westminster politics is at an all-time low.

When Sir Keir Starmer insists this time will be different, he needs it to be. Unlike his predecessors, Starmer is facing the threat of a hard-right, anti-immigration party snapping at his heels. In Reform UK, there is now a natural outlet for voters’ anger about immigration. The stakes have been raised: the success or failure of Labour’s immigration plan will play a big role in determining whether Nigel Farage ever becomes prime minister.

If the politics behind the immigration crackdown makes sense, what about the substance? There is much in Labour’s plan to commend. The focus on integration, in particular, is long overdue.

Britain has become a country where too many communities live alongside each other but not together. It is completely reasonable to ask that people coming to live here learn English to enable them to become part of society. The Government is also making it easier to deport foreign criminals, stopping more people who have broken the law from claiming asylum and lengthening the time someone must have lived in the UK to gain the right to stay permanently. All of this makes sense.

But at the core of Labour’s plan is a fundamental flaw – one that could amount to another enormous act of British self-sabotage. The Government is cracking down on people coming to the UK to do what Whitehall wonks deem, often wrongly, to be low-skilled jobs, before any plans are in place to replace them. That is a potential disaster in the making.

It is obvious why ministers have these workers in their sights: immigration has soared in part because Britain’s economy is so dependent on foreign labour. In England, for example, a staggering 21 per cent of all payrolled employees are non-UK nationals, and the number of low-skilled workers arriving has shot up in recent years. Stem that tide and you will succeed in cutting overall migration.

There is just one, very large problem: who will do the jobs instead? Ministers claim that their plan to cut the number of low-skilled worker visas and completely end the hiring of foreign care workers will force employers to train more British workers instead. The suggestion is that people coming to the UK to look after our sick and care for our elderly are somehow stopping British workers from doing so.

Hardly. The truth that few of our leaders dare admit is that foreign workers are often doing jobs that, for all sorts of reasons, British people simply do not want to do. Young people are not spending a fortune on university degrees to fulfil their dreams of becoming care workers. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t seem to want to be bricklayers, or fruit pickers, or HGV drivers.

If they did, those jobs would already be over-subscribed. Instead, despite a massive influx of foreign workers, there remain 131,000 vacant jobs in social care and 40,000 in construction. That they are not being filled is proof that the Government’s assumptions are wrong: there are already plenty of jobs in those sectors like care for British people who want them. The problem is that not enough do.

How, then, will the Government make these jobs more attractive to British workers quickly enough to plug the holes left by their decision to stem the flow of foreign workers? Astonishingly, it seems to have no idea. Instead, ministers are absolving themselves of responsibility by demanding that individual sectors come up with “workforce strategies” explaining how they will recruit more UK workers by paying them more and improving their working conditions.

Quite how care agencies only just making a profit, or councils already facing impending bankruptcy, are going to find the money to give their workers a hefty pay rise is a detail that ministers do not seem to have bothered to concern themselves with. Instead, they are making matters even worse by refusing to exempt social care from their national insurance hike, as they were being loudly urged to do.

The impact of all of this could be profound. While most of us may not be directly affected, we will all feel the reverberations. We will notice when the carers we or our loved ones rely on are no longer there, or the tradesmen we need are nowhere to be found. We will suffer when the staff coming here to keep the NHS running find that they can no longer get work visas to work in Britain. We will know it when our local pub or café or bar is forced to close because they simply cannot find enough staff.

Even if we could find unemployed Brits to fill all the jobs currently being done by migrant workers, would we really want to? I would much rather my elderly or disabled relatives were cared for by a trained, experienced and skilled foreign carer than an unemployed graduate who had no interest in the job.

Caring is a vocation – vulnerable people have the right to be looked after by people who know what they are doing and doing it for the right reasons. Lower quality care is not a price the elderly and disabled should have to pay, just so the Government can say it has cut net migration.

We know all this, instinctively. We see how reliant our health and care sectors are on people who weren’t born in Britain. It’s why most people tells pollsters that they while they want immigration to come down, they do not think this should apply to care workers. Polling for the Migration Observatory found that just 12 per cent of people think it should be made harder for care workers to come to Britain. Fifty-four per cent think it should be made easier.

It is very possible that, come the next election, Starmer will be able to boast that he, unlike so many of his predecessors, has reduced immigration. But at what cost? If the overall migration numbers are down but the crisis in social care has deepened even further, and shortages in construction stop us building the homes we need, will it have really been worth it?

These are the trade-offs that politicians must have the courage to be honest about. Cutting immigration is a legitimate aim. But doing so at any price, even if it harms public services and makes people’s lives worse, is not what voters want. The Government may be about to do it anyway.

Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is former Westminster editor

Copied from Daily Telegraph online

Janet Eastham 02 May 2025 5:34pm BST

How Reform’s Doge units will tackle council waste 

Nigel Farage, whose party has won hundreds of seats at local elections, vows to run rescue plan based on Elon Musk’s US scheme

Nigel Farage has pledged to establish a mini-version of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in every council under Reform UK control.

The party’s leader announced to slash spending as his party surged to success, seizing multiple county councils in the local elections.

“I think every county needs a Doge,” Mr Farage declared on the BBC’s Today programme on Friday.

“I think local government has gone under the radar for too long.

“We’ve seen the high-profile cases of Croydon, of Thurrock where they’ve gone bankrupt, Birmingham indeed where they’ve gone bankrupt.”

Mr Farage, whose party has won hundreds of county council seats, vowed to launch a rescue plan modelled on the initiative backed by the Tesla owner, who he met for the first time in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in November.

Mr Musk, who recently announced he is stepping back from his government role, claimed the initiative saved more than $10 billion (£7.5 billion) a week since the US president entered office, but this claim has not been supported by evidence.

Nevertheless, Mr Farage is keen to follow in these footsteps.

“We look at the millions a year being spent in many cases on consultants, we look at money being spent on climate change, on areas that county councils frankly shouldn’t even be getting involved in,” he said.

On top of consultants and net zero, Reform’s mini-Doge units will also axe diversity roles, working from home, and inefficient pothole schemes.

“So we want to get the auditors in, look at long-term contracts, ask why they’re signed up to, for example, pothole providers that aren’t doing the business. And a change of culture, no more work from home, increased productivity from staff,” he said.

Among their victories, Reform won majorities on Staffordshire and Lincolnshire county councils, both previously Tory-held, and ended four years of coalition rule in Durham.

Mr Farage said that council staff working on diversity or climate change initiatives should be “seeking alternative careers” after Reform took control in Durham.

”I would advise anybody who’s working for Durham county council on climate change initiatives or diversity, equity and inclusion or … things that you go on working from home, I think you all better really be seeking alternative careers very, very quickly,” he said.

In February, the government’s spending watchdog warned that almost half of councils in England risk falling into bankruptcy.

The National Audit Office said that rising pressure on public services and delays to spending reforms meant town halls were in an “unsustainable” financial position.

The Telegraph has carried out a deep dive to understand what a Doge under Reform could mean in practice.

Ban on council employees working from home

Calling time on council home-working may be Reform’s easiest win – albeit five years late.

Data obtained by The Telegraph in December reveal that 97 per cent of councils still let staff work from home at least one day a week, with nearly a third allowing three days a week, years after lockdown ended.

Local authorities where home-working is rife suffer from low productivity and routinely cut public services, such as public lavatories and free car parks, to cover mounting shortfalls.

Council bosses at Labour-run Rother district council, where more than 95 per cent of employees can work from home for three days a week, recently proposed charging motorists to use free car parks, and has already closed several public lavatories.

Meanwhile, staff at Broxbourne borough council were admonished in Parliament by Lewis Cocking, the Tory MP for Broxbourne, who told a select committee that constituents were being let down by the local authority’s working-from-home practices that left staff almost uncontactable.

A joint MIT and UCLA study last year found an 18 per cent productivity drop for home workers compared to office staff. Earlier Stanford research put the decline at 10 to 20 per cent.

But if Reform’s Doge units could end working from home, it might not only lift output – it could also directly save money by ending the practice of taxpayers’ footing the bill for council workers’ utility bills.

Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted by the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) revealed that councils spent nearly £700,000 on staff’s home internet expenses between 2019 and 2023.

The Labour and Liberal Democrat-run North Hertfordshire council topped the list with £136,578 paid since 2021, while Newcastle city council spent £101,410 since 2019.

Figures obtained by the campaign group also revealed that 11 councils alone had spent nearly £450,000 on their employees’ home heating since 2019.

Diversity and inclusion spending scrapped

Axing equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) schemes is another possible route for Reform to save on council costs, with spending on diversity officers nearing £52 million over three years.

According to the TPA, councils more than doubled their outlay on EDI jobs, rising from £12 million in 2020-21 to nearly £23 million in 2022-23.

Labour-run councils were among the worst offenders, with the bankrupt Birmingham city council hiring an assistant director of community services and equality, diversity & inclusion salary of about £103,000 in 2022.

Calderdale council in West Yorkshire also came under fire after hiring a “staying well team manager” – one of 40 similar “wellbeing” roles across 10 authorities, costing taxpayers at least £1,149,441 between them.

Councils have even faced costly legal challenges from staff unwilling to toe the ideological line.

Votes are still being counted for Cambridgeshire county council, which last year was forced to pay £63,000 in compensation and legal costs to Elizabeth Pitt, a social worker, after disciplining her for criticising a colleague’s “gender-fluid” dog.

The dachshund, named Pabllo Vittar after a Brazilian drag queen, attended a council Pride event in a pink tutu to provoke a “debate about gender”.

Ms Pitt, a lesbian, and her colleague were both reprimanded for criticising this gesture and raising concerns about trans people in women-only spaces.

In West Sussex, Arun district council – which has said it could be bankrupt within five years – spent £398,616 building 14 gender-neutral toilet cubicles in 2021-22.

Following the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, the council may even need to spend more money undoing this renovation.

Meanwhile, the TPA has also uncovered councils splashing out on LGBT+ rainbow symbolism.

Haringey council spent £22,000 on three rainbow-painted pedestrian crossings. Other schemes in Kingston and Hertfordshire brought the total to £29,000.

A surge in Reform support in Hertfordshire has contributed to the Tories losing control of the county council, with votes still to come in.

Since 2019, more than £230,000 has been spent nationwide on the diversity-themed street furniture – enough, campaigners pointed out, to pay for 109,000 free school meals.

Potholes filled while wasteful repair contracts axed

It has also transpired that Mr Farage’s act of planting flowers in a pothole in the lead up to local elections was no mere stunt.

Last month, the Clacton MP joined a man in a pink high-vis vest to fill several craters with blooms – highlighting what he called a “monstrous” national embarrassment.

“This should embarrass every county council in the country,” Mr Farage said in a widely shared TikTok clip.

But behind the viral video lies a serious policy pitch. Mr Farage has vowed to scrap wasteful pothole repair contracts that are failing motorists.

Earlier this year, The Telegraph laid bare the scale of the crisis with our Fix Our Potholes campaign, which revealed that councils are leaving roads in disrepair at record levels, despite soaring maintenance budgets.

Portsmouth city council, run by the Liberal Democrats, is among the worst performers. Its spending on major roads has nearly tripled over the past decade – up from £3.7 million in 2014-15 to £10.3 million in 2023-24. Yet the condition of its network continues to deteriorate.

In the year to March 2024, the council logged 284 potholes on major roads – a 37.9 per cent rise on the previous year. Despite this, it spent £345,000 per mile – the highest cost in England and seven times the national average of £49,000 per mile.

Mr Farage claimed that Reform’s Doge units will audit existing highway repair contracts and demand answers from councils paying above the odds for second-rate work.

End to costly net zero projects

Slashing green initiatives could be another quick victory for Reform’s Doge units.

Days after Sir Tony Blair criticised Labour’s net zero stance – comments on which the former prime minister later rowed back – Mr Farage has targeted local authority climate schemes, arguing that councils “shouldn’t even be getting involved”. More than 80 per cent of councils have declared climate emergencies, with many pledging to hit net zero by 2050.

If Reform follows through on its pledge to cut these projects, there are plenty of schemes that Mr Farage could end – beginning with adult cycle training.

The TPA found councils have spent more than £2 million teaching adults how to ride bikes since 2021. FoI data show 88 councils funded more than 31,000 lessons in three years – with Wigan, Lambeth, Redbridge and Plymouth among the highest spenders.

Some eco schemes are not only costly, but also impractical. The TPA also found that residents under Blaenau Gwent, Cotswold and Merthyr Tydfil councils have been told to sort waste into no less than 10 separate bins and bags.

Blaenau Gwent, with the UK’s highest average band D council tax in 2022-23 (£2,099), requires separate disposal for household refuse; food waste; paper; plastics and tins; glass; cardboard; household batteries; textiles; small electrical items; and green waste bags.

Long-term contracts and consultants audited

Reform is also promising to end the use of costly consultants and audit long-term contracts to ensure that the public is receiving value for money.

Last month, The Telegraph revealed that the bankrupt Labour council at the centre of Birmingham’s bin strike chaos spent more than £53 million on external consultants between 2020-21 and 2023-24.

Local authorities are increasingly paying private sector consultancies to do work for them, arguing that they do not have capacity themselves.

In south London, Southwark council spent £31 million on consultants and agency staff in less than 10 months – £6.2 million more than it did over the same period last year.

The advisers were brought in to work on a scheme called “Southwark 2030” and a school closures programme – despite growing public concern.

In Croydon, where the Conservative minority-led council has issued multiple Section 114 bankruptcy notices, £6 million was spent on three consultancy firms last year. One contract alone cost £1.8 million for less than six months’ work.

But Reform may need to look at the high salaries of council’s full-time employees if it wants to truly maximise spending.

The TPA found that at least 3,906 council employees received total remuneration of £100,000 or more last year – up 26 per cent on the year before.

Of these, 1,092 earned more than £150,000, and 262 exceeded £200,000 – a record since the campaign group began compiling its “Town Hall Rich List” in 2007.

• Reform UK, 
• Local councils, 
• Local elections 2025,
• Nigel Farage,
• Net Zero

Archie Bland

In depth: ‘Nigel has a long track record of not being able to handle anyone else stealing his limelight’

Copied from – the Guardian Online

11 Mar 2025

It gives depth to all the thoughts I’ve been having about the likely outcome for Reform from this battle of egos being played out in the press. I’m not actually a Reform supporter at present; it’s too much of a one man band at present for my taste. I do however, agree with so very much of what that one man has to say and what he has said about the state of this country.

I do not like some of the company he keeps, nor do I like to hear him speak in glowing terms about certain world leaders, but there can be no denying the fact that Nigel Farage has shaken British politics to its foundations.

However, it now seems it will turn out to be more of a tremor than an earthquake and when the dust settles the only thing to have fallen will be the Reform Party.

————

It’s quite hard to summarise the fight between Rupert Lowe (above) and Nigel Farage, but let’s give it a go. Lowe – the MP for Great Yarmouth who shot to prominence after Elon Musk’s thoroughly surprising endorsement of him as a replacement for Farage – gave an interview to the Daily Mail last week in which he warned that it was not clear whether Farage’s “messianic qualities” would distil into “sage leadership”, and said that he would not be standing for Reform again unless his leader got better at delegating.

Then Reform said it was investigating two complaints from female employees about bullying in Lowe’s offices, that he had threatened violence against the party chair, Zia Yusuf – and that the latter was with the police. This rolled on over the weekend, culminating in the KC appointed to investigate allegations against Lowe denying his claims that she told him she was shocked at the process, and Lowe threatening a libel suit against the party – saying that the bullying allegations were not about him personally.

Lowe’s proximity to this particular bin fire is not especially surprising to those of us who followed the fortunes of Southampton football club during his chairmanship, sad to say; still, it’s difficult to reach a definitive view on whether his interview was retaliation for the investigation, the investigation was retaliation for the interview, or a bit of both.

What’s perhaps more significant is what it suggests about the state of Reform. “It would be a massive embarrassment to lose one of your five MPs,” Giles Dilnot said. “People are entitled to ask how you would manage 120 MPs if you got that far. It is not unrecoverable – but it is much more than a little local difficulty.”

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What is the fight really about?

As well as the allegations about Lowe’s conduct, which he denies, the disagreement here boils down to a question that faces any upstart party: how to professionalise. Reform says that Lowe’s alleged conduct suggests he is not a fit person to be an MP, and that the process he is facing is evidence that it is a serious party; on the other hand, as Eleni Courea writes in this useful analysis piece:

Lowe and his allies argue that his treatment proves his point: that Reform UK is entirely under Farage’s thumb, a protest movement directed by one man rather than the professional political party he promised to turn it into.

Dilnot spoke to Reform sources for two excellentpieces on the state of the party and the row over Lowe, and suggests that a central issue is the position of Yusuf. Part of his job is to try to build a proper base for the party to campaign from in future. Ben Habib, who left the party not long ago after a similarly interminable saga, told GB News: “Zia Yusuf has systematically been … displacing people and in the process rubbishing their reputation.”

Dilnot said: “In professionalising, they have to do away with the enthusiastic amateur, and try to put people who know what they’re doing in positions on the ground. Yusuf has put a lot of noses out of joint in trying to do that. But Nigel has supported him every time.”

That process is difficult in part because it may make the rank and file question whether they have enough of a say, Tim Bale said. “If you look at what motivates people to go out and be active, it tends to be people quite involved in the life and soul of the party at a local level. That has to come from them feeling they have some meaningful input into the party’s direction.”

Bale recently conducted research that suggestedReform members are more likely than other party members to post about the party online – but less likely to go out leafleting. “There is a tradeoff,” he said. “It has benefited Farage to be able to make quick decisions. But you need boots on the ground – especially in local elections, which are essential to creating a sense of momentum.”

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Is Farage’s ego a problem?

It would be hard to deny that Farage has been the dominant force behind his movement’s success for the last 20 years – but there are those who think that to take the next step, Reform has to grow beyond him.

“Nigel has a long track record of not being able to handle anyone else becoming popular and stealing his limelight,” Dilnot said. “He does not like rivals, and he says that he knows he has to build a broader team, but it remains to be seen whether he will do it.” In his piece for ConservativeHome yesterday, Dilnot reported sources saying that Lowe’s growing profile had been the subject of several conversations at Reform HQ.

Of course, every party has its internal divisions. But while Reform has matured, there is little sense yet that its factions have much to do with policy positions – like the European Research Group and the One Nation group in the Tory party, for example – rather than personalities.

“They still have an extremely leadership-focused view of how the party should be run,” Bale said. “It’s very difficult for people to set out positions that differ strongly from Farage. Other parties are broader churches.”

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Is there a policy dimension here?

Well, sort of. Lowe, perhaps mindful of Elon Musk’s view, has appeared willing to entertain the idea that Reform should court voters who might be sympathetic to the outright extremist Tommy Robinson. Lowe has said that Farage wants to “silence” his calls for mass deportations. He has also claimed not to know why Robinson was in prison – he should read First Edition – and said that although “not right for Reform”, he deserves“credit for the things that he’s done”.

But it’s not clear whether that view really has enough purchase within Reform’s membership to make it a viable wedge issue for Lowe. “Whatever you think about Farage, he has managed to detach people’s enthusiasm for his views from the extreme end of the spectrum,” Bale said. “It would be a pretty small minority within Reform who want to see them move towards Robinson.”

“Nigel is still wildly popular,” Dilnot said. “But the more nationalist element are pretty unhappy with him.” There is a group who like Lowe, too, even if it doesn’t tend to override their devotion to the leader: “Nigel’s biggest problem is the people who do like him, but also think Rupert’s great.”

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So where does all this leave Reform?

There will certainly be those who say that some rats-in-a-sack style fighting within the party is unlikely to bother voters. And it’s true that the question of Lowe’s fate is unlikely to be on many people’s minds by the time of the next election.

But if the row doesn’t end quickly, and with the party publicly united behind their leader, it is likely to metastasise into a useful attack for the Tories and Labour – the idea that Farage is a captain with a very fine tricorn hat, but no ship.

The other big question may feel almost incidental – but it is likely to be the vital one in the long term. “There is a worry, which Rupert Lowe hinted at, that Nigel doesn’t have the appetite to do the detailed policy work,” Dilnot said. He pointed to a recent policy launch promising to reduce energy bills at the same time as legislating to put energy cables underground rather than on pylons, a vastly expensive undertaking,

“One of the major attacks that the Conservatives and Labour want to land is that this is policy written on the back of a fag packet outside the pub,” he added. “That isn’t entirely true – there are people within Reform who want to build a more serious agenda – but they have a long way to go to prove it.”

Tom has summed up perfectly everything I observed about the way our seat of democracy operated for as long as I was involved in local government. Those who aspired to climb the greasy poll from local government, learnt quickly the Westminster way of business, doing their former colleagues no favours on their way up.

One thing that has struck me more than anything about most of those reaching high office, is their apparent disdain for the place they came from.

Eric Pickles was one those most obviously hostile to local government once he became the minister for local government.

He killed off pensions for councillors. I’m not criticising that one way or the other, but it was a perfect example of his general approach to local government and its councillors in particular.

In many ways I can see why he would feel that way about councillors. Many that I have encounter aren’t worth the basic allowance, let alone a pension at the end of their term. However, this is where my criticism of people like Pickles lies. When presented with the opportunity to get councillors to do a better job, he took the spiteful route of removing a benefit. He could so easily have required a major improvement in performance, delivery and results in order to qualify for pension rights.

He could have done something about the training that is offered and that some attended but others don’t. Within my own council, I attempted more than once to get a change to rules for the entitlement to full basic allowance to be dependent on attendance at least six key training sessions. Planning, even if they were not on that committee, health and safety, lone working, data protection, local government finance.

None of these were so lengthy that anybody needed to take time off work, or lasted any longer than any other council meeting. Yet too many councillors avoided them like the plague.

So yes, I can see why ex-councillors hold little regard for those they came through the ranks with. However, that means they should be doing their utmost to change things, not just allowing things to continue and probably now get worse as unitary authorities become the norm for every area of England.

This now means that we will all be ruled by a very small cabinet of ambitious local politicians sitting above a gaggle of untrained wannabes, all playing their own version of Traitors week in week out.

Note. The LGA has a number of different training courses available that council/group leaders can nominate the chosen few to attend. this piecemeal approach to councillor training does their local taxpayers no favours.

2 January 2025

Opinion

Tom Nicholson

This country’s most important political 

pundit? Claudia Winkleman 

Good afternoon,

Dig out your hooded cloak, cut yourself a flat fringe and turn up the melodramatic cover version of “Mr Sandman”: The Traitors has returned for its third series. I’m a huge fan of its backstabbing, plotting and gleeful campiness, and have worked out my own game plan for victory. No doubt I’d have a meltdown at the roundtable and get myself banished immediately, but a man can dream.

Ian Dunt has gorged on all the international versions too – New Zealand’s is particularly choice – but for slightly more hifalutin reasons. For him, The Traitors is a window into how our politics works, and how to tell when we’re being lied to.

“Watch the programme carefully. You will see the same technique over and over again. A Traitor is suddenly in the spotlight at the round table. All eyes are on them. They have to explain themselves. And then, instead of doing so, they simply turn the spotlight on someone else. They do not answer questions, they just raise them in a different direction. This technique works nearly every time. It is quite hard to prove your honesty. But it is astonishingly easy to encourage people’s suspicions in an unrelated area.

“There’s a lesson here in how to spot political lies. ‘The Traitors’ teaches us to look out for those who whip up the crowd against outsiders, who use their popularity to escape accusations of deception, and who respond to scrutiny by raising unrelated suspicions about others