I have now spent some time trying to suppress my urge to call this piece ‘How a small group of people managed to persuade the government to sacrifice the wildlife, farmland, communities and the most vulnerable in Devon to further their own interests.’ Obviously, that’s overly histrionic, possibly inaccurate and definitely not helpful, but it […]
You can move power out of Westminster. You can’t leave Westminster’s problems attached to it. There aren’t many politicians talking about rewiring Britain. Most promise to spend more, regulate more, cut more or tax less. Andy Burnham is offering something much more fundamental. His argument is that Britain won’t become more prosperous by asking Whitehall […]
The 30by30 Delivery Plan isn’t a plan, and it won’t deliver 30by30. In its dying days, Starmer’s government has just published a new plan for how it will protect and restore 30% of land for nature in England: its ‘30by30 Delivery Plan’. The problem is, it’s not a plan, and it won’t deliver 30by30. It […]
Britain has time to change its voting system before the next election, a position Andy Burnham has long championed. He should use that time. “There is a piece of history that every defender of first past the post should know. It is the story of exactly how the Nazis rose to power, and it is […]
Let’s face it: a lot of us are worried, aren’t we? We can see that there’s so much that needs to be fought, fixed and/or changed, whether it’s the climate emergency, or the return of fascism, or wars, or wealth inequality at the global level. Or perhaps you are kept wake at night by anxiety […]
Nigel Farage is not a man to do things by halves. Seven unsuccessful attempts to become an MP, including once being beaten by a man dressed like a dolphin, until Clacton elected him to parliament in July 2024. Five houses paid for with funds from who knows where and now the subject of investigation. Not […]
When people in the southwest think about poverty, their concerns often lie close to home. The cost of living crisis, increasing food bank use and housing pressures are all visible realities across the region. There is another aspect to poverty that can feel very distant from our everyday lives in the southwest: the extreme poverty […]
I remember how, on one of the several anti-Brexit marches in London we joined with Devon for Europe, a very well-dressed elderly upper-class lady near us could be heard chanting – in a very posh voice – “Bollox to Brrrexit!”. She was evidently enjoying the protest, being a bit of a rebel for once! On […]
Let me make this one personal, because, for once, it is. When the papers report that Reform UK plans to target EU nationals living in Britain, they are not writing about a faceless statistic. They are writing about me. And my husband. And three of my four children. So let me introduce us to Mr […]
What are the issues that concern you most? For me, it is the climate and nature crisis. I am increasingly frustrated that this is not at the forefront of political debate in the UK, even now that the National Emergency Briefing on climate and nature has made it clear that climate breakdown is no longer […]
“Ponies could be put to death” shrieked the Times, using language that conjures some barbaric, medieval ritual punishment. ‘Keir Starmer’s incompetence has allowed the Dartmoor ponies to be led to slaughter’ howled Victoria Atkins (Conservative MP from Horncastle, 190 miles away). Honest Bob Jenrick (Reform UK, MP for Newark, 260 miles away from Dartmoor), and […]
Why did the Telegraph put “Food is too cheap” in quotation marks when Zack Polanski never used those words? You’d be forgiven for thinking, when you saw this Telegraph headline, that Zack Polanski had said the words “food is too cheap” in a recent speech he gave. He didn’t. I’ve listened to the 30-minute speech he gave to the […]
JD Vance called for “righteous anger.” Nigel Farage demanded “pure, cold rage.” Elon Musk reiterated what he said to anti-migrant marchers last year: “you either fight back or you die.” They seem to have got what they wanted in Belfast yesterday. Masked men pulled migrants and non-white residents onto the street and set their homes […]
The future of justice in the UK hangs in the balance this week. This comes against a backdrop of the long custodial sentences and disproportionate use of remand to detain anti-genocide and climate protestors in the UK, and the increasing restrictions on peaceful protest in legislation and the conduct of trials—as outlined in the recent […]
A violent attack. A short video. A name, ideally. A few big accounts willing to post before they know anything. Then thousands more people repeating it as if the facts are already settled. That’s how fear pollutes our politics. We’ve seen it in real-time after the horrific knife attack in Belfast. A man was seriously […]
I am feeling nervous. I am standing in the town centre of Newton Abbot with fellow community activists from a group called Common Ground. We’re all powerfully concerned with democracy and with how it is working (or not working) in our local communities. As a group we have no allegiance to any of the political […]
I sat and watched Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, and I want to tell you what it looked like from where I am standing. Not from a green leather bench. From a desk, across from real people, every single working day — people on benefits, and every one of them struggling. So when I watched Kemi […]
The US is seven times wealthier than Britain by GDP, but it spends 115 times more on elections. Their deluge is coming our way. Having lived in the States and written about American politics for years, the amount of money involved in British donation scandals can sometimes feel surprisingly small. The hard reality for us […]
As misleading headlines go, this Express headline has to be one of the worst. The figures show almost the exact opposite, so how did the Express get it so wrong? To be fair to the Express, the “shocking new study” they refer to in the subheading was a study released by the Centre for Social Justice, which also […]
An invitation from the Totnes Make Votes Matter team! Totnes Make Votes Matter (MVM) group are participating in the national MVM’s action day ‘Wake up, Westminster!’ on Saturday June 13. We will be meeting at 11:00 at Vire Island, by the old bridge very close to The Plains (TQ9 5DW). Our plan is to do a banner drop […]
Sit down. This one is going to make your blood boil. In 2024-25, the Trussell Trust handed out 2.9 million emergency food parcels across the UK. Over a million went to children. One parcel every 11 seconds. Up 51 per cent in five years. Add the 1,172 plus independent food banks Trussell doesn’t count, the […]
Introduction and Summary Every time someone in British politics proposes funding public services properly, the bond market’s reactions get wheeled out like a loaded gun. Spend more on the NHS and the markets will panic. Hire more teachers and investors will flee. Suggest running a larger deficit and the warnings become apocalyptic: the UK, we […]
In June 2026, it will be a full ten years since that fateful referendum led to Brexit! National Rejoin March (NRM) plans to mark the occasion in two ways. First, a team plans to walk from London to Brussels, where they will hand a book of messages from supporters to the EU Parliament. Second, the […]
Farage wants us out of the ECHR. Here is what that actually means. Nigel Farage and Reform UK want the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). They sell it as a quick fix for immigration. The truth is much, much bigger than that. Let me lay it out in plain English. […]
A lot of people have asked me, after my last few posts: “All right Claudia — what do we DO about it?” Honestly? There is no magic answer. But here is what works, and what doesn’t. Plain English, no fancy words. ✅ What actually works:
I wrote about how Reform UK’s rhetoric is being written, theme by theme, in the same key as the speeches my country spent eighty years apologising for. I did not expect to be back this quickly with another instalment — but here we are. Last Sunday — May 3rd, 2026 — Reform UK’s home affairs […]
I grew up in a country where every history lesson, every memorial, every awkward family dinner eventually circles back to the same uncomfortable question: how did ordinary, decent people let it happen? How did a respectable European democracy slide, in barely a decade, into something that ended with six million Jewish lives extinguished, millions of […]
A few days before an election, Reform are backtracking on their promise that they will be able to turn away all refugees immediately at the border, and have instead decided that they will be put into concentration camps in areas that Reform don’t run. (Presumably Reform UK have failed to consider the cost or logistics […]
How a misleading headline turned NHS guidance into a culture war myth This Telegraph headline is not true. The subheading is not true. The first paragraph is not true. And I don’t believe any of this was a mistake… The story The Telegraph broke this story about diversity and inclusion training delivered by the Lancashire NHS Trust with materials originally published in […]
I’ve lived in the same part of the world in the south west of England for all of my life. I am rooted into this place, and its familiarity is comforting and has always sheltered me in tumultuous times. This little corner of Devon has always felt like a safe haven. And yet I am […]