On September 1, Andy Burnham stepped up to the despatch box for the first time as Prime Minister, promising a different way of doing politics. This week brings one of the first opportunities to show how different it will be. The Representation of the People Bill returns to Parliament carrying some worthwhile reforms – and […]
All across the country there is a pattern of local democracy being overridden in the name of things we allegedly need. Lately, I am awoken to the scrapings of a giant digger illegally working a few yards from a site of special scientific interest, with features of unique ecological importance, that is supposed to be […]
It must be clear by now that the far right populists and the Epstein class will do ANYTHING to win and hold on to power. They will flout domestic and international law, commit genocide, start wars to distract from the Epstein files, cheat, grift, bribe, lie…and engineer stunts like the Moroccan Ceuta ‘invasion’ to fan […]
The annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival took place in rural Dorset, over the weekend of 17-19 July 2026. As over the last two years, Dorset for Europe were there, with a stand in the ‘martyr’s marquee.’ We’re happy to report that our stand was very well attended on both Saturday and, particularly, on Sunday, when entry […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We read all too frequently of policies which threaten to reduce social provision in Trump’s USA, and there are certain politicians who would do the same in the UK. We probably remember Thatcher’s 1987 assertion that ‘there’s no such thing as society’; her policies ensured a drift away from social provision in the general sense, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Reform UK claims to speak up for downtrodden workers. Apparently that includes mega-rich crypto billionaires. Westminster is ripe with scandals these days, but The Guardian just uncovered a whopper. Cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne reportedly gave Farage an undisclosed £5m personal gift just before he announced he’d run for his seat in Clacton in 2024. That tax-free gift […]
Peter Thiel’s company now admits they want to govern for us. Will we let them? Peter Thiel’s Palantir drew a lot of attention last weekend for a tweet that reads like the monologue of a cartoon villain. In a long post, they endorse the arguments made in The Technological Republic, a 2025 book written by the company’s […]
As politicians put on a patriotic pantomime, a whole generation feels alienated from a country that no longer seems to work for them. St George’s day (April 23) generally marks the start of a peculiar season in British politics. Debates over English identity and patriotism are re-ignited and rehashed anew. Politicians play tug-of-war with a […]
Péter Magyar is inheriting the ruins of a democracy Orbán spent sixteen years hollowing out. Will Britain learn Hungary’s lesson the easy way or learn our own the hard way? Viktor Orbán conceded defeat on Sunday 12 April after sixteen years, after four consecutive supermajorities, after rewriting the constitution and redrawing the maps and packing […]