Dear Editor,

With regard to the article The great heat pump paradox: more heat, less progress, while a great deal has been written about the economics of heat pumps from the point of view of the consumer, it is worth adding some perspective from the point of view of an installer, by comparison with a registered gas installer.

First, I'm afraid, a minor quibble. You state in the article that "By contrast, gas and oil boilers are technically simple". This is not really the case. They are an established technology, but they are an extremely dangerous technology if not correctly installed and maintained. I don't imagine that you have any other piece of technology in your house for which you have a separate alarm specifically to warn you when it goes wrong and tries to kill you. For this reason, the RGI and Gas Safe qualifications are quite technical and difficult to obtain.

However, the economics of heat pumps from the point of view of the installer or engineer do not work out as well because (a) there is a far smaller installed base and (b) they do not require the same mandatory annual checks and frequent maintenance as a gas or oil boiler. This means that most of the money for the heat pump engineer comes from installing new units, whereas for an RGI/Gas Safe engineer the bulk of their income will come from servicing and maintenance.

Both will be looking at installing between two and four new units a month, but the gas engineer will probably service 200-400 units per annum. You can see that, as things currently stand, it does not make sense for an RGI/Gas Safe engineer to get into the heat pump business.

You can contrast this with what happened in the Netherlands, where the government subsidised additional training for all of its gas technicians in air-to-air heat pumps - what we know in the UK as F-gas certification - and also significantly subsidised installations of these units without requiring the removal of any existing gas or oil boiler, allowing them to act as additional rather than complete replacement heating.

This built up a skilled workforce and a large installed base of the new technology, and reduced actual gas demand because, for most of the year, an air-to-air heat pump can provide most of the heat requirements of a Dutch household.

I hope this helps explain some of the slow uptake of heat pumps in the UK. There is also more to say about the UK preference for air-to-water over air-to-air, but that is a different topic.

Duncan Jones
Caistor, Lincs

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The post Letter: Why the heat pump sums don't add up for installers first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

East Anglia's biggest shake-up of local government in half a century has been agreed, challenged in the courts, withdrawn, reviewed by a new prime minister - and now restarted, all within seven months.

In March, ministers decided how councils across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex would be reorganised after months of competing proposals and public consultation. Then Reform UK took control of all three county councils, all three launched legal challenges, and Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street with his own ideas about devolution. By September the decisions had been withdrawn and the national programme was under review.

Now local government reorganisation (LGR) is moving again. But councils which had expected to disappear in 2028 will survive for another year, the structures chosen in March are no longer guaranteed, and public money is being spent on transition work for councils which may never exist. After seven months of stops, starts and legal challenges, East Anglia could yet end up with much the same council map it started with.

What is being reorganised?

Much of East Anglia still has two-tier local government. County councils provide services including social care, education and highways, while district, borough and city councils deal with services such as rubbish collection, housing and planning. LGR would replace those two layers with fewer single councils, known as unitary authorities, each responsible for the full range of council services. The aim is to simplify local government, with residents relying on one council for all their local services, while reducing costs by removing duplication.

Councils across the region spent much of 2025 developing proposals, followed by government consultations before ministers announced decisions for Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex in March. What happened after May's local elections reopened decisions which had appeared settled.

Reform councils go to court

Reform won control of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk county councils in May. Within weeks, all three were pursuing judicial reviews of the government's decisions. In Suffolk, the county council had proposed replacing all six existing councils with one county-wide authority, while the five district and borough councils had jointly proposed three. Ministers chose three.

Suffolk County Council HQ with Michael Hadwen inset. Photo by Paul Downey via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

The new Reform administration challenged that decision. Council leader Michael Hadwen said Suffolk could not be forced into a "costly and chaotic reorganisation on the basis of a flawed process" and later promised to "fight tooth and nail" to prevent the county being divided. By the end of June, his cabinet had voted to continue with a judicial review intended to halt LGR altogether, rather than simply secure its preferred single-unitary model.

Hadwen later said Reform had been "clear before the election" that it opposed LGR and would take all possible steps against it. However, East Anglia Bylines examined all ten Reform campaign leaflets from the Suffolk election held in the crowdsourced ElectionLeaflets.org archive and found no mention of local government reorganisation. Nor did Hadwen mention it in his first speech as council leader, when he set out the new administration's priorities. His decision to make stopping LGR a defining issue therefore appears to have emerged some time after the election.

The legal action divided the council. Labour's Martin Cook warned against spending taxpayers' money on litigation, but Hadwen dismissed opposition criticism: "Opposition parties are entitled to their views, but they did not win the election. We did."

Norfolk and Essex join the challenge

Norfolk's March decision would have created three authorities - Greater Norwich City, East Norfolk and West Norfolk. After Reform took control of the county council, its new leader David Bick said: "We could not stand idly by and watch the government dismember our county." Norfolk joined South Norfolk Council in challenging the decision.

Essex County Council also went to court over ministers' choice of five unitary councils across Essex, Southend and Thurrock. Ten district, borough, city and unitary councils had submitted that proposal, while the county council had backed three. After Reform took control, leader Peter Harris described the chosen scheme as "ill-thought, expensive" and said the council would resist it. By the end of June, all three Reform-controlled East Anglian county councils were pursuing legal challenges to decisions made only three months earlier.

Then the prime minister changed Image by Number 10 via Wikimedia Commons (OGL3)

The Starmer government continued with LGR despite the challenges, announcing decisions for another 14 areas as late as 16 July. Andy Burnham became Prime Minister four days later. On 7 September, Communities Secretary Angela Rayner announced a rapid review and withdrew the decisions already made for Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Proposals elsewhere, including Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, were also paused.

The government said updated legal advice had raised questions about whether the process was sufficiently robust. There had been no court ruling that the original decisions were unlawful, and ministers stressed that withdrawing them was not an admission that they had been wrong. But the review went beyond the legal challenges. Rayner told Parliament that Burnham had asked her to look again at LGR and said ministers would consider whether the proposals aligned with "the priorities of the new Administration and the new Prime Minister".

Hadwen called the withdrawal a "resounding victory for Suffolk" and said residents could "breathe a sigh of relief". Less than two months later, however, it became clear that LGR itself was not going away.

Back to the drawing board

Local Government Minister Jim McMahon announced the first results of the review on 29 October. Five areas elsewhere in England have moved to the next stage, while ministers continue considering the remaining proposals. Some decisions are expected by Christmas and all areas should know their fate by early next year.

All the original proposals remain under consideration. Suffolk could still have one or three unitary councils, while Norfolk's eventual structure could contain one, two or three. Essex is again awaiting a choice between the competing proposals, including the three-unitary model backed by the county council and the five-unitary arrangement ministers chose in March.

Hadwen is now "keeping our options open", while Suffolk Green group leader Andrew Stringer described the announcement as "basically resetting the clock". Cook pointed out that retaining Suffolk's existing system is not among the options: "Keeping things as they are isn't one of the options on the table."

Cambridgeshire was already waiting

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough are slightly different because ministers had not reached a final decision there before Burnham ordered the review. Proposals would replace Cambridgeshire County Council, its five district and city councils and the existing Peterborough unitary authority with either two or three new councils. A decision had already been delayed before the September review created a further wait.

Lucy Nethsingha. Image by Robert Alexander via LDRS

South Cambridgeshire MP Pippa Heylings described the process as a "merry-go-round", while Cambridgeshire County Council leader Lucy Nethsingha warned that uncertainty was making financial planning, recruitment and procurement more difficult. Across all four areas, elections to existing councils will now take place in May 2027. Elections for their replacements are planned for May 2028, with the new councils taking over on 1 April 2029.

Delay comes with a bill

Councils have already spent money preparing for changes which were expected to happen sooner. Areas where new authorities had previously been announced will now receive half of the £900,000 transition funding allocated for each proposed council, based on the original decision regardless of the eventual outcome. Suffolk will therefore receive £1.35mn for the three councils announced in March, even if ministers ultimately choose something different. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, where no decision had been made, will receive £500,000.

The review has now concluded that LGR should continue. What remains unknown is whether ministers will reach different conclusions from those made in March - or whether, after a year's delay and additional expense, some or all of East Anglia will end up with much the same council map.

Reorganisation is not devolution

LGR and devolution are often discussed together, but they do different things. Reorganisation changes which councils provide existing local services. Devolution transfers powers and funding currently held by central government to larger regional strategic authorities. The Budget significantly expanded that fiscal devolution, with mayors due to receive a share of business rates from 2027 and a proportion of income tax receipts from 2028.

Norfolk and Suffolk are due to share a mayoral strategic authority, while Greater Essex will have another. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough already have a combined authority and elected mayor. These bodies work across larger areas on issues such as transport, skills, economic development and major infrastructure.

For Burnham, who spent nine years as Mayor of Greater Manchester before entering Downing Street, that distinction may prove particularly important. His government has made clear that it intends to go further on devolution than its predecessor.

What that could mean for East Anglia - and what powers its new mayors might eventually have over people's everyday lives - is another question we'll explore in a follow-up article.

This article is based on a several pieces by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, compiled with assistance from AI tools and edited by East Anglia Bylines.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Democracy They planned to rewire local government. Now they've pulled the plug by Stephen McNair 12 October 2026 Democracy Local government in the East: what now? by Stephen McNair 22 June 2026 Democracy Transforming local government: what next in the East? by Stephen McNair 8 October 2025 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post East Anglia's council shake-up is back on - but a year later first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Loud noises and bright lights from fireworks can cause animals stress, especially those sensitive to noise. Bonfires also pose a threat to wildlife such as mice and hedgehogs, which hide within log piles to seek shelter or to hibernate. Fires and fireworks release carbon and chemicals into the atmosphere, and often litter is left behind.

The Trust encourages people to attend organised displays where possible to reduce the numbers of individual households contributing to these problems.

Essex Wildlife Trust's top tips

If people choose to celebrate at home, they are urged to take the following precautions:

1.  Prepare or move your bonfire on the day you are planning to burn it, so animals do not have the opportunity to take shelter within. You can also place chicken wire around the bottom to prevent animals entering.
2. Consider a bonfire alternative such as a raised fire pit. 
3. If you find a hedgehog in your bonfire, put on a pair of gloves and carefully remove it, taking with you as much of the vegetation as possible. You can keep it in a cardboard box with ventilation holes until after the displays and then release it into a vegetated area.
4. Light the bonfire from one corner to give animals the chance to escape, and ensure the bonfire is completely put out once finished.
5. Aim to use environmentally friendly fireworks and avoid using them near trees and hedges to help protect nesting birds from disturbance.
6. Make sure to pick up your litter following the celebrations.

Image by Jon Hawkins, Surrey Hills Photography. Used with permission Wise advice

Andrew Armstrong, Senior Ranger for Essex Wildlife Trust, says: "As we approach the fireworks season, please be mindful to protect wildlife. For example, when moving pallets or pieces of wood, please do check for hedgehogs or small mammals sheltering under the wood. If possible, please relocate these animals to a safe area.

"Also, please consider alternatives to candle-lit sky lanterns. These lanterns can descend and cause fires on local nature reserves."

Darren Tansley, Wilder Rivers and Protected Species Manager for Essex Wildlife Trust, says: "Hedgehogs and dormice have been killed in Essex whilst sleeping in woodpiles created for bonfires so it is best to restack your fire on the day and to check for any animals.

"We would recommend attending an organised display to contain the effects to fewer locations. Everyone wants to enjoy Bonfire Night and keeping both ourselves and our wildlife safe is possible if we just take a few precautions."

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More from East Anglia Bylines Activism Saving hedgehogs starts with small steps close to home by Kate Moore 8 February 2026 Environment Vandalism, fly tipping and fires: Why Essex nature reserves need your help now by East Anglia Bylines 8 July 2026 Environment An amazing Essex wildlife story with a David Attenborough connection by Jenny Rhodes 8 May 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post Remember, remember… to keep wild animals safe this Bonfire Night first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Media responses to the budget have generally focused on a few headline items and on the fact that there were few big ones. But there was a record number of apparently modest policy announcements (the Institute for Government counted over 90). Some may be symbolic indicators or first steps in a longer-term direction of travel; some address small issues which matter to particular groups. Here we identify ten which our readers might have missed: in no particular order.

Devolving taxes

As part of its major initiative to transfer power out of Whitehall, the Government intends to devolve funding from central government to mayors and strategic authorities, moving local government funding from Whitehall grants toward locally retained tax revenues. This will represent the biggest shake-up of local government finance for many years.

The Government expects that all of England will be covered by devolution agreements by the end of 2028 and the new Fiscal Devolution Roadmap lays out the Government's plans to do this.

To provide incentives for local leaders to help businesses to start and grow, from 2027, 20% of business rates will go to mayors and a share of income tax receipts will be added from 2028.

There will also be £285mn of Good Growth Funds in 2027/28, comprising £165mn for mayoral areas and £120mn for places moving toward devolution or strategic authority status. From April 2028 mayoral and strategic authorities will have access to a new £1.5bn borrowing facility.

A new focus on prevention

Short term pressures often lead to cuts in programmes whose impact is not immediately obvious. Public health programmes, for example, may seem less urgent, but if they reduce demand for much more expensive hospital services they can result in major savings.

To protect such programmes, in the 2027 Spending Review, there will be a new Preventative Departmental Expenditure Limit - a protected budget category for prevention, recorded and measured by Departments and separated from day-to-day spending. This has the potential to transform how Departments manage their budgets.

Strengthening social housing

The Government is committed to a major expansion of social housing. To get more council homes built, the budget extends cheaper borrowing for councils and makes all land sold to social housing providers VAT-free. An additional £1.5bn is being allocated to the Social and Affordable Housing Programme, taking the total government commitment to council housing to £40bn. 

Funding the energy transition

The transition from a fossil fuel to renewable-based economy raises many issues, including the retraining of workers.

A new Energy Wealth Fund, based within the larger National Wealth Fund, is designed to address this. It will invest in renewable energy and low carbon infrastructure across the UK, support the green transition, attract private investment, create skilled jobs and build a longer-term national asset.

The Fund has been given start-up funding of £2bn, which will grow as North Sea oil and gas tax revenues are added. This means that the revenue from current oil and gas exploitation will fund the transition, rather than simply being swallowed by the Exchequer.

Better management of electricity

The transition to a predominantly electricity-based energy economy faces challenges in how and where to generate electricity and how to distribute it. Projects often cause public protest and not all approved projects deliver real benefits.

So, in future, the Government will only buy and build new electricity generation projects when they lower bills and when they can connect to the grid.

GB Grid will be used to build cheaper, faster grid connections and the Government will reform the complex web of institutions that govern the system. 

The Government plans to reform the way electricity prices are set. Because all electricity prices are currently set through an auction process, British electricity prices are set by the global gas market, although renewable electricity is much cheaper to generate than electricity from gas-fired power stations. The Government plans to replace the auction process for renewables with fixed price contracts. This aims to provide a stable and predictable financial base for renewable generators and reduce prices for consumers.

Managing data centre development

Data centres are economically important and Slough is now the second largest data centre complex in the world. But they are politically contentious.

The new British Data Centre Covenant aims to tackle the political concerns. It will offer strategically important data centres faster grid connections and planning support in return for commitments on community benefits, water use, energy costs, jobs and UK AI supply chains. Where necessary, developers will be allowed to build on-site generation while they wait for grid connection. The Government also intends to ensure that sensitive UK data is held in the UK and not on servers exposed to foreign control.

Supporting women in business

Women face a variety of barriers in the tech sector, with only 2% of venture capital investment going to businesses founded by women. A study for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) estimated the loss to the economy at £16bn.

The Government's Women in Tech Taskforce has made recommendations on how to rectify this, and the Government is launching several initiatives to support female business founders.

NewTech Forward and Inclusive Investment standards will promote more inclusive employment and investment practices, alongside a new scale-up women's programme to help women founders overcome barriers to fundraising and growth. The Tech Forward Standard is being developed by the Government and its Women in Tech Taskforce to address discrimination, harassment and barriers to career progression in the UK tech sector.

Supporting young entrepreneurs

There are young people with good potential business ideas but who lack the finance to start up.

A new pilot scheme, the Young Entrepreneurs Allowance, will provide successful applicants with support towards their living costs during the first year of their business.

Strengthening the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation (GCDC)

In order to overcome the constraints that have limited growth in one of the UK's most economically significant regions, GCDC was established in July as a statutory body covering Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire. Its "infrastructure first" growth model gives it powers over land assembly, infrastructure delivery and financial/investment activity.

The budget gives the Development Corporation access to substantial funding. This includes new powers to borrow against its assets and repay debt from land value uplift and development contributions. There will be a £215mn boost for the Corporation itself, comprising £105mn in repayable finance and £110mn in capital grants for housing and infrastructure. The repayable element is effectively a form of public borrowing/investment that GCDC would be expected to repay as development proceeds.

The funds can be used for high street and town centre regeneration; improving transport links and local infrastructure; new housing; and local business, innovation and skills-related growth priorities.

Tackling violence against women and girls

The Government laid out its ambition to halve violence against women and girls in 2025. 

The budget announced a new Misogyny Prevention Fund which will provide £15mn over three years to prevent misogynistic attitudes and improve outcomes and safety for women and girls. The fund will support projects such as mentoring for young people; workplace training; communications campaigns to improve women's and girls' safety; prevention work in schools, workplaces and communities.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Democracy They planned to rewire local government. Now they've pulled the plug by Stephen McNair 12 October 2026 Energy Data centres: it's complicated, and it's not a left/right issue by Max Terzza 9 September 2026 Environment Who should we grow food for? People or animals? by Jenny Rhodes 23 April 2025 Cambridgeshire Is this how to manage the growth of Cambridge? by Stephen McNair 5 August 2026 Business Ten things you probably missed in the budget by East Anglia Bylines 3 November 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post Ten things you probably missed in the budget first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Losing your mobile phone is disruptive enough. Lose your wallet at the same time, away from home, and suddenly many of the things you take for granted become impossible. You have no access to money, no means of payment, no maps or messages, and no easy way to contact anyone for help. When both were stolen from me near King's Cross station at the end of September, I discovered just how complicated getting back to normal could be.

A day of two halves

30 September began well enough. I travelled by train from Cambridge, where I live, to the Bedford Square studio of Bloomsbury Radio, for a recording in connection with the 26 project honouring the bicentenary of University College London. UCL student Aleksandra Grebe and I were interviewed about our contribution to the booklet 26 firsts.

After the interview, I walked back to King's Cross through sunlight and thoughts of early lunch. My mobile's map guided me to Euston Road along streets and squares I wasn't that familiar with. At the King's Cross concourse I made eagerly for Upper Crust, opening my leather shoulder pouch in search of the wherewithal.

My wallet wasn't there.

My mobile phone wasn't there.

Snarl.

Still in the pouch were my ticket back to Cambridge, my railcards, my pensioner's bus pass, and the keys to my bike and to the house.

I found a seat near Platform 9¾ and parked myself to take stock of things.

Right. So I could get home without any difficulty.

King's Cross concourse. Image by Alan Stanton CC BY-SA 2.0.

I knew we had some leftovers in the fridge. They could make up for the fact that Upper Crust was now out of bounds.

I scribbled in my notebook a list of things to do.

• Report theft @ KGX
• Report theft of cards to bank
• Report theft of EH & NT cards

I wasn't sure how to report the theft at King's Cross. An information kiosk advised using the phone number 60106. That would have to be by the home landline.

I made the journey home, as per the original intention, by train and bike. It was a troubling experience to ride past Mill Road Co-op and know that that, too, was now out of bounds.

Delayed lunch was ham sandwiches, biscuits, and chocolate. I hope that came after reporting the theft.

The first stage was to pick up the phone and ring that 60106. An automated voice told me the network didn't handle local numbers without area codes.

I remembered reading, a few days earlier, John Elworthy's account in East Anglia Bylines of Cambridgeshire Police and its new application of artificial intelligence to the reporting of non-urgent crime. I found it online. It asked where the incident had happened, and what was the postcode. From Google Maps I found the postcode for King's Cross station, and found it again from King's Cross's own website when the police site asked for confirmation. At some point the app advised me that I was reporting an incident that had occurred outside Cambridgeshire Police's patch.

I forget whether I made the report to the Metropolitan Police or the British Transport Police. Later emails indicate that both are involved. See it, say it, sorted.

Then the report to the bank, to stop and replace the cards. I suppose I made it by phone. I have neither scribbles nor emails from it, but judging by later events it went smoothly.

My wife Clare was away at the time, in Brussels. I told her of the theft in a WhatsApp message from my laptop at 17:25.

Ordering the replacement phone was an evening job, done via my laptop. I specified that delivery should be to the named UPS pick-up point, a shop at the other end of the village.

A new mobile phone

WhatsApp on my laptop was fine for a fortnight. Then it logged me out and told me I would need a mobile phone to log myself back in.

I'd had no news of the replacement mobile on order. I looked for 'Fairphone' in my email. A message that I'd missed on Friday 2nd told me that delivery was expected on Tuesday 6th, and offered a 'Track' button. Clicking on this brought me the information that the package had been left at the front door on Tuesday 6th, but the photo bore no resemblance to our doorstep.

A phone call to the address I'd expected to collect from confirmed that they were in that line of business. I went and asked. They referred me to next door, and pointed south. Next door was a Chinese mini-market, who knew nothing of the matter. I asked at the original shop again. This time they pointed north: an Indian mini-market, who likewise knew nothing of the matter. My third enquiry at the original shop led to the explanation that the delivery must have been to the shop on the south side that was actually next door but one, the shop beyond the Chinese mini-market. This place had a UPS sign outside. I went in and was encouraged by the resemblance between their counter and the UPS driver's photo. I asked about my parcel, showing a print-out of the information I'd had. My parcel was the second thing they produced.

My next port of call was an EE phone shop. They fitted a SIM card that would allow me to keep my number. I spent the afternoon setting the new device up, with a back-and-forth of verifications between the new mobile and the laptop. Everything about the new mobile seemed that little bit more complicated and harder to control than on its predecessor.

I ended the day with WhatsApp installed on my new mobile, but I couldn't read all the messages there. Also, attempting to link my laptop to WhatsApp was frustrated by differences in terminology between the two devices. Eventually, WhatsApp had had enough of my attempts and advised me to come back later.

Next day, I switched the new mobile on with immediate frustration. Everything I tried to do with it was blocked by pages announcing that it had contracted varying numbers of viruses and claims about sites I knew I hadn't visited. There were offers to purge it of these things if I clicked the button marked 'Install'.

Evidently I'd misclicked at some point and brought down one or more rogue apps. Did this explain the previous day's waywardness?

Attending to this myself would probably make things worse. Best take the phone to EE again.

Pending that, I found the manual online and printed it out.

EE confirmed my suspicions. The man behind the lectern recognised the rogue apps straight away. They'd probably come in, he said, when I downloaded a QR code reader. Such things were not needed: the phone's camera should be able to read QR codes. Learn something new every day.

New cards and wallet

The replacement bank cards arrived a week after the theft.

Wallet and pouch. Author supplied.

Emails from milk supplier Milk & More, saying our regular payment to them had failed, continued after I tried registering the new card with them. I bought milk, fruit and bread using (with invitation) the stash of coins Clare keeps on her chest of drawers.

After another email from Milk & More, I had another go at entering the new card details. The update was immediately rebuffed, with advice to ring the bank.

A call to the bank, lasting 48 minutes, found no reason for the failure of the card update. They advised me to ring Milk & More, who offered to bundle home-delivered eggs into our regular delivery.

Then two sets of emails from Milk & More took different sides. One accepted the payment update, one rejected it. Since resolved by switching to the other card.

I've done this much to prevent a future theft: my new wallet is small enough to hide in a zipped pocket in the pouch. I bought it before the new cards arrived; Clare produced her card for our joint account to pay for it.

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The post See it. Say it. Sorted. But it's not that simple first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Two floors above the streets of Norwich, a balcony has become an award-winning mini wildlife haven containing 140 plant species. Harriet Festing and her husband Stephen have created a garden overlooking Norwich Cathedral. It attracts red and white-tailed bumblebees, several species of butterfly and bats flying overhead.

You don't need a large garden to create a haven for wildlife - or indeed a garden at all. With some imagination, balconies, window boxes and other small outdoor spaces can provide food and habitat for wildlife, while the landscapes around us can provide the inspiration.

Local inspiration Image by Claire Naylor, © National Trust. Used with permission.

For Harriet and Stephen, that inspiration comes from East Anglia.

"In creating a garden, we wanted it to be both beautiful and attract wildlife," Harriet says. "Since the flat is two floors up, plants must be in containers. We had to check with the architect when we moved in that the balcony is weight bearing - which it is.

"Two years on, the garden is home to 140 plant species, most of which are native.

"We've grandly divided the balcony into ecological zones: woodland, which is anchored by a Scots pine, field maple and rowan tree; wetland, pond and bog gardens; grassland; and a coastal zone.

"It does reflect our local environment as we go walking along the North Norfolk coast and in woodlands. It also aims to attract different species of wildlife."

Gardening at height

Creating a garden two floors up brings challenges that gardeners at ground level don't necessarily face. Everything has to grow in containers, the weight the balcony can safely support is important, and plants in pots can dry out much more quickly than those growing in the ground.

That was particularly pertinent this year. The UK experienced its hottest summer on record, while East Anglia endured some of the most extreme heat. Maintaining such a varied container garden through those conditions is impressive in itself.

Harriet and Stephen's efforts have earned them first place in the Wild about Wildlife category of the National Trust's Sky Gardening Challenge, which encourages people living in flats and apartments to green balconies, window boxes and ground-floor spaces.

This was the first year the competition had been held nationally, following a pilot in Manchester in 2025. Nearly 10,000 people signed up for the wider challenge and almost 150 entries were submitted, with judges visiting the 15 finalists before selecting winners across five categories.

Small spaces, big potential Image by Claire Naylor, © National Trust. Used with permission.

One balcony may be tiny, but add them together and the potential space for nature becomes considerable. Research from the University of Manchester estimates there could be more than 430,000 balconies across England and Wales, covering 177 hectares - roughly the area of 250 football pitches.

Victoria Holden, founder of Greater Manchester community organisation Northern Lily and one of the competition judges, says they were looking for people who had overcome the particular challenges of gardening at height.

"We were looking for people who had taken on the challenges that gardening at height can bring, who had gone that extra mile, however small their space, and learned something along the way," she says.

"We met so many people who are making sustainable choices and attracting wildlife and pollinators into their spaces. It has been so wonderful to see what people can do."

Slow gardening

National Trust urban ranger and fellow judge Dot Tye says the entries also reflected a move towards what she calls "slow gardening", with people considering the longer-term ecological consequences of their choices.

"I have loved reading people's reasons for getting involved as well as visiting them across the country to see their sky gardens," she says. "I think there is a move towards slow gardening where people are reflecting on the decisions they make and considering the long-term ecological impact.

"We advocate for peat-free planting and pass this on to our sky gardeners. It's great to see them taking their love of nature that step further."

For Harriet and Stephen, that has meant looking beyond their balcony for inspiration and bringing something of the local landscape home. Woodland, wetland, grassland and the North Norfolk coast have all found their way into one small space above Norwich.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Environment Our rare and fragile Suffolk shingle beaches by Rachel Fulcher 25 August 2026 Environment No nest, no scream: why swifts need our help by Kate Moore 4 July 2026 Community Essex council launches 'nature pledges' for public to support wildlife by East Anglia Bylines 20 March 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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We have an energy crisis. Many people struggle to heat their homes, and all of us pay more for it than we would like. Wouldn't it be great if we had a means of getting more heat out of the energy we buy? There is a simple answer. We could. But this is a classic case of a complex policy issue. We know where we want to get to, but a series of interlocking problems are preventing us getting there. Probably we should have started somewhere else, and certainly we should have started sooner.

Heat pumps are a much more efficient way of heating houses than oil or gas, and they are much better for the environment. So, the government has been providing subsidies to encourage people to switch. But take-up has been slow in the UK, with heat pumps accounting for less than 5% of all heating installations, and in Norfolk and Suffolk, less than 1% of new homes are heated in this way.

It is a classic political dilemma. What clearly makes sense in the long term runs up against short-term priorities, and government's difficulty in planning strategically. So, what are the blockages?

Knowledge

Most people don't understand heat pumps. Little has been done to explain the benefits, and heat pumps can sound too good to be true. Yet we all have this technology in our kitchens. In our refrigerators, a pump compresses and expands refrigerant gas to extract heat from the inside, and release it outside. A heat pump uses the same technology in reverse, cooling the outside air to heat water for radiators. And this is hardly new. More than half of homes in Norway are heated in this way.  

Insulation

Britain famously has a poorly insulated housing stock. Heat pumps are more efficient running at lower temperatures. As a result they work best running continuously at a steady temperature, rather than being switched on and off as we often do with gas. This means they are more efficient in a well-insulated house. In some older houses radiators may need replacing. So, there is sometimes work to be done and money to spend before installing a heat pump.

Grid

Heat pumps run on electricity. We are all connected, and we have seen a huge expansion of renewable energy supplies. But our outdated grid infrastructure is struggling. At times we have to shut down generators because the grid cannot cope. So, if everyone is to switch from gas to electricity, we need massive investment in the grid, and we really needed it a decade ago. And of course, people don't like new pylon lines.

Image credit: IMS Heatpumps Workforce

Heat pumps are technically complex. Installers require qualifications in electrics as well as plumbing. There are currently only 30,000 qualified heat pump engineers. By contrast, gas and oil boilers are technically simple, and there are 130,000 registered Gas Safe registered engineers available to install and maintain them.

Furthermore, our education system is not good at developing the STEM skills which would provide the foundation for training these fitters. And British employers are notoriously reluctant to recruit apprentices and to pay to upgrade the skills of existing workers. Only around 6,000 a year are being trained, at a cost of up to £5,000 a time.

The market

More heat pumps mean more firms to install and maintain them. But setting up a new business, or growing an existing one, is risky in a new industry. You need capital for equipment and you need to recruit and perhaps to train staff. But an unexpected shift in government policy, like cutting subsidies, can kill demand for your services overnight. If an installer's business fails, their customers may have difficulty finding anyone to maintain the heat pump.

Imports

Heat pumps can be more expensive because they are imported. The government wants to revive British manufacturing, but British firms face an uphill struggle against international competition in this field. While most gas boilers are made in the UK, less than a third of heat pumps are. The leading firms, Vaillant and Daikin, manufacture in Germany and Japan and account for around 40% of the market.

Electricity prices

All heating systems involve an input of energy, but at the point of use, burning fossil fuels (gas or oil) is inherently less efficient than using electricity to drive a pump. While a typical air source heat pump can convert one unit of energy into around three units of heat, the most efficient gas and oil boilers can never even reach one unit.

So, if the price of a unit of energy was the same for all sources, heat pumps would be much cheaper to run. But that is not how the market works.

Renewable electricity is very cheap to produce, but is not always sufficient to meet demand. So, the grid must call up gas-fired power stations to make up the shortfall. The price the grid must pay for electricity is set by an auction process, where all generators are paid the price offered by the most expensive one needed to meet the last part of demand. Since this is usually gas, it is the worldwide gas price which most often sets the market price for electricity.

And this artificially high price of electricity can cancel out the efficiency savings of heat pumps.

Conclusion

This is a classic 'wicked' problem. By switching to heat pumps, we could all save money, and help save the planet. But until the cost of electricity can be made comparable with gas, the savings from switching to heat pumps will be modest. Even if electricity were cheaper, the grid would still need substantial investment to cope with the increased demand. People need confidence that there will be firms available to maintain their systems. Firms need confidence that there is going to be an ongoing market for installation and maintenance. Workers need confidence that there will be well-paid jobs if they undertake the training involved.

Unless the government can give people confidence that it will maintain consistent long-term policies to address these problems, the transition to heat pumps will remain slow. Take-up will mostly be by people with sufficient capital to cover the costs, strongly committed to reducing their carbon footprint, or well-informed about the government subsidies.

So, as so often, the poorest are the ones who would have most to gain, but are least likely to see it happen.

Stephen McNair lives in rural north Norfolk in a fairly large very old house with limited insulation. He replaced his oil boiler with a heat pump in 2021.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Energy Letter: Cooling matters too in the heat pump debate by East Anglia Bylines 17 March 2026 Community New housing in Essex: free energy for five years by Jenny Rhodes 25 February 2025 Climate "I was so disappointed": the government's heating plan by Stephen McNair 20 October 2021 Economics The great heat pump paradox: more heat, less progress by Stephen McNair 1 November 2026 Culture The magic hidden in our homes: six centuries-old ways to ward off evil by East Anglia Bylines 31 October 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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Thomas Waters, Imperial College London

Virtually all cultures and epochs fizz with magic. You might call it a secret ingredient of human life, because magic takes so many forms and serves so many functions.

One relatively new area of research among historians and archaeologists focuses on the use of magic and mysticism to protect buildings, gardens and their inhabitants. It's one of the many forms of magic I explore in my new book, Magick: Decoding the Visual Culture of Spells, Illusions and Psychic Powers.

Early modern Europe saw numerous reports of towns such as Schiltach in Germany in 1533 being burned by "incendiary witchcraft" and fire-starting demons. These dramatic examples, from an era of terrifyingly combustible domiciles, helps explain why so many people focused magical building protection on chimneys and around hearths.

Even today, people living comparatively safe and comfortable lives still use special objects and occult techniques to allay their anxieties and increase their sense of security.

A few years ago, a lovely volunteer guiding me around an ancient church in North Yorkshire explained she had planted a rowan tree in her garden. The purpose? To repel her neighbour's "evil eye". Rowan trees have been used in this way for centuries across the British Isles.

So, if you've got problem neighbours, or your house and garden seem to suffer from bad luck, perhaps it's time to try a magical solution.

1. Protective plants Medicinal plants, medical herbs, botanical illustrations, plate 2 - from Larousse du XXème siècle 1932 image by EN NOIR & BLANC. CC0

Trees, herbs and other plants were and are used to defend properties against dangers both natural and supernatural. The 17th-century botanist Nicholas Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653) claimed that a bay tree in the garden protects from witchcraft, the devil and lightning.

Betony, meanwhile, was said to be good against liver disease, epidemics and witchcraft, while bittersweet nightshade was believed to be effective against harmful sorcery.

Across Britain and Europe, a rosemary bush in the garden was supposed to protect from harmful night witches, who would be caught up counting every leaf until the light of morning dispelled their evil powers. In the Americas, chilli peppers have long been regarded as evil-averting, and were sometimes fixed to doors to repel harmful powers.

2. Mystical symbols A hexafoil marking on the inside of All Saint's church in Worlington, Suffolk image by Medievalg. CC BY-SA 3.0

In early modern Europe and beyond, five- and six-pointed stars were inscribed into wood and mortar to repel evil.

Magical instructional texts known today as "grimoires" - including the tiny Booke of Experiments (1622) now held in Oxford's Bodleian Library - explain that these star symbols helped overcome enemies.

Some inscriptions may have been masons' marks to assist construction. However, the concentration of these symbols in certain areas of historic buildings suggests they may also have been intended to repel witchcraft and other harmful influences.

We have less certainty about the significance of another recurrent symbol - two interlocking Vs. During the early modern era, these were quite widely inscribed into beams, walls and doors. The reference may be derived from the medieval Christian phrase Virgo Virginum, meaning Virgin of Virgins.

The meaning of hexafoils or daisy wheels - made up of six ellipses in a circle - is even less certain. While some think these were mason's marks or just decoration, the positioning of hexafoils at key entry and danger points (around fires and chimneys) again raises the possibility of a more mystical purpose.

3. Magical architecture The town of Schiltach in Germany, burned by 'incendiary witchcraft' and fire-starting demons. Image from 1929 publication of Compendium Maleficarum image by Francesco Maria Guazzo. Public domain

Throughout world history, researchers have found that many buildings feature some forms of magical protection. Medieval Chinese masonry guides, for example, advised on the placement of demon tiles and figurines to scare away burglars and evil spirits.

In Spain's Aragon region during the 17th and 18th centuries and even beyond, geometric shapes on chimney flutes were said to confuse evil-doing witches with intricate designs.

On the Channel Island of Jersey, stones protruding from chimneys seem to have been originally added to stop rain damaging cottage roofs. However, during the 18th and 19th centuries, these "witches' seats" became known as resting places for flying witches. According to this way of thinking, it was best to placate rather than attack or retaliate against magical evildoers.

4. Witch bottles Witch bottle protective charm used to ward off or reverse malicious witchcraft and curses image by Portable Antiquities Scheme. CC BY 2.0

These macabre and somewhat unhygienic magical objects, created to break bewitchments, were fairly popular across Europe between the early modern era and the early 20th century.

Witch bottles generally contained the fingernails, hair or urine of a person supposed to have been bewitched, along with other objects like bent pins and cloth hearts.

Some were buried and others boiled or left up the chimney. The aim, generally, was to attack the witch's bladder, to make them reveal themselves, stop their magical attacks, or perhaps die. Secrecy was important: speaking about the witch bottle was supposed to break the spell.

5. Special stones Ein sogenannter Hühnergott, ein Feuerstein mit einem natürlich entstandenen Loch. Fundort: Küste bei Lohme (Rügen).

Across East Asia, Shigandang stones are used to protect public places and private dwellings. They evoke the holy Mount Tai mountain in China's Shandong Province, said to be so heavy it can hold down any evil.

Naturally holed stones, often known as "hag stones", were widely used across Britain in the 19th century to provide good luck, as well as to protect from witchcraft and bad dreams. Large examples might be left in the front garden, whereas smaller hag stones were hung from a bedpost or beams in a barn.

In recent years, the crafting and use of hag stones has undergone something of a renaissance among modern witches - who overwhelmingly undertake positive magic while rejecting harm - and other esoteric practitioners.

6. Religious objects A ḥilya - description of the Prophet (Hilya al-nabi) image by Hafız Osman (1698). Public domain

In 19th-century Britain, sleeping with a Bible close by the bed, or even under the pillow, was a fairly common method to keep away harmful powers and nightmares.

In Ireland until the early 20th century, crosses surrounded by circles were sometimes drawn on farm walls or inscribed into mortar to keep away the "good people", as capricious and dangerous fairies were euphemistically known.

In the Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, calligraphers specialised in the creation of evil-repelling hilyas or hilyes - beautiful scrolls extolling the virtues of the Prophet Muhammad, which could be worn in cases as amulets or hung on walls for supernatural home protection.

Magic takes many forms. Yet in everyday life, it is often a low-key form of supernatural self-defence, soothing anxieties and taming troubles - psychologically, if not literally.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Thomas Waters, Lecturer in History, Imperial College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Anglia The Witchfinder General: East Anglia's dark secret by Stuart Burrell 30 October 2025 Anglia Misogyny: are witch hunts a thing of the past? by Kathryn Waters 13 October 2021 Featured Guy Fawkes v. Jack o'Lantern by Kate Viscardi 31 October 2022 Friends of Bylines Network

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Mr Pecksniff - artist: Joseph Clayton Clark (CC0)

It is astonishing how far the issue of the EU has progressed since Keir Starmer had to leave in his socks and Andy Burnham stepped in. It is all the more laudable since, by merely floating the options, he has lit a fire under his party and an apparently willing media. There are many cautious voices about the dangers ahead, and those dangers certainly exist. But it merely takes the courage to thread together the auguries to reach a conclusion that what follows - whisper it soft - is merely a prolonged epilogue to what has been the most terrible defeat of reason.

But so much depends on Mr Burnham's vaunted 10-year plan, which if it is to be launched on schedule must be published next month. It will need to include an explanation of the Jackdaw and Rosebank decisions. Spelling out what is to be done with the water industry. An approach to electoral reform. And of course, that discussion on the EU.

Mr Burnham must realise that, facing the rest of a catastrophic decade for living standards, his best (and perhaps only) chance of pulling it off is to be bold and radical. There are riots across Europe, and sooner or later they will occur here too if we don't change.

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First https://theonion.com/protestors-criticized-for-looting-businesses-without-fo-1843735351/

— The Onion (@theonion.com) 2026-10-19T19:00:19.685074975Z

The PM knows he has to win the trust of the electorate first, but then he needs to use that political capital to give our economy and our culture the shake-up which is decades overdue.

Tony Blair had a 10-year plan, so did Ramsay Macdonald and Arthur Balfour, so there are precedents. But perhaps never before has so much rested on its success.

*

While Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) and her sixth form chums snigger over their 'gotcha' response to the budget, they have other concerns to confront. It seems the Russian diplomat who set up the parliamentary Conservative Friends of Russia has been identified as a Russian intelligence officer involved in an attempted European disinformation campaign.

Sergey Nalobin was at the heart of Russian political interference operations in London when David Cameron was PM. He has recently featured in court proceedings in Estonia, and he has been identified as an intelligence officer by Ukrainian and Estonian sources. In fact, he was reported to MI5 in 2010, but they declared him a legitimate diplomat.

Bang to rights, then. Members of the Conservative Friends of Russia include our own John Whittingdale (Maldon) and Andrew Rosindell (Romford). Dupes, apparently, of a Russian intelligence operation. How humiliating. Last week we wrote of how the former head of MI6 revealed the Kremlin had been keen to encourage the Brexit campaign, to destabilise Europe. To borrow a phrase often attributed to Lenin, Russia's "useful idiots".

Now this. It is a humiliation for all those involved. The Conservative Party can no longer call themselves the party that defends our country against its foes, and still keep a straight face.

*

Meanwhile, behind the arras the plotting continues… ProsperUK is the Conservative Party ginger group which isn't quite part of the party, in spite of being led by a number of their alumni. Prosper is reluctant to define quite what they are, since it is clear their intention is to become the new - that is old - Conservative Party, the One Nation party, and it is unlikely the present incumbents of the shadow cabinet would willingly give up their seats to those they would have seen as traitors to their country.

(After the last entry, readers may feel entitled to a small snigger.)

Because look who we have here… David Gauke, Ruth Davidson, Andy Street, Ken Clarke, Amber Rudd, Malcolm Rifkind, Philip Hammond and the rest. Readers will note a common characteristic shared by this group: they are pro-Europeans. It is clear from their pronouncements on the prosperity of this country that a return to Europe is firmly in their sights, though for reasons of discretion of course they have yet to spell it out.

Following this week's budget, however, they returned to their theme: "Our next major piece of work will examine the UK's future relationship with Europe, and how removing barriers to trade and investment could help unlock economic growth, and what that relationship looks like in the future…"

How fanciful might it be to imagine how, by the next general election in 2029, Reform and Restore - with only one in five voters backing them - are the only pro-Brexit parties left standing?

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Andrew Pakes. Image by UK Parliament via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

This week's budget featured a promotion for one of the region's MPs. Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) has been appointed the government's champion for co-operatives and mutuals. The role makes him the sector's main conduit into government, supporting its growth and policy development, and advances the government's ambition to double the size of the sector. For all that the title may sound pompous, the subject seems close to the PM's heart; so we can assume we shall hear more of Mr Pakes' endeavours.

He already chairs the all-party parliamentary group for mutuals, and we have an idea of one of his likely first steps. Last year he introduced a ten-minute rule bill (which rarely gets anywhere), seeking legal recognition of co-operative housing tenure to help co-op housing schemes access support from lenders, regulators, and advisers.

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Any fears that the Greens would not be taking their present predicament seriously on the notorious 'Zionism is racism' vote might be assuaged by news that the party's Governance and Democratic Engagement Working Group is on the case, and is expected to report… oooh, by next spring.

But in the meantime, the party's membership has dropped by 18,000 since May, and since the 'Zionism is racism' vote the party has been deserted by 17 councillors. In this region, Daniel Potter (Babergh) went to the Tories, and Paul Thorogood (both Essex County Council and Braintree District Council) went independent.

Insiders claim the reluctance of those opposing the Greens4Palestine lobby to counter their influence arises from the fear that factionalism will create further division and put off voters. All the more reason, then, for having acted last February, when it was known the debate would come to a head, but could still be contained without the destruction which the party is suffering.

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Composite image. Farage by Owain Davies via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0); Clacton by diamond geezer via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

What to make of this week's imbroglio featuring Nigel Farage's absence from the budget debate and subsequent allegations of a former "physical altercation" with a Liberal Democrat MP?

Mr Farage was making an awful fuss over what at first seemed a small matter, sufficient to ring alarm bells for this diarist. First there was the question of a missing prayer ticket on his chosen seat, which he claimed meant he could not attend. Only of course, the chamber is packed and dozens of MPs had to make do with standing room only. Not however Mr Farage, who presumably felt having to stand would be an insult to his amour propre.

But then came his bizarre allegation of a physical altercation, which suggests gangs of burly LibDem MPs barging their way through the Commons corridors and looking for his blood. In the end, the LibDem explanation was that Mr Farage had "shoved a female MP out of the way, sending her flying so he could get to the front of the procession for the King's Speech". The MP in question was Caroline Voaden (me neither), and the Reform version, straight from the playground, was 'she started it'.

Anyway, the occasion was almost six months ago. Does this imply that Mr Farage has gone in fear of his life for the past six months? This could explain why he is almost never there, and also why he needs five million quid to provide security against any further attacks by 'Bruiser' Voaden. A surprise perhaps that he hasn't thought of this excuse before.

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On the matter of Nigel Farage and his security, by the way, we learn this week that his minder on the campaign trail for the local elections was at the time facing rape charges, for which he has since been jailed.

*

So all in all it has been yet another hebdomadis horribilis for Nigel Farage. His budget presentation flopped horribly in front of the cameras. He invited business people, but nobody came. He blames this on "incompetent staff". (He will no doubt have them thrown out of their cottage.) But according to Mr Farage, it seems it is also the fault of Julius Caesar, for establishing a calendar which caused the event to be held on a Monday.

Nigel Farage's net favourability fell from around −14 to −27 percentage points over the year to 24 October 2026, based on PollCheck's seven-poll moving average. Data by PollCheck

Meanwhile, the polls show his unpopularity plumbing depths only previously associated with the Mariana Trench, yet this is because they are biased. It is not, of course, because most voters watch his floundering discomfort and are reminded of a bloviating duckbilled platypus with haemorrhoids.

*

What can turn the corner for Reform, then? Well, this week the party published the full list of policies which will make up its manifesto. There are 56 of them. Number 50 is "Fully re-legalise Imperial measurements".

Britain began adopting the metric system in 1965, 61 years ago. So for all but the nation's great-grandparents, this is a completely foreign and extraordinarily complex system of which they know nothing. We know from polling analysis that Reform's appeal lies predominantly among the over 60s, but this offer looks like an attempt to win the votes of the over 80s.

It is possible that, if they actually want a majority, Reform's political strategists may need to rethink their plan.

*

A curious story in the Guardian this week reported on a parish meeting at Wethersfield. Mair Godley, 78, has been giving English language lessons to asylum seekers. The meeting was also attended by Reform councillor Carl Johnson, who for her act of charity likened Ms Godley to a Nazi collaborator, claiming he didn't want to bring his daughter up to be raped and murdered by asylum seekers.

Argument became heated, and Cllr Johnson was eventually requested to leave to "restore order".

*

Cllr Sam Journet. Image by LDRS

Councillor Sam Journet was elected to Essex County Council to represent Reform, but he has left his cabinet position - the second Reform departure in six days. There have been allegations about his behaviour, including being arrested on suspicion of stalking, harassment and a public order offence, although police subsequently took no further action. He was accused of staff intimidation, disruption and barging into restricted parts of the council building. A Reform colleague accused him of bullying. He was accused of secretly filming council staff and residents. He faces questions over missing company accounts and declarations of interest.

So naturally, his party made him the Mayor of Basildon.

*

Bedford is in its greatest ferment since Mabel Barltrop established the Panacea Society here after the First World War, changed her name to Octavia and declared that Bedford was the site of the original Garden of Eden. (She later went on to give her name to a car.)

It is to your diarist's regret that we rarely feature Bedfordshire, though not for the want of trying. In despair, Pecksniff once appealed to one of the wise men who claimed to know somebody in Biggleswade, who must know something. Answer there came: it is feared the sprouts may be a little smaller this year.

Cllr Tim Caswell. Image by LDRS

Anyway, there is real news this time. The Speaker of Bedford Borough Council has denied making threats to kill and possessing an offensive weapon.

Tim Caswell was arrested by armed police in the street where he lives over what are described as "concerns for welfare". Cllr Caswell pleads not guilty to the charges.

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Liz Truss. Photo by Gareth Milner via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It has been the onerous task of Pecksniff over several years to play Boswell to the rise and fall of one of the most remarkable political careers of recent times: that of Liz Truss. She has taken her fall from rather-less-than-grace hard, and what makes her ignominy so cringeworthy is her utter lack of self-awareness. Even in those hysterical official photographs she arranged when still Foreign Secretary, she stood about apprehensively like a postillion waiting to be struck by lightning. In some ways she must be a sad creature, but still, to quote Oscar Wilde, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Relentlessly, every week she devises some new wheeze to reduce the British public to hysterics. Last week there was her new book, the most unfortunately named 'Bank Job'. (She can't help herself.) A few courageous commentators have tentatively scanned its pages since. From which we learn that, according to La Truss, if we had stuck with her the British would be on Mars by 2040. Though one imagines that might be in an attempt to escape her.

*

This week's Oleg Gordievskis, Mata Haris, Kim Philbys and Sir Francis Walinghams were Linda Buckmaster, Mary Marshall, Kate Viscardi, Helen Forte, Liz Crosbie, Malcolm Lynn, David Patey, and the man with the false moustache, James Porter.

<<< Previous Pecksniff's Diary

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Households are being encouraged to prepare for emergencies - but in Downham Market, some are struggling to afford today's essentials. The government's new Be Ready campaign asks households to prepare for three days of disruption from emergencies such as severe weather, when power, water, phone or internet services could be affected.

The advice includes keeping three days' bottled water and non-perishable food, along with essentials such as a torch and batteries, a power bank, first-aid supplies, hygiene products and some cash. It is sensible advice, and the government recognises that not everyone will be able to do everything on the list, suggesting that households check what they already have and gradually buy an extra item or two when they can. But what if there isn't money for an extra item?

Since it was established in 2023, Downham Solidarity Fund has distributed more than £6,000 through more than 200 small grants to people living in Downham Market. Grants are limited to £40 and come with no strings attached: applicants don't have to justify whether they need the money for food, energy, prescriptions or some other living cost.

According to co-founder Robert Shippey, however, the pattern is clear.

"The overwhelming reason people are asking for support from the fund is for basic essentials like groceries and energy bills, so without additional support in place it's difficult to imagine how some households in Downham Market and beyond will be able to stockpile to prepare for the incoming issues.

"Some people asking for support request less than the £40 limit, which tells us just how tight budgets are these days when such relatively small amounts are helping."

When there is nothing left over Action for Children CC BY

The experience of the fund reflects a much wider problem. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation this summer found 62% of low-income families had been unable to afford at least one essential during the previous six months. Almost half had gone hungry, eaten smaller meals or skipped meals because they didn't have enough money for food.

In Downham Market, a third of children live in low-income families and around one in four state-school pupils are eligible for free school meals. Growing up on a low income can restrict children's opportunities and experiences as well as the material things their families can afford.

School holidays can make that particularly visible. Children who would normally eat at school are at home, adding to the family food bill, while childcare and organised activities can be expensive. With the unsettled weather East Anglia has experienced during this half-term, even the simplest free options - a trip to the park or an afternoon outdoors - become harder.

Norfolk does run Big Norfolk Holiday Fun, its version of the government-funded Holiday Activities and Food programme, which provides eligible children with activities and a meal. But the county's programme operates during the Easter, summer and Christmas holidays; there does not appear to be a Norfolk-wide programme running this October half-term. Families with enough money can usually work around these inconveniences, but for those whose budgets are already stretched to breaking point, each removes another option.

Financial insecurity is not confined to families with children. Older people living largely on the State Pension - particularly those paying rent and without private pension income - can have little left after essentials, while people with disabilities and long-term health conditions may face additional everyday costs associated with their condition.

Image by Lysenko Andrii. Licensed by Shutterstock [AD]

Having a job does not necessarily provide protection from poverty either. Figures from April show 3.1 million people receiving Universal Credit - more than one in three claimants - were also in employment. In rural areas, limited public transport can restrict the jobs available to people without a car, while for some workers - including those providing care in people's homes - a vehicle may be essential to doing the job at all. Running it then becomes another unavoidable cost.

The circumstances differ, but when almost everything coming in is needed for today's essentials, there is little or nothing left with which to prepare for tomorrow.

When £20 makes a difference

Downham Market does have organisations trying to fill those gaps. Its foodbank provides emergency food, while the Solidarity Fund can respond with small amounts of cash that allow people to meet whatever immediate need they face. But some of that local provision has already disappeared.

"We have support in the town but services are under pressure," Shippey says. "We've just seen the Love Downham Shop, which provided subsidised essentials, close due to lack of funding at a time when initiatives like this are going to be needed more than ever."

The shop, run by Swan Youth Project, closed in August after almost four years. As well as subsidised food and affordable clothing, it provided a warm space and access to advice and other community support. Some of those services have moved to the youth project's Paradise Road base, but the shop itself has gone.

The government's preparedness campaign acknowledges that some households won't have the means to prepare fully, and suggests that people with extra supplies might donate them to others who cannot afford to prepare their own households.

Resilience itself requires resources. For people experiencing grinding poverty, there may be no spare money to put aside or capacity to buy something now because it might be needed later. Constantly making limited resources stretch to cover food, energy, housing, transport and other essentials leaves little room for manoeuvre when circumstances change.

Someone with enough money can keep additional food in the cupboard, replace something before it breaks, maintain a small emergency fund or absorb an unexpected £20 expense. For someone living on the edge of their income, that same £20 can make the difference between managing and not managing. The maximum Solidarity Fund grant is only £40, yet some applicants ask for less because that is all they need to get through the immediate difficulty.

Poverty takes many forms and affects people at every stage of life, but one consequence runs through them all: when the present consumes everything you have, it is extraordinarily difficult to build resilience against the future.

Telling households how to prepare for an emergency is sensible. But for some, the emergency is already here.

This article is based on a press release by the Downham Solidarity Fund, compiled with assistance from AI tools and edited by East Anglia Bylines. Donations can be made on their website.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Activism Cross-party MPs want to focus on preventing poverty by East Anglia Bylines 5 May 2026 Lifestyle New report: Poverty is an expensive political choice by Tom Burgess 18 February 2026 Economics Examining child poverty and living in Omelas by Martin Waller 15 September 2021 Friends of Bylines Network

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Since the winter storms of 2025-2026, when yet more houses fell into the sea, local people have been asking: 'Is this just climate change, or could dredging be making matters worse?'

Image by Fran Crowe. Used with permission

It is February 2026 and the calm after the storm, but cold and wet. A Thorpeness resident stands despairingly in what remains of her once beautiful garden, the rest having been eaten away by the sea. The sounds of demolition machinery attacking a neighbouring house are all too evident. Four homes have recently been lost and eight more are condemned, hers included. 'I have nowhere else to live, nowhere to go,' she says in a scared and desolate voice.

Only a few months previously it had been estimated that coastal homes were safe on this cliff top for at least another ten years. Villagers therefore wonder whether such a dramatic miscalculation has resulted purely from unexpected worsening of climate change with increased storm surges, or if there might be some other influence that exacerbates the situation. Could this be offshore dredging?

A profitable business

The Crown Estate is the body that manages the seabed for up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline around England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is responsible for granting dredging licences, including those off the East Coast. These licences generate income for the Crown Estate. In addition to licence fees, operators pay a royalty for every tonne of sand and gravel dredged. The Crown Estate's overall net revenue profits are returned to the Treasury.

Most of the dredged material off East Anglia is in great demand in the construction industry as represented by the British Marine Aggregate Producers Association (BMAPA). Both the Crown Estate and BMAPA reject suggestions that licensed offshore dredging is contributing to coastal erosion. Dredging can affect sediment movement and the underwater landscape, with potential consequences for the stability of the near shore, beaches and coastal erosion. The more difficult question is whether offshore aggregate dredging is having any such effect on the Suffolk coast.

Coastal dynamics

Off East Anglia, this natural movement is in a mainly southerly direction and is known as 'longshore drift'. It is crucial for supplying sediment to beaches, which in turn helps to support the base of cliffs. Long experience has shown that any interference with this process, for example putting in hard defences, will cause erosion further down the coast.

Within the sea, sandbanks have a protective effect by reducing the power of the waves as they move towards the shore. Some of Suffolk's coastal towns, villages and businesses have relied on two such banks, the Sizewell and Dunwich Banks. Clearly, if these, or indeed any others, were significantly reduced in size the results at the shore could be devastating.

Licences granted for aggregate dredging. Used with permission Dredging activity off the East Coast

If we look at the Marine Aggregate Dredging map of 2022 for the Eastern Region we see immediately that a very large area of licences has been granted offshore between Lowestoft and Caister. There are two more areas further south. The annual amount dredged has varied from 23 km2 (2016 and 2020) to as much as 97 km2 (1998). Could it be that the removal of such large quantities of sand and gravel (160 million tonnes during the 25 years to 2022) has either altered the movement of sediment in some way, or allowed the energy of storm waves to increase, or otherwise caused beaches to shrink, thereby affecting the stability of coastal villages?

The Crown Estate and BMAPA insist that their dredging is in deep water and too far offshore to interfere with longshore drift or cause any 'drawdown' from the coast into newly formed troughs. They emphasise that the average alteration of depth is only 0.33 m, yet the height and depth of the peaks and troughs prior to dredging remains unclear.

Evidently, the sand and gravel only come from what they refer to as 'fossil deposits' which they say are mostly immobile. However, they do admit that 'sandbanks represent the nearest point of potential influence from dredging taking place offshore'.

The vulnerability of offshore sandbanks Sizewell nuclear poser stations are worryingly close to the sea. Image used with permission

Local swimmers have been puzzled by how sandbanks that they used to stand on have mysteriously vanished. So, what about the protective Sizewell and Dunwich banks? During the last few decades hydrographic charts have shown consistent erosion of the two with lowering of the crests and a spreading out along the eastern contours. Could dredging be a contributing factor?

Recent events suggest that they are no longer substantial enough to prevent storm surges from ripping away the soft cliffs at Thorpeness. It is also a worry that Sizewell nuclear power stations A and B lie just 4 km to the north, with C currently under construction. The company is already having to consider recharge of the soft defences along the beach.

A trustworthy science?

As Alan Brampton, who carried out research for the Crown Estate, has said, he is engaged in 'an inexact science. Sediment transport is very difficult to model.' Distressed coastal residents are therefore left with more questions than answers.

Nevertheless, old-fashioned commonsense indicates that such a very large area of offshore dredging could be having an impact on East Anglia's complex and finely balanced coastal processes. We interfere with these at our peril.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Climate "Sorry, you are on your own!" climate crisis hits Norfolk by Stephen McNair 3 December 2023 Environment Coastal erosion has forced vulnerable villages to confront 'hard truths' by Owen Sennitt, Local Democracy Reporter 5 February 2026 Anglia Coastal erosion is unstoppable - so how do we live with it? by Dr Sophie A Day 20 October 2022 Truth is power

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An absence of women scientists featured in UK exam board specifications for science could be a factor in the disproportionate number of girls dropping STEM subjects at 16, and contributing to the gender gap in STEM careers, new research from the University of Cambridge has found.

The study, which analysed the UK's six main exam boards' specifications across science subjects, found that of 86 scientists mentioned at Key Stage 4 (KS4), which covers GCSE and equivalent qualifications, just one was a woman - Rosalind Franklin. Even then, Franklin, whose work on X-ray crystallography contributed to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, featured in only one specification.

In some cases, students are learning about discoveries to which women made important contributions without learning the names of the women themselves. The researchers looked at specifications for biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, physics, and astronomy, and found that several major scientific breakthroughs included in UK specifications involved women, but those women are not explicitly included in the compulsory learning material. Instead, it is left to individual teachers to highlight their achievements in the classroom.

The paper, published in the British Educational Research Journal, notes that many of the foundations of modern science were developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when scientific and mathematical practice was largely dominated by men. However, women also made significant contributions to major scientific breakthroughs which the researchers say are rarely acknowledged in current specifications.

A growing divide after GCSE

The Cambridge team - Dr Greg J Cooke, Skyla B White, and Stephanie Buttigieg, working with the IncludeHer movement - argues that relatively small changes could bring these contributions into existing teaching frameworks, including the achievements of Nobel Prize-winning women scientists. Greater visibility, they suggest, could encourage more girls to continue with STEM subjects, particularly physics and mathematics, at Key Stage 5 (KS5), which covers A-level and equivalent qualifications, and beyond.

Despite girls typically outperforming boys in the majority of STEM subjects at KS4, physics, mathematics, and further mathematics have significantly higher uptake among boys at KS5. The percentage of girls choosing mathematics and further mathematics is now lower than it was in 2005.

The researchers found what they describe as a 'compelling' correlation between the gender representation of scientists students encounter at KS4 and the STEM subjects girls subsequently choose at KS5. They found a 'saturation' of male scientists in compulsory physics learning materials, alongside much lower numbers of girls continuing with physics after 16. Biology and chemistry, which are slightly more popular with girls at KS5, feature fewer individual scientists overall in KS4 exam specifications.

While women's under-representation in STEM has many complex causes, the researchers argue that the marked change in gender disparity between KS4 and KS5 makes the point at which students choose their post-16 subjects particularly important. Stephanie Buttigieg says research had already shown that relatable role models could help girls develop a stronger sense of belonging in science and more positive attitudes towards scientific careers.

"When school science specifications leave out women's names, they miss a real opportunity to help girls see a future for themselves in science and continue to reinforce the harmful stereotype that science is mainly for men," she says.

The women behind the science

The team has identified places in existing exam specifications where women scientists could be incorporated without major changes to what students are required to learn. Rosalind Franklin, for example, could be included in all biology specifications, while Marie Skłodowska-Curie - who won two Nobel Prizes, discovered polonium and radium, and coined the term 'radioactivity' - could be included in discussions of atomic structure and isotopes in KS4 chemistry.

Skyla B White points to another example: students learn about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, used to classify stars, without necessarily encountering Annie Jump Cannon, whose work helped make it possible.

"It's fantastic that students learn about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, for example, but it was built on the work of Annie Jump Cannon, who is not mentioned. You can't tell one story without the other," White says.

Lise Meitner, a nuclear physicist involved in the discovery of nuclear fission who provided the first theoretical explanation of the process but was controversially excluded from a Nobel Prize, is suggested for inclusion in KS4 physics.

Cambridge itself has a striking example. In 1967, while studying for her doctorate at the university, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsars. The discovery led to the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for her supervisor Antony Hewish and fellow radio astronomer Martin Ryle, but Bell Burnell was not included.

The imbalance in the number of women scientists named in exam specifications continues beyond GCSE. The researchers also analysed KS5 exam specifications and found that only three of the 181 scientists mentioned were women - Rosalind Franklin, geologist Marie Tharp, and seismologist Inge Lehmann. They suggest, among others, including Dorothy Hodgkin, who won a Nobel Prize for using X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of biologically important molecules, including insulin, when students study protein structure in KS5 biology.

Dr Greg J Cooke says the women proposed for inclusion had "helped shape the modern world", but that science education can concentrate on facts and outcomes at the expense of the people and processes behind discoveries.

"We often find ourselves obsessing over scientific facts and outcomes rather than the human journeys and rigorous methods that produced them," he says. "It is important that students understand the iterative history of science and the context behind these discoveries to frame their knowledge when assessing the bigger picture."

Cooke points to the stories of Susan Solomon's role in understanding ozone depletion and Meitner's contribution to the science that led to the nuclear age. "It is long overdue that we teach these inspiring stories about women."

This article is based on a piece by Stephen Bayer for the University of Cambridge, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Read the original here.

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More from East Anglia Bylines History Ada Lovelace: how her triumph in STEM made history by Kate Viscardi 3 October 2024 Cambridgeshire The truth about the women locked up by Cambridge University by Jenny Rhodes 19 January 2025 Activism From aviators to activists: Essex commemorates its outstanding women by Jenny Rhodes 2 July 2026 Subscribe to our newsletters

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The post Where are the women? Scientists missing from school science first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Watch any major fundraising marathon and the causes printed on running vests tell you something about modern Britain. Cancer. Mental health. Dementia. Youth services. Community safety. Every so often, something less expected catches the eye: runners raising money for Crimestoppers - an organisation that enables anonymous reporting of crime to the police.

Since 1988, Crimestoppers has facilitated over 151,000 arrests and the seizure of more than £367 million in illegal drugs. Its track record isn't in question. What is in question is why the reporting of crime is funded as a charitable activity at all. If a service is essential to public safety, it should be a statutory duty, not dependent on the goodwill of marathon runners.

From village road race to London Marathon

Running and charity are intertwined at every level, from the village road race to the biggest events in the national calendar. Take the Tiptree 10, a ten-mile race through the Essex countryside. Entry costs £18 for affiliated runners, £20 unaffiliated. An optional commemorative t-shirt is £6 which is relatively inexpensive. Every finisher goes home with a miniature pot of Wilkin & Sons strawberry jam - 28 grams of the sort you'd find on a hotel breakfast tray, retailing for £1 on Ocado or roughly 35p per pot at trade prices. Nobody's getting rich.

image by LONDON WALKS 4K. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

This isn't a charity cash cow. It's a community event, locally sponsored by Wilkin & Sons - the jam manufacturer based in the village - and organised by Tiptree Road Runners. In a single year the race donated £6,500 to five charities including Disability4Sport, Helen Rollason Cancer Charity and Action For Family Carers. In previous years it supported the Tiptree food bank, Kids Inspire, and the Active Essex Foundation. Lean, transparent, and rooted in its community.

Now scale that up to the London Marathon, where charity places carry registration fees of £50 to £100 and minimum fundraising targets of £2,000. Runners spend months training and fundraising. The event generates tens of millions of pounds. At that scale, it becomes far harder to say with any confidence who truly benefits - the runners, the causes they support, or the institutions sitting between the two.

The first aid you fund twice

St John Ambulance is a case worth examining. The charity provides first aid cover at sporting and community events using over 40,000 unpaid volunteers. To run for St John in the 2027 London Marathon, runners are asked to pay a £100 registration fee and raise a minimum of £2,000 - money used, in part, to fund the training and equipment that keeps those same volunteers on the course.

Think about what that means. The first aid provision at one of the world's largest sporting events is being funded by the very runners whose safety it exists to protect, through a charity that depends on unpaid labour to deliver it. We've normalised this arrangement to the point where we don't even notice the circularity.

Follow the money

If the first uncomfortable question is why are these services provided by charities rather than the state, the second is where the charitable money goes once it's been raised. Not all of it reaches the frontline.

The headline numbers on charity executive pay are stark. The median salary for a charity CEO in the UK is around £60,000, according to the ACEVO Pay and Equalities Survey. Among the top 100 charities, that median jumps to £192,000. The CEO of the Wellcome Trust earns over £500,000 a year. For context, the Prime Minister is expected to earn £174,039 per annum.

Defenders will say that large charities are complex organisations managing hundreds of millions of pounds, and that skilled leadership commands a premium. Fair enough. The research, though, suggests the public doesn't buy it. A study by Maas and De Waegenaere at Tilburg University found that when media coverage exposes high executive pay at charities, volunteer numbers fall. People give less, and they volunteer less.

The gravitational pull of self-preservation

There's a deeper structural problem here. In some cases, the charity sector has started to serve itself more than its beneficiaries. When a charity spends a significant share of its income on a senior management team, a communications department, a fundraising consultancy, and a brand strategy, we're entitled to ask whether those functions serve the mission or whether they've become instruments of institutional self-preservation.

I've seen this at a local level in Harlow. We have community organisations doing brilliant, lean, often voluntary work on a shoestring. We also have larger charities that have won local authority contracts, grown their staffing structures accordingly, and now spend considerable effort maintaining those structures. The people at the top aren't bad people. There is, however, a gravitational pull in any organisation toward preserving what already exists, and charities are no more immune to it than the rest of us.

Then there's the issue that rarely gets discussed. Many charities exist because a problem should have been solved by government policy but wasn't. If the state properly funded cancer research and care, we wouldn't need 268 cancer charities, each with its own management structure and overhead. If social care were properly resourced, we wouldn't need a multitude of charities filling the gap. Once a charity exists to fill a gap left by the state, though, it develops institutional interests of its own - and the gap becomes harder to close.

Image by Air Ambulance NI Time for a national conversation on charity reform

In 2025, the British public donated an estimated £14 billion to charity. Nobody knows for certain the exact number of not-for-profit organisations in the UK; there are around 170,000 registered with the Charity Commission in England and Wales, and the true number is far higher.

What we've done in this country, particularly since the 1980s, is gradually and deliberately withdraw state provision from areas where it was once expected. The charitable response is then celebrated as evidence of community spirit, rather than acknowledged for what it really is: evidence of a gap that should never have been created.

If the UK is to maintain a strong and sustainable charity sector, we need an honest conversation about what the state should provide, what the private sector contributes, and what should not be left to goodwill alone. That conversation should address the sector's transparency, its proportionality, and its efficacy. We owe it to those generously fund raising or benevolently donating, because their billions are at stake.

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Academic science (natural or social) is about making new discoveries. When a researcher thinks they have found something new, or a flaw in established knowledge, they normally write a paper and submit it to an academic journal - from the high status global journals like The Lancet or the British Medical Journal, to smaller, more specialised ones. These journals are the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge. Their editors and reviewers decide what does and does not become part of accepted knowledge. Publication makes the findings accessible to everyone working in the field.

Peer review

To decide what to publish, the journal gives the draft, anonymised, to an expert in the field, for 'peer review'. The reviewer looks for problems such as weak evidence, unclear writing, errors, missing references, arguments that do not hold up or failures to recognise previous research. Their comments help authors improve the work before it goes to publication. If the reviewer thinks the research is sound and makes a significant contribution to knowledge, they may recommend that it be published.

This is how it has been done for more than two hundred years. When the system is working at its best, a conscientious reviewer will provide detailed, carefully evidenced feedback, and the author will revise and resubmit. But the process uses a great deal of people's time, and has a range of weaknesses. Editors struggle to find available reviewers. Reviewers have busy lives, incomplete knowledge, professional prejudices and rivalries. The work is usually unpaid and the process can take months.

So, two Harvard professors, Gary King and Steven Worthington, set out to see whether AI could improve the process. They have now presented their findings for comment and discussion in a 'pre-publication' paper.

What they did

They took 124 research manuscripts across a range of academic fields.

• Each manuscript was reviewed twice: by Claude Opus 4.8 and by an established human expert in the relevant field.
• They then used ChatGPT 5.5 to compare the pairs of reviews, using seven measures: theory, methods, weaknesses, framing, communication, figures, and sources. To ensure that ChatGPT was not favouring AI-generated reviews, the human ones were converted to an AI style.
• Finally, they asked three former journal editors to review ten of the pairs of reviews.

What they found

They expected a mixed pattern of responses. But they were wrong. In side-by-side comparisons, the AI review won in virtually every case, with the AI one judged, by both ChatGPT and the human editors, as more useful, more thorough, more accurate, and better at identifying weaknesses in the research. Although the AI reviews did make mistakes, the human reviews made more.

The bottom line

This paper does not suggest that AI can replace the traditional peer review process. But it does suggest that AI can play a more important part in academic research than has previously been suggested. It can help original authors to improve their articles before submission, acting like a very well-read, tireless assistant that can read a long manuscript, spot possible problems, and suggest improvements. For the author, a detailed AI review, generated in a few seconds, is much more helpful than a human one delivered three months later. But there are also risks. We still need humans to check AI for confident mistakes, invented or misrepresented sources.

And humans still need to decide whether a given article is suitable for a particular journal, whether it meets ethical standards, whether there are conflicts of interest, and whether it should ultimately be accepted or rejected. A human must take responsibility if a flawed or misleading study is published.

Next steps

This is a significant paper, with surprising findings and serious implications for academic life.

But, in science, all findings are provisional. Every discovery or new theory is only correct until someone proves it wrong. This is just as true for this paper. It is clear that AI has a role to play in the dissemination of academic research. But future researchers will refine this finding.

And it is worth noting that King and Worthington are not comparing a perfect model with an AI one. The introduction of their paper lists 16 well-documented weaknesses of the traditional system. As the authors say, "although human peer review is the default quality-control standard for scholarly publishing … problems with this system are deep, common and well known."

For all its weaknesses, this paper suggests that AI can overcome some of them, and perhaps free academics for more creative tasks.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Business Five years to save Europe! by Stephen McNair 30 June 2026 Business Deep research: the next generation of artificial intelligence by Stephen McNair 9 April 2025 Science The machines are marking our science - and doing it better by Stephen McNair 28 October 2026 Brexit The Swiss route to a closer relationship with Europe? by Niall Ó Conghaile 27 October 2026 Activism ⁠Palantir under fire: the battle over its NHS role by Aidan Baker 26 October 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The announcement by Andy Burnham that he wants an "honest discussion" about freedom of movement, but that he "can't imagine recommending" Schengen or the euro is the clearest insight yet into the British Prime Minister's thinking on what the eventual Europe-UK relationship will look like.

The support for free movement was heartening, and must be seen as a direct rebuke to the Brexiters, who made ending rights for Spaniards, Danes and Germans such a central plank of their agenda. While Mr Burnham has been careful not to be too proscriptive compared to previous British leaders, it is difficult to say that his distaste for two of the pillars of European integration can be considered orthodox.

It is for this reason that talk of a "Swiss deal" has resurfaced as either an intermediary or permanent destination for the UK. If anything, this seems underpriced.

What would a Swiss-style deal mean?

What is meant by a Swiss-style arrangement? People are actually talking about two things. Firstly, we have the bilateral framework consisting of circa 120 agreements that grew organically from the 1970s. It came about owing to the practicalities of a country virtually surrounded by European Union states needing to find ways of making that work. That arrangement was not planned, as such, but instead new agreements were simply encrusted onto each other.

Overall it came essentially to replicate many of the facets of the European single market, including free movement of people. However, it was problematic owing to the agreements' being static and so needing constant negotiated updating, and the lack of an anchor treaty with solid governance.

The Union learnt from this and pushed very hard for the arrangement to be modernised. Although it did not get everything that it wanted, it did manage to get:

• "dynamic alignment" with European market rules (which are moving constantly), reducing the need for negotiation;
• a structured system for contributing to the European budget;
• improved governance, in particular with the Court of Justice of the EU as the final arbiter concerning European law; and,
• a consistent structure across those agreements that pertain to the single market (although not a single-treaty deal that the EU wanted).

The EU took this seriously: it was prepared to let the old agreements go into abeyance without these adaptations.

When we're talking about a Swiss deal then it is that latter paradigm that is being referred to: a central single-market treaty and some add-on deals (like defence). This might not be where some former remainers want to end up, but it is a workable arrangement.

What would each side gain?

For the EU, a properly constituted deal would give two key advantages. Firstly, it would keep control. Regulatory decisions remain inhouse.

Secondly, it would provide a cordon sanitaire with the UK - which has yet to fully regain trust - preventing it from, in particular, blocking common defence, financial support for Ukraine or 'Made in Europe'.

Equally though, there is a two-sided strategic element to this. Europe will want to show how cooperation can get you nice stuff in a way that aggravation won't, and in this arrangement, it can be more flexible and even supportive of pro-Europeans in the UK. That lays down a marker to the UK far right: here's the deal, it is popular with Britons, take it down at your peril.

Current geopolitical considerations also come into play, as a Swiss-style deal would commit the UK firmly to the EU, and keep it out of the Europhobic axis.

Lastly, if this arrangement were to fall apart, Europe could act much more swiftly and unilaterally rather than via Article 50.

For the UK government, while the economic arguments speak for themselves, the obvious advantage is not having to go through the accession process, which is liable to be painful. Instead of the Commission checking the UK's homework, the arrangement can be presented as a meeting of equals. And, of course, this could mean obtaining a very deep deal indeed without a messy referendum.

I imagine they'd also be delighted to avoid talk about the nuts and bolts of European integration, such as the euro, Schengen, CAP and CFP. In particular, taking fish out of any deal guts an emotional isolationist argument.

Avoiding these areas means settling a Swiss-style deal could also be quick, at least quicker than membership. However, that is down to the UK's cooperation. Quibbling every point will delay.

Where would the difficulties lie?

Nevertheless, politics will be tricky and may need massaging. Firstly, although Mr Burnham has spoken positively of free movement, he also wants youth visas strictly limited and unfree. Taking this into a Swiss-style deal seems politically unworkable for the EU and for relations with EFTA. One solution might be an emergency brake in the event of "societal difficulties", that everyone hopes will never be used.

Secondly, on the UK's current trade deals, it will seek exemptions on standards to preserve them. This frankly seems a non-starter, which would damage the single market irreparably.

Lastly, there are the standards themselves. The UK will argue for a say - in particular in financial-services regulation, even though not a member. It is difficult to see how that particular square could be circled.

Even if on a temporary basis, a Swiss-style deal may prove durable. The push to membership will be harder when the key economic benefits are already secure, for both the public and politicians.

The other issue is the 'Swissification' of the relationship won't necessarily lead to a more popular EU in the UK. Bickering is a more likely outcome.

I don't envy the Prime Minister. He has a lot to balance, and he can't take any real action until he has secured a new mandate. It may be that the search for a way forward ends up leading to the pretty meadows of the Alpine state for inspiration. Hopp!

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More from East Anglia Bylines Brexit Joining Europe again: first, we need durable consent by Anna Damski 13 October 2026 Brexit Is Britain ready to join Europe again? by East Anglia Bylines 21 October 2026 Brexit Another referendum on the EU? You must be joking by Peter Thurlow 16 October 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post The Swiss route to a closer relationship with Europe? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

September scaled up a row between the US data analytics company Palantir and the non-profit political campaign organisation the Good Law Project. Also involved is the Department of Health and Social Care, which took exception to the Good Law Project's publicity on copyright and trademark grounds.

Palantir vs the Good Law Project

The Good Law Project (GLP) had distributed anti-Palantir flyers inside an NHS hospital, and made a video of this feat. The fliers had mimicked NHS material, using the NHS logo, and that was the cause of trouble. The Department objected to this appropriation of the logo, and asked GLP to take the video down.

GLP, being lawyers, replied with a lengthy letter giving reasons in law why they weren't going to do this - notably that their fliers were an obvious parody and were certain not to be mistaken for anything produced by the NHS itself. The video's still up, at the time of writing. You can see it on GLP's Instagram page - despite the Department's similar request to Instagram's owner Meta.

Palantir vs Clive Lewis

Clive Lewis will be familiar to readers of East Anglia Bylines. He's a Labour MP for a constituency on our patch (Norwich South) and has contributed on a number of occasions. Speaking to journalist Carole Cadwalladr after addressing a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference, he summarised a letter he'd received from Palantir's senior vice president UK, Tom Watson, in the words "We are watching you. We are monitoring you. And that's what we do. Your card is marked".

Those words are Clive Lewis's own. You don't find them in Watson's letter, which is reproduced in full in Cadwalladr's account. But it's hard not to sense them as the subtext to Watson's itemising of Lewis' words and actions. If you present somebody with a list of things they've done, this is usually the prelude to announcing what that person has earned by them.

Lewis felt such a threat was implicit in the level of detail Watson brought to the listing of Lewis's anti-Palantir statements. And Clara Maguire, director of the organisation behind the fringe meeting, told Cadwalladr she shared that perception. "Palantir is a data surveillance company. That's its business model. And yet here's their latest hire, a Labour lord, [inferring to] his former colleague that they are actively surveilling his activities." Watson is a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, and has taken long-term leave of absence from the House of Lords in order to serve his Palantir role.

Palantir vs a host of organisations

Palantir has been a target of campaigning by organisations across the UK for some years. They are the British manifestation of an internationally coordinated movement. 'People vs Palantir' days of action culminated on 1 October in some 40 protests across England against Palantir's role in the NHS.

The demonstrations in Cambridge and Ely included activists from the groups Keep our NHS Public (KONP), Global Justice Now, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Ely for Peace and Freedom. Nationwide, the protests involved groups like Amnesty International, Medact, Just Treatment, and Pull the Plug. Overseas, Palantir in 2024 was the subject of a divestment decision by the Norwegian financial services company Storebrand.

(L) Demonstrators outside Addenbrookes in Cambridge
(R) Elisabeth Burleigh and Hooda Abdullah hand over the letter from the No Palantir in the NHS campaign to Beth Hughes, Chief Governance and Performance Officer at Cambridge University Hospitals Trust
Both images by Chris Jessop. Used with permission Why Palantir vs so many - the issues

What have so many organisations got against Palantir? Key British players in the day of action were the medical anti-war campaign Medact, the human rights group Amnesty International, and the anti-poverty movement Global Justice Now. A focus of their campaigns is Palantir's Federated Data Platform (FDP), which aims to sit across NHS bodies in order to connect and analyse data. A scan of the campaigners' publications distils their concerns about the firm into three broad areas:

1. Human rights

All of the groups are troubled by Palantir's involvement with Israel's activities in occupied Gaza and with ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The groups point to the many human rights violations that have been alleged in connection with those current flashpoints. Additionally, Medact notes Palantir's provision of software to America for questionable adventures in earlier decades:

"The US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had devastating public health consequences (a 2006 Lancet study estimated over 600,000 Iraqi deaths) and were widely condemned as illegal wars of aggression," writes Medact in its online briefing 'Concerns regarding Palantir technologies and NHS data systems. For Global Justice Now, some public utterances by Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel have been provoking. The movement's briefing 'Kick Palantir out: why the UK must end its relationship with the militarised tech firm notes: "Thiel once wrote that he considered votes for women detrimental to his vision of American capitalism, and that he no longer believed 'freedom and democracy are compatible'."

2. Procurement practices

The briefing Concerns regarding Palantir technologies and NHS data systems lists a number of instances where Palantir's contracts are associated with intensive lobbying by the firm. The 'revolving door' between official appointments and senior posts in Palantir is discussed with many examples. There we meet that Tom Watson whose letter Clive Lewis quoted. Watson's name is buried in mid-paragraph, one example among many. Medact's conclusion of this discussion finds "significant concerns around [Palantir's] unfair procurement practices, revolving doors and intense lobbying, calling into question the FDP [Palantir's Federated Data Platform] tendering process and making the legitimacy of the contract vulnerable to public mistrust, as well as potentially open to legal challenge."

3. Data management and privacy

Medact's concerns here are with the interoperability of code between Palantir's FDP software and the firm's military applications. "Pseudonymisation of data within the FDP may be insufficient to protect patient data … Palantir's services to other governments, including its contract with ICE, have involved significant cross-department data compiling and analysis, which can be used to enable data-driven abuses of state power."

What now?

The day of action called for some specific goals. Different organisations had different focuses, but the overarching aim was to end Palantir's NHS involvement. The initial term of the contract with NHS England ends early in 2027, when NHS England must decide whether to extend it.

Readers wishing to know more about the campaign should follow the links under the names of the organisations above. East Anglia Bylines has approached Palantir for comments on the day of action and the concerns raised in this article. No response had been received at the time of publication.

DISCLOSURE. Aidan Baker is an active member of Global Justice Now.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Health Why as a doctor I'm fighting NHS privatisation by Dr Daniel Goyal 10 November 2022 Health Here's how the Right is softening you up to sell off the NHS by The Bear 15 July 2025 Brexit From promises to collapse: The measurable damage Brexit caused the NHS by The Bear 15 September 2025 Truth is power

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The post ⁠Palantir under fire: the battle over its NHS role first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

It's a dark night but the pub is full of people. So full that reaching the bar is less joining a queue and more allowing the current to take you there. I succeed remarkably quickly and allow myself to be swept back towards the door. There's a bench outside and a cold seat seems preferable to standing in a crowd, especially given what is to come.

A hushed wait

I'm quickly joined by other old 'uns. I don't know them but we exchange pleasantries and settle down to wait. Gradually, people spill from the pub and take up positions where we can all watch the unlit lane beneath us. It's remarkably quiet because everyone is listening.

Then it comes. There's a drumbeat and pitch torches flare into the darkness. There's the sound of heavy footsteps and Old Glory molly dancers gradually come into view, only hats and grey faces visible in the guttering light. Behind them come the musicians, unsmiling, heads wreathed in ivy.

(L) Procession through the woods (©Agata Melnyk) (C) The plough, dressed for Plough Sunday (©Janice Issett)
(R) The Lord and Lady (© Janice Issett). All images used with permission

The procession passes and turns into a large space beside the pub, followed by the crowd. The musicians, all women, take up position and the men begin to dance. The light is dim and they are moving fast, but there must be at least 20 dancers.

Well-defined roles

They wear heavy boots, but their timing is impeccable. Most are dressed in old-fashioned clothes: cord trousers, collarless shirts, waistcoats, trilby hats and neckerchiefs. Two are dressed as gentry, a large man in a tailcoat and a top hat, and a slender man in a long dress with a flowing beard. These are the Lord and Lady, and they lead the dancers.

The only voice is that of the Brolly Man, who introduces the dances, including a nautical one. This is a reminder that during the hard days of winter farmworkers would find work on fishing boats to try to make ends meet. Then the Lady grabs my hand, the rest of the audience is also swept up by the dancers, and we are spun round in a decreasing spiral, laughing and trying to get the steps right.

Molly dancers dancing energetically image by Sofi Nowell. Used with permission Practical magic

There is something mystical about all this; the dim light, the music, the work clothes of the dancers and the ivy headdresses of the musicians. Words come to mind: enchanting, wonderful; fantastic; other-worldly; fabulous; magical; but those all suggest something light and airy.

This is the complete opposite - not mundane, but through that and out the other side to another kind of magic. Something solid, keeping the spirit of the earth alive through the cold winter.

The history of Molly dancing is practical, though - born of the need for rural workers to get through the hard days of winter with few opportunities to earn money. Faces were disguised with ashes and soot, nowadays grey facepaint. The dancers are determinedly unsmiling because the pattern of a performer's teeth could give away his identity. This really mattered when lampooning the gentry could result in the loss of both job and tied cottage.

The exhausted and laughing crowd sweep the dancers and musicians into the pub, and I try to talk to performers. They won't have it, I'm greeted by a polite but firm direction to the Brolly Man, the only one who can speak for them. He finds me, and there is a distinct flicker of recognition from him. He knows me, I'm sure, but he's not letting on and I can't place him, beneath his grey facepaint.

Well-established traditions

We talk about Old Glory and the revival of Molly dancing. The temperature drops when I mention Morris dancing: "Some sides do Morris in the summer. We don't". We can agree on Molly dancing having more of an authentic feel than other folk dances. It was by-passed by the revival of interest in folk dances at the end of the 19th century - probably too working-class for the sensibilities of the collectors. The result is it's refreshingly twee-free.

I'm told Old Glory chose early-Edwardian farmworkers' clothes as the costume for its dancers. But it was immediately recognisable to me from my childhood in rural Hertfordshire. The main difference was the trilby hats replacing the flat caps worn by my farmworker uncle and bricklayer father. Indeed, there are local farmers here in Suffolk whose garb is not so very different today.

Molly across East Anglia

Molly is traditionally danced on Plough Monday, after the blessing of the plough on Plough Sunday, the traditional start of the agricultural year. It's now possible to see Molly dancing throughout the winter. Old Glory's programme* starts on 31 October for Samhain, then runs through December and January to the celebration of Imbolc on 30 January. They do still collect money, but without menaces and it goes to charities.

Old Glory performs around the north-east of Suffolk. Elsewhere in the region there's Gog Magog Molly (who will be guesting with Old Glory on 30 January), Pig Dyke Molly and Cambridge Morris (who led the revival of Molly dancing in 1977) in Cambridgeshire. Ouse Washes Molly Dancers are based in Norfolk. Milkmaid Molly in Bury St Edmunds is a participatory group for able-bodied and those with disabilities. In Essex, Belchamp Morris dance Molly in the winter.

The Seven Champions Molly Dancers (lately escaped from the Kentish Treacle Mines) practice mostly, but not exclusively, in Kent. They and Old Glory share a bond and often invite each other as guest sides.

*Please note, Old Glory will not be in Whittlesey on 16 January. They are hoping to find an alternative venue.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Culture Bringing hope to the world - why nine ladies dance by Elana Katz 2 January 2026 Cambridgeshire The curious rise of competitive peashooting by Aidan Baker 19 July 2026 Environment Politics of farming: juggling food security, nature and uncertainty by Kate Moore 27 May 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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We are all familiar with the fable of the boiling frog: heat the water slowly enough, and it sits peacefully until it is too late. It is a warning about how immediate feedback loops fail when danger creeps up incrementally.

In ecology, this short-term failure compounds into Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Each generation accepts the degraded state of the natural world they inherit as normal. We no longer hear the morning chorus our grandparents grew up with. We reset our expectations with every generation - not just failing to react as the crisis escalates, but forgetting how rich and vibrant our living systems used to be.

An insider's view of local government

In political life, an even deeper dynamic is at play. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak termed it 'hypernormalisation' when describing the final years of the USSR - a concept later brought to prominence by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It describes a system where politicians, civil servants and the public know the status quo is failing and the official narrative is fiction, yet everyone maintains the façade because confronting reality feels too radical for our institutions.

Over my five years as a councillor, and having chaired Norwich City Council's Climate and Ecological Emergency Executive Panel, I have seen first-hand how local government actually functions. I have worked alongside capable, knowledgeable council officers who do brilliant work within the system. But that insider view exposes a fundamental structural flaw: a bureaucratic cup game where cash-strapped councils compete against one another for tiny, short-term grants.

In this setup, even visionary long-term plans are squeezed into short-term political cycles. Officers and councillors alike are kept trapped plugging leaks in the present rather than preparing our communities for the future.

Did you get the memo?

Yet I know the wealth of experience local authorities have. And I know far more detailed, national-level intelligence exists behind closed doors in Whitehall that local representatives are barred from seeing. Local government expertise would help frame the county's response if they were included in the conversation.

When central government launched its official Prepare campaign, advising households to stockpile three days' worth of food, water and emergency supplies, it was a rare crack in the façade. While Whitehall tells households to prepare, it refuses to equip local communities or municipal authorities with comparable information. The campaign covers a range of emergencies and does not in itself confirm what Whitehall believes about ecological catastrophe, but the contrast remains.

That is why I proposed Motion 14B - 'Transparency, Ecological Risk and Resilience Planning' - as the very first policy motion brought to Norwich City Council under our Green administration, co-sponsored by Leader Lucy Galvin. Our goal is to pioneer a democratic approach to governance, going directly into neighbourhoods to talk openly about climate adaptation and co-designing local resilience with residents. But genuine democracy requires honest information. That is why we formally requested access to the Joint Intelligence Committee's full assessment on ecological collapse.

Neither confirm nor deny

Defra's official response - hiding behind the "neither confirm nor deny" formula historically associated with nuclear secrecy - fuels the suspicion that the state is withholding the full assessment because confronting its findings would demand a total shift in how we govern.

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee also sought access to the full assessment, including on a confidential basis, but was refused. In a letter dated 17 June, its chair asked the minister either to provide the assessment or publicly explain why access was being denied.

This secrecy is dangerous. Climate risk specialists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based here in Norwich, have repeatedly shown that effective adaptation depends in part on effective risk communication and public trust. Suppressing ecological intelligence does not prevent panic; it creates an information vacuum where fear, rumour and conspiracy flourish.

The political consequences of a vacuum

Current political discourse fixates on border control and migration, treating human movement as an isolated political threat. But treating migration as the root problem ignores one of the major forces likely to shape human movement in coming decades: severe ecological breakdown.

The government's own publicly released nature security assessment makes this plain. Using intelligence frameworks, Defra warns that global ecosystem collapse poses a direct threat to UK national security. With the UK importing 40% of its food, domestic security relies on critical ecosystems thousands of miles away, where cascading environmental failure makes severe crop losses, water insecurity, and intense resource competition highly likely. Without major intervention, the state's own assessment warns that some critical ecosystems face a realistic possibility of beginning to collapse from 2030, with potentially severe consequences for food production.

By narrowing public discourse to border walls and administrative tweaks, Whitehall allows reactionary politics to weaponise symptoms while ignoring causes. Protecting the living world is not a soft preference or a matter of "being nice to nature"; ecological stability underpins our national food grid, public health, and basic economic survival.

The country needs an honest discussion

Our current state strategy is fundamentally incoherent. Whitehall cuts international aid while boosting military expenditure, treating security as something delivered purely through defence contracts and border policing - all while the primary driver of global instability sits unaddressed. Pledges to plant trees or deliver minor carbon offsets fail to grasp the magnitude of the moment. We need a complete paradigm shift.

Civilisation only exists because of remarkably stable climate conditions over the last ten thousand years. Human survival has always hinged on our capacity to adapt - to face reality directly and organise ourselves accordingly.

When I wrote the motion, I knew Whitehall was unlikely to hand over classified intelligence. Demanding access was a deliberate act to expose institutional secrecy and start an honest discussion about our collective future.

At this year's Green Party conference, Adrian Ramsay MP proposed No National Security Without Nature Security. The motion formally asserts a fundamental truth: true national defence cannot be found in military posturing or state secrecy while the ecological foundations of our survival break down beneath us. Real security requires a state that trusts its own people with the truth, treating living systems as critical infrastructure, so that local council chambers and empowered citizens can proactively adapt to the world as it actually is.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Climate New emergency briefing warns UK climate risks are accelerating by Mark Popay 29 April 2026 Climate For food security our diets must change by Jenny Canham 10 September 2026 Community Our new climate: adapting to survive - and thrive by Prof Rupert Read 21 February 2026 Truth is power

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The post Are we being told enough about the ecological collapse? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light" Dylan Thomas exhorted us, and with the clocks soon to change, I need no such instruction as I'm already feeling blue. We've had a wonderful summer, and until several weeks ago, my partner and I were able to spend our evenings having a picnic meal looking over the seaside at Frinton like the old couple we are becoming. Now, the nights are getting longer and colder, and so it's back to sitting in front of the television; so here's what we've been watching.

Slow Horses, Apple TV Gary Oldman, star of Slow Horses image by Gage Skidmore. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I persuaded the other half to splash out on an Apple TV subscription so we could watch For All Mankind, and thankfully she likes Slow Horses so we're watching the latest episodes.

The best TV shows know when to stop: The Wire and Breaking Bad finished after five seasons. Unfortunately, Slow Horses didn't. Adapted from the Slough House novels by Mick Herron (Mick Jagger is a fan of them and sings the theme tune) the show is set in the world of failed MI5 agents exiled to the eponymous decaying premises in London. There is apparently enough material left for another two series, but sometimes, less is more, and sadly, series six is a prime example of this. "Plot armour" - aka the inability to kill off major characters - is in full effect, so the show's two main protagonists, Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman) and River Cartwright are invincible despite otherwise skilled opponents plotting their demise at every turn.

Oldman delights as the cynical and seedy Lamb, and at launch, in making spies incompetent without reducing them to Johnny English levels of farce, the show turned the genre on its head; but it has now become somewhat monotone and therefore monotonous.

The precursor of TV series were film serials shown before the main feature, which would end with an improbable cliff-hanger to get the audience into the cinema the following week, to see how Batman, Flash Gordon et al. would survive. In order to keep the tension up, this is the route Slow Horses has gone down: villains will spray bullets around like confetti; but like The A-Team, never does a fired shot land on target. If one can suspend logical thought, it's entertaining enough, but otherwise it's very much the law of diminishing returns. 2/5.

Image © Paramount Skydance Corporation Michael Palin in the Philippines, Channel 5

While there's too much of Slow Horses, there was too little of this show, which I was surprised to discover when writing this review, is over after just three short episodes (but you can still watch it online). The increasingly irascible John Cleese famously asked for Michael Palin as his luxury when on Desert Island Discs and it remains a solid choice.

Sadly, since the series was filmed, Palin has injured himself and had to cancel the tour promoting the book he's written as part of doing this show, so I fear this could be his last such outing; if so, and you haven't seen it, watch it. No-one does the Englishman abroad better than Palin, nor ever has; he's a more avuncular Whicker, a less self-satisfied Clive James. As with all good travel writers and journalists, it's less about where he's visiting, more about how he reflects on his environment, and his exuberance when swimming in a huge shoal of fish will brighten up even the wettest, coldest evening. 5/5.

Celebrity Traitors, BBC One Ardross Castle image by sylvia duckworth. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

"Watercooler TV" is, like "viral videos", the Holy Grail for producers, and this show is still hitting that target. Claudia Winkleman - who increasingly represents the unhappy union of an Oompa-Loompa and a member of the Addams Family - instructs a group of celebrities (some of whom I'd never heard of) who are cloistered in a Scottish castle. They are divided into Traitors, seeking to eliminate the other contestants, and Faithfuls, who try and work out the identities of the enemies within.

In this season, a Traitor 'outed' themselves straight away, an unusual tactic, otherwise there is little to go on for the Faithfuls, who tie themselves in knots to discern whether the way in which one of the competitors held their teacup or said goodnight to the others marks them out as a Bad Egg.

It is, of course, glorious nonsense. As the omniscient viewer, we see the machinations of the Traitors, who gather at midnight wearing hooded cloaks as they decide who to "murder" next. Pointless tasks are undertaken by all during the day to win more money - which is all donated to charity.

There is no suffering or humiliation, as on I'm a Celebrity…, likewise a dearth of displays of swimwear-clad contestants showering in waterfalls, so this is very much family viewing, but it's harmless enough fare and provides a neutral topic of conversation when engaging with friends and family.

So, if you want to have a stress-free meeting next time you see your racist relatives or conspiracy-theorist associates, make sure you've watched a few episodes so you're au fait with the zeitgeist. 3/5.

All Creatures Great and Small, Channel 5 Malham Cove, Yorkshire image by Andrew Curtis. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Yes, those of us over a certain age will still miss Robert Hardy and Peter Davison as the Farnon frères in the original series on BBC, and recall fondly the sight of Christopher Timothy being overly intimate with a birthing cow. I suspect many of the audience of this Channel 5 re-boot remember the original, but the new cast fill the roles well, although seeing Samuel West, who plays Siegfried Farnon, also appearing in Slow Horses as a dastardly villain is somewhat jarring.

This is the ideal autumnal entertainment, and like the original, has now reached seven series, although another has already been commissioned. The Yorkshire Dales as a backdrop never fail to lift the spirits, and although this incarnation of the show has covered difficult topics such as PTSD, bereavement and domestic abuse, overall, this is the epitome of "feel good" television. Animals are saved, light humour is interjected, vintage cars and buses and horses and carts take us around bucolic vistas.

I'm sure if he was alive today, Orwell would have pointed out the perils of looking back to an idyllic past, but I've outlived Orwell and sometimes I just want feel-good television to stop me contemplating the world burning. This does the trick. 4/5.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Opinion Why watching TV news leaves us feeling powerless by Peter Thurlow 19 December 2025 Culture Attic attack: do we love or loathe our 'stuff'? by Ben Smith 4 August 2026 Community Winter 2025: how to find wellbeing from nature by Jenny Rhodes 1 January 2025 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post What to watch as the nights draw in first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Mr Pecksniff - artist: Joseph Clayton Clark (CC0)

"We have crushed the British to the ground. They are on their knees, and they will not rise for a very long time." So Russia's then ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, reportedly boasted to colleagues after the Brexit vote.

Even at the time, Brexit critics could have been forgiven for wondering suspiciously exactly who the 'we' were. Nothing since has other than exacerbated those doubts, and this week the former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, spelled it out. The Brexit brigade, naively or for some more unscrupulous purpose, had acted as, in Lenin's words, Russia's "useful idiots".

"Russia was very keen that the Leave campaign should succeed and that Britain should leave the European Union", he explained. "Because that would marginalise Britain as a global player and weaken Europe in general. That's the strategic opportunity the Russians spotted, and the leaders of the Leave campaign fell into it."

Did money change hands? Was it treason, or was it all down to the astonishing stupidity of our ruling class at the time?

*

But this week has seen more positive signs from the EU. "I would love to see the UK back," says Bernd Lange, chair of the European parliament's trade committee; and he only echoes the sentiments of so many of East Anglia Bylines' own European contacts. (Given Britain's appalling arrogance and rudeness through the Brexit period, this goodwill continues to astound.)

Hr. Lange suggests the way in may be through a 'Switzerland+' deal, involving regulatory alignment and, crucially, freedom of movement. It is only a suggestion so far, but it is telling that there has been no outraged response from the usual Brexit suspects.

Image by Number 10 via Wikimedia Commons (OGL 3)

For Andy Burnham, one potential attraction is that it can be presented as something new, to avoid attempts to tar it with the brush of past arguments. And for the first time, we know No.10 is open to ideas.

*

The Liberal Democrats have paid Andy Burnham an inadvertent compliment this week. Only a month ago a leading LibDem MP was assuring Pecksniff the prospect of an early election was "vanishingly unlikely", yet this week they are girding their loins for a possible call on 10 December.

The reason for this abrupt handbrake turn? They accept the PM is on a roll, and is keen to govern on his own mandate rather than that bequeathed to him by Keir Starmer. And dear reader, we know that means: Europe.

*

Image by Alisdare Hickson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

There was a time, not long ago, when Labour Party members were keen on proportional representation. We can record the dying of that enthusiasm to coincide almost exactly with their party forming a government.

This week one Labour MP claimed the idea of working with the Greens made them physically sick - yet the Greens are probably their nearest neighbours ideologically. Hardly promising for electoral reform, but that hubris and those attitudes seem unlikely to stand against Mr Burnham's burning ambition for change.

*

Under Boris Johnson, we should have been prepared for any depths of amoral depravity. But it was our misfortune as Covid-19 suddenly burst among us that those among the cult of mediocrity in public life under his squalid regime included Matt Hancock.

Matt Hancock pictured during the first lockdown. Photo credit: Number10 via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Mr Hancock was always known as a creep, one of George Osborne's familiars. As a backbencher, John Bercow is one candidate credited with these bon mots to his Tory colleagues: "There is no point trying to crawl up George's arse. No matter how high you climb, you will still see the soles of Matt Hancock's boots ahead of you."

For all his disagreeable unctuousness and determined self-aggrandisement, the handicap of being among the lowest forms of political life made promotion slow. During the coalition he was given a job in a 'Liberal Democrat' department: business, from where it is said he eagerly betrayed his unsuspecting new colleagues. His real purpose was to report back to his Tory chums and undermine the department's success.

But it took Covid to expose his complete failures as a man. Now he was his own master, executing the petty conceits of a mediocre man on the make, and then refusing to accept responsibility for his own words or actions.

Petty conceits for him, perhaps. But not petty for the families of the 43,000 who died in care homes while he made misleading claims about protecting them and Boris Johnson boogied on in Partygate. They will never forget, and never forgive.

*

The Green Party confronts a muddle the consequence of its own imprudence. If members welcome all fervent supporters of Palestine - many of them quite naturally Muslims - then some of those Muslims will share not a whit of the Greens' other principles. (They are not the first to fall into that trap. Jeremy Corbyn was happy to call one Palestine supporter "my dear friend" who on other platforms happily called for the death of all Jews.)

Zack Polanski at the Green Party Conference 2025

Zack Polanski suffered the obligation of taking a position on the 'Zionism is racism' motion which has caused all the fuss, but ducked his responsibilities. It now requires some propitiatory act from him, though that seems unlikely since he seems incapable of understanding the political catastrophe for his party that has just occurred. Of the motion, he told Laura Kuenssberg: "I don't think this is actually controversial".

You think? It has made headlines ever since, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have attacked it, many local Green parties have attacked it, Green councillors have attacked it, all the Green MPs have attacked it, and the motion was supported by the vote of less than half of one per cent of the membership. We now find the party machine scrabbling about for a way out of the mess - a mess which apparently their leader does not even recognise.

A polling disaster. Yet the Greens are unlikely to mitigate their decision until next year, with change unlikely before 2028.

*

Image by Conservative Party via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Kemi Badenoch's fervour for following sound Conservative principles seems paradoxical: rejecting some of those previously trumpeted by her predecessors. She has an obsession to leave the European Court of Human Rights and throws out any candidates who don't support her position. But the court was set up by Winston Churchill. Would she have chucked him out then? Is he now to be expunged from the roll of Tory deities?

As to Europe, Margaret Thatcher was a leading player in establishing the single market. How long before she joins him? What exactly are Tory principles these days? This week Andrew Boff, a senior London Tory and potential mayoral candidate, has resigned from the party over the ECHR issue, having been a member for 53 years.

Mr Boff says: "A political party that cannot tolerate support for fundamental human rights has moved a very long way from the principles that first attracted me to it. I have not abandoned my Conservative principles. I believe the party has abandoned some of its own."

And dear reader, the ECHR has only overruled a British immigration case three times in the last 45 years….

*

So we come to the weekly Reform rogues' gallery. So far, eight leading figures at the top of the party are under criminal investigation by the police, for what those involved would no doubt claim are minor derelictions of acceptable behaviour which should be disregarded. (My editor will wish your correspondent to emphasise that they are merely under investigation. They can be touchy…)

UPDATE: Reform UK now have eight Senior Officials under criminal investigation with the Police pic.twitter.com/k7voeo6wg9

— AxoAndy (@AxoAndy) October 17, 2026

Meanwhile, 61 Reform councillors across the country have left the party since being elected last May; and 17 in our region have resigned, defected or have been expelled since August last year.  Two were on two authorities, so in all 19 councillor positions. All six counties are represented.

Aug'25Richard EverettTendringExpelled after alleging that Farage overspent on his General Election campaign.  Now "not in a political group"
Oct '25Des WattCambridgeshireNow Conservative
Feb '26Peter ColleyHertfordshireNow Restore Britain.  He pointed to "abuse and mistreatment" that he claimed to have had endured from members of the "Reform management group"  - and to "incompetence", at a regional and national level.
March '26Tony HillHertfordshireUnclear
April '26Sarah-Jane ShieldsBasildon"I would like to formally state it is true that Sam Journet has been bullying me. His behaviour has caused significant issues …" Now Independent Councillor.
April '26Andy OsbornCambridgeshireDisqualified for breaking electoral law.
May '26Stuart PriorEssex CC and Rochford DCExpelled and resigned as councillor after being "accused the week before the elections of creating racist and Islamophobic posts on social media".
May '26Joseph SoperThurrockResigned, citing a serious illness in the family as the reason.  Note that he didn't turn up for the election count.
May '26Mark StanleyThurrockResigned, citing "a change in personal circumstances".  He didn't attend the count either.
May '26James SidlowCambridgeshireResigned citing "personal circumstances and wider pressures".
June '26Mark TuckerNorfolkResigned due to ill health
June '26Tony NelsonHuntingdonshireResigned - probably due to ill health
July '26James FletcherLutonUnclear - now a "non-aligned Independent"
August '26Peter ReevePeterboroughSuspended after being charged with drink-driving offence.  Now Independent
Sept '26Christopher PereraEssexSuspended "after it was found that he "damaged" the party's interests".  Now Independent.
Sept '26Bradley ThompsonEssex and TendringSuspended following "several serious and well-documented allegations of misconduct".  Now Independent.
Sept '26Gary KeoghSuffolkResigned "because of changes in his personal and family circumstances".

*

Image by Essex County Council

Meanwhile, readers will recall the sinister charade of Operation Vanguard, launched by Reform-led Essex County Council a month ago,in pursuing their malign liturgy of hate against asylum seekers. The aim is supposedly to keep their public safe from residents of Wethersfield asylum centre, even though the police point out there is no evidence of any threat. (Nigel Farage accuses them of "misleading people" because their statistics fail to support his prejudices.)

Triumphantly, Reform's council leader Peter Harris claims his private security team has reported 172 incidents. Only, he cannot say whether any of them involved asylum seekers. As Pam Cox MP (Colchester) points out: "It is deeply concerning that the council has not even gathered information on whether any incidents have involved asylum seekers, despite this being central to the justification of the scheme."

There is no reason to believe the estimable Ms Cox is of a naturally credulous nature, so she will not be surprised if Cllr Harris is reluctant to provide further details on the figures, which might fail to support his bigotry.

But then we learned this week that the council's vigilantes security teams have already arrested and handcuffed two alleged shoplifters. (Since no colour was mentioned, we must presume they were white.) The trouble is, the Vanguarders have no more powers in law than the man in the street. So making a 'citizen's arrest' is rather dubious, and handcuffing can amount to assault. Hence the incidents have been reported and recorded by the police as such.

So, here we have those supposedly protecting the public who are instead assaulting them. The council's deputy leader, Russell Quirk, insists the two arrested are "prolific shoplifters", without offering any evidence to support the claim, and in danger of facing a civil suit for defamation. Also, it seems the two were both young girls, not likely to put up much of a fight, and there is a nagging suspicion that this might have partly prompted the alacrity of the event.

*

Photo by Gareth Milner via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Liz Truss these days cuts an embarrassing figure, searching always for the grand gesture that will establish her true stature, like somebody perhaps asking her to launch a ship. She remains furious at supposing life has treated her far less generously than her talents deserve, but too stupid to understand her eternal infelicity, and that life's generosity has rewarded her far above her natural limitations. (It would be wise, though, for your correspondent not to dwell on how that might have come about…)

Her latest histrionics involve the publication of a book, 'Bank Job', a dangerous title which will invite lewdness from the baser sort, and can only confirm the woman's unworldliness. Her former colleague Conor Burns is excoriating: "She is now an international embarrassment with zero self-awareness". Though to be fair, his own only notable act in politics is to have walked into the office of the then foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, while his girlfriend was apparently on her knees looking for a pen she had dropped under the desk.

*

This week's eager searchers after truth were John Elworthy, David Patey, Malcom Lynn, Helen Forte, JJ Jackson, Mary Marshall, Liz Crosbie, Yasmin Gregory and James Porter.

<<< Previous Pecksniff's Diary

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Norwich's rivers are "possibly in their worst ever condition" and could cost hundreds of millions of pounds to repair, councillors have been warned. Saving the Wensum and the Yare could take up to 30 years, with the rivers battered by sewage spills, polluted runoff, exceptionally low flows and the longer-term degradation of their natural habitats.

The warning follows a difficult summer for the city's waterways. In July, hundreds of fish died in the heart of Norwich when a downpour after weeks of drought flushed pollution from drains into low, warm water, causing oxygen levels to plummet.

Norfolk Rivers Trust says the deaths were a symptom of a much deeper problem. In August, it warned that Norfolk's rivers had lost many of the natural defences that once helped them withstand prolonged dry weather.

A river struggling to breathe

Centuries of drainage have changed the way water moves through the landscape. Rain which once remained in soils, wetlands and pools, gradually feeding rivers during dry periods, can now move rapidly downstream and out of the catchment.

The Wensum is also fragmented by dams and weirs, which Norfolk Rivers Trust says can contribute to stagnation and overheating. Loss of tree cover has removed shade which once helped keep the water cool, while abstraction, pollution and rising temperatures add further pressure.

"The deeper truth is that our rivers are in trouble," the trust said after the summer's fish deaths. "What we're seeing is the result of long-term damage, and it's a warning we can't ignore."

Dead fish at Cow Tower, Norwich. Image by Celina Błędowska.

This August, Anglian Water warned that flows in the Wensum were among the lowest for the time of year since records began in the 1960s. Campaigners have also warned that low flows could allow salt water to surge further upstream towards Norwich.

The River Wensum, one of only around 200 chalk rivers in the world, runs from north-west Norfolk through the heart of the city. Its entire length is designated both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation. The Yare, whose upper reaches are also chalk-fed, skirts Norwich's southern edge before the two rivers meet at Whitlingham and flow towards the Broads.

Despite those protections, Norfolk Wildlife Trust says the protected sites of the Wensum and Norfolk Broads are now rated red on every conservation-status measure in the new Norfolk Environment Delivery Plan. That means they are deteriorating, severely degraded and require "significant intervention over a long timescale".

Sewage and pollution

The problems facing the rivers led Norwich City Council to hold a special scrutiny meeting at Blackfriars' Hall on Monday, bringing together councillors, campaigners, conservation groups and members of the public.

Figures in a council report show that a single overflow at Fye Bridge discharged into the Wensum 70 times in 2025, for a total of almost 27 days. In 2024 it discharged 79 times, for nearly 26 days.

Much of Norwich's sewer network is Victorian. Like many older systems, it uses combined sewers, where rainwater from streets and wastewater from homes and businesses travel through the same pipes. During heavy rain, the system can become overwhelmed and overflow into the rivers to prevent sewage backing up into homes and streets.

Dr Jonah Tosney, head of rivers and catchments at Norfolk Rivers Trust, told the meeting: "To fix those two rivers is going to cost tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of pounds, and it's going to take 20 or 30 years."

Cllr Gary Champion

Gary Champion, a Green councillor, added: "The Norwich sewers are sorely outdated. You need a significant amount of investment."

Sewage is not the only legacy problem. The Yare's riverbed contains mercury discharged by industry from 1964, while pollution reaching both rivers comes from a range of urban and rural sources. Norfolk Wildlife Trust says years of sewage and agricultural pollution have left the Wensum and Broads system severely degraded, with climate change adding further pressure.

Who pays to put it right?

The meeting heard there was no dedicated money in place for schemes to keep rainwater out of Norwich's sewers. Asked whether funding had been set aside, Phil Hunt, the council's environmental strategy manager, said: "I think the short answer to that is no."

Anglian Water, the Environment Agency and Natural England, which share responsibilities for water quality, sewage and the rivers' protected status, did not attend the meeting.

Chris Turnbull, of Wensum Riverkin, called on the "big three" to "pull their finger out".

"We really need action with all of us coordinated," he said. "We can sit in this hall. We can talk in an echo chamber. If they're not in it, then we're not going to go anywhere."

Anglian Water has sent a written statement to the committee and agreed to appear before councillors on 12 November.

Norwich City Council is now drawing up a rivers strategy, the first to cover both the Wensum and the Yare. It will set out responsibilities and consider how improvements could be funded. The council also plans to adopt a rivers charter recognising the rivers' "right" to clean water and to flow, alongside a voluntary pledge asking residents, businesses and organisations to cut pollution and water use.

Repairing the whole river system

Norfolk Rivers Trust argues that restoring the rivers will require more than improving sewers. Wetlands and floodplains can be restored to hold water in the landscape, pollution and abstraction reduced, and natural habitats rebuilt to make rivers more resilient to increasingly hot, dry summers.

There is already restoration work under way. Norfolk Rivers Trust completed a large-scale project on the Yare in 2025 and works with farmers and landowners across Norfolk on measures designed to improve soil health, retain water and nutrients and reduce polluted runoff. Since 2012, it says its work with hundreds of landowners has improved more than 3,700 hectares of land and restored around 10km of river habitat.

Norfolk Wildlife Trust is also recruiting a project manager to bring organisations and communities across the Wensum catchment together to develop a shared vision, strategy and action plan for the river.

For the Wensum in particular, the contrast is stark. A globally rare chalk river, internationally protected for its wildlife, flows through the centre of one of England's oldest cities. Yet after years of pollution and habitat damage, conservationists say restoring it to health will require sustained work over decades.

As Norfolk Rivers Trust put it after this summer's fish deaths: "We don't have long to turn things around."

This article is based on a piece by Henry Durand / Local Democracy Reporting Service, compiled with assistance from AI tools and edited by East Anglia Bylines.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Environment Could beavers really rescue Norfolk's threatened chalk streams? by Stephen McNair 20 January 2025 Environment New study to investigate Norfolk's rare chalk stream amid environmental concerns by Owen Sennitt, Local Democracy Reporter 8 July 2024 Environment Gaywood: time for action on Norfolk's chalk streams by Peter Thurlow 10 September 2024 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post Norwich's rivers may be in their worst ever state first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Dear Auntie Eve and Uncle Adam,

Hello. We have arrived. I am Winnie and this is Bertie.

We understand that you have kindly agreed to look after us, and we are VERY excited about this arrangement. We thought it would be helpful to leave you with a little guide to us, The Chunkers™, so you know exactly what you've let yourselves in for.

First things first: Walkies

We are particularly excited about this because YOU LIVE NEXT TO THE BEACH. This is excellent news for us.

We like to go for walks, sniff everything, investigate everything, run around, enjoy the fresh air and generally behave as though we have never seen a beach before in our lives. Please be prepared for us to be extremely excited about this.

There is, however, a small matter you should be aware of… We like to play a little game of TAG before walkies.

The game is called "Try and Catch Us So You Can Put Our Harnesses On."

We absolutely love going for a walk. We just feel that first thing in the morning, the best way to prepare for a lovely stroll is to make everyone work for it. So, if we suddenly decide that putting our harnesses on is beneath us and we start trotting around looking delighted with ourselves, congratulations — you've started the game.

While I may participate in the game, my brother Bertie is the reigning champion. Once the harnesses are finally on, we may look sad that the game is over, but we will be extremely excited about our beach adventure.

We will try to walk like this…

But we cannot promise it won't look something like this…

The garden

We LOVE being in the garden. We also consider ourselves extremely talented gardeners and would be delighted to help you with any landscaping requirements while we're there.

Our specialities include:

• Digging — we can make holes absolutely anywhere.
• Pruning — particularly things you weren't planning to prune.
• Plant inspection — extensive and thorough.
• General landscaping — we prefer a more natural, rustic look.

We like to think of ourselves as garden designers with a very hands-on approach. Here is an example of our landscaping abilities that we can offer…

Our vocal talents

We have been told that we can be quite vocal. By "quite vocal", they mean we bark a lot.

Sometimes we have something important to say. Sometimes we don't. Either way, we will probably let you know about it.

An insight into Winnie

Winnie (that's me) is extremely affectionate and likes to make absolutely certain that you are giving her enough attention. I may gently grab your arms to encourage you to make a fuss of me, followed by lots of enthusiastic kisses.

Sometimes I gets a little over-enthusiastic with the arm grabbing, so if it becomes a bit much, simply give me a toy to carry around. This is the magic trick.

Once I have a toy in my mouth, I'll happily talk to you around it, with the benefit that I am now too busy to grab your arms. In fact I'll soon lose interest in you and happily just wander around having a very important conversation with my toy.

Basically, I think that personal space is overrated — but, know this, toys and mud are always an excellent distraction.

An insight into Bertie

Bertie also enjoys giving kisses, although he has taken a slightly more athletic approach than me. Occasionally, he gets so excited that he launches himself into the air to give you one. Think of it as a high-impact kiss.

He means well.

Bertie also has another special talent which you should be aware of: DROOL.

If you are eating, Bertie will probably position himself very close by and produce an impressive amount of drool while staring lovingly at your food. And, if you're particularly lucky, he may then casually wipe said drool onto your trousers. Please take this as a sign that he really, really likes you.

And possibly that he would like a bite of whatever you're eating. Which brings me to…

The most important piece of advice: food

We usually have lunch around 1pm. However, please be aware that we may start barking considerably earlier because we are always hungry. We may also look at you as though we have never been fed before. Between you and me, this is a performance.

We like dinner somewhere between 6:30pm and 7pm, although our internal dinner alarm tends to go off at approximately 5:45pm. You may hear about this.

Repeatedly.

That said, all feeding times are very flexible, so please feel free to feed us a little earlier or later if that works better for you. We promise we won't complain.

Well… we probably will. But we'll still eat it.

So in summary

• Beach walks? YES PLEASE.
• Garden time? ABSOLUTELY.
• Digging? Obviously.
• Pruning? We're professionals.
• Snacks? ALWAYS.
• Cuddles? ESSENTIAL.
• Barking? VERY LIKELY.
• Winnie demanding affection? GUARANTEED.
• Winnie + toy = happy talkative dog? YES.
• Bertie flying through the air for a kiss? POSSIBLE.
• Bertie's drool on your trousers? HIGHLY POSSIBLE.
• Leaving golden hair absolutely everywhere? PROBABLY.
• Being spoiled rotten? NON-NEGOTIABLE.

Thank you for reading this in order to give us a fun-filled day at your house!

We promise to be very good.

Probably.

Rest assured we promise you lots of love, licks, chaos and golden fluff,

The Chunkers™

P.S. If we look innocent, we probably are.

P.P.S. If there is a hole in the garden, it was probably already there.

P.P.P.S. If your trousers are mysteriously wet, please don't ask questions.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Community Why your dog has evolved to love you by Martin Waller 28 August 2021 Science How much can dogs really understand us? by Juliane Kaminski 18 February 2026 Community The rage inspired by Britain's hanging dog poo bags by East Anglia Bylines 17 May 2026

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"Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."

That somewhat worrying instruction was issued to Facebook employees by their boss, Mark Zuckerberg, back in 2007, when the social media platform had "only" 20 million users, compared to the 3 billion or so it has today. In fact in 2007 the very phrase "social media" was obscure enough for Wikipedia to consider removing it from their site as it was a "marketing buzzword of limited currency". At the time though, if things in the virtual ether "broke", our lives were mostly unaffected.

How times have changed.

The proliferation of the Web depended on technologies which were mostly free to use. While the computers we, the end-users, used and still use ran on "paid" software like Windows or the Apple O/S (Operating System), the websites we were starting to use and then depend upon ran on a combination of software known as LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Let's explain that fairly simply: imagine that a website is a restaurant.

Cooking up a website image by Raysonho. via Wikimedia Commons (CC0) Cooking up a website

Linux is the building and the kitchen equipment. It is the operating system, the same kind of thing as Windows on your laptop, but built for machines that run all day without anyone sitting at them. It does the unglamorous work of managing the electricity, the plumbing and the locks on the doors. Nobody going to the restaurant notices it, but nothing else can happen without it.

Apache is the front-of-house staff. When a visitor types in an address, their request arrives at the door and Apache is the one who greets it. It works out what they are asking for, passes the order to the kitchen, collects the finished dish and carries it back to the table. It also deals with hundreds of customers at once without losing track of who ordered what.

MySQL is the pantry and the filing cabinet. It is the database, the place where everything the site needs to remember is stored in an orderly way: every article, every customer account, every product and price. When the chef needs something, they ask the pantry and it fetches the item quickly. Without it, the site would have no memory.

PHP is the chef. A simple website is like a printed menu: the same pages for everyone, never changing. Most sites are not like that. They show your name when you log in, list the latest articles, work out the contents of your basket. PHP is the cook who prepares each page fresh when it is ordered, following a recipe and using whatever ingredients are needed. This is why a site like a news page or an online shop can look different for every visitor.

Put together, when you visit a website, Apache takes the order, PHP starts preparing the page and asks MySQL for the ingredients, and Apache serves the finished page back to you. All of it runs on Linux and usually takes a fraction of a second.

Vulnerable

All of the above elements, bar MySQL, were written by largely unpaid enthusiasts; now they are managed by foundations funded by Big Tech but under no control by any government. On Wednesday 21 October, details were leaked of a vulnerability in one of those elements, PHP. As vulnerabilities go, this was a big one. The National Security Agency and the FBI advised site owners to switch sites off until this could be fixed. Governments in the Netherlands, Finland, France and Australia took their websites down.

Before the Cloud - what an old-style server room would have looked like image by Carl Lender. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

This was the second large outage that took place in a week. The previous day, our own Bylines Network sites went down when one of Google's data centres in London failed. Worse than losing Bylines Network was the disruption to courts (where video links were lost), and banks such as Revolut, Halifax, Lloyds and HSBC. So regardless of whether the many elements that make up our interconnected society are deployed on paid platforms or not, they are proving to be increasingly fallible.

Who or what are we vulnerable to?

The web and the apps on our phones going down is no longer a mild inconvenience. Our post-industrialised societies depend upon them; and it's impossible to draw a comparison in human history where something so integral to our everyday lives is essentially resting on technologies that operate without any overall regulator or statutory body accountable for them. It's akin to the railway network being built by hobbyists, and our trusting that trains won't collide because "someone" rather than any national agency will ensure due diligence.

The PHP vulnerability was "discovered" using AI - so add to the mix a relatively new incomer, who can unearth issues that no human could ever have foreseen. In this case, the AI had been instructed by "the good guys" to find this weakness; but there are enough "bad actors" out there willing and able to harness AI to destructive ends.

Are we prepared?

What can we do about all of this? Frankly, not much. "Prepping" as in preparing for the breakdown of society is becoming more and more popular, and there's even a UK Government website advising us to do so. Am I doing so? No. Once I've eaten the food that's in the house, if the power isn't back on and order restored by then, who knows what sort of post-apocalyptic nightmare we'd be living in, and whether surviving in that would be worthwhile?

Known as the "Blue Screen of Death" - will this be the last image we see before the power goes out? image by Devon McCormick. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Every generation since the beginning of recorded time has predicted the End of Days. Ours is the only one where that might be presaged by a spinning wheel on a computer screen, that doesn't stop revolving until the power goes - for the last time - out.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Business Clicks at any price: the corruption of Facebook by East Anglia Bylines 31 July 2026 Energy Datacentres: are we frogs in a digital pot? by Guy Chapman 21 September 2026 Climate COP26: Can we rely on science and technology to save us from the climate crisis? by Julian Huppert 9 November 2021 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post The LAMP is flickering first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

A recent report from the Centre for Ageing Better argues that the government is overlooking a growing employment crisis among people aged 50 to state pension age. In response, the Centre has launched a new measure - NETER, meaning people who are not in employment, training, education or retirement - to make this group more visible in labour-market policy and statistics. It points out that while 13% of 16- to 24-year-olds are NEET - not in employment, education or training - 21% of people aged 50 to state pension age (2.9 million) are similarly trapped.

And many NETERs want to work. Between 2023 and 2025 the number of people in this age group interested in or actively looking for employment rose by 22%, to 918,000, the highest figure recorded since 2020. And while the government has responded to youth unemployment with major funding - including £820 million announced in the previous Budget - it has introduced no comparable programme for older workers. Over the last decade government has spent ten times as much on supporting young people into work as on people aged over 50. But older workers face equal problems: age discrimination, with repeated unsuccessful job applications, financial insecurity and the loss of carefully planned retirement prospects.

A complex picture

The problem is that official statistics often hide NETERs by treating different groups separately and not publishing a single figure comparable with the NEET measure. But although more than half of NETERs - around 1.6 million people - cite long-term illness or disability as their main reason for not working, 362,000 of these are interested in or looking for work. Again, there are 490,000 with caring responsibilities who want employment - 78% of them women.

The Centre argues that NETER should become a regular headline labour-market indicator, published alongside measures such as unemployment and NEET figures. It wants the measure incorporated into the government's Get Britain Working programme and used to assess progress, expose inequalities and identify where additional support is needed.

Why intervene?

The paper presents both social and economic reasons for action. The report argues that increasing employment among people aged 50 to state pension age could substantially benefit the economy. The employment-rate gap between this group and people aged 35 to 49 is currently 15 percentage points. It suggests that reducing that gap by just one percentage point would increase economic output by £7 billion.

The Centre wants its NETER data used in a place-based approach. Employment and skills responsibilities are increasingly being devolved to strategic authorities, so a regular and authoritative figure for NETERs could help local leaders identify barriers and target interventions.

The Centre does not argue that youth unemployment deserves less attention, but that older workers facing similar exclusion should receive equal recognition, resources and tailored support.

With the population aged 50 to state pension age projected to grow from 14.8 million today to 17 million by 2046, the Centre concludes that the NETER crisis is likely to become more significant and cannot remain overlooked.

This article is based on a press release from the Centre for Ageing Better.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Community In praise of older people by Celina Błędowska 1 October 2026 Education Young people are 'out of work and out of sight' by Ian Flintoff 25 June 2026 Business The graduate job market is grim right now - but university is still worth it by Dr Sean Brophy 19 June 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post Older people count too: what about the NETERs? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

For years, the prospect of Britain joining the EU again has been largely taboo in mainstream Westminster politics. Andy Burnham has now swept aside the red lines that kept it there.

After putting Britain's long-term relationship with the EU back on the agenda at Labour conference, last week the prime minister called for a "serious dialogue" and a "calm, clear-eyed, rational look" at the options, ranging from the status quo to full EU membership. Now a major new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has landed at an extraordinarily opportune moment. Its research began months before Burnham's intervention, but its conclusion could hardly be more pertinent to the debate he has helped open: EU membership should become Britain's medium-term goal.

"The world Britain built its post-Brexit strategy for no longer exists," says IPPR executive director Harry Quilter-Pinner. With Russian aggression, an unpredictable United States and economic coercion from China, the think tank argues that Britain lacks the scale to protect its prosperity, security and democratic institutions alone.

That does not, Quilter-Pinner stresses, mean "announcing another referendum tomorrow". Alongside its strategic case for membership, IPPR has published research addressing a harder question: how solid is the apparent public support for joining?

A majority - but how durable?

Polling commissioned by IPPR and Persuasion UK found 52% wanting to join the EU, against 29% who wanted to stay out. Among those expressing a preference, that produces a seemingly comfortable 64-36 majority.

A separate experiment involving almost 3,000 respondents then stress-tested propositions for EU membership and a closer economic relationship. Participants encountered different combinations of benefits, obligations, trade-offs and arguments for and against, and were asked whether they would accept the proposed deal.

Across the membership scenarios, average support was 52%. The figures from the two exercises are not directly comparable - the questions and methodology were different - but the experiment was designed to discover how support performed under pressure. IPPR's Tazu Walden warns that, as 2016 demonstrated, "a seemingly safe majority can be softer than it first appears".

The findings have arrived in the middle of a debate that has developed rapidly since Burnham put Britain's European future back on the table. Over the past week, contributors to East Anglia and Yorkshire Bylines have approached from different directions the same broad problem IPPR is now examining: how does Britain reach a decision about Europe that people understand, consent to and can live with afterwards?

More than winning the vote

Writing in East Anglia Bylines, Suffolk for Europe chair Anna Damski argued that favourable opinion polls were not enough: Britain needed "durable consent" before joining the EU again. Her argument was partly informed by ten years of campaigning and conversations with voters. Asking whether people want to join can conceal very different assumptions about what membership would mean, just as Leave in 2016 encompassed incompatible expectations of what Brexit would eventually deliver.

Any new discussion therefore has to include the awkward questions - the euro, Schengen, free movement, budget contributions and EU law - as well as the benefits. Britain should not assume that its former opt-outs and exceptional arrangements would simply be restored.

Damski wrote: "I don't want us to scrape over the line with 52% and congratulate ourselves on winning, only to discover afterwards that substantial numbers of people voted for something quite different in their heads."

The appearance of another 52% in IPPR's research is coincidental, but it neatly illustrates the distinction between winning a vote and building a durable majority.

A national conversation

Damski suggested citizens' assemblies as one way of creating a more informed debate. Dr Mike Galsworthy, chair of European Movement UK, subsequently developed a deliberative approach in much greater detail in Yorkshire Bylines, proposing a structured national conversation lasting 12 to 18 months.

His model would include citizens' assemblies across the UK, with participants hearing evidence, questioning experts and deliberating together, alongside a sector-by-sector exercise examining what different relationships with Europe would mean in practice.

"A better-informed citizenry makes better democratic decisions," Galsworthy argues. The process would allow the country to learn what the available options actually involve before political parties decide what to put in their manifestos. His proposal does not prescribe its own conclusion; disagreement between assemblies, he argues, would itself provide useful evidence of where the country stands.

But how should Britain decide?

That leaves the question of how the decision should ultimately be made. East Anglia Bylines columnist Peter Thurlow tackled that part of the problem, questioning the assumption that Britain would necessarily need another referendum and the difficulty of turning a complex range of preferences into a simple binary choice.

Whatever democratic mechanism is eventually chosen, he concludes, it must be preceded by a "proper, extensive and honest education programme" explaining the EU and the choices available. IPPR similarly does not insist on a referendum. Once public consent is stronger, it says a mandate for membership could come either through a fresh referendum or a clear manifesto commitment.

There are differences between the arguments. IPPR has already reached its preferred destination: full EU membership. Galsworthy's national conversation deliberately leaves the destination open, while Damski supports membership but argues that people must understand both its benefits and responsibilities. Thurlow focuses on how the eventual democratic mandate might be obtained. All, however, look beyond a favourable opinion poll.

Looking forward, not back

IPPR associate director Laura Chappell puts the change of emphasis succinctly: "It's time to stop talking about Brexit and focus entirely on the future."

That does not mean forgetting 2016. Britain voted narrowly for an action - leaving the EU - before there was agreement on the destination, and the years that followed were spent resolving questions that might usefully have been confronted before the vote. Five years after Britain finally left, its long-term relationship with Europe is already being reconsidered. If the country eventually chooses full membership again, another narrow victory followed by years of argument over what voters really meant would hardly constitute a durable settlement.

IPPR's membership propositions averaged 52% support across its stress test, even as respondents encountered competing arguments, costs and obligations. That offers encouragement to advocates of membership, but also warns against mistaking a polling lead for settled consent.

The EU has changed, the world around it has changed and Britain's choices have changed with them. The question now is not simply whether a majority can be assembled for joining the EU again, but whether Britain can arrive at a decision informed and durable enough that, this time, the argument about what the country has chosen takes place before the choice is made.

This article is based on a press release from IPPR, compiled with assistance from AI tools and edited by East Anglia Bylines.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Brexit Joining Europe again: first, we need durable consent by Anna Damski 13 October 2026 Brexit Another referendum on the EU? You must be joking by Peter Thurlow 16 October 2026 Brexit Britain still hasn't learnt what being outside the EU means by Niall Ó Conghaile 6 October 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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Why this Tory obsession with inheritance tax?

There is something quite extraordinary about the Conservative Party's decision that cutting inheritance tax should be a centrepiece of its attempt to recover its electoral fortunes. Kemi Badenoch used her speech to the Conservative Party conference to announce that a future Conservative government would abolish inheritance tax on the family home and increase the tax-free allowance on other assets. It tells us a great deal about the modern Conservative Party. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, almost none of it is good.

Who pays (or doesn't)?

Inheritance tax is simply not a significant concern for the overwhelming majority of people in the UK. According to the latest HMRC data, just 4.72% of UK deaths resulted in an inheritance tax charge in 2023-24. In other words, fewer than one estate in twenty paid the tax.

That fact matters because it puts the Conservative proposal into perspective. Young people struggling to find secure employment are not worrying about inheritance tax. People who cannot afford their rent, or who despair of ever being able to buy a home, are not worrying about inheritance tax. Nor are those relying on food banks, struggling with energy bills, or wondering whether their income will last until the end of the month.

Inheritance tax is instead an issue of considerable importance to a relatively small group of people who have accumulated substantial wealth and who would like to pass as much of it as possible to the next generation without making any further contribution to the society that has assisted the creation of their good fortune. There is nothing surprising about that: greed is as old as the hills, and most are in the Tory party. There is, however, something very surprising about a political party now apparently believing that satisfying this desire should be one of its flagship policies for winning a general election.

What do they really pay?

To put this in context: the current standard inheritance tax rate is 40%. But that rate is only charged on the taxable part of an estate above the available allowances. The basic nil-rate band is £325,000, and the residence nil-rate band can add another £175,000 in appropriate circumstances. Unused allowances can also be transferred between spouses and civil partners. This means that in many cases, up to £1 million can be passed on tax-free.

Badenoch's proposal would exempt the family home from inheritance tax when it is passed to children or grandchildren and increase the tax-free allowance on other assets to £500,000 per person. Couples would therefore be able to pass on their family home plus a further £1 million without paying inheritance tax.

As a result, the headline rate gives a deeply misleading impression of the tax actually paid. HMRC says that even among those estates that did pay inheritance tax in 2023-24, the average effective tax rate was just 13%.

Crisis - this crisis?

So, what exactly is the national inheritance tax crisis that Kemi Badenoch is seeking to solve? In blunt terms, there isn't one. There is instead a political obsession among a relatively wealthy minority, amplified by parts of the media and by politicians who appear to spend rather too much time talking to people who look remarkably like themselves.

That is what makes this proposal politically revealing. Britain has profound economic problems. We have a housing crisis, failing public services and people unable to see a GP or dentist. Younger generations face extraordinarily high housing costs. Millions of people suffer economic insecurity. Real wages have stagnated, investment is inadequate, and enormous inequalities in both income and wealth persist.

A party losing touch

Faced with all that, the Conservative Party appears to have looked around Britain and concluded that one of the most pressing problems requiring its attention is the tax bill faced by fewer than one in twenty estates. That is not serious politics. It is the politics of a party that has lost touch with the country it wishes to govern.

There is another issue here as well. Inheritance is, by definition, unearned by the person receiving it. No one chooses the family into which they are born. No one works to acquire an inheritance before receiving it. Inherited wealth is the consequence of circumstances over which the recipient had no control. At the same time, millions of people who work for everything they have are taxed on the incomes they earn. The Conservatives apparently think that reducing the taxation of inherited wealth should take priority.

That says something important about their conception of society. They remain deeply concerned with preserving accumulated private wealth and its transmission between generations. They appear much less concerned with creating the conditions in which those without inherited wealth might thrive.

A political party seeking government should be asking what prevents people from living secure, fulfilling lives and what government can do about those obstacles. It should be thinking about housing, employment, healthcare, education, social care, climate change, inequality and the provision of the infrastructure on which everyone depends. Instead, the Conservatives appear to be asking how they can make already substantial inheritances larger.

That might appeal to some of their remaining supporters. It might please some newspaper proprietors and columnists. It might even win back some affluent voters who have deserted them. But it does not amount to a programme for government.

What is this policy about?

The real significance of this proposal is therefore not inheritance tax itself. It is possible for reasonable people to debate its design, its allowances and the reliefs that should apply. That may be a minority sport, and it is not beyond the boundaries of sensible tax debate. The important question is not that, but what the choice of inheritance tax as a flagship political concern tells us about the Conservative Party.

It tells us who they are thinking about, whose anxieties they hear and, most importantly, about the enormous number of people whose anxieties they apparently do not hear at all. A party that thinks inheritance tax is one of Britain's great political problems has ceased to understand the problems facing most people in Britain.

That is why this proposal will not restore the Conservative Party to its former position. It might instead help explain why it has become a fringe party and why, unless it begins listening to the concerns of the great majority rather than the wealthy few, it is likely to remain one.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Economics Inheritance: the good tax everybody hates by Stephen McNair 2 July 2023 Economics How capitalism drives inequality: and how to stop it by Prof Richard Murphy 2 November 2025 Business Will inheritance tax changes really mean the end of Britain's farming? by Stephen McNair 7 November 2024 Economics Why scrapping inheritance tax is a bad idea by Martin Waller 26 September 2023 Business Why this Tory obsession with inheritance tax? by Prof Richard Murphy 20 October 2026 Download the Bylines app to get our content straight to your phone! Get the app

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There is something rather absurd to observe these days with a Reception class in school before the register has even been taken.

I was struck by something I hadn't expected when I recently returned to the classroom front line as a 'sub' or supply teacher. It wasn't phonics, interactive whiteboards, or even the changes in behaviour management.

It was the water bottles.

Not one or two but a whole army of them. Bright plastic vessels, brushed steel, flip-top lids, shoulder straps, and in colours that, viewed en masse, were rather offensive to the aesthetic eye. They dwarfed the children's lunchboxes and, in some cases, the children themselves.

I kept wondering when this had become normal.

Not because children shouldn't have water. They should. A drink at break, another at lunchtime. Maybe a quick detour to the fountain during the long afternoon.

This felt different. Somewhere along the timeline, access to water has become a continuous hydration exercise as if running a marathon, and continuous hydration has quietly become accepted as part of effective teaching. When did this happen?

I cannot remember the evidence that persuaded schools to make that leap. Of course, there is evidence that dehydration affects concentration. There is also good evidence that hunger, malnourishment, poor sleep, anxiety and excessive heat also affect concentration. These are not easily disputed.

What is much harder to find is convincing evidence that carrying a litre of water around and sipping it all day, in class, improves learning.

The weight of the new

Education has an extraordinary ability to accumulate new ideas, always welcomed with enthusiasm because most are rooted in good intentions. Few people ever ask what we should leave behind to make room for these new ideas.

The result is a profession carrying more than it can comfortably hold. In fact, it is hurtling towards a collective breakdown.

Teachers are expected to teach an expanding curriculum while managing increasing SEN and pastoral needs, safeguarding responsibilities, attendance concerns, behaviour, mental health, family support and endless accountability measures. Every addition seems reasonable in isolation. Together they create something almost impossible to sustain.

Weighing what matters

And the curriculum tells the same story.

Every review begins with what ought to be included. Financial education. Online safety. Climate change. Relationships. AI. All important. All worthy.

Yet curriculum design is not simply an exercise in deciding what matters. It is an exercise in deciding what matters most. That distinction has become blurred.

Artificial intelligence makes that impossible to ignore. Our instinct is already to squeeze another subject into an already overcrowded timetable. AI literacy will become another entitlement. Prompt writing another competency. Critical use of generative AI another vital framework.

Before long, teachers will be carrying that as well.

Subtract rather than add

I wonder whether this technological revolution is asking us something rather different: not what schools should add next, but whether they have reached the point where something has to be left behind.

The world no longer rewards people simply because they can recall information. Most of us carry more information in our pockets than previous generations found in an entire library. The challenge now is deciding what to trust. Schools should be spending more time helping young people make sense of competing claims than asking them to reproduce facts they can retrieve in seconds.

This is not an argument against knowledge. Knowledge remains the foundation of thought. But this focus is no longer enough.

Make space

Our future life preparation increasingly lies in interpretation, discernment and curiosity; qualities that cannot simply be downloaded. It lies in the lifelong ability to entertain ourselves and others.

Those things require something schools are running dangerously short of.

Time.

Attention.

Space to think. Creativity. Music, drama, the arts.

Perhaps that is why the oversized water bottle has stayed with me. It is such an ordinary object, yet it tells a familiar story. Schools rarely abandon practices. They inherit them.

The same is true of much of the curriculum. The question is whether schools have remembered that every addition has a cost.

Time to be brave

For years we have behaved as though curriculum reform means finding room for one more thing. AI presents us with an opportunity to be braver than that.

Perhaps the most important educational reform of the next decade will not be deciding what children should learn. It will be deciding, finally, what they no longer need to.

I look forward to Mr Burnham's keen and cross-party attention to the national curriculum, with daily announcements before too long!

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More from East Anglia Bylines Community Beyond the test: let's reclaim education for the next generation by Cllr Gary Champion 12 August 2026 Education Who gets our attention? What returning to the classroom taught me by Mary-Jo Hill 27 August 2026 Education Seeing the student: how special support brings school success by Matthew Pugh 26 June 2026

What happens when the media itself becomes part of the problem? Who holds it to account? 14 years after the Leveson Inquiry reported its findings, has anything really changed? And how can we build something better?

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Over the last weekend many of the 5,000 volunteers who carry out a monthly count of waterbirds for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) headed for their local reservoirs.

For the small team that count at Hanningfield Reservoir in Essex, there were mixed feelings. Water levels had been dropping steadily over the months of drought, relieved by little or no appreciable rainfall.

Low water levels at Hanningfield Reservoir in Essex. Image author-provided.

But 2026 has been exceptional, with regulars recalling the severe drought of 1976. And as the birders prepared for the Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS), the BTO itself warned of the impact of low water levels on reservoir birds.

"Reservoirs can be particularly important for wintering wildfowl, providing feeding and roosting habitat when natural wetlands are unavailable or unsuitable. Changes in water levels can, however, alter the availability of shallow margins and feeding areas, potentially affecting where birds congregate."

Hanningfield has been attracting waterbirds since it was filled in 1954. It is the 11th largest reservoir in England with a capacity of 25,500 million litres. Unlike many reservoirs it is set in rolling countryside with wooded margins and shallow lagoons holding reedbeds, enhancing its attractiveness to birds of many species.

But it is its appeal to water birds that has led to its status as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Falling numbers

Two species to be found at Hanningfield, often in large numbers, are Tufted Duck and Coot. In October 2023, the WeBS survey recorded 1,227 Tufted Duck and 2,474 Coot; the following year there were a more modest 203 Tufted Duck and 1,104 Coot.

In October last year, when Essex and the rest of the East of England was experiencing an exceptionally prolonged dry period, the number of Tufted Duck fell to just 25, and Coot to 176.

While numbers climbed slowly as the reservoir filled during the wet winter of 2025/26, the recovery stalled as a dry spring turned into a hot, dry summer. Water levels fell dramatically through evaporation and usage. By September Tufted Duck numbered 56 and Coot only 28.

So, with a further month of barely detectable rainfall, it was unsurprising to find numbers at an all-time low - in single figures with eight Tufted Duck and a mere six Coot.

Where have the birds gone?

Two questions arise. Why have they left, and where have they gone?

Coot prefer shallow vegetated lakes, where they dabble for plant material and small crustacea and molluscs. The retreat of the water has exposed the shallow reservoir floor where the food on which they depend was to be found, the sun baking the exposed mud to a harsh, hostile environment.

Nesting coot at Hanningfield. Image by Sarah White.

Tufted Ducks, in contrast, dive for their preferred molluscs. Quite why the retreat of the water to the reservoir's deeper core should affect them so dramatically is not as clear, but may be related to the increased competition in a limited area and less stressed feeding opportunities elsewhere.

Where they and the Coot have gone to is unclear. Other reservoirs and natural waters in the South East report a similar story, and analysis of the WeBS data may provide answers.

But the prospects for the rest of the year and particularly for 2027 are extremely worrying. Will Hanningfield get its waterbirds back?

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Karen sashayed into the Round Office of the Presidential Palace, her tight face flushed and clearly cookie-cutter modified by plastic surgery. The 'it girl who looks great on TV'. This was a must-have look in the Washington presidential circle.

"Mr. President-sir, we've done what you asked," Karen cooed with excitement as she glanced down at her Hello Kitty-covered tablet. "The midterm results are a landslide for us."

President Crypto looked up as he was folding ketchup-drenched paper, perfecting the origami dart missile he so loved to aim at the less worthy.

With sauce-coated teeth, he leered at the pert vision and enquired, "By how much? Did you do all I asked?"

"99.9% in the House of Representatives and 99.7% in the Senate," gushed Karen with youthful glee. "Yes sir. We had armed military at all the voting polls, used super, super intelligent AI to adjust the voting machines, shredded all the ballots we didn't like, and threw out all the mail-in ballots except yours of course. Best of all, sir, we didn't even need to nuke California on behalf of the Iranians."

"That's good. I'm great, the best president ever, no-one's been as successful as me."

He paused, a small brain cell switching on. "Why not 100%?"

"Well, you know how devout those papists are," beamed Karen, "so I've dispatched a SEAL team to the Vatican to arrest the Pope. That'll show them not to mess with a white Christian country."

Abruptly the door behind Karen swung open and the breathless, bearded Vice President Jayden (or was it Aiden or maybe Brayden? - he kept changing his name) strode in.

"Crypto," he began.

"Now what did I tell you to call me?" shouted the president as he threw the finished ketchup missile at his deputy. "Here's a snack for you, breakfast of champions."

The Vice President winced, wiping a residue of ketchup from his cheek. "Err, Your Highness Master President-sir, err, I have unpleasant news, there is a large, angry crowd demanding to speak with you."

"What's wrong with those people, didn't I send them all five-dollar checks?" barked the president with disdain. "Haven't gas prices plummeted now oil is flowing in from Russia?

"Where is their fealty towards me, their lord and master? Where is their white nationalist pride? Their pride at building beautiful things?" he shouted, waving his hand around his gleaming, newly redecorated golden office in the newly renamed Gold House.

Instantly bored with the political topic, his attention turned to his own redecorating achievements. "What do you think, isn't it beautiful and grander than grand? Genuine pinchbeck gold leaf on everything, better than that Frenchie shack Versailles," he bragged haughtily.

Suddenly the door burst open again. A panicked gaggle of disheveled, sweaty-faced oligarchs stampeded into the room. In unison they yelled out, "AI has infiltrated the global stock markets, adjusted down the value of our shares, we are all ruined."

The president glared, holding up his masterful hand and silencing the mass invasion. Before any of them could speak further, he imperiously pronounced, "I have more important matters, very important matters. Karen, have the guards bring in the rogue, the so-called hack."

Archie, for that was the name of the journalist, was dragged in, hooded and shackled, by muscular guards sporting the latest all-black uniform.

"You are a traitor to the country, a nobody, stupid, and not attractive at all. How dare you publish fake news about me," he roared at the hooded man. "What do you have to say to me? I am the best of the best, have the highest polls of any president ever, and I am so darned good looking too. Ask anyone in the room." 

Silence reigned, except for a few shifting feet.

Archie, now able to see, hobbled towards the shouting voice.

"I write the truth," he whispered.

Staring at the president, Archie's gaze noticeably shifted upwards from the president's red teeth to his very golden yellow, if slightly asymmetric, hair.

Aware his golden mane was the focus of Archie's fascinated gaze, the president proudly pointed at his slightly askew hair. "Well, you best write that this is all me, completely natural. Every strand is the finest real hair that taxpayer money can buy from China. Isn't that right?" he asked, his challenging eyes focusing on the cadre of weak-kneed oligarchs leaning against the newly golden mantelpiece.

"Uhh, yes sir. I mean, your Highness Master President-sir, our great business leader," they chimed, finding their voices and knowing their place, while very discreetly trying to peel off the genuine pinchbeck gold leaf that the glue gun had failed to hold in place and was now adorning their very expensive suits.

Before the president could further berate the journalist and eulogize on his own truthfulness, the War Secretary strode into the crowded room sporting a makeup bib around his neck.

"Crypto, sir," he began, being on a first-name basis due to their shared television celebrity status. "We've a problem with the protesters outside," he opined.

"The drones that your relatives sold us don't have batteries, the snipers don't have ammunition because the arsenal in the Triumphant Arch isn't completed yet, and our testosterone-enhanced military has joined the protesters because, and I quote, 'it's more democratic'. Imagine that," he said in disbelief.

Completely unfazed, the president stood up. "Well there is only one thing to do: every man for himself. It's time to fly. Karen, load my gold bathtub onto Golden One. Anyone for golf?"

Each and every hand stretched into the air, except, of course, the shackled Archie.

"What about my favorite golden sofa?" asked the presidential VP. "I just had it reupholstered by Sofa-You-Love."

"No time, no room; you're on your own," said the president hobbling to the side exit, hand in hand with his faithful Karen. But as she dutifully pulled open the door, a fateful draft blew across the president's head.

The entire room took in a breath of panic. Unbeknown to the president, his golden toupee fluttered like an autumn leaf to the floor.

The oligarchs, the VP, the War Secretary and even the guards surged forward, all grabbing at the golden toupee. For he who wears the golden toupee is president.

But as the sound of protesters calling for the president grew louder and closer, all thoughts of attaining power faded, and all save Archie fled the room rather than wear a presidential mantle and confront angry citizens.

Alone, Archie stared down at the tattered toupee, and ever the journalist started to compose a suitable epitaph.

"As fall slips into winter, here lies the end of the Great American Experiment. The people's voices have reignited the warming flame of democracy. Will spring bear its sweet fruit? Perchance, ordinary people have remembered that the power was theirs all along."

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More from East Anglia Bylines Economics Trump's Russian diesel deal could come at a devastating price by Prof Richard Murphy 11 October 2026 Culture Trump v BBC: is the President losing? by Stephen McNair 5 July 2026 Business The Trump family's profits from crypto: a Reuters probe by Stephen McNair 21 June 2026

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Jobs in social care are often characterised as unskilled, unfulfilling and insecure. But in his speech to the Labour Party conference Andy Burnham singled out the expertise and dedication of care workers, praising their 'huge skill, humour and humanity'. I've just published a labour market study that provides the evidence behind those words.

Work that Matters, shows that jobs in social care are better than most others with low to middle pay. The research was conducted by PF Global and commissioned by Care Matters, a new hub for evidence and ideas on specialist social care.

The research

We asked a representative sample of over 4,000 UK workers to rate their jobs on 40 measures of employment quality, and compared roles in social care for working-age adults to others across the labour market. The measures covered everything from the skills required for the job to the extent of work-life balance. Respondents scored their job on a 5-point scale between positive and negative statements - e.g. 'I always enjoy work' versus 'I never enjoy work'. To develop the list, we drew on decades of previous research on the quality of work, including studies by academics, think tanks and international bodies.

Contrary to the stereotypes, social care came very near the top when we looked at jobs with low to middle pay. On nine out of 40 measures, jobs in working-age social care were significantly better than other roles with annual earnings of up to £40,000. Across the remaining 31 measures, the care sector was in line with other jobs. There were no measures where care was significantly worse than other roles in the same pay bracket.

We also compared jobs in social care to alternatives that people often consider (again examining work with low to middle pay). We looked at retail and hospitality, and found that jobs in care for working-age adults were significantly better on 15 of the 40 measures, and worse on none. We also looked at healthcare, which is often seen as preferable to social care. Jobs in care were not significantly worse than health on any of the 40 measures.

This rather busy chart summarises the whole report. For each indicator, the score for other jobs is set to zero, so you can see where working-age social care is better than the rest of the labour market. Care is above the line on many more measures than it is below (and where it is below, the gap is not statistically significant). Retail and hospitality jobs are also mapped, and they are below the average on almost every measure.

The nine measures where social care beats other jobs

It is worth quoting the statements for which working-age social care beats other jobs, because they bring to life what makes work in care stand out.

Care workers are more likely to support statements that show their jobs are purposeful:

• 'My work is meaningful and worthwhile'
• 'I'm proud to do my job'
• 'My work helps other people a great deal'
• Their answers point to greater skills and responsibilities:

'My work requires a great deal of job-related skills and expertise'

• 'My job involves a great deal of personal responsibility'
• 'My job requires excellent people skills'

They indicate more job security, both immediately and as people consider how the labour market will change with new technology:

• 'I'm certain jobs like mine will exist in 10 to 20 years' time'
• 'Job security at my work tends to be very good'

Finally, workers in the sector are more likely to agree that 'My work has clear and formal ways to raise issues and concerns'.

Secure work, fairly rewarded

The statement 'I'm certain jobs like mine will exist in 10 to 20 years' time' generates the most eye-catching finding. On this measure social care beats every other sector. As AI transforms the world of work, social care will offer the most certain work in the decades ahead (according to workers' own ratings).

We know that we will need many more care workers in the future, and this research shows that these new jobs can be skilled, fulfilling and secure. The quality of work on offer means that social care should be able to attract the talent it needs, including young adults considering career options.

But for that to happen pay and conditions need to be better. Fortunately, change is coming. Fair Pay Agreements for adult social care will increase pay above the National Living Wage from 2028, and in recent weeks the Government has announced a new pension scheme for the sector.

Jobs in social care are skilled, secure, fulfilling - in time they will be rewarded fairly too.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Health Burnham's big gamble: the 23rd attempt to fix social care by Stephen McNair 29 July 2026 Employment Immigration and social care: an orderly unwinding? by Andrew Harrop 3 June 2025 Education Young people are 'out of work and out of sight' by Ian Flintoff 25 June 2026 History On the shoulders of giants: social care reform by East Anglia Bylines 16 August 2026 Health Surprising findings: social care is not 'bad work' by Andrew Harrop 17 October 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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Mr Pecksniff - artist: Joseph Clayton Clark (CC0)

There has been nothing more from Andy Burnham this week on his ideas for a national discussion on our relations with Europe. But we have seen an enticing vision of how it might work from one of the leading players already in the debate. Mike Galsworthy is Chair of European Movement, (and is incidentally a director of Bylines Network.)

He agrees with Mr Burnham that we need a debate before we make up our minds, when we are informed; rather than an argument afterwards based only on ignorance and prejudices. And if the government wants to carry the voters with them, that would need to be the approach.

Dr Galsworthy explains the exercise should place "citizens, communities, businesses and civic organisations at the forefront of the discussion. Their needs, opportunities and hopes should prove the starting point. I also believe the benefits would extend beyond the immediate question of the UK's relationship with Europe: this could also be a better way of doing politics."

Mike Galsworthy.
Image © Anna Damski. Used with permission

The way forward, he suggests, is through citizens' assemblies, which proved so successful in settling Ireland's savage abortion debate: "Randomly selected citizens spent months hearing evidence, questioning experts and deliberating together. These assemblies helped inform public debate before the referendums, so the country talked to itself before it voted, and the result is remembered for its maturity rather than its bitterness."

The assemblies should be in every nation and region, and every sector: "A structured conversation … replaces a clash of grand visions, with a collective effort to find the best paths forward. Education comes naturally, because people would learn how the EU works and what different structures could mean for their own job, town or business." (And tell me, my dears, how many at the moment could claim to tell the difference between an EU customs union and a cheese and pickle sandwich?)

It is crucial that the government seizes the narrative early, and introduces their ideas of how the debate will proceed; because otherwise the Brexiters surely will. That means action must be almost imminent. Dr Galsworthy suggests it needs to begin next month, but then Mr Burnham has promised a ten-year plan before the end of the year. Whether or not he adopts a strategy such as Dr Galsworthy's we cannot know. But dear reader, let us luxuriate in the knowledge that at last ça marche!

*

It comes as a surprise to read one poll this week which suggests voters would like the forthcoming debate on the EU to be settled by another referendum. Really? After all the agonies of the last one? Are they mad? My distinguished colleague Peter Thurlow wrote magisterially yesterday about the implications and the options of such a move. But surely a repeat referendum would tend to fight all the old battles of the last one.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Except perhaps in this one we would have a government more alert to Russian interference. It can hardly come as a surprise that neither Reform nor the Conservatives are keen to discuss the interference by Russia in our politics, especially the last referendum. There were all those embarrassing donations to the Tories and their MPs by Kremlin-linked Russian tycoons. The bizarre tale of Boris Johnson somehow escaping his security detail to have a tête-à-tête with a KGB agent in an Italian castle. Those meetings by Nigel Farage with Russian officials, his regular paid appearances on Russia Today, Nathan Gill's conviction for taking bribes from Russia, and the rest.

It can be generally accepted that being associated in the public mind with any connivance with Russia and the Kremlin, especially now we are almost at war, is likely to prove a formidable obstacle to advancement in the polls, particularly one would have thought in the minds of Reform and Conservative voters.

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"Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity," declared Tacitus. The same can be said to be true for scandal. The way out is through chutzpah: bluff your way out. Your diarist thought of this Roman sage this week: readers, being of a naturally discerning nature, will have noticed how awfully cross Nigel Farage seemed at the suggestion by Andy Burnham that the Russians have been interfering in our politics.

Mr Farage is a man of capricious temper, but methinks he doth protest too much. It is almost as though the PM had insulted somebody close to him. And almost as though he has forgotten, as above, how Reform's man in Wales is presently serving a ten-year sentence for accepting £40,000 to deliver pro-Russian speeches.

"The prime minister is a liar," Mr Farage declared. "Yes, a liar!" Even though MI5 have confirmed the threat. But consider, dear reader… From his own knowledge he cannot possibly know that Russia hasn't been involved in undermining our democracy.

He could only know if they had…

*

Russians to the left of him, racists to the right. And somewhere in the middle there are seemingly several investigations into Reform's funding, alongside questions about 72 million of the crisp and crackling from its two biggest donors. Already raked from stem to stern, there comes this week another whiff of grapeshot with the ITN revelations. Nigel Farage appears somewhat overburdened with vicissitudes at the moment.

Image: Luke Tryl / More In Common

The thing is, nobody likes to be called a racist, not even racists. So being associated with a party accused of racism is always going to mean a certain amount of recalibration among even the cruder spirits in the electorate. Polls after such claims invariably show the popularity of Mr Farage and his party takes a noticeable dip. At the moment, Reform is already losing out for second place in the polls to the Conservatives. So expect further tribulations in the coming week.

*

Word around Westminster is that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is likely to report imminently on investigations into Nigel Farage. The word also believes it knows the conclusions, and they would be crushing for Mr Farage. If the word has it right, then Clacton's finest will shortly be facing yet another by-election, but this time of his constituents' choosing.

He will bluster of course, claiming waste of public money, returning to the silted-up residues of his past, mean-spirited political glories. But this time the other parties will weigh in, and he will be facing more than some bloke with a bin on his head. Five other parties, all of whose one aim is to rid politics of Nigel Farage. The man himself would always cling on until he is disabused of there being any remaining hope of more money changing hands. But this time it won't be up to him.

*

Caroline Lucas. Image by Health Hotel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Over the weekend, those at the pond life end of the Green Party chose to try and smear Caroline Lucas, representing as she does all the attributes that they most resent. (There were allegations that she had accepted Israeli money. This was a lie.) Attempts to bring down a public figure purely out of malice make those responsible no better than the propagandists of Reform.

Zack Polanski is attempting - rather late in the day - to row back from where his Ultras have dragged him. But he will not succeed while he permits the carpetbaggers to continually undermine everything the Greens have always stood for. They have already dragged him into the unhappy position of having to respond to Andy Burnham's dictum that Labour will cease any formal alliances with the Greens across the country. It is a trap, of course, but one he seems likely to jump into. Will his hubris lead him to try and brazen it out? His choice is brief humiliation if he agrees 'Zionism is racism' is wrong; or a long-term fall in the polls and almost certain internal warfare within his party.

*

Ed Davey. Image by House of Commons via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The unspoken embarrassment confronting Ed Davey is that he is in danger of being relegated to that limbo where nothing better is expected of him. Politics is in foment, but not the Liberal Democrats. Any party's standings in the polls might fluctuate wildly, but not the Liberal Democrats. This humble diarist rather likes the party, and likes its members, but in any word cloud the word 'exciting' is unlikely to feature prominently. And for those who would argue politics should not all be about excitement, it is surely preferable to anonymity.

Last week Pecksniff criticised the party's lamentable knee-jerk reaction to Andy Burnham's plans for the triple pension lock to help fund a national care service. They made a floater, dismissing the idea before the paint was even dry. Strategically it was verging on the catastrophic. There are signs that much of the membership were aghast too, leading to a challenge by his MPs this week. It came to nothing. But to play to the gallery, at PMQs Mr Davey challenged Andy Burnham to blow a public raspberry at Donald Trump, knowing full well that he couldn't and it would lead to disaster for Ukraine.

Ed Davey gives the impression of being a decent bloke, voted by the wise men at the Muckrakers the party leader most likely to enliven an evening at the pumps. But progress for his party needs entail something rather more.

*

Cllr Peter Reeve. Image credit: LDRS

Over 100 Reform councillors have left the party since the May elections. Criminal charges, allegations of racism, dubious business dealings, non-attendance, realising they actually had to do things. And some have shown a quite embarrassing excess of bravura in confronting their particular scandal.

Peter Reeve is - or was - a Reform councillor on Peterborough City Council. (He has been suspended by his party following a drink drive conviction.)

This week, the now independent councillor was supposed to be discussing planning. But a propos nothing at all, he announced to the planning committee that "perhaps the answer is a brand new reform government". There followed a paean of praise for Nigel Farage, and a fond wish: "Id love to have Nigel Farage in parliament". Indeed, so would the voters of Clacton.

*

Photo by Gareth Milner via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Apparently oblivious to open ridicule, it is rumoured that Liz Truss is seeking a return to the Commons, and moreover in her old seat of South West Norfolk. To her poor benighted voters, those she described as the 'Turnip Taliban', this might savour of impertinence.

Her present party, the Conservatives, live in fear that she might stay put and expect their backing in any new bid for glory. (ConservativeHome are presently clutching their pearls.) So might she quit for Reform? My dears, as we have just seen, Nigel Farage has enough problems.

In the two years since she so rancorously lost her seat to Labour's Terry Jermy, she has proved insensible to decorum. Readers may recall those cringe-making photographs for which she posed while foreign secretary. Some of the more sensitive readers are only just creeping out from behind the furniture. But it hardly requires a keenness of aesthetic consideration to acknowledge that, since her departure, her wild ideas have usually failed to fall within propinquity of any political sanity whatever.

*

Our intrepid spies behind enemy lines this week were Malcolm Lynn, Mary Marshall, James Porter, Stace Richards, Liz Crosbie, Kate Viscardi, Helen Forte, John Elworthy, David Patey and Mark Cunliffe and Celina Błędowska.

<<< Previous Pecksniff's Diary

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More from East Anglia Bylines Brexit Joining Europe again: first, we need durable consent by Anna Damski 13 October 2026 Brexit Another referendum on the EU? You must be joking by Peter Thurlow 16 October 2026 Democracy Westminster: it's time for reform from the ground up by Calix Eden 16 October 2026

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On this day 192 years ago - 16 October 1834 - the Palace of Westminster burnt down. It was an accident waiting to happen - for years MPs and officials had debated and put off essential maintenance. Nobody was prepared to spend the money, particularly after the new Buckingham Palace had gone spectacularly over budget and was considered such an eye-sore. Everyone knew that Westminster was a severe fire hazard, was rat-infested, had bars aplenty to indulge MPs far more interested in drinking than democracy, had arcane rules and language that belonged in court, and was in reality a creaking and cob-web-infested medieval palace.

Medieval tally sticks image by Winchester City Council Museums. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Among the patently redundant traditions was the use of 'tally sticks' to count Members in to the lobbies, much like a shepherd might count sheep. How to dispose of them? The resulting inferno is beyond irony. The huge fire lasted for days and the public as well as artists such as Turner ('I never lose an accident' he is reported to have quipped) took boats to get the best view to watch. Lord Melbourne referred to it as 'One of the greatest instances of stupidity on record'.

Fast forward nearly two hundred years, and remarkably little has changed. Westminster is still an extreme fire hazard, it is still a royal court with arcane procedures, it still encourages drinking on the job, and it still has rats. Nobody is prepared to face up to the fortune needed to repair it, so we just procrastinate with a blatantly unsuitable building to the tune of £2mn per week.

There can be few - if any - political seats of power in the world that have changed so little after two centuries. Burnham is the first Prime Minister to offer explicit remedies to Westminster, such as Number 10 North (although this may prove more complicated now it cannot be built on a site linked to the Manchester City owners), but does this go far enough?

The Westminster spell image by Unknown artist. via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

As visitors to the House of Commons, we do feel in awe of the building and its splendid decay. It is like walking through a museum in real time. In fact, it is a UNESCO World Heritege site, alongside Stonehenge, the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal, but unlike most heritage sites it is a working building, and not just any building but parliament itself.

Stepping into Westminster Palace is like entering a gothic novel, perhaps something from J K Rowling's Hogwarts, or Miss Havisham's once-lavish wedding celebrations preserved in cobwebs as part of Great Expectations (one wonders if Dickens took inspiration from Westminster and its fire). It is a strong individual who as a new MP will not be affected by this building and feel he or she has become a member of an exclusive club with its own rules and quirks.

Members of the aristocracy and public school alumni are at an inherent advantage because this environment is a familiar one. It is in effect an extension of Eton, and it is little wonder a third of our Prime Ministers come from this institution. The weekly Prime Minister's Questions is pure pantomime and represents opposition for oppositions sake. To misquote Macbeth, it is full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Our 'mother of democracy' is a palace

The glaringly obvious must be stated and then repeated until we appreciate it. Westminster is a palace. It is owned by the Crown. Members of the Commons and the Lords swear primary allegiance to the monarch, his heirs and successors. When Norfolk's own Clive Lewis had the courage to point out the obvious, he was threatened with expulsion.

The monarch reads out the policies of his government at the opening of parliament in a bizarre spectacle resembling a reenactment on the set of a lavish historical drama. The monarch meets his prime minister once per week in his private palace for an 'audience' to 'discuss matters of government'. Nobody knows what is said, suggested or implied at these meetings. And yet, we still get away with referring to Westminster as 'the mother of democracy' after John Bright coined the phrase in 1865. By all means, we can choose to retain the monarchy, but if we are as committed to democracy as we tell ourselves, monarchy should have nothing to do with our political system: that is a hard ask if we still have parliament in a palace.

Health & Safety gone mad

Westminster is blatantly unsafe and unsuitable. Health and Safety is a euphemism as far as Westminster is concerned. On a weekly basis we spend up to £2mn in simply keeping it from falling down. This year the National Audit Office report states that it 'requires extensive restoration to address serious risks, including failing mechanical and electrical systems, fire safety issues and high levels of asbestos.' There is constant scaffolding, loose wires, buckets for leaks, and rodents aplenty, as we saw during a notorious Kemi Badenoch interview in February 2026. The cost for repairs is estimated at £40 billion and will take as many years. This is the same as the original estimation for HS2 and we all know how that spiralled.

What should we do with Westminster?

If we are serious about revamping our democracy, now is the time to look at the fundamentals. Westminster Palace is clearly unsuitable for our parliament in multiple ways. As an alternative, a new House of Commons would reflect genuine democracy. It could be a round chamber with enough space for everyone, and a building that encouraged real debate and collaboration rather than point-scoring and deference. No longer would it be adorned with pompous sculptures and paintings celebrating monarchs and generals, but instead we could have art work from school children or contemporary British artists. A new parliament can even save us money (see the exorbitant cost above) especially if one considers Westminster could become a lucrative visitor attraction to rival Versailles.

Nearly two centuries ago the fire failed to cleanse Westminster. Perhaps now we finally have a second chance.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Anglia Why are women so under-represented in East Anglia politics by Jenny Rhodes 8 March 2024 Activism The male power structure: once seen never forgotten by Helen Hepburn 8 March 2024 Democracy Westminster: it's time for reform from the ground up by Calix Eden 16 October 2026

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A poll this week suggests that, in the event of an EU debate leading to some kind of vote, many punters would expect another referendum. This must be a surprise, given the agonies it caused last time, and there are huge issues with the idea. But in any case, let us be clear: a referendum is not necessary.

The first referendum in 1975 was not to decide on whether to become members, but whether to leave. Ted Heath had taken us in, without any talk of referendums, and it was only under Harold Wilson that the idea came up, promoted by those who wanted to leave. (In those days it was the unions, who saw it as a bosses' club.) They lost.

Dragged out of the EU under false pretences

Then as most people know by now, the Cameron referendum in 2016 was only advisory, not binding. But he chose to see it as binding. His successor Theresa May then secured parliamentary approval to begin withdrawal, without asking the electorate to endorse the decision in a further referendum. No referendum took place when we first joined, and no binding referendum took place before we left. Their use has only been tactical, for party political reasons, to get the PM of the time out of a hole. They are not a normal part of our system of representative democracy.

But with Andy Burnham assuring the electorate that we are the boss and he will follow whichever course we take, we now confront a potential huge inequity. You will recall Leave won the 2016 referendum by 52% to 48%. Because the vote wasn't binding, the result could be ignored, but Cameron and May pretended otherwise, fearing the wrath of the xenophobia it had whipped up.

A binding referendum could have been annulled

If it had been a binding vote, Brexiters would surely have argued that a supermajority should be required to change the status quo, perhaps two-thirds or at least 60%. Leave broke electoral rules, so had it been a binding referendum, the result could well have been annulled.

But we were given the worst of both worlds: an advisory vote whose result couldn't be overturned because of electoral irregularities, but which the Tories presented as binding, even without a supermajority.

So what would happen this time? It's difficult to see how it could be other than binding, given Burnham's assurances. That means Brexiters could demand a supermajority for any change from the status quo - i.e. being out of the EU - although no such threshold applied in 2016. So Brexiters could demand perhaps 60%, perhaps more, for a vote to rejoin. Whereas to leave it only took 52%.

Here's where it gets complicated

That is clearly an unacceptable inequity, and one we can be sure Burnham will avoid. But what is the solution? (Don't make up your mind yet, it gets more complicated.)

Leaving aside any referendum, we will apparently be asked which of several options for our relations with the EU we would prefer. Those options are likely to be: the present status quo, plus an even harder Brexit. Then there is a customs union, the single market, presumably customs union and single market, and finally full membership. So how do you arrange a multiple-choice question of probably six choices, and attach to it a supermajority?

An illustrative ballot paper showing six possible options for the UK's future relationship with the EU. Six options in a multiple-choice question

Actually, this might prove the way through the maze for Burnham. It could be argued that the complexities of a multiple-choice vote would not necessarily result in a fair outcome, but that the multiple choice itself would give sufficient scope to gauge an accurate reading of public preferences without a referendum. It might also provide the best chance of winning a vote in favour of full membership. It goes like this…

Very few like the present arrangement, so that's not going to win. With some certainty we can judge that an even harder Brexit would also fail. That leaves the four 'progressive' choices. Polls have often shown a public preference for full membership over piddling about with a customs union or the single market.

Everything depends on being honest with the voters

Few people understand what they involve anyway, and perhaps full membership gets the nod because it's easier to understand. Those who want to be cautious and give a customs union or single market as first choice are unlikely to go for any kind of Brexit as second, nor want to get caught up in the complexities of anything other than full membership.

But all of this of course will depend on Burnham setting up a proper, extensive and honest education programme to explain to voters what the EU is for and why membership is to our advantage.

Not before time. It has never been attempted in the 40 years of our membership.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Brexit Joining Europe again: first, we need durable consent by Anna Damski 13 October 2026 Brexit Britain still hasn't learnt what being outside the EU means by Niall Ó Conghaile 6 October 2026 Brexit The plan that can take us back to the EU by Peter Thurlow 29 September 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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Location of the excavation at the Palazzo della Rovere

English expats avoided 'travel money' hassle, thanks to special treatment from the Pope in the early Middle Ages, new research suggests. The discovery of 20 coins alongside evidence of craftwork in Rome's English quarter, provides the first material evidence of the Schola Saxonum, and suggests it was a thriving and valued expat community.

In 2020, archaeologists started excavating deep under the walled garden of the Palazzo della Rovere near the Vatican. These excavations were directed by the Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Roma and carried out by MDM Archeologia srls under the supervision of Renato Sebastiani and Alessio De Cristofaro.

Three years later, the site made global news when the discovery of the ruins of Emperor Nero's theatre was announced. Now, the site has led to a major medieval discovery which transforms our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons in Rome.

(L) Edward the Elder depicted in a 14th-century genealogical scroll. Image: The British Library; (R) 10th century portrait of Æthelstan in CCCC MS 183. Image by The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The archaeologists found 20 coins which have been identified as Anglo-Saxon - 19 silver pennies and one halfpenny - minted over a period of about 40 years in the names of Alfred the Great's son, Edward the Elder (899-924); and his grandsons Æthelstan (924-39) and Eadred (946-55).

Fourteen of the coins were found in rubbish pits in two clusters of six - eight coins, which are now fused together after a millennium underground. The rest were scattered nearby. The team also found ten coins from the Roman period and from tenth-century Italy, as well as evidence of craftwork involving leather, bone and metal.

Long-term collaborators Professors Francesca Tinti and Rory Naismith were invited to build on the initial research of the coins by Cecilia de Leone, by studying and interpreting the intriguing coins and their significance in light of what was already known about the history of this area. Their findings, presented in a chapter co-written with Marzia Di Mento, Valentina Pica and Filippo Salamone, have just been published in a new book (in Italian) entitled: Rome and the Others (300-1000): Foreigners in the city between conflicts and integration.

Professors Francesca Tinti and Rory Naismith in Cambridge. Image: University of Cambridge

"The coins aren't pretty but they have a lot to say," says Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval English History at Cambridge. "More Anglo-Saxon coins from this period have now been found in Rome than papal coins. This sounds bizarre, but it's telling us that a very large amount of money was flowing in from England at this time."

As well as dating the coins, Naismith and Tinti were able to identify which parts of England they came from: East Anglia, Kent, London and the West Midlands.

The halfpenny is a particularly rare find for this period and is important, the researchers argue, because this denomination is associated with trading hubs in which lots of lower value money was changing hands.

"Before this big discovery, we never had any material remains of the English quarter in Rome," says Francesca Tinti, Professor of Medieval History at the University of the Basque Country, and a visiting research fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (2025-6). "We've been hoping this moment might come for most of our careers." 

What we knew before The church of Santo Spirito in Sassia on the site of the Anglo-Saxon church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Image by Labicanense via Wikimedia commons (CC BY 4.0)

Medieval texts refer to an Anglo-Saxon quarter in this area from the second half of the 8th century; two 9th-century fires were recorded; and it was known that these expats worshipped in a church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was even said that Burgred, King of Mercia (the English Midlands) from 852 to 874, was buried in the church having been exiled from England by the Vikings.

The English quarter lay within the Leonine City, an area between the Vatican and the River Tiber protected by walls following a raid by pirates in the 840s. While still on the periphery of Rome in this period, it occupied a finger of land pointing directly to St Peter's and benefited from nearby bridges making it convenient to cross the Tiber. We don't know how big the entire Schola Saxonum was but the area of craft activity covered at least 3,000 square metres, approximately half a football pitch.

A few placenames in Rome still hint at this largely forgotten history. The embankment road between the Tiber and the Vatican - the Lungotevere in Sassia - takes its name from the Schola Saxonum. And the Santo Spirito in Sassia hospital continues the charitable function which the area once provided to Anglo-Saxon visitors.

Expats with privileges Fused group of Anglo-Saxon coins found in the excavations of the Palazzo della Rovere. Image by Cecilia de Leone / Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Roma

Naismith and Tinti argue that because the coins were found individually or in small clusters, and scattered - rather than deliberately buried in a larger hoard - they provide clear evidence of trade. The archaeologists found no evidence of silver bullion being melted down on the site so the researchers are confident the coins were lost by craftspeople and shoppers, not in the context of being turned into local currency.

Together with the leather-, bone- and metal-working finds, the coins show that the Schola Saxonum was not just a place for pilgrims to rest and pray. It was a bustling hub of craft and trade.

Naismith says: "The Anglo-Saxons are there to visit the Pope and tour churches in Rome, but they've still got to feed themselves. So they've got to make things and trade. That's what these finds tell us. This was a fairly big community, probably hundreds of people, living there on a permanent basis. So they're keeping a miniature Anglo-Saxon town going. You can easily imagine craftsmen arriving from Winchester, London or York and setting up shop by the Tiber."

Evidence of English coins changing hands in Rome challenges a long-held assumption that the papacy forbade the use of foreign currency in the city. Documents from Rome in this period generally only refer to papal coinage, and other texts record foreigners preparing to get their travel money. In a 9th-century letter, we hear from a Frankish abbot fretting about the need to change currency as he plans a trip to Rome. This new discovery suggests that English visitors to Rome were given special treatment.

"You don't find other foreign coins in Rome from this period," Naismith says. "It seems to be very much an English thing. There are not many coins from the Frankish world or even northern Italy. It seems to be a very specific connection they've got with the English at this stage."

Anglo Saxon coins found in Rome. Image by Rory Naismith

One of the newly identified coins is Papal, suggesting that the two currencies were used side-by-side.

The researchers point out that while other foreigners, including the Franks, Lombards and Frisians, were also cared for by dedicated institutions close to St Peter's, the Anglo-Saxons left the most traces behind, and appear to have enjoyed special privileges.

Tinti says: "The English in Rome were quite unique. They made the greatest effort to get there. Their journey was really dangerous and many people died on the way. But once in Rome, they were special. We knew they had the privilege of being able to bury their dead in this area and now, it seems, they were permitted to use their own currency."

For Anglo-Saxon kings, having their coins in use so close to St Peter's brought significant prestige, the researchers argue. At the same time, the arrangement showed people back in England that their rulers could facilitate pilgrimages, bringing spiritual benefits to the king and his subjects.

A long special relationship

England's special relationship with Rome was built on diplomatic ties going back to the late 6th century, when Pope Gregory I arranged a mission to the English. "The Anglo-Saxons were very devoted to Rome from that point on", says Naismith, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

He points out that the relationship became increasingly formalised from the late 8th century when Offa of Mercia (757-96) instituted an annual payment of 365 gold pieces to the papacy to keep the candles burning in Rome's churches. In the late 9th century, Alfred the Great was sending frequent alms to Rome, and in 883 - according to Alfred's biographer, Asser - Pope Marinus I generously freed the Schola Saxonum 'from every tribute and toll' at Alfred's request. The researchers caution that this doesn't prove that Alfred secured the currency deal, but it is a possibility, and we now know that his son's coins were in use in Rome.

The 10th century witnessed the development of Peter's Pence, which involved every household in England, at least notionally, giving a penny as alms for Rome. And in 1027, King Canute visited Rome, in part to continue the tradition of negotiating financial benefits for English pilgrims with the Pope.

"The English were particularly keen on consulting the papacy," Tinti says. "Sometimes the Popes struggled to understand what was happening in their far-off land."

"The Anglo-Saxons were very firmly a part of the European community," Naismith says. "They kept these bonds with Rome going strong for hundreds of years, through thick and thin. These coins show us how deep that relationship went. It's not just kings sending money and forgetting about it. It's people going to Rome in large numbers and setting up a home away from home on the banks of the Tiber."

This article from the University of Cambridge is republished under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Read the original here.

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Montenegro

Picturesque towns famous for their majestic cats - that is the Montenegro I brought home from three days along its coast. Part of former Yugoslavia, it sits on the Adriatic Sea to the east of Italy.

The mountains seem to lean over the terracotta rooftops for a better look at the sea, while the sky turned pink as lights came on below. The water that is literally blue, the mountains rising above the coast, and old towns that seem made for wandering. Beautiful enough to justify the social media enthusiasm, though not always the bargain the reels suggested.

It is an easy-to-sell destination on reels and videos. With the promise of a cheap European escape, Montenegro becomes an attractive travel destination. After spending three wonderful days covering three cities, I could quite understand the enthusiasm, but it's less convincing in the light of the price tag attached to the social media story.

Tivat to Kotor

My budget trip began at Tivat airport. Before we go into details, it is worth mentioning that Uber doesn't work in the country, and public transportation details aren't very clear on Google or TikTok either. Locals, however, know the routes by heart, as buses are available all the time and, of course, there are taxis everywhere.

The bus is an 18- to 20-minute walk from the airport, an unattractive prospect. Alternatively, a taxi to the bus stop will cost €20 to €30. Adding €5 to €10 to the taxi fare would get you to Tivat town centre and maybe show you a quick tour of the town. I would strongly recommend you do that before heading towards Kotor or Budva, which are the main attractions. The charges for taxis aren't fixed: bargaining is the key there.

Two or three hours seemed enough to explore the compact centre of Tivat before moving on. Along the waterfront, people sat fishing, yachts rested offshore, and mountains stretched across the horizon; Tivat offers a warm welcome. Also better to go to a random café, which might not seem very attractive from the outside but might offer some of the best Eastern European or Balkan food. A bite of Burek and coffee can be a good start after the flight. With plenty to see on a short wander, Tivat can be a gentle introduction to the coast.

The half-hour bus journey from Tivat to Kotor will offer some of the best views of the coastline (and bear in mind that a direct taxi to Kotor will be a minimum of €60). Kotor has its own charm. The centre is small enough to explore in a day, but its appeal lies in lingering. At night, warm lights turn the stone golden. Restaurant tables fill little pockets between buildings alongside the local shops.

In the medieval Mediterranean town, Romanesque churches, Gothic windows and elegant Venetian-era palaces, crowd the narrow stone-paved lanes, while fortifications climbing the mountainside above the town create a magic around the place. Eastern European pizza in a narrow lane, plates of pasta outdoors, and a random bar in an alley that turned into sort of an outdoor nightclub. Eating became part of discovering the town. It is worth mentioning that food prices at the main spots are almost the same as in the rest of Europe, so the budget-friendly tag won't be accurate here at all.

(L) The Kotor fortifications climb the mountainside image by G. Jarvis. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0) | (R) Blue Cave, Kotor image by Miomir Magdevski. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) The magic of Kotor

Nights in Kotor old town are magical, but the daytime offers wonder. The water offers another route through the landscape. Boat trips reach the Blue Cave and sights around the bay, passing small waterfront settlements including the Lady of the Rock Island, Perast, and Cold War-era submarine tunnels. White wakes cut across deep blue water; inside the blue cave, brilliant turquoise glows beneath rough rock.

Here, too, there is a catch. A group option costing €30 to €40 per person carried around 15 to 20 passengers and covered six sights in two and a half hours. Historical explanations added context, but there was little time to wander. Private tours offered more flexibility, at a higher price.

Cats seemed to own Kotor's narrow lanes, lounging in doorways and surveying the passing visitors from stone walls. Even the souvenir shops celebrated them with cat-themed keepsakes, giving these unhurried residents the status of unofficial town mascots. For a different perspective, the climb towards the fortress takes roughly two and a half hours at an unhurried pace. The roofs gather below, the bay opens out, and the mountains stretch into the distance. Photographs capture the view; standing above the town gives it scale. Pro tip: avoid visiting when the big cruise ships dock!

Accommodation: not cheap

The cost of accommodation challenged the image of a cheap destination. Room prices in Kotor felt high compared with other European destinations, particularly given the expectation of affordability. Hostel places are also very limited. Among other options, apartments, homestays and rooms in converted houses feature more prominently than conventional hotels. Decent rooms will be around €40 to €50, which might feel a bit high for a budget stay. These can be appealing places to stay, but a domestic setting does not automatically mean a modest bill.

Old town of Budva and its beach image by lovinkat. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0) Budva: charm and easier on the wallet image by Wolfgang Sauber. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Kotor to Budva is another one-hour bus ride; however, timing depends totally on traffic. Budva offers cheaper accommodation and more hotel choices compared to Kotor. Beaches in Budva are the main attraction, with open sea, clear shallows and a slower rhythm beside the water. Life in Budva's old town is smaller and less varied than Kotor's, with fewer food places that caught the attention, but still worth exploring slowly.

Sandwiches and coffee at an outdoor table, surrounded by old stone buildings, made a pleasant pause between exploring and returning to the waterfront. Narrow stone lanes ran between shuttered houses, opening into little squares with café tables and towers overhead.

Budva's old town had its share of majestic cats too, adding to the charm of its quiet stone lanes. Beyond the walls, clear water washed over pale rocks. The pleasure was in moving between the enclosed streets and the openness of the shore. Its cheaper accommodation made it easier to balance the budget without giving up an attractive setting. The architectural character of the Budva old town is more closely associated with Venice.

A meeting of empires

Montenegro's architecture reflects a meeting of empires, with churches and clock towers, where cafés and local shops complement the Venetian heritage of its coastal towns. Those walls once protected a vulnerable coastal settlement, long before they became a backdrop for holiday photographs.

A short stay will definitely leave you wanting more of Montenegro. The beauty is real, and there will be savings to be found. But the country deserves a more useful introduction than a bargain label.

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For the first time since Brexit, the government has put Britain's long-term relationship with the EU back on the table. Andy Burnham has opened the discussion beyond the current reset, with options ranging from carrying on much as we are through a customs union and single-market membership to joining the EU again.

And in a statement to Parliament on Monday, he went further, promising a serious national dialogue about those options. He told MPs that maintaining the status quo wasn't good enough, and that the British public would be the "boss" at every stage.

It's certainly a discussion we need. But before deciding where it should lead, we should probably learn the most important lesson from 2016: winning a vote isn't enough. We need to know what we're voting for, and if we eventually choose membership, we need something much more important than a narrow majority. We need durable consent for membership.

The lesson of the Brexit referendum Image by ChiraiJon via Wikimedia Commons (CCBY 2.0)

Leave described an action, not a destination. People may have voted to leave the EU, but they weren't all voting for one agreed version of Brexit. They could imagine single-market access, controls on immigration, sovereignty, regulatory independence, frictionless trade - or some combination of them. The problem was that not all of those things could be delivered together, and we didn't really confront the contradictions until after the vote.

That ambiguity helped Leave get their majority, but it also helped create the dissatisfaction that followed. There might have been a majority for leaving, but there wasn't a majority for one particular Brexit. Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to grapple with what Brexit actually meant, and to this day, there are people arguing that what we got wasn't the Brexit they'd voted for.

If Britain moves towards the EU again, we mustn't make the same mistake in reverse. In June, YouGov found 55% supported joining, against 34% opposed. But when people were asked about joining without our former opt-outs, support fell to 35% with 43% opposed. That gap matters. It means we've got a lot of talking to do about what joining actually means.

Join, not re-join

I think the language is important here. I'd rather talk about joining than re-joining, because it wouldn't involve simply reversing Brexit, regaining the membership we had before. We'd be applying to join the EU again from scratch, under conditions negotiated when the time comes. We should expect none of the special arrangements we accumulated during our previous membership to return.

So let's talk about the difficult bits the YouGov poll highlighted. We may as well start with the big one: joining almost certainly means accepting the euro at some point. And there are other important questions to consider. What would Schengen mean for Britain and Ireland? How much would we contribute to the EU budget? Which laws and institutions would we be signing up to?

Image by Matthew Klint

And we absolutely have to talk about immigration and free movement, because we know how important they were in 2016. Freedom of movement works both ways. Yes, EU citizens would regain rights to live and work here, but equally, British citizens would also regain corresponding rights across Europe. If we're not prepared to accept that, we need to know now.

We can't have people voting to join and discovering afterwards that what they voted for wasn't what they thought they were getting. We've done that once and now we're contemplating reversing it. Do it again, and we're simply creating the grievance for the next Farage to come along and exploit: this isn't what I voted for.

There's no constitutional mechanism that can guarantee that some future government won't try to take Britain out again. What protects us from that isn't some clever constitutional lock. It's having enough people who knew what they were getting into, voted for it and remain comfortable with the choice they made. That's what I mean by durable consent.

What can Britain bring to Europe?

This mustn't all be about obligations and what we might have to give up. We also need to make a positive case for joining, and I think we've spent far too much of our relationship with Europe asking, essentially, what's in it for us?

I'd like us to turn that around. What can Britain contribute to the EU? What can we do with our European neighbours that we can't do nearly as effectively on our own, despite our precious sovereignty?

Climate change doesn't stop at national borders. Neither do security threats. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made it very clear that what happens in Europe affects us too, because we are in Europe. These countries are our neighbours. The political uncertainty we've seen in the US is another very good reason for Europe to have the ability to act collectively. That doesn't mean choosing Europe instead of America. We'll continue to have an important relationship with the US, particularly on security and intelligence. But America isn't in Europe. We are.

There's science and research, energy and climate change, security and defence - all areas where we can achieve more together. And Britain has so much to contribute: one of Europe's largest economies, considerable diplomatic and military capabilities, world-class universities, financial expertise, strengths in renewable energy and a globally influential arts, music and film sector. It's not just about what Europe can do for us. Britain can be a force for good in Europe too.

And if we decide to join again, I don't want us to go back demanding British exceptionalism at every turn. If exceptions are negotiated, fine. But we shouldn't start from the assumption that Britain somehow needs to be treated differently. I'd much rather we said: we want to be part of this. We want to be in the centre of it, not standing on the edge, half in, half out.

A genuinely national conversation

None of that means the answer to the discussion Burnham has opened is predetermined. He's put several options on the table and we should look seriously at all of them. A customs union could remove some barriers to trade in goods, but there would still be border checks and VAT and customs paperwork. Single-market participation could bring much closer economic integration, while requiring Britain to follow many rules that we'd have little influence in making.

But I don't want this discussion about our new relationship with the EU to be politicians, campaigners, newspapers and social media users shouting at each other for the next few years. I'd like to see citizens' assemblies held all around the country, bringing together broadly representative groups of ordinary people to hear evidence, question experts and actually talk these things through.

There's a useful precedent for taking the preparation seriously. Before Scotland's 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish Government published Scotland's Future, setting out in detail what it believed an independent Scotland would look like. Some of its assumptions were contested, but at least there was an attempt to say: this is what we're asking you to vote for.

We should expect that level of seriousness from both sides. Those arguing against joining shouldn't just be able to say "stay out" and allow everyone who agrees with them to imagine a different version of what staying out means. We've done that once.

Don't rush to another referendum

There doesn't actually have to be another referendum. A government elected on an explicit pledge to seek EU membership could claim a mandate to do it. But Burnham himself has said it must be done "with the consent of the public", without yet saying what form that consent should take.

If there is another referendum, though, all the difficult discussion needs to come first. The vote should be the point at which we decide, not the point at which we start working out what we've decided. The last thing we want to do is paralyse Parliament again like we did in the aftermath of the referendum.

It's worth remembering Britain would go into any subsequent accession process in a very different position from any current candidate countries. We were members for 47 years. We have mature democratic and legal institutions, and despite Brexit we remain aligned with the EU in many areas. But all that being said, I don't think anybody can sensibly promise a timetable now.

What matters first and foremost is getting our own decision right. I want Britain to join the EU. But I don't want us to scrape over the line with 52% and congratulate ourselves on winning, only to discover afterwards that substantial numbers of people voted for something quite different in their heads.

If Britain chooses to join, I want us to do it wholeheartedly. Not as the awkward country on the edge of Europe, forever asking what special deal we can have, but as a country that has decided this is where it belongs and this is where it intends to play a full part.

That, for me, is the test. Not whether we can win another referendum, but whether we can establish durable consent for membership.

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In September, in a surprise intervention, Angela Rayner announced that the planned reorganisation of local government, which was to begin next year in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, was to be halted. She said that the prime minister had directed her to review the plans "to ensure a robust, lawful process".

What had been planned?

The government planned the biggest change in local government since 1974. It had two elements:

• Local government reorganisation (LGR). Replacing two tiers of local government in counties like Suffolk with single unitary authorities across the whole of England. A single, consistent structure across England would be easier for people to understand; there would be long-term savings from a reduced number of councils and removing duplication of functions. After extensive consultation, the councils in our region proposed, and the secretary of state approved, plans for three unitaries each in Norfolk and Suffolk, and five in Essex.
• Creating strategic authorities. Usually these would be led by directly elected mayors, to coordinate major issues like transport and housing across a number of those unitaries. There would be a directly elected mayor for Essex, and one for a combined authority covering Norfolk and Suffolk.

Elections for the new mayors in this region are still planned for 2028, subject to the consent of the county councils, but the reorganisation is now suspended pending review, and authorities have been instructed to stop planning work.

Suspending the plan

In her statement, Angela Rayner said she was concerned to ensure that the right and legal processes had been undertaken, and that the plans matched the priorities of the new government. It is not entirely clear why the new government should doubt the former, or why they would change the priorities. And it is not clear whether they have in reality been abandoned, or simply delayed.

One can only guess at underlying reasons. In our region, the plans had been vigorously opposed by all three (Reform-led) county councils. All had launched judicial reviews challenging the process. And although lawyers had suggested that this was likely to fail, a legal dispute might have led to expensive delays and distraction from other priorities. There has been concern that all the approved plans would have created much smaller unitary authorities than the original plan had envisaged, which might eliminate the planned savings from the reorganisation. And it may be that the new government wants first to establish the new strategic authorities, with elected mayors exercising new powers before the new unitaries began to assert their authority.

The reaction

Among local government staff, and many councillors, the response was shock and anger. As Heather James, editor of the MJ (formerly Municipal Journal) said in an Institute for Government seminar:

"I have covered local government for nearly 30 years and I don't think I have seen this level of fury and deep distrust in my entire career. Even the people who didn't want reorganisation, or didn't get the outcome they preferred, are absolutely furious … These are not just boundaries and maps, they are communities … and being delivered by people who are making life choices and career decisions based on the actions of the government. So, there is a really emotional impact that is happening across the country … This level of chaos is hugely destabilising, with huge amounts of money being spent at local level to try to deliver this."

Jonathan Carr-West, chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, said: "If the Prime Minister is serious about his ambitions to rewire the state, then lessons must be learned from this debacle and learned fast. The proposed rewiring transformation is potentially a much larger undertaking than LGR, involving many more sectors and institutions. Its success will rely on collaboration and trust, and the local institutions that today's announcement impacts most. All … have been dealt a severe blow today."

Stephen Robinson (LibDem) leader of Chelmsford City Council, said: "The most frustrating thing is all of the effort and the sheer will and goodwill which has been built up by officers of councils working together".

He said that, in Essex, councils had started working towards the government's decision to create five new unitaries, with programme management arrangements and staff put in place. Chelmsford had appointed a programme management officer to work on service integration, with three management officers appointed to work across the new authorities. The pause had created "an awful lot of uncertainty" for councils and staff.

South Norfolk District Council leader Daniel Elmer (Con), said: "I don't believe the government has the capacity now to assess any new proposals and get through them within the current parliament. …  we'll probably never know exactly what the legal advice to Angela Rayner was. They have two years to get it right this time, so I'm not entirely sure if anything they do rapidly is not just going to expose them to the exact same risk over again."

Suffolk County Council leader Michael Hadwen (Ref), who launched one of the judicial reviews, said that the government would now need to undertake further work to ensure any revised process could withstand legal challenge, including establishing clear criteria and addressing concerns raised over consultation and boundaries. "In my opinion," he said, "we will have a general election before anything happens on LGR."

So what now?

The future is now uncertain. The government has not given any timetable for the "further consideration". Unless the reorganisation is rapidly reinstated in some form, there will be district council elections on the existing boundaries next May, and county council elections in all three counties in 2030. The councillors elected to all three county councils this year were expected to serve for only two years. They will now probably still be in post at the next general election. If they have a coherent plan, Reform now have three years to put it in place.

Across our region, local government is under great financial and political pressure, and facing huge uncertainty. As the Local Government Information Unit has said, we don't know:

1. Will the government commit to continuing LGR, or will the devolution white paper put forward a new trajectory?
2. Is the review testing the original criteria? What are the "priorities of a new administration"? Is there a formal consultation mechanism for councils and communities in the reviewed areas?
3. What happens to money and staff time already committed to shadow authorities, and joint committees in the reviewed areas?
4. Are councils expected to keep reorganisation teams running at cost during the review, or stand them down?
5. What happens with the decisions for devolution and local elections in May 2027?

The picture may become clearer when we see the Rewiring the State white paper planned for the autumn, building on the Cabinet Office paper of the same name.

A lot of people are hoping we will get clear answers soon.

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Trump did a deal yesterday with Russia to supposedly release up to 4.8 million tonnes of diesel onto world markets over the coming months, although three million tonnes of that depends on the condition of Russia's refineries. I do not know the price, but the sum is significant because this is a refined product, not crude oil. The issue, however, is not the price. It is its significance and consequences.

The significance is threefold.

First, despite all Trump's claims, it is clear that oil is not flowing through the Strait of Hormuz as a result. The second is that Trump does not expect it to do so. Iran and the Houthis have created a stranglehold.The third, and most obvious, is that Trump is consequently willing, to save his own skin, to do a deal with Putin, the benefit of which will be that Putin has the funding he needs to continue the war in Ukraine.

The consequence is a massive rift in the relationship between the EU, Britain, Ukraine and the US. Russia is also being empowered at the same time, which can only increase world tensions at a time when they are already being artificially inflated by politicians' hype.

The world did, then, become a considerably more dangerous place last night, and all because Israel did, earlier this year, persuade Donald Trump to go to war on Iran, and there is no prospect of either of those countries coming out of the resulting debacle with any hint of a victory. Instead of conceding, however, Trump is willing to do a deal with a fellow fascist. That is the world we live in now.

Let's be clear, this deal covers only a few months. The crisis will continue thereafter.

From April this year, I forecast that we would face shortages of fuel, gas, food, and other raw materials from late summer onward, with issues becoming critical in October. It seems that I got my timing absolutely right.

Trump is now panicking. No other explanation explains this deal, which trashes most aspects of normal international relations the way the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and Russia did in 1939. That ended badly, and I suspect this one will, too.

The signs that we are heading for a crash grow almost by the day. The AI share price market saw a major disruption this week when OpenAI admitted its revenues were $20 billion a year less than markets had thought. They also admitted they will burn through $250 billion in cash over the next few years, which is the equivalent of five times their current annual revenue. If ever there was an economic model waiting to collapse, that is it.

And the Financial Times is this morning forecasting a major meltdown in the airline industry because of the crisis created by the cost of jet fuel. Even Ryanair is saying things are getting desperate. Failures in that sector were among the other forecasts I made. And the impacts of food shortages have not hit as yet.

I said in a video yesterday that politicians would reach for modern monetary theory, which argues that governments issuing their own currencies can create money to fund spending, when they were desperate and had no choice but to change. I think that moment of desperation might be approaching very fast.

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The word real is small enough to slip into a question almost unnoticed.

"Have you ever met your real mother?"

It may sound like innocent curiosity. But what does that question make of the woman who raised me? Was she temporary? A substitute? Someone who simply occupied a place until biology could reclaim it?

I have never understood why someone else's curiosity should give them the authority to decide which of my parents deserves to be called real.

If someone asked me that question today, I would probably pause, smile politely and ask one of my own: "What exactly do you mean by real?"

If they meant the woman who gave birth to me, the answer would be yes. I have met her. But that meeting did not change the meaning of a word I had understood throughout my childhood.

My mother was the woman who welcomed me into her life when I was nine months old. She protected me, cared for me when I was ill and taught me what it felt like to belong. I did not grow up thinking of her as a different category of mother. She was simply Mum.

I am not asking anyone to deny the significance of biological origins. They can matter deeply, for medical reasons, personal identity or questions someone may carry throughout life.

Nor would I presume to tell another adopted person what to call the people in their story. We do not all share the same experiences or feelings, and there is no single way to understand our relationships. That choice belongs to them, just as mine belongs to me.

What I question is why other people so readily assume they can make that distinction on my behalf.

Curiosity is not permission

There is something peculiar about the questions people feel entitled to ask when they discover that someone was adopted.

Have you found your real parents? Why were you given away? Do you feel something is missing?

These questions can arrive before a relationship has even developed, as though adoption turns an otherwise private life into a story available for public examination.

I do not think most people intend to be unkind. More often, curiosity arrives before consideration. Yet how many would interrupt someone who grew up with their biological parents and demand an explanation of whether they really loved their mother?

Being adopted does not mean being permanently available to discuss the circumstances of one's birth, separation or family relationships.

Sometimes the most respectful question is the one we choose not to ask.

If I decide to talk about my adoption, I am choosing what I wish to share. That openness should not be mistaken for unlimited permission to investigate the rest. Adoption is part of my identity; it is not the entirety of who I am.

Why must my mother come with an explanation?

The distinction between biological and adoptive can be necessary. Medical histories and official documents sometimes require precision. These words describe different facts about how a family began.

But ordinary conversation is neither a medical consultation nor an administrative form.

There are moments when I am speaking naturally about my mother and someone interrupts to clarify: "Oh, you mean your adoptive mother?"

Suddenly, a perfectly ordinary memory becomes an exercise in explaining my family. The person listening is no longer interested in what my mother said or did. Their attention has shifted to the label they believe I should have used.

Most of the time, I let it pass. A small nod, perhaps a polite smile. Not because I agree, but because I do not always have the energy to turn an ordinary conversation into another lesson about adoption.

It is a peculiar kind of tiredness.

I am not uncertain about who my mother was. I am tired of the expectation that I must repeatedly clarify it for other people.

And real goes further than a clarification. When someone uses it to identify a biological parent, it quietly suggests that another parent is somehow less authentic.

It is no longer simply a description. It becomes a judgement.

Changing the word is not enough

We can replace real mother with biological mother and congratulate ourselves on using more considerate language. But changing a word is not necessarily the same as changing the assumption behind it.

If we continue to regard biology as the original, authentic version of family, and adoption as something that merely takes its place, what have we really understood?

The deeper issue is our difficulty accepting that family relationships do not all begin in the same way, or acquire their meaning through the same experiences.

My mother's place in my life was never provisional. It did not depend on a stranger accepting the circumstances through which we became a family.

Occasionally, when someone realises that their choice of words has troubled me, the response is familiar:

"You know what I meant. I didn't mean to offend you."

I understand that. I am not angry with someone simply for using an expression they may never have questioned.

But the meaning of a word does not disappear because the intention behind it was innocent. Asking someone to consider that meaning is not an accusation of cruelty. It is an invitation to listen.

Over the years, I have also learnt that I do not have to offer this explanation every time. I can recognise a misconception without accepting the responsibility of correcting every person who holds it.

Perhaps we could begin by allowing people to name their own relationships. By accepting those names without interrogation. By understanding that listening is sometimes more respectful than asking another question.

I know who my mother was. I know what she meant to me. And I no longer feel the need to defend the legitimacy of a relationship I have already lived.

My mother does not become any more real when a stranger understands her. She was real long before the question was asked.

The Hidden Voice explores these ideas further in her book, Love Isn't Born. It's Built. - Children Beyond Blood, which examines adoption, identity, origins, family separation, grief and belonging.

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Reform-run Suffolk County Council has taken the unusual step of backing plans to explore a county-wide referendum on housing asylum seekers at RAF Barnham. It could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, may not take place until after the first residents arrive and, whatever the result, wouldn't bind the government. But there's another problem with asking Suffolk whether it wants asylum seekers at Barnham: if the answer is no, where should they go instead?

Cllr Faircloth-Mutton. Image by Joao Santos

The council voted by 39 votes to 13, with 13 abstentions, to explore holding the referendum alongside next May's local elections. Reform Cllr Philip Faircloth-Mutton, who proposed it, says it would allow people to have their say on the government's plans to accommodate up to 1,250 asylum seekers at the former RAF base. "This referendum is the best opportunity to put on record the true feeling of Suffolk residents in respect of this issue," he told councillors.

There's little doubt about the strength of opposition around Barnham. Protesters have gathered outside the base, Barnham Parish Council opposes the plans and is considering doing a 'Piddington', while West Suffolk Council has also made its objections clear. The government already knows all this. A county-wide referendum might tell it what Suffolk as a whole thinks, but by May it could be asking people about an asylum centre that had already opened.

If not there, where?

The difficulty is that people seeking asylum who would otherwise be destitute have to live somewhere while their claims are considered. Reform has been a vocal opponent of asylum hotels, and East Anglia has already seen protests outside the Park Hotel in Diss and the Bell Hotel in Epping. East Anglia Bylines has previously reported what it was like for families inside the Diss hotel to hear protesters outside demanding that they leave.

Moving people into ordinary housing doesn't necessarily solve the problem either. After weeks of tension over the Barnham announcement, nearby Thetford experienced several nights of disorder in August when residential properties believed to house asylum seekers were targeted. Former military sites provide an alternative, but Reform opposes using sites like Barnham too.

Reform's national policy promises to stop irregular Channel crossings and deport those who arrive illegally. But the UK is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention and can't simply disregard its obligations to people seeking protection, including those who arrive without permission. Reform's proposals raise legal and humanitarian questions that go well beyond Barnham. More immediately, they don't answer the problem facing the government now: where should people already here and awaiting decisions on their claims live?

Representatives from Barnham visit Piddington to learn from the Oxfordshire village's campaign against plans for asylum accommodation. Image by LDRS

Cllr Harry Richardson, who represents Barnham, makes an important distinction. Residents, he says, have been "clear and explicit that the substance of their objections concerns the place and not the people". There are legitimate questions about whether a site beside a small Suffolk village is suitable for 1,250 people, and Richardson doubts that a referendum next spring will help his constituents. But if the problem is the place rather than the people, there still has to be another place.

What happened at Wethersfield?

There's already a large asylum centre on a former military base elsewhere in the region. RAF Wethersfield in Essex has accommodated predominantly single adult male asylum seekers since 2023. It hasn't escaped criticism, particularly over conditions and whether an isolated former airfield is an appropriate place to house so many people.

But three years of Wethersfield also give us some evidence about its effect on surrounding communities. Reform politicians, including Nigel Farage, have repeatedly described male asylum seekers as "fighting-age males", language that carries an obvious suggestion of threat. Yet Essex Police say crimes and incidents associated with Wethersfield residents are very low, while Braintree, Chelmsford and Colchester town centres - all destinations accessible to residents by bus from the site - have less crime than three years ago. This challenges the idea that putting large numbers of male asylum seekers on a former military base inevitably makes nearby communities less safe.

What will Suffolk's referendum buy?

Then there's the bill. Opposition councillors suggested the referendum could cost between £250,000 and £500,000, although nobody yet knows what the final figure would be. Faircloth-Mutton says the council will assess the cost before going further. Suffolk, however, isn't exactly looking for ways to spend spare cash.

Image by gosimpletax via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In February, the council increased council tax by 4.99% - the maximum normally permitted without special government approval or a local referendum - and still needed £46.5 million in savings and almost £1 million from reserves. Reform, then in opposition, wanted a smaller 4% increase. Its group leader Christopher Hudson argued that the council should "tighten its belt" rather than take more from residents struggling with their own finances.

Eight months later, Reform is running the council and wants to explore spending a substantial sum asking those same residents a question whose answer ministers could ignore. Green group spokesperson Cllr James Patchett called it "political theatre", saying residents wanted practical solutions rather than being "gaslit".

Reform councillors say a referendum would give Suffolk residents a direct voice on a decision made by central government. It would certainly provide a county-wide measure of opinion. What it wouldn't do is provide an alternative to Barnham.

A referendum won't stop Barnham opening. It won't find somewhere else for people to live. And it could cost Suffolk hundreds of thousands of pounds simply to tell the government what its residents think. For a council that says money is tight coming from a party that promises to cut wasteful spending, that's an expensive substitute for an answer to the question Reform still hasn't answered: if not Barnham, where?

This article is based on a piece by the Local Democracy Reporting Service by Joao Santos, compiled with assistance from AI tools and edited by East Anglia Bylines.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Local government Reform leader says removing whip from Norfolk councillor would be 'a waste of my time' by East Anglia Bylines 5 October 2026 Devolution Goodbye to the rules: Reform are the masters now by Martin Cook 11 August 2026 Immigration Who should women and girls really fear? It isn't Abdul by Stephen McNair 7 October 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post Suffolk's asylum referendum first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Mr Pecksniff - artist: Joseph Clayton Clark (CC0)

After a decade of right-wing hubris, left-wing cowardice and public grief, Brexit and the EU are once more on the agenda. Andy Burnham has ignored the naysayers in his own party and committed to the cause that dare not speak its name: becoming a member of the European Union once again - or at least taking steps towards it. Wisely, Mr Burnham has stayed clear at this stage of professing any preferences. The last thing he needs at this juncture is to offer Reform ammunition.

There are many supporters of Britain in the EU who would much rather have marched off to glory, flags flying and all guns blazing. However satisfying, this would have been a mistake. So the PM's suggestion has been greeted in a somewhat low-key fashion. It is crucial that it is the people's decision and not something foisted on them.

The PM's idea is for a national debate - a proper debate this time, reasoned and backed up with facts rather than lies. East Anglia Bylines hopes to play a role in that debate. We previously published a long-running and successful series called 'Our Place in Europe…?', which we shall pick up again. You may wish to browse the accumulated wisdom of our story so far, since you, dear reader, will have a part to play.

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The atmosphere among delegates to the Conservative Party conference sounds often to have been like that of the congregation at the funeral of somebody they didn't know very well but felt duty-bound to mourn, and they were all looking forward to the tea and sandwiches. (Chris Mason was an exception: he thought they were all rather upbeat.)

Even so, Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) seems more buoyant this year, probably because for the first time her leadership isn't under threat. But confidence in survival is not quite the same thing as winning over the country - a mistake of which Ms Badenoch seems unaware. She wasn't present when a packed house disconsolately heard Professor Sir John Curtice describe to them how their party is no better off than in its catastrophic showing in 2024.

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The party's big idea seems to be a shiny new defence system, though Ms Badenoch denied that it would be "in essence a British Iron Dome", even though that is how she herself described it in her party's own press release. She says her government would put aside £10 billion for the project, though quite how that buys a defence system that general Sir Richard Barrons estimates could cost £80-120 billion remains unclear. Presumably the missing £70 billion or so is merely semantics. (Numbers are clearly not her thing. It seems the conference document overpriced the cost of net zero by £500 billion…)

She has now changed its name to the "Britannia Shield", possibly because Britannia Dome sounds like an entertainments complex. Unfortunately though, the Britannia Shield sounds like something awarded at a school prize giving.

It was unfortunate that, once again, Ms Badenoch displayed an alarming poverty of intellectual resource in discussing it, as the attached interview illustrates.

"I'm not a defence expert."Even by Kemi Badenoch's lamentable standards, this is agonising. Just give thanks she will never, ever be Prime Minister.

A new three-year programme will enable pupils across the East of England to investigate the climate challenges facing their own schools and help shape the response.

I once visited a school where everyone knew one corner of the site flooded after heavy rain. Pupils knew it. Staff knew it. Site teams knew to keep an eye on it. What nobody really knew was why.

Had a drain become blocked? Was water arriving from somewhere else on the site? Had changes over time altered where rainfall collected? A familiar problem, but the evidence probably wasn't there.

Many school climate conversations begin in a similar place. The issue might be an overheated classroom, poor air quality at the school gate, wasted energy or the absence of wildlife from the school grounds. Schools know something is happening. They often care deeply about it. The challenge is finding the time, support and evidence needed to understand it properly.

ClimateReady Schools begins there.

The Royal Society has awarded the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research a £105,000 Science Community Grant to work with 25 schools across the East of England over the next three years. The programme will support pupils in carrying out scientific investigations into their own school environments and sharing what they discover with the people responsible for making decisions about those places.

Starting with the places pupils know

Schools will investigate issues including energy, air quality, biodiversity, flooding, food and waste, and climate resilience. What's important is that these investigations begin with places pupils already know.

One school may investigate where heat is escaping from a building. Another might compare air quality around the school entrance at different times of day. Elsewhere, pupils could sort and measure lunchtime waste, looking at what is being left behind and whether changes to menus, portions or recycling arrangements make a difference.

Pupils will develop questions, gather evidence and present recommendations to school leaders. These findings could also support schools' own energy-saving, behaviour-change and Climate Action Plan priorities, giving leaders and governors evidence drawn from their site rather than a generic checklist.

Anyone who has worked with young people on genuine investigations will recognise what happens next. Assumptions turn out to be wrong. Results raise new questions. Sometimes a problem turns out to be more complicated than it first appeared. That's good science.

Beyond the one-off school visit

Each participating school will work with a named Climate Ambassador whose expertise connects to the investigations taking place. Ambassadors will come from research, science and related STEM fields, with schools and volunteers matched according to the needs of the project and the experience they can bring.

What appeals to me about the programme is that these relationships will develop over three years rather than through a single assembly or careers talk.

Schools will get to know the Ambassador. The Ambassador will get to know the school.

Pupils will revisit ideas, build confidence and develop familiarity with scientific thinking over time. Teachers will receive support before each module and become part of a wider regional network sharing experiences and resources.

Some of the best questions I heard during 13 years teaching geography were ones I had never considered until a pupil asked them. The programme recognises that learning can flow in both directions.

Looking again at the East of England

People who don't know our region particularly well might sometimes imagine a largely prosperous region of market towns, commuter settlements and countryside. Spend time working with schools, though, and a more complicated geography emerges.

There are coastal communities living with erosion and flooding. Rural schools where universities can feel physically distant. Places where young people may rarely meet working scientists despite living alongside some of the country's most visible climate-related risks.

ClimateReady Schools aims to widen participation by creating sustained opportunities for young people who have historically been underrepresented in higher education and STEM. Rather than lowering expectations, this means giving more pupils the time, tools and relationships needed to take part in serious scientific enquiry.

Everyday school life can look different once pupils begin gathering evidence. A travel survey can reveal how distance, safety and public transport shape the way people reach school. Recording first flowering, leaf fall or the arrival of migratory birds can reveal seasonal changes that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Repeating an investigation can show whether a school intervention changed habits or simply produced a short-lived response.

The science remains rigorous, and there is no need to invent relevance.

Building something that lasts

The equipment provided through the programme will remain with schools, allowing future year groups to continue and expand investigations. Schools will also have opportunities to share findings through regional showcases and networks linked to the UEA Tyndall Centre's Schools Climate Hub.

ClimateReady Schools will not solve every challenge facing schools. What it can do is create more room for curiosity, investigation and evidence-informed decision-making.

In many cases, the starting point will be surprisingly ordinary. A puddle that always forms in the same place. A classroom that is always warmer than the others. A patch of grass that becomes more interesting once somebody starts looking closely at what lives there.

For 25 schools across the East of England, climate action will begin with questions like these and with the time and support to investigate them properly.

That feels like a good place to start.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Education When 'banter' becomes bullying: new safeguarding guidance for schools by Mary-Jo Hill 8 October 2026 Climate New school safeguarding guidance has a climate blind spot by Kit Marie Rackley 17 July 2026 Activism Suffolk MP backs radical plan to end sexual harassment in schools by Jenny Rhodes 8 March 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post 'ClimateReady Schools': putting young people at the heart of climate action first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

This was the summer when the climate crisis finally became impossible to ignore. England and parts of Wales sweltered through five heatwaves, with unprecedented temperatures and lengthy periods of drought. Farmers found themselves trying to produce food in the toughest conditions in living memory.

The effect has been dramatic. Yields have plummeted, with Britain on track for its worst harvest on record, compounding a run of poor years which have cost arable farmers billions. Vegetables have struggled badly with the lack of water. Livestock farmers have seen their grass burn off and were feeding their animals winter food supplies in August.

Last year I wrote for this publication that farmers were at a crucial point for their future but levels of support in the corridors of power were uncertain. Sixteen months on, little has changed to improve that outlook.

Nature and food production go together

If nothing else, the summer of 2026 shows that we need to fundamentally rethink how we are farming in this country. More than ever before, this year has shown that food production and the protection of nature go hand in hand.

Water management now needs to be at the heart of farming. We can expect hotter, drier summers with long periods of drought, followed by wetter, milder winters with more extreme rainfall events. The super El Niño currently building in the Pacific may give us a glimpse this winter of what will be coming more frequently. Farmers need to prioritise being able to collect and store water when it does rain, for use during the long spells without any.

Sugar beet crop under water. Image by Chrissy. Used with permission.

This means focusing on soil health and reducing chemical inputs in favour of building organic matter. Soils are a giant sponge at the heart of our landscape, and they can be supported by rainwater collection systems and on-farm reservoirs. To hold on to water and provide vital breaks against the devastating wildfires we have seen this summer, we need to re-wet our landscapes where possible.

However, none of this will be totally effective without drastic reductions in our carbon emissions. Without concerted efforts to reach net zero, much of what we do will be in vain. Temperatures and conditions will simply spiral out of control until they are too hostile to farm much of anything.

Government support needs urgent reform

All of this requires support and investment from governments recognising that farming, climate mitigation, food security and national security are all linked. However, the support currently available for farmers does not suggest that this is being taken as seriously as it should.

Recently the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), offering funding for a range of nature-friendly farming practices, reopened for the first time since March 2025. The result was predictable: a mad scramble for farmers to get their hands on any cash available, with the entire £233mn budget allocated in just six hours.

This is no way to support something that is the bedrock of our future. We need to move to longer-term, whole-farm agreements, and we need budgets that accurately reflect the level of demand and the desire among farmers to be supported for doing the right thing for their land and businesses. Farmers need greater long-term certainty and public money needs targeting towards the environmental outcomes that will make our farms, food production and country more resilient. This won't be achieved by handing out money to whoever can fill in an online form fastest.

For the many farmers who missed out, another opportunity to receive support early in the new financial year is vital. But we should also look beyond simply fixing the next application window and commit to redesigning how these schemes work together over the next few years.

I do have some sympathy for the current government, which is attempting to unpick errors in scheme design made by previous administrations and do its best with limited resources. But farmers already harboured negative feelings about SFI from the previous window abruptly closing when the budget was spent. I fear another loss of trust towards agri-environment schemes and government support for nature-friendly farming from this latest episode.

We urgently need to turn problems into solutions

Big changes to our globalised food system are required to really meet the threat that climate change poses to all of us. The supply chain and private sector, which hold a lot of influence and power, need to do far more to invest in the transition to nature-friendly and regenerative approaches to agriculture. More investment in higher-level agricultural schemes with more ambitious environmental outcomes and landscape-scale work is required.

But recently, I have also spent time thinking about simpler measures that could quickly contribute to a more nature-friendly, resilient farming sector. One of these is nutrient management.

Currently we have a system where livestock farmers have huge amounts of organic nutrients in the shape of manure. Trying to use all of this often means spreading it on land that doesn't need it, before rainfall washes it off and pollutes watercourses. On the other hand, arable farmers in areas like East Anglia need nutrients for crops but often resort to environmentally damaging, soil-weakening chemicals.

Image by Wolfgang Weiser via Unsplash (CC0)

We badly need investment in infrastructure to carry these nutrients across the country to where they are needed. For livestock farmers, this would turn a burden and a problem into a valuable resource. For arable farmers, they could replace synthetic inputs with cheaper, nature-based solutions.

The extreme weather conditions this summer show there is no time to delay. We need to do everything in our power to make our farms and food production more resilient to the conditions ahead. But while we are working on the big changes, we cannot afford to overlook more straightforward ways of turning problems into solutions.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Environment Politics of farming: juggling food security, nature and uncertainty by Kate Moore 27 May 2026 Climate Nature-friendly farming offers food security and better resilience by Martin Lines 23 May 2025 Anglia EA Sustain Festival: the latest thinking on food and farming by Jenny Rhodes 26 January 2023

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The post Food security and resilience vital after extreme summer drought first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

Article by Sophie Perry and Leila Fathi

A number of pressures have converged on food production over the past year, and their effects are likely to show up in our shopping baskets this winter. Farmers have faced increasingly erratic weather, influenced by climate change and the El Niño phenomenon, while international conflicts have pushed up the cost of fuel, fertiliser and other essential inputs.

These pressures compound one another: adverse and unpredictable weather reduces crop yields, while higher fertiliser and energy costs make it more expensive to produce and process food.

This will not only impact farmers' livelihoods and shoppers' wallets, but potentially the quality, volume and nutritional value of the food on our shelves, as manufacturers turn to cheaper alternative ingredients to limit overall price increases.

Here are five familiar foods that illustrate how this could play out this winter:

1. Chocolate

Chocolate is not only a comfort food with the ability to boost mood, but its production supports the livelihoods of nearly 6 million smallholder farmers worldwide, mostly in West Africa. This is a result of the manual labour required to harvest cocoa, meaning that as a crop it cannot easily be grown on an industrial scale.

However, cocoa trees are sensitive to their environment. The effect of drought on cocoa yields has long been recognised, but recent research shows that intense periods of heavy rainfall can be a problem too. They can reduce the activity of the flying insects required to pollinate cocoa flowers, while increasing the likelihood of fungal diseases that decimate crops. The current El Niño, set to continue into 2027, is expected to exacerbate erratic weather patterns, potentially leading to both droughts and heavy rainfall in some coca-growing regions, which will continue to affect supply chains.

The resulting reductions in yield caused a huge price spike in 2024, which was then passed on to consumers - a bar of Dairy Milk jumped more than 60% in price compared to 2021, for instance. Prices have since reduced somewhat but are still far above historic levels and are soon expected to rise again as a result of a particularly poor yield this year.

But price is not the only thing that can change. As cocoa becomes more expensive, manufacturers may look for ways to swap the more expensive cocoa butter for cheaper alternative ingredients like palm oil. Despite palm oil serving some functional properties to maintain a smooth texture and shelf stability, it is less often found in premium chocolate products and can have a different mouthfeel.

2. Potatoes

Unlike chocolate, potatoes aren't just a luxury or comfort item. They're a staple of European diets, and provide a healthy yet affordable starch source.

But potato plants need lots of water to produce their characteristic tubers - meaning this year's extremely dry summer has put crops under immense stress. Recent reports warn that UK and European potato harvests could be 3.5 million tonnes lower than expected - that's roughly 5kg per person in the continent.

Given demand for a staple like potatoes is relatively steady, this abrupt fall in supply will tend to mean rises in price. What has long been relied upon as a filling and affordable base to meals may put further pressure on household budgets, and leave shoppers looking to find alternative options such as oats, barley, beans or lentils.

3. Leafy greens

Spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens are especially susceptible to heat shock and water stress as a result of their shallow roots and high water content. Similarly to potatoes, their yields have suffered this year. High temperatures, cause plants to go to seed prematurely, while widespread drought limits water available for crop irrigation. In these stressful conditions, pests can cause problems for especially susceptible crops.

In these circumstances retailers will likely have to increase imports from other countries such as Spain. While other European countries are not immune to the impacts of extreme heat and drought, their farming systems are often better prepared to accommodate them, demonstrating a lack of resilience within UK food production which must be urgently addressed.

4. Bread

Arable farmers growing field crops such as wheat do not irrigate their crops but rely on the right amount of rain at the right time of year. This year's long summer drought meant that UK wheat yields have fallen significantly below recent averages.

But wheat only makes up about 10% of the overall cost of an average loaf of bread. Increases in pricing are also being driven by energy prices and other overheads passed onto bakeries, which need to power huge mills to produce flour and heat ovens to bake bread. This means a poor harvest is one of many factors likely to inflate the price of bread over the coming months.

Bread has historically been cheap to produce. Much like potatoes, it has long been considered a routine purchase and a staple source of energy, so even a modest increase in cost will soon add up for consumers across the country.

5. Olive oil

Despite the cost of olive oil coming down from a spike in 2024, it is expected to rise in coming months.

Olive trees are relatively hardy but still depend on sufficient water and favourable temperatures - 70% of Spain's olive groves are rain-fed, for instance. Yet, in recent years there has been an increase in droughts and extreme temperatures in important olive-growing regions across the Mediterranean, with fires affecting groves in Greece, Italy and Portugal this year alone.

The effects of droughts and wildfires on olive yields and the price of olive oil is likely to result in a a nutritional dilemma for shoppers. Olive oil is rich in antioxidants (such as polyphenols) and healthy fats (mostly monounsaturated fats), crucial for heart and brain health. But when prices rise, shoppers will likely be pressured to choose a more affordable alternative.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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More from East Anglia Bylines Environment Politics of farming: juggling food security, nature and uncertainty by Kate Moore 27 May 2026 Environment How new smarter greenhouses could improve the UK's food security by Dr Sven Batke 12 February 2025 Climate Alarm bells - Britain's food system is vulnerable by Kate Moore 24 May 2026 Friends of Bylines Network

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The post Five foods that could cost even more this winter - and why first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.