Millions are waiting for NHS treatment. Record numbers of households are living in temporary accommodation. Finding an NHS dentist remains difficult for many. Yet Britain still spends billions internationally. Helping people overseas can be right. But when resources are limited, taxpayers are entitled to ask: why was spending the money there more important than spending it here?

When I was working, if I ran short of money, I had to make choices.

I couldn’t keep spending on everything simply because everything seemed worthwhile. I had to decide what was essential, what could wait and what I could no longer afford.

If things became difficult enough, even charitable giving would have had to be reduced. Not because I’d stopped caring, but because I had responsibilities of my own.

Government finances are far more complicated than a household budget. Governments can borrow, tax and invest in ways individuals cannot.

But one principle doesn’t disappear:

Money committed to one priority cannot simultaneously be committed to another.

And that raises a question I suspect an increasing number of people are asking.

Look at what people experience

Most people don’t experience Britain through Treasury spreadsheets.

They experience it when they need something.

In England, the NHS elective waiting list stands at around 7.11 million pathways.

At the end of March 2026, 135,580 households were living in temporary accommodation — a record high.

The latest published NHS dental statistics showed that only around 40% of adults in England had seen an NHS dentist during the previous two years.

There are complicated reasons behind every one of those figures.

Money alone won’t solve them. You can’t train a doctor overnight. Building houses requires land, planning, workers and infrastructure. NHS dentistry has workforce and contractual problems as well as funding problems.

But try explaining all that to someone who has paid tax for decades and can’t find an NHS dentist.

Or someone whose family member has been waiting months for treatment.

Or someone worried about keeping a roof over their head.

Then they hear another announcement about millions or billions being committed internationally.

It’s hardly surprising if they ask:

What about us?

So how much are we actually spending?

Let’s get the number right, because this argument is frequently distorted.

Britain did not simply hand £14 billion to foreign governments in 2024.

According to the government’s final development statistics, UK Official Development Assistance — ODA — totalled £14.082 billion in 2024. Of that, £11.273 billion was bilateral ODA, while £2.809 billion went into the core budgets of multilateral organisations.

Another £2.827 billion — 20.1% of total ODA — was classified as support for refugees and asylum seekers in donor countries, principally reflecting costs incurred within the UK asylum and refugee system.

So anyone claiming Britain simply “gave £14 billion to foreign governments” isn’t accurately describing what happened.

But correcting that misconception shouldn’t end the discussion.

It was still £14.082 billion of public expenditure.

We are entitled to ask what we achieved with it.

No, foreign aid didn’t break Britain

This needs saying clearly.

Foreign aid did not cause NHS waiting lists.

It did not cause Britain’s housing shortage.

And cancelling the entire aid budget tomorrow wouldn’t suddenly produce millions of dental appointments, thousands of houses or enough doctors and nurses.

Foreign aid is also only a relatively small part of total government expenditure.

But none of that means we shouldn’t scrutinise it.

The question isn’t whether foreign aid caused Britain’s domestic problems.

It didn’t.

The question is:

When Britain has competing needs, how does government decide which deserves the money?

Government is already making that choice

We know this isn’t simply a theoretical argument because government is already reducing aid expenditure.

UK aid spending is expected to fall to 0.3% of Gross National Income in 2027/28.

The House of Commons Library estimates that this would mean spending of around £9.2 billion, compared with approximately £15.4 billion had spending remained at 0.5%. The government expects the reduction to provide around £6.5 billion towards increased defence expenditure in that year.

Government has therefore already accepted the principle.

Circumstances change. Priorities change. Money previously committed to one purpose can be redirected towards another.

If government can decide that defence now deserves greater priority than some international development spending, taxpayers are entitled to ask where healthcare, housing, social care and other domestic pressures sit in that calculation.

Show us what the money achieved

This is where government could make a much stronger case for international spending.

Don’t simply tell people that £100 million went into an international development programme.

Tell them what happened because of it.

If British money vaccinated a million children, show us. If it prevented famine, demonstrate it. If an investment generated a return, tell us what that return was.

If expenditure helped prevent instability that threatened British interests, explain how.

And if a programme failed, tell us that too.

This isn’t an unreasonable demand.

Britain’s own Independent Commission for Aid Impact concluded in March 2026 that management of the aid budget over the period it examined had not always been based on clear priorities or evidence of good value for money.

That doesn’t mean foreign aid is a waste of money.

It means taxpayers asking about value for money have a legitimate question.

When should another country pay first?

There is another question that deserves to be asked.

What happens when Britain provides assistance connected with a country that has substantial resources of its own?

It might have a large economy. It might receive substantial revenues from oil, gas or minerals. It might be capable of funding advanced technology, major infrastructure or a space programme.

None of that means everybody living there is wealthy.

Countries can possess enormous resources while millions of citizens remain poor.

But that creates a difficult question:

What responsibility does that country’s government have to help its own population before British taxpayers are asked to contribute?

There may be excellent reasons for Britain to become involved.

Perhaps we’re responding to an emergency. Perhaps we’re providing expertise. Perhaps it’s an investment rather than a grant. Perhaps there is an important British strategic interest.

And sometimes helping vulnerable people may be justified despite the failures or priorities of their government.

But those distinctions matter.

British taxpayers should be able to distinguish between helping a country that genuinely cannot meet a need and contributing where another government possesses substantial resources of its own.

That doesn’t mean abandoning ordinary people because of decisions made by their government.

It means asking who should reasonably be expected to pay first.

Sometimes spending abroad will be the better choice

The argument has to work both ways.

Suppose spending £100 million overseas prevents an infectious disease spreading internationally.

That could save lives abroad while protecting Britain and avoiding far greater expenditure later.

Perhaps supporting stability somewhere prevents conflict, displacement or a future security problem.

Perhaps development creates an important trading partner.

Perhaps spending overseas genuinely produces more benefit than spending the same amount here.

If that’s the evidence, then spending abroad may be the right decision.

And sometimes the justification is simply humanitarian.

If thousands of people are starving after an earthquake, famine or war, I don’t want Britain to become a country that simply looks the other way.

But compassion and accountability aren’t opposites.

We should be capable of both.

And apply exactly the same test at home

Keeping money inside Britain doesn’t automatically make it good spending.

Waste £100 million domestically and taxpayers are still £100 million poorer.

So the standard should be universal:

What was the objective? What did it cost? Did it work? Could we have achieved more by spending the money differently?

If we expect government to answer those questions about spending overseas, we should expect exactly the same answers about spending at home.

Give taxpayers the receipt

Government already publishes enormous amounts of information about international development.

But publication and accessibility aren’t the same thing.

An ordinary taxpayer shouldn’t need to understand government accounting or search through spreadsheets to discover what happened to billions of pounds.

Give us an understandable annual account.

Tell us how much Britain spent, where the largest amounts went, whether they were grants, investments or contributions to international organisations, what they were supposed to achieve and what actually happened.

Tell us which programmes succeeded and which failed.

And for significant expenditure, answer something we rarely hear:

Why was spending that money there considered better than spending it somewhere else?

That would be genuine transparency.

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This is bigger than foreign aid

Ultimately, I think this is becoming a question about trust.

Someone who cannot find an NHS dentist doesn’t care which departmental budget pays for international development.

Someone living in temporary accommodation doesn’t experience government through percentages of GDP.

They experience government through what happens to them.

If they repeatedly hear that resources are limited when they need something, while simultaneously seeing government find money for other priorities, they will ask questions.

That doesn’t mean their conclusions will always be correct.

Some overseas expenditure may represent extraordinarily good value. Some claims circulating online about foreign spending are misleading or simply wrong.

But dismissing the underlying question is a mistake.

When people stop trusting official explanations, they don’t stop looking for explanations.

They find them somewhere else.

That makes transparency more important, not less.

Responsibility begins at home

We’ve all heard the phrase:

“Charity begins at home.”

I don’t think that quite captures it.

Britain has responsibilities beyond its borders.

We have allies, security interests and international commitments. Sometimes helping another human being who is suffering is simply the right thing to do.

But I’d put another principle alongside it:

Responsibility begins at home.

Government’s responsibility is to make choices on our behalf and then be capable of defending them.

That means recognising the pressures people experience here while explaining why some of our resources are better used elsewhere.

It also means admitting when priorities need to change.

Who comes first?

I don’t think the answer is automatically Britain every time.

And I don’t think international spending should automatically be protected from challenge because its purpose is worthy.

Government may be able to justify much of this expenditure.

Some of it saves lives. Some may protect British interests. Some may prevent much greater costs later.

Then make that case.

But when someone struggling to obtain healthcare, find affordable housing or access overstretched public services asks why Britain can afford billions internationally, the answer cannot simply be that government has decided the spending is necessary.

Explain the choice.

Show the outcome.

And accept that taxpayers are entitled to question whether the priority was right.

Trust shouldn’t be the starting point of accountability. It should be the result of it.

Sources

Use these as the principal source links in the Substack article rather than filling the piece with secondary reporting:

• UK Government — Statistics on International Development: Final UK ODA Spend 2024

• Independent Commission for Aid Impact — Management of the ODA spending target

• House of Commons Library — UK aid: Reducing spending to 0.3% of GNI by 2027/28

The date is not important. What happened before it—and what happened afterwards—is.

A different kind of Beyond the Headlines

I normally explore questions about power, institutions and accountability through argument and evidence.

This time I’m trying something different.

Fiction.

Nothing that follows is presented as fact, prediction or allegation. It is a thought experiment about democracy, fear and what might happen when ordinary people stop whispering.

Author’s note: The Coffee Shop Rebellion is a work of political fiction. Its government, politicians, organisations, legislation, technologies and events are fictional. It is not an allegation about any current or former British government, political party or individual.

The Accident

Nobody really intended to elect the government.

That was the strange thing.

There had been no revolution or great ideological awakening. Most people couldn’t name more than a handful of its senior politicians.

They were simply exhausted by the government already there.

Scandals had accumulated. Promises had been broken. Public services weren’t working as people expected. Ministers appeared on television explaining that things were improving while millions looked at their own lives and wondered what country they were describing.

Eventually the electorate decided it wanted the old government gone.

What replaced it almost didn’t matter.

The result shocked everyone.

Including the winners.

The new Prime Minister stood outside Downing Street promising a different kind of politics.

Government would listen again. Institutions would be rebuilt. Public confidence would be restored.

For a while, people believed it.

More importantly, for a while, much of it was true.

Then something changed.

Historians would later spend years trying to identify the moment.

They never found one.

Perhaps that was the point.

Good Intentions

The new government had inherited genuine problems.

Artificial intelligence could manufacture convincing photographs, voices and political messages.

Foreign governments were attempting to manipulate public opinion.

Threats against politicians were increasing.

Irregular migration remained unresolved.

Public confidence in institutions was falling.

Doing nothing wasn’t an option.

So the government acted.

Initially, many of its measures were reasonable.

Election safeguards were strengthened. Technology companies were required to cooperate more closely with authorities investigating serious threats. Public bodies received guidance intended to reduce discrimination.

Specialist organisations were invited to advise departments.

Most people barely noticed.

Inside the governing movement, however, a highly organised faction was acquiring influence.

It wasn’t particularly large.

It didn’t need to be.

Its members understood something the moderates didn’t.

Power doesn’t always belong to the largest group. Sometimes it belongs to the group most determined to use it.

Appointments changed.

Advisers changed.

Candidate-selection procedures changed.

The same organisations appeared repeatedly around government tables.

People who challenged the emerging consensus weren’t arrested.

They simply stopped being invited.

That distinction reassured everybody.

For a while.

Helen

Nobody officially lost their job for disagreeing with the government.

That would have been outrageous.

Instead, things happened.

Helen was fifty-three and had worked in administration for the same organisation for eleven years.

She wasn’t an activist.

She didn’t attend political meetings.

She had never stood for anything more controversial than secretary of the local gardening club.

One evening she went to dinner with friends.

The conversation turned to government policy.

Helen disagreed with something.

Nobody shouted.

Nobody was threatened.

Everyone went home.

Three weeks later she was called into a meeting.

Someone had reported what she’d said.

Her employer insisted she wasn’t being punished for holding an opinion.

There were simply concerns.

Judgement.

Reputation.

Workplace confidence.

Professional standards.

Eventually Helen left.

Whether she’d technically resigned or effectively been dismissed became something lawyers could have argued about.

Helen couldn’t afford lawyers.

So she stopped talking about politics.

Until one Thursday morning.

Frank’s Coffee House

Frank’s stood between a pharmacy and an empty shop that had once been a bank.

Twelve tables.

A scratched wooden counter.

Tea served in mismatched mugs.

Coffee considerably better than anyone expected.

Frank had owned it for twenty-three years.

Every Thursday morning, six people occupied the table beside the window.

Margaret was a retired nurse who had spent forty years working in hospitals and possessed the unnerving ability to make everyone feel twelve years old when they behaved badly.

Samir owned the convenience store around the corner. He had spent most of his adult life being asked where he was “really from” and had developed an instinctive suspicion of anyone claiming to speak for an entire community.

Peter was an electrician. He distrusted government, academics and anybody who used the phrase stakeholder engagement.

Helen mostly listened.

Daniel lectured at a university and had never encountered a statement he couldn’t turn into a question.

Frank supplied the coffee.

They didn’t agree about much.

That was why Frank enjoyed Thursdays.

One morning Helen told them what had happened.

When she’d finished, nobody spoke.

Peter glanced towards the counter before giving his opinion.

Samir lowered his voice.

Margaret leaned closer.

Daniel watched them.

Then he asked:

“Why are we whispering?”

Nobody answered.

The following Thursday they met again.

Then again.

Eventually they established a rule.

Nobody had to agree with anybody else.

Another followed.

Nobody could threaten somebody for disagreeing.

And finally:

Nothing said peacefully around this table should cost somebody their livelihood.

A builder overheard them and asked if he could join.

Then a student.

Then a police officer who never gave his surname.

Frank pushed two tables together.

Someone jokingly called it Parliament.

“Absolutely not,” Frank said. “Parliament’s got enough problems.”

Margaret looked at the tables.

“The Coffee Table.”

The name stuck.

Protecting Democracy

Meanwhile, the government faced a problem it couldn’t simply ignore.

Election security.

Intelligence agencies had identified sophisticated attempts at foreign interference.

Deepfake recordings of candidates appeared online.

Fabricated documents circulated days before elections.

Anonymous accounts pushed contradictory stories designed less to persuade voters than to make them distrust everything.

The government introduced the Emergency Democracy Act.

It allowed an election in an affected area to be postponed where there was compelling evidence that the integrity of the vote had been seriously compromised.

The safeguards looked impressive.

Independent assessment.

Parliamentary oversight.

Time limits.

Most people thought it sensible.

The first postponement lasted three months.

There were unusual circumstances.

People accepted it.

Then another election was delayed.

Then another.

Six months this time.

The circumstances always seemed exceptional.

That was what made them difficult to challenge.

Inside the Room

Minister Rachel Mercer had been awake for nineteen hours when the intelligence briefing arrived.

She read it twice.

Foreign servers.

Thousands of fabricated accounts.

Artificially generated recordings of candidates.

Evidence that at least one hostile government was involved.

Across the table, a civil servant waited.

“If we allow the election to proceed,” Mercer said, “and we know somebody is trying to compromise it, what happens afterwards?”

The official didn’t answer.

“Whoever loses says the election was stolen. Whoever wins is accused of being illegitimate. We could spend years fighting about whether the result was real.”

“The alternative is postponement.”

“I know.”

“And people will say you’re cancelling elections.”

Mercer looked exhausted.

“What would you do?”

The civil servant hesitated.

“I don’t know.”

Neither did she.

That mattered.

Mercer hadn’t entered politics wanting to stop elections.

She genuinely believed she was protecting them.

When the Prime Minister approved another postponement, she defended it on television.

“Democracy isn’t simply holding a vote,” she said. “It’s ensuring people can trust the result.”

It was a good argument.

Daniel admitted as much at the Coffee Table.

“She’s right,” Peter said.

“Possibly,” Daniel replied.

“That’s not much of an answer.”

Daniel looked at him.

“The dangerous powers aren’t always created by bad people, Peter.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Good people eventually leave office.”

The Ring of Steel

As public support weakened, the government changed direction.

Organisations that had once enjoyed privileged access suddenly found themselves excluded. Advisory panels disappeared. Ministers announced that public institutions should no longer promote political ideology.

Peter approved.

Samir was less impressed.

“They loved these organisations when they agreed with them,” he said. “Now suddenly political influence is dangerous?”

“Maybe they’ve realised they were wrong,” Peter replied.

“Good.”

Samir shook his head.

“No. They’ve realised they want different people doing the influencing.”

Then came immigration.

Successive governments had promised to control irregular maritime arrivals.

An island was established as an offshore processing centre. People intercepted attempting unauthorised entry by sea would be taken there while identity, security and immigration decisions were made.

Then came the technology.

Radar.

Surveillance aircraft.

Autonomous maritime systems.

Artificial intelligence.

Drones.

Together they monitored Britain’s coastal approaches.

Government advertising gave the system a name.

THE RING OF STEEL

It was popular.

Peter supported it.

So did Samir.

Margaret surprised Daniel by supporting it too.

“A country needs to know who’s entering,” she said. “That’s hardly extremism.”

Daniel agreed.

His objection was different.

“Who controls the Ring of Steel?”

Peter laughed.

“The authorities.”

“Today.”

Peter sighed.

“Oh, here we go.”

Daniel put down his spoon.

“We keep asking whether we approve of what they’re using these systems for.”

He looked around the table.

“Maybe we should ask what else they could be used for.”

Rachel Mercer received the inland deployment order six months later.

The Ring of Steel had been designed to watch the coastline.

The new authorisation allowed parts of the system to monitor demonstrations where security agencies believed serious disorder was possible.

Mercer read the document.

Then she read it again.

“They aren’t the same thing,” she said.

Her security adviser shook his head.

“No. But the intelligence assessment says the technology could prevent violence.”

“Border surveillance and political demonstrations.”

“The system doesn’t know the difference.”

Mercer looked up.

“I do.”

The adviser slid the security assessment towards her.

It was detailed.

Professional.

Persuasive.

That was becoming the problem.

“What happens if we don’t use it and somebody dies?” he asked.

Mercer stared at the signature line.

Then she signed.

Weeks later the deployment widened again.

Critical infrastructure.

Government buildings.

Transport hubs.

Large demonstrations.

Political gatherings classified as potential security risks.

Mercer watched one of the drone feeds during a briefing.

Hundreds of citizens appeared as small moving shapes on a screen.

She remembered the coastline.

She remembered saying the system would keep people safe.

She could no longer remember precisely when protecting democracy had begun to require watching so many of the people participating in it.

The Tables Multiply

Someone photographed the three rules at Frank’s and posted them online.

Another café copied them.

Then another.

Coffee Tables appeared across Britain.

There was no organisation.

No membership.

No headquarters.

No leader.

People simply met.

Some wanted lower immigration. Others wanted higher immigration. Some wanted lower taxes. Others wanted stronger public services.

They argued.

Sometimes furiously.

Then ordered another coffee.

There was no ideology to ban.

The government initially ignored them.

Then mocked them.

Then people entering meetings began being photographed.

Employers received anonymous emails.

Businesses hosting Coffee Tables experienced unusual scrutiny.

Frank received four inspections in eleven days.

He passed every one.

Then someone smashed his windows.

Nobody knew who.

Police treated it as criminal damage.

Ministers condemned the attack.

Frank replaced the glass.

The following Thursday eighty-three people arrived.

There weren’t enough chairs.

Peter spent twenty minutes repairing a broken table instead of joining the discussion.

When Frank offered to pay him, he refused.

“You’ll only waste it on coffee.”

It was the first time Frank realised the table had become something more than furniture.

Fear worked when people experienced it alone.

It became less effective when frightened people discovered one another.

Beyond Britain

A photograph showed Frank standing beside his repaired window.

Someone had taped three sentences to the glass.

You don’t have to agree.

You don’t have to be silent.

Nobody should be frightened for speaking peacefully.

Three days later a café in Dublin displayed the same words.

Then Cork.

Galway.

Amsterdam.

Warsaw.

Madrid.

Prague.

Nobody coordinated it.

The languages changed.

The principle didn’t.

Journalists gave it a name.

The Coffee Shop Rebellion.

Frank hated it.

“We’re not rebelling,” he told a reporter.

“What are you doing?”

Frank considered the question.

“Talking.”

“Your government seems worried about people talking.”

Frank looked through the window.

“Perhaps that’s the problem.”

The Tipping Point

Something was changing inside the institutions themselves.

Police officers attended Coffee Tables.

Civil servants came.

Doctors.

Teachers.

Lawyers.

Some soldiers when off duty.

They didn’t swear allegiance to the movement.

There was nothing to swear allegiance to.

Instead, officials began asking questions.

Police officers asked whether particular orders were lawful.

Civil servants requested controversial instructions in writing.

Government lawyers challenged increasingly expansive interpretations of emergency powers.

Judges scrutinised government decisions.

There was no coup.

Nobody wanted one.

The Coffee Tables repeatedly said the same thing:

We don’t want to overthrow the government. We want the right to vote it out.

The distinction mattered.

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The New Media

Independent publications that had once struggled for audiences suddenly found millions looking for alternatives.

Podcasts grew.

Small broadcasters expanded.

Journalists investigated leaked documents.

Some reporting was excellent.

Some partisan.

Some nonsense.

Freedom didn’t guarantee quality.

It guaranteed competition.

The government attacked what became known as the New Media.

Irresponsible.

Extremist.

Dangerous.

The labels gradually stopped working.

Established broadcasters continued operating. Some challenged government. Others remained supportive.

Nobody needed to silence them.

People simply looked elsewhere.

Every government announcement now generated questions.

Where is the evidence?

Who authorised this?

Who oversees it?

When does the power expire?

And increasingly:

When do we get to vote you out?

Two Responses

Other governments watched.

Some responded by reviewing emergency powers, strengthening oversight and answering uncomfortable questions.

In those countries, something surprising happened.

Coffee Tables gradually emptied.

People who believed they could remove their governments democratically had less reason to organise against them.

Others responded with restrictions.

Journalists were investigated.

Surveillance expanded.

Intelligence began passing between governments.

In those countries the tables multiplied.

For the first time, the Coffee Tables faced a difficult question of their own.

Talking had started something.

What happened when talking was no longer enough?

One Principle

The proposal came from Dublin.

Not a political programme.

One principle.

Citizens must retain the genuine ability to remove their government through free elections.

Nothing else.

No immigration policy.

No economic programme.

No religion.

No tax position.

No left.

No right.

And no violence.

The Coffee Tables would not seize power.

They would demand that those who possessed it submit themselves to the electorate.

Peaceful gatherings grew.

Lawyers challenged emergency measures.

Journalists reported them.

Politicians from incompatible traditions appeared on the same platforms.

Government supporters were invited too.

At one gathering, Rachel Mercer attempted to speak.

The boos made it impossible.

Margaret walked onto the platform.

She waited.

Eventually the crowd quietened.

“If she can’t speak because we disagree with her,” Margaret said, “then we’ve learned nothing.”

Mercer spoke.

She defended many of the decisions she’d made.

She admitted others troubled her.

She was heckled.

She continued.

Almost nobody changed their mind.

Afterwards Mercer found Margaret.

“Thank you.”

Margaret shook her head.

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“I know.”

That was precisely why it mattered.

The Price

The government pushed back.

Some gatherings were restricted.

Organisers were investigated.

Frank’s licence was suspended.

Then Daniel was arrested after refusing an order to leave a gathering that authorities had declared unlawful.

The Coffee Tables told supporters not to obstruct the police.

Daniel went quietly.

His photograph was on every news site before his wife knew what had happened.

The university suspended him pending the outcome of the case.

His daughter was sixteen.

For the first week she refused to answer his calls.

When she finally did, Daniel tried to explain.

“I didn’t choose this.”

“You went there.”

“I had a right to be there.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Daniel stopped.

His daughter was crying.

“Mum hasn’t slept properly since they arrested you. People have been messaging me. Someone sent me a picture of our house.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You always say that what we’re doing matters.”

“It does.”

“More than us?”

“No.”

“That’s what it feels like.”

Daniel had no answer.

He spent eleven weeks waiting for the case to be resolved.

Eventually the prosecution was abandoned.

People at Frank’s celebrated when he returned.

Daniel didn’t.

His wife hugged him.

His daughter stayed upstairs.

He never returned to the university.

Months later he was offered another academic post.

He declined it.

Helen asked him why.

“I used to think having the right argument was enough.”

“And now?”

Daniel looked towards the table.

“Now I know arguments have bills attached.”

Helen understood.

She never recovered her old job either.

Victory, if it came, would not put everything back.

The Empty Table

Three days after Frank’s coffee shop closed, someone placed a small wooden table outside it.

Two chairs.

One coffee cup.

Nobody knew who put it there.

By lunchtime there were twenty.

By evening there were hundreds.

Then they appeared across Britain.

Ireland.

Europe.

Tables outside homes.

Universities.

Businesses.

People sat.

Talked.

Asked questions.

A police officer finishing his shift placed a coffee cup on one.

A nurse followed.

Then a civil servant.

A teacher.

An off-duty soldier.

The photographs travelled.

The government still possessed authority.

But something more fragile was disappearing.

Legitimacy.

Let Us Vote

Then the government announced another postponement of the general election.

This time the justification didn’t hold.

Courts examined it.

Parliamentary opposition hardened.

Government MPs began questioning their leadership.

Newspapers that had previously supported ministers demanded an election.

Millions gathered peacefully.

Their demand consisted of three words.

LET US VOTE.

There were confrontations.

There were arrests.

There were isolated acts of violence.

The Coffee Tables condemned them.

Anyone advocating violence was told they did not speak for the movement.

Inside government, Rachel Mercer faced another decision.

This time she didn’t sign.

She resigned.

Her resignation statement contained one sentence that appeared on front pages the following morning:

A government may protect democracy, but it cannot protect democracy from the electorate.

Other resignations followed.

One foreign government abandoned the coordinated restrictions and announced elections.

Then another.

The alliance began breaking apart.

Eventually the Prime Minister appeared outside Downing Street.

The general election would proceed.

The government campaigned.

So did its opponents.

The Coffee Tables endorsed nobody.

Election day arrived.

The government lost.

And then something happened that mattered more than the result.

It left.

Power changed hands peacefully.

That was the victory.

Afterwards

There were celebrations.

Not everyone joined them.

Daniel watched the election coverage at home.

His daughter sat at the other end of the sofa.

Neither said much.

When the outgoing Prime Minister confirmed the transfer of power, Daniel looked towards her.

She nodded.

That was all.

It wasn’t forgiveness.

But it was something.

Helen still didn’t have her old job.

Daniel never returned to university.

Frank’s business had debts it hadn’t had before.

Families had argued.

Friendships had ended.

People had been frightened.

Some wounds outlasted the government that caused them.

The country didn’t suddenly become harmonious either.

People still argued about immigration.

Tax.

Religion.

Borders.

Identity.

Public spending.

Culture.

The Coffee Tables themselves nearly split over what should happen next.

Some wanted to form a political party.

Polls suggested it could win.

Frank opposed it.

Helen did too.

Daniel surprised everyone by agreeing.

Helen explained why.

“If we become the government, eventually somebody will need a Coffee Table to protect them from us.”

That ended the argument.

Instead they created something deliberately weak.

The Alliance of People

It couldn’t contest elections.

It couldn’t endorse candidates.

It couldn’t govern.

Its purpose was to defend the conditions under which everyone else could argue about politics.

Its principles fitted on one page.

Governments must be removable.

Elections must be genuine.

Courts must remain independent.

People must be free to question power peacefully.

Surveillance must itself be scrutinised.

No political movement owns the state.

Emergency powers must remain temporary and reviewable.

And finally:

Nobody has to agree.

The Table

Years later, a journalist visited Frank’s Coffee House.

The original table remained beside the window.

It wasn’t the original table exactly.

Peter had replaced the top twice.

But nobody mentioned that.

Six chairs surrounded it.

An old photograph hung on the wall.

Frank.

Margaret.

Samir.

Peter.

Helen.

Daniel.

Six ordinary people drinking coffee.

“Is that where the rebellion started?” the journalist asked.

Frank pointed towards the table.

“About there.”

“What were you trying to achieve?”

Frank laughed.

“Nothing.”

She looked confused.

“We were having coffee.”

“But you changed the world.”

Frank shook his head.

“No.”

He looked around the café.

Every table was occupied.

People were arguing.

Politics.

Immigration.

Taxes.

Religion.

The government.

Each other.

At one table, two men were arguing about whether the Alliance of People itself had become too influential.

Frank smiled when he heard them.

Nobody was whispering.

“People remembered they could.”

Outside, beneath the name of the coffee shop, someone had painted the words that eventually appeared above Coffee Tables around the world:

POWER BELONGS TO PEOPLE ONLY FOR AS LONG AS THEY LEND IT.

Underneath, in smaller letters:

Sit down. Have coffee. Ask questions.

A final thought

This is fiction.

But the question behind it isn’t:

How much power should we ever allow governments, institutions or movements to accumulate before we start asking what happens when the people using it are replaced by somebody else?

Because perhaps the strongest safeguard in a democracy isn’t having the right people in power.

Perhaps it’s making sure nobody can keep it forever.

If this experiment worked for you, I’d genuinely like to know. Should Beyond the Headlines occasionally use fiction to explore real questions—or should I stick to the essays?

Leave a comment below.

Before you read

This article has two distinct parts.

Part One is based on Britain as it exists today. It looks at immigration statistics, illegal-working enforcement, Digital ID and facial recognition. These sections are based on published evidence.

Part Two is a fictional thought experiment. It is not announced government policy, a prediction of what will happen, or a claim about the intentions of the current government.

Instead, it asks what might happen if today’s measures failed, public confidence continued to deteriorate and a future government decided that controlling illegal immigration justified much more intrusive identity checks.

The technology discussed in the scenario has roots in the present.

The future described does not.

The argument in 60 seconds

Britain is strengthening identity and Right to Work checks in an attempt to make illegal working harder.

Digital ID could make those checks more reliable without requiring the population to be continuously identified by the state. Facial recognition is separately already being used for defined law-enforcement purposes.

But suppose those measures don’t solve the problem.

Imagine a future government proposing compulsory biometric registration, arguing that everyone legally entitled to live in Britain should be able to prove it.

Then imagine that identity infrastructure being connected to increasingly sophisticated facial recognition.

Now make the question harder.

Suppose it actually worked.

Illegal working falls. Immigration enforcement becomes more effective. Identity fraud becomes harder. Serious offenders become easier to identify.

Would you accept the loss of anonymity?

This article isn’t predicting that future.

It’s asking where we would draw the line if technology eventually made that choice possible.

A note about the numbers

Immigration statistics have become part of the political argument themselves.

Some people trust official figures. Others question whether government statistics capture the full picture, how particular categories are defined, or whether politicians selectively use figures that support their case.

That scepticism shouldn’t simply be dismissed. But neither should suspicion be treated as evidence that official statistics are false.

For this article, I use published Home Office and Office for National Statistics data as the starting point because they provide the most comprehensive publicly available national datasets.

That doesn’t mean accepting a government’s interpretation of them.

Where something is an estimate, I describe it as an estimate. Where figures represent detected or recorded activity, I don’t assume they capture activity that was never detected. Where figures are provisional and may subsequently be revised, that matters too.

The sources are provided so readers can examine the evidence themselves.

There is another reason for caution. The Home Office is due to publish its next quarterly immigration statistics on 27 August 2026. The figures below therefore represent the latest published information available when this article was written.

PART ONE — BRITAIN TODAY

Start by separating different kinds of immigration

Before looking forward, we need to separate several things that are often mixed together.

Legal immigration is not illegal immigration. An asylum seeker is not automatically an illegal immigrant. Someone entering Britain through an illegal route is not automatically someone who will ultimately be found to have no right to remain. Someone can also enter Britain legally and subsequently lose their legal right to remain.

Those distinctions matter.

Britain permits people to come here legally to work, study, join family and for other reasons. It also has obligations towards people entitled to protection.

At the same time, Britain has a legitimate interest in controlling its borders and enforcing decisions against people who have no legal right to remain.

Those positions aren’t contradictory.

The numbers are changing

One fact sometimes lost in the argument is that overall migration has already fallen substantially.

The Office for National Statistics provisionally estimates long-term net migration at 171,000 in the year ending December 2025, compared with 331,000 a year earlier and a peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023.

ONS describes these as provisional estimates and official statistics in development. They are produced using administrative information and statistical methods rather than being a literal count of every person entering and leaving Britain, and estimates can subsequently be revised.

Source: Office for National Statistics — Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025

But overall migration and illegal immigration are different problems. That’s why falling net migration doesn’t necessarily end the political argument.

Small boats remain highly visible. Illegal working remains a problem. Government continues removing people who have no legal right to remain and looking for more effective ways of enforcing the system.

The question therefore isn’t simply:

How many people came?

There is another question:

Do people believe the rules are actually being enforced?

The border we don’t normally see

Most television pictures of illegal immigration show boats.

But immigration control doesn’t finish when somebody reaches Britain. Someone living here without permission needs somewhere to live and some means of supporting themselves.

That makes employment important.

Between January and June 2026, Immigration Enforcement recorded 7,270 illegal-working visits and 4,756 arrests. Restaurants, takeaways and cafés accounted for the largest category of enforcement visits, while beauty businesses, retail, car washes, construction, warehousing and delivery services were also targeted.

In warehousing, distribution and delivery alone, the Home Office recorded 635 visits and 635 arrests during those six months.

The Home Office says the total represented a 31% increase in visits and a 20% increase in arrests compared with the same period in 2025.

Source: Home Office — Illegal working and enforcement activity to the end of June 2026

Those figures tell us about enforcement activity. They don’t tell us precisely how many people are working illegally across Britain.

But they demonstrate that the problem exists.

They also reveal something easily overlooked:

A border isn’t only a line around a country. There is another border inside the economy — the point at which somebody tries to get a job.

Consider the person bringing your dinner

Food delivery provides a useful example.

Millions of us order food through apps, and the system depends upon a large and flexible workforce.

Someone being foreign, speaking another language or delivering food tells us absolutely nothing about whether they have a legal right to work in Britain.

But the Home Office has publicly identified vulnerabilities involving illegal working and misuse of legitimate delivery accounts.

Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats have themselves worked with government on stronger identity and Right to Work checks. Government has also moved to strengthen Right to Work requirements across flexible-working arrangements.

Source: Home Office — Delivery firms to bolster rider security checks to stop illegal working

The issue isn’t whether these businesses deliberately facilitate illegal working. The available evidence shows them taking measures intended to prevent it.

The wider issue is whether flexible labour arrangements can create vulnerabilities that people without the legal right to work may exploit.

If somebody can earn money despite having no legal right to work, immigration enforcement becomes considerably more difficult.

That brings us to Digital ID.

Digital ID

Britain is developing a national Digital ID system.

The government’s case isn’t solely about immigration. It argues that Digital ID could make dealing with public services easier, reduce identity fraud and make proving who you are simpler.

But immigration enforcement is explicitly part of the case.

According to the government’s current explainer, the proposed Digital ID will include information such as name, date of birth, nationality or residency status and a photograph used as the basis for biometric security.

Government also says employers will be required to use it as evidence of someone’s Right to Work.

Source: UK Government — Digital ID scheme: explainer

The argument is straightforward.

If an employer can establish quickly and reliably whether somebody has permission to work, employing somebody illegally becomes harder.

For people entitled to live and work here, government argues that the same technology could make everyday identity checks and access to services easier.

That’s the bargain currently being offered.

There is an important limit

This is where we must distinguish what is happening today from what comes next in this article.

The government is not currently proposing that police should be able to stop anybody walking down the street and demand their Digital ID.

Its current published information says police will not receive a new general power to demand it, while the government’s consultation states that there is no general legal requirement in the UK to carry proof of identity at all times.

Nor is government proposing that facial-recognition cameras should continuously establish the identity of everybody going about their daily lives.

Britain does already use facial-recognition technology for defined law-enforcement purposes, and government has consulted on the legal framework governing its future use.

That raises genuine questions about privacy, proportionality and safeguards.

But it is not the universal identification system described later in this article.

That system is fictional.

PART TWO — A FICTIONAL FUTURE

From this point onwards, this article is a thought experiment.

The following scenarios are not announced government policy. They are not claims about what the current government secretly intends to do. And they are not predictions.

They take technologies and political problems that exist today and ask what choices a future government might face if today’s solutions proved insufficient.

Scenario One: It works

Imagine Britain in 2029.

Digital Right to Work checks have become routine and quick. Employers can establish someone’s status easily, loopholes involving flexible and gig-economy working have largely been closed, and employers deliberately using illegal labour face meaningful consequences.

Illegal working becomes substantially more difficult.

Meanwhile, asylum decisions become faster. Someone genuinely entitled to protection receives an answer more quickly, while someone who exhausts the legal process and is ultimately found to have no right to remain is removed more effectively.

Facial recognition continues to be used for defined law-enforcement purposes, subject to legal rules, oversight and safeguards.

Illegal immigration hasn’t disappeared. It probably never will. But government has greater control and public confidence begins to recover.

This might be the ideal outcome:

Better enforcement without fundamentally changing the relationship between the individual and the state.

Scenario Two: We continue struggling

Now imagine a different Britain in 2029.

People have found ways around the employment controls. Illegal working continues. Removal remains difficult in some cases. Small boats continue crossing the Channel.

Government announces another initiative, followed by another. Different political parties offer different solutions, but increasing numbers of people conclude that nobody has actually solved the problem.

Something potentially more damaging than the immigration statistics begins to deteriorate:

trust.

Social cohesion is complicated. Immigration isn’t responsible for every community tension, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.

Housing shortages, poverty, inequality, crime, misinformation, cultural differences, political rhetoric and declining confidence in institutions can all play a part. Nor does immigration automatically destroy cohesive communities.

But perceived loss of control can become another ingredient.

People begin asking why rules exist if government cannot enforce them. Others start blaming people who have done nothing wrong. Legal migrants can become associated with illegal immigration simply because of where they came from.

Communities become defensive. Politics becomes angrier. Simple solutions become increasingly attractive.

Eventually, government faces a choice.

Carry on — or do something much more radical.

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Beyond the Headlines separates what is happening from what might happen — without telling you what you’re supposed to think.

2030: A fictional Prime Minister makes an announcement

Remember: this is fiction.

A future Prime Minister stands behind a lectern in Downing Street.

The government says previous measures haven’t worked well enough. It has strengthened border enforcement, targeted criminal gangs, increased employer checks and introduced Digital ID.

But illegal working and illegal residence remain significant problems.

The fictional Prime Minister makes the case:

Britain cannot operate an effective immigration system if it cannot reliably establish who is legally entitled to live and work here.

Then comes the proposal.

Universal biometric registration

Every British citizen and every person legally resident in Britain must establish a verified identity.

It doesn’t necessarily mean carrying a plastic identity card. The identity could remain digital.

But registration is no longer optional.

Why would we accept it?

Because our hypothetical government would have a powerful argument.

If you’re legally entitled to live here, registration proves it. If you’re legally entitled to work, your employer can establish that immediately. If you’re entitled to certain benefits, government can establish your eligibility.

Identity fraud becomes harder. Borrowed identities become harder to use. People living illegally find it increasingly difficult to participate in the legitimate economy.

The government then asks:

If you have the legal right to be here, why would you object to proving it?

Many people might find that convincing.

Perhaps you would too.

Then comes facial recognition

Facial-recognition technology already exists today.

Our fictional government now proposes linking biometric identity more closely with immigration enforcement.

Instead of facial recognition simply helping authorities determine whether somebody matches a person they are looking for, a much broader identity infrastructure might eventually enable another question:

Can we establish who this person is?

Imagine walking through a railway station.

A camera sees your face and your identity is established. Nothing happens. You continue walking.

Another person passes the camera and their identity cannot be established.

That doesn’t prove they’ve done anything wrong. There could be numerous innocent explanations.

But our fictional Parliament has passed legislation allowing that failure to establish identity to trigger further enquiries.

Now the question becomes personal.

Would you accept that?

Suppose it worked

This is where the argument becomes uncomfortable.

Don’t imagine an incompetent surveillance system.

Imagine an extremely effective one.

Illegal working falls dramatically. Borrowed and fraudulent identities become much harder to use. People ultimately found to have no right to remain become easier to locate.

Identity fraud falls. Serious criminals become easier to identify.

Government produces the results and says:

It worked.

What then?

The argument for saying yes

The case isn’t ridiculous.

Government already knows who holds a passport. Employers already check identity. Banks establish who their customers are. Airports use biometric technology. Phones recognise our faces. CCTV already records enormous amounts of public activity.

Supporters might therefore argue that universal digital identity is simply another stage in the development of a modern state.

They might argue that privacy shouldn’t become a shield behind which people can ignore immigration law, and that a country has a legitimate interest in establishing who is legally entitled to live and work within its borders.

If the system substantially improved immigration enforcement, perhaps losing some anonymity would be a reasonable price.

That is a legitimate argument.

The argument for saying no

But something fundamental would have changed.

Ordinary people going about lawful lives in Britain have historically not been required to continuously establish their identity to the state.

Under our fictional system, being unidentified could itself attract attention.

Instead of government needing a reason to identify you, you increasingly need to demonstrate to government that you belong.

And once the infrastructure exists, another question appears:

What else could we use it for?

Five years later

Move our fictional story forward to 2035.

The immigration system is working better. The technology is reliable. The database exists. The cameras exist. The public has become accustomed to them.

Another government comes to power.

It doesn’t need to build the infrastructure. It inherits it.

Someone asks:

If this system can identify people breaking immigration law, why shouldn’t we use it against serious organised crime?

Many people might agree.

Then terrorism. Violent offenders. People wanted by the courts.

Perhaps benefit fraud. Perhaps tax evasion. Perhaps public disorder.

Each extension could have its own reasonable justification.

Nobody needs to announce:

We’re creating a surveillance state.

Instead:

The technology already exists. It works. Why wouldn’t we use it to solve another serious problem?

This is sometimes called function creep: a system created for one legitimate purpose gradually acquires others.

It doesn’t require conspiracy.

It requires only useful technology and governments discovering additional uses for it.

Your face isn’t a password

Biometric identity creates another kind of risk.

Lose a password and you can change it. Lose a bank card and you can replace it.

You cannot replace your face.

The Information Commissioner’s Office says biometric-recognition systems used to uniquely identify somebody process special-category biometric data.

That leaves difficult questions.

Who can access the information and who can search it? How long is it retained? Can different databases be connected? What happens when the system makes a mistake, and how does somebody challenge it?

What happens after a security breach?

Can Parliament expand what the system is used for?

And what happens when the government operating it isn’t the government that originally created it?

What about the people the system gets wrong?

Not everybody unable to establish their identity is living here illegally.

Someone may be homeless or lack conventional documentation. Someone may have a disability or struggle with technology. An elderly person may not own a smartphone. Government records can simply be wrong.

The government’s current Digital ID proposal recognises some of these problems. It says physical alternatives will be available for people without smartphones, alongside face-to-face assistance and specialist casework for people who struggle to prove their identity.

Those safeguards would become even more important in our fictional compulsory system.

Because once identity becomes a gateway to ordinary life, getting someone’s identity wrong becomes considerably more serious.

So what would you give up?

Britain has a legitimate interest in controlling its borders.

It has obligations towards people genuinely entitled to protection.

Employers shouldn’t be able to gain an advantage by exploiting people who have no legal right to work, and people ultimately found to have no right to remain should expect immigration law to be enforced.

None of those positions requires a political label.

The difficult question is how far we’re prepared to go.

Digital Right to Work checks?

Stronger enforcement against employers?

Targeted facial recognition against defined watchlists?

Compulsory Digital ID?

Universal biometric registration?

Facial recognition capable of establishing the identity of ordinary people going about their lives?

At some point, most of us probably draw a line.

The interesting question is where.

Now make the decision harder

Suppose the strongest version really did work.

Illegal working falls dramatically. People without a legal right to work find it much harder to participate in the legitimate economy. People ultimately found to have no right to remain become easier to locate.

Identity fraud falls. Serious criminals become easier to identify. Public confidence begins to recover.

Would you accept compulsory biometric identification then?

Maybe your answer is yes.

Maybe it’s no.

Neither answer automatically makes someone authoritarian. Neither automatically makes someone soft on illegal immigration.

It means making a judgement about the balance between two things democracies need:

the ability of government to enforce the law

and

the ability of innocent people to live without unnecessary interference from government.

There may never be a perfect balance.

But perhaps there is one question we should ask before the technology makes the choice easier:

If we give government a power because we trust its purpose today, what safeguards would we want if one day we no longer trusted the people controlling it?

Evidence and scenario note

Part One describes current policy and evidence. Part Two is a fictional thought experiment.

References to future compulsory biometric registration, universal facial identification, automatic identity checking in public places and restrictions associated with that hypothetical system are not current UK government policy.

The fictional scenarios extrapolate from technologies, enforcement mechanisms and policy questions that exist today in order to examine the potential trade-off between more effective enforcement and individual liberty.

The Home Office is scheduled to publish its next quarterly immigration statistics on 27 August 2026. This article uses the latest published information available at the time of writing and will be reviewed against that release.

Sources

Office for National Statistics — Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025.

Home Office — Illegal working and enforcement activity to the end of June 2026.

UK Government — Digital ID scheme: explainer.

UK Government — Making public services work for you with your digital identity.

Home Office — Delivery firms to bolster rider security checks to stop illegal working.

Home Office — Legal framework for using facial recognition in law enforcement.

Information Commissioner’s Office — Biometric recognition guidance.

This article is an experiment in evidence-based speculative storytelling. The opening is fictional. Everything presented as reality is based on documented evidence. The sections looking towards 2027–2030 explore possible futures — they are not predictions.

Manchester, November 2029

It’s just after midnight.

A man leaves a tram stop and starts walking home.

Two people approach him. There is an argument.

One of them throws a punch.

Within seconds, an emergency call reports an assault. A drone stationed nearby is dispatched.

It doesn’t carry a weapon. It cannot make an arrest and doesn’t decide who is guilty.

It is simply an eye in the sky.

By the time the attackers start running, the drone is approaching. Its camera finds them.

They separate.

The drone follows one while police receive live pictures and location information.

A facial-recognition system produces a possible match against a police watchlist. A human operator checks it.

Officers intercept the suspect several streets away.

The incident has been recorded.

From the emergency call to locating the suspect, only minutes have passed.

There’s just one problem with this story.

It hasn’t happened.

Not like this.

Not yet.

But several of the technologies needed to make it possible already exist.

REALITY — 2026

The police are already above us

British police forces already use drones extensively.

According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, UK police make around 60,000 drone flights each year. They are used for tasks including locating missing people, tracking offenders and giving officers an aerial view of developing incidents.

The NPCC says drones can help officers search large areas quickly while providing information to commanders on the ground.

Source: National Police Chiefs’ Council — Police use of drones

Police forces are also experimenting with something particularly relevant to our fictional assault: Drone as First Responder.

Norfolk Constabulary has led trials in which remotely stationed drones can be dispatched following an emergency call and transmit live footage back to a police control room, potentially giving officers information about what is happening before a conventional patrol arrives.

Source: National Police Chiefs’ Council — Drone as First Responder trials

The Metropolitan Police has gone further.

In July 2026, Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said the Met’s programme had expanded from two drones to nine, with drones being deployed to around 200 incidents each week.

According to Rowley, their response time was approximately two minutes, compared with an average of nine minutes for response officers. That allows a drone, in some circumstances, to arrive first, provide live intelligence and potentially track suspects.

Source: Metropolitan Police — Commissioner’s speech on technology, July 2026

Kent Police has reported another practical example. Its drones were deployed to more than 1,100 calls during 2025 and helped locate 58 suspected criminals and 16 missing people.

Source: Kent Police

So the drone in our fictional Manchester assault isn’t the particularly futuristic part.

The more difficult question is what we eventually allow that drone to do.

The face in the crowd

Britain also already uses police facial recognition.

Live facial recognition compares people passing a camera against a predetermined police watchlist. Retrospective facial recognition can compare images obtained during an investigation with images already held by police.

These systems are not supposed to make autonomous decisions about guilt. Current policing guidance includes safeguards around watchlists, proportionality and human decision-making.

Source: College of Policing — Live Facial Recognition guidance

The technology is also expanding.

In June 2026, the Home Office announced £140 million of investment over three years in policing AI, including funding for 40 additional live facial-recognition units.

Source: Home Office — PoliceAI investment

None of this means police drones are currently flying around British cities automatically identifying everyone underneath them.

They aren’t.

But we already have some of the individual components: drones capable of rapidly reaching incidents, cameras capable of recording suspects, facial-recognition systems capable of comparing faces against watchlists, and AI increasingly being incorporated into policing.

The speculative question is what happens if those capabilities gradually become connected.

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POSSIBLE FUTURE — 2027

The drone gets there first

Imagine Drone as First Responder trials prove useful and are expanded.

The government’s argument could be straightforward: the drone isn’t replacing the police officer. It’s getting there first.

Someone reports an assault outside a railway station. Instead of officers arriving several minutes later with limited information, a drone reaches the area quickly and gives the control room a live picture.

Perhaps the offender is still there. Perhaps they are running away. Perhaps the situation reported during the emergency call isn’t quite what officers expected.

The drone doesn’t decide what happened. It records what it can see, while humans retain responsibility for decisions.

For many people, that might be an easy bargain to accept.

If you were lying injured on the pavement, would you object to a police camera arriving before the police officer?

POSSIBLE FUTURE — 2028

Now give it another pair of eyes

Suppose the programme appears successful.

More cities introduce remotely stationed drones. Areas experiencing persistent violent crime receive greater coverage, while police argue that the technology allows limited human resources to be directed towards incidents where officers are actually required.

Then comes another proposal.

If a drone is already following somebody suspected of committing a serious assault, should police be able to check whether that person is already on a legitimate watchlist?

Perhaps they are wanted in connection with murder, rape or another serious violent offence.

The argument suddenly becomes harder because many members of the public may actually support it.

A Home Office survey published in December 2025 found 64% overall support for police use of facial-recognition technology.

Context mattered considerably. In areas described as having high levels of crime, 79% regarded live facial recognition as always or usually acceptable.

Source: Home Office — Public attitudes to police use of facial recognition technology, December 2025

That suggests an interesting public bargain.

We might be prepared to give police greater ability to watch public spaces if we believe that doing so increases their ability to find people who seriously harm others.

But how far does that bargain extend?

Beyond the Headlines

If you enjoy evidence-based stories exploring where today’s technology might take us next, you can subscribe free.

The aim isn’t to predict the future. It’s to investigate what’s happening now — and ask where it might lead.

POSSIBLE FUTURE — 2029

When being seen becomes the deterrent

Return to Manchester.

The assault happens. The drone arrives and the attackers run.

The camera follows while police receive their location. Facial recognition produces a possible match against an authorised watchlist, a human officer verifies it and officers on the ground make the arrest.

But something else has changed.

Potential offenders now know the system exists.

The deterrent isn’t necessarily the drone itself. It may be the perceived probability of being recorded, followed and identified.

Would someone be as willing to attack another person outside a railway station if they believed there was a high probability that police would obtain a continuous recording of their escape?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

We shouldn’t pretend the evidence gives us a simple answer. Surveillance doesn’t automatically prevent crime, and cameras cannot solve the complicated causes behind violence.

But imagine that recorded violent crime starts falling in areas covered by the system.

Residents begin demanding coverage.

One neighbourhood has rapid-response drones. The neighbouring one doesn’t.

People start asking their MPs:

Why aren’t we protected too?

Something introduced as an experiment gradually becomes an expectation.

POSSIBLE FUTURE — 2030

From observation to intervention

By 2030, imagine that seeing police drones over British cities is no longer remarkable.

Neither is facial recognition in certain circumstances.

The controversial proposal is now something different.

Robotic police support.

Not science-fiction machines independently deciding who should be arrested.

Something much more limited could arrive first: machines capable of remaining in particular locations for long periods, recording incidents, communicating with the public and summoning human officers.

Government might make much the same argument it previously made about drones:

This isn’t replacing police officers. It’s protecting them.

A machine could potentially approach a dangerous situation without immediately putting an officer’s life at risk. It could enter hazardous environments, maintain a presence for long periods and create a continuous record of interactions.

Eventually another question would inevitably appear.

If somebody is being seriously attacked immediately in front of such a machine, should it be allowed to intervene physically?

That is a very different proposition from a camera in the sky.

Yet we may have arrived there through a series of individually reasonable decisions.

What happens if it works?

Stories about surveillance technology often make the technology obviously sinister.

That’s the easy version of this story.

The harder version is that the system works.

Imagine assaults falling in areas where the technology operates. Imagine missing children being located faster, wanted offenders finding it harder to disappear and police officers receiving better information before entering dangerous situations.

Imagine people genuinely feeling safer walking home.

Then ask those people to give the technology back.

Would they?

Public attitudes towards facial recognition already hint at this tension.

The same Home Office research that found substantial support for police facial recognition also found significant concerns. Sixty-eight per cent were worried about misuse or hacking, 49% about false identification and 46% about losing control over information collected by police.

Source: Home Office — Public attitudes to police use of facial recognition technology

Those aren’t necessarily contradictory positions.

Someone can believe facial recognition could help police catch a violent offender while simultaneously worrying about what happens when the technology gets something wrong.

The real argument isn’t simply surveillance versus privacy.

It is whether society can obtain the benefits of increasingly powerful technology while maintaining meaningful limits on how that power can be used.

The other 2030

There is another possible future.

The cameras make mistakes. Someone is wrongly identified. Watchlists gradually expand.

Technology introduced to deal with murder, rape and serious violence begins being authorised for less serious offences. Systems introduced in particular high-crime locations spread into ordinary residential areas.

And infrastructure created by one government eventually passes to another government whose priorities may be very different.

At that point, the important question is no longer whether the technology works.

It is:

Who controls it?

That concern isn’t science fiction.

The government has already acknowledged that the existing legal framework surrounding police facial recognition is complicated and has consulted on a clearer framework covering facial recognition, biometrics and related technologies.

Source: Home Office — Consultation on a new legal framework for law-enforcement use of biometrics and facial recognition

The Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner has argued for safeguards including necessity, proportionality, transparency, accountability and lawfulness.

Source: Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner

Those principles could ultimately matter more than whether the next generation of drones can fly for two hours or twenty.

Because technology doesn’t decide the limits placed upon technology.

We do.

Where would you draw the line?

Forget 2030.

Imagine you’re walking home tonight.

Someone attacks you.

A police drone reaches the scene before an officer could. It records your attacker and follows them when they run.

A facial-recognition system produces a possible match indicating that the person may already be wanted for a serious violent offence. A human police officer verifies the identification.

Officers arrest them.

Would you object?

I suspect many people wouldn’t.

So make the question harder.

Would you accept drones routinely patrolling your neighbourhood if violent crime fell?

Would you accept facial recognition being attached to them?

Would you accept the system checking everyone it sees?

Would you allow an algorithm to decide that someone’s behaviour looked suspicious?

Would you eventually allow a machine to use physical force to protect someone from immediate serious injury?

Somewhere between those questions, most of us probably have a line.

We just won’t necessarily draw it in the same place.

Perhaps that’s the question we should be asking now rather than in 2030.

Because Britain doesn’t need to invent every component of this future.

Some of them already exist.

Reality, possibility and fiction

Documented reality: British police currently use drones and facial-recognition technology. Drone as First Responder programmes are being trialled, the Metropolitan Police has expanded its drone programme, and the government is investing further in policing AI and facial recognition.

Possible future: The events and developments described from 2027 to 2030 are fictional scenarios. They are neither government plans nor predictions that these events will occur.

The question: If these technologies continue improving, what powers should we permit them to have — and what safeguards should we demand before granting those powers?

Sources

• National Police Chiefs’ Council — Police use of drones

• National Police Chiefs’ Council — Drone as First Responder trials

• Metropolitan Police — Commissioner’s speech on technology, July 2026

• Kent Police — police drone deployments

• College of Policing — Live Facial Recognition guidance

• Home Office — PoliceAI investment

• Home Office — Public attitudes to police use of facial recognition technology

• Home Office — Consultation on a new legal framework for law-enforcement use of biometrics and facial recognition

• Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner — response to facial-recognition consultation

Beyond the Headlines examines the mechanisms underneath today’s stories — and, in this experimental series, where today’s decisions might take us tomorrow.

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On 19 August, the Home Office published new guidance explaining behaviours and expectations to people seeking asylum in the UK.

The guidance covers gender equality, domestic abuse, sex and consent, behaviour in public and getting help.

The language is explicit.

Men and women have equal rights. Marriage does not remove the requirement for sexual consent. Sex without consent is rape. The age of consent is 16.

The Home Office also explains that laws and customs in Britain may differ from those in an asylum seeker’s home country.

Read the Home Office guidance

My first reaction was straightforward:

If the Government believes this guidance is necessary, does it think there is a growing problem?

After looking at the evidence, I don’t think we can make that leap.

But trying to answer the question revealed something else worth examining.

The published national statistics cannot readily tell us whether asylum seekers are disproportionately represented among people prosecuted for sexual offences.

So rather than decide what the leaflet means before examining the evidence, let’s look at the strongest arguments from both directions.

🔵 THE LEFT-WING VIEW

This is preventative integration

There is a credible argument that we’re reading too much into the guidance.

People seeking asylum arrive in Britain from different countries, cultures and legal systems. Some British laws and social expectations will inevitably differ from those they have previously encountered.

The Home Office itself makes that point.

It also explicitly says that the rules and expectations in the guidance are not just for asylum seekers — they apply to everyone living here.

Explaining those expectations is therefore a reasonable part of integration.

There is nothing unusual about preventative education. Schools teach consent. Employers provide sexual-harassment training. Governments run campaigns about domestic abuse.

We don’t conclude that everyone receiving that information is likely to commit an offence.

Why should we apply a different standard to asylum seekers?

There is also an important danger in moving from individual crimes to assumptions about an entire population.

An asylum seeker who commits a sexual offence should be investigated and prosecuted where the evidence supports it.

But one person’s crime does not tell us how another person with the same immigration status will behave.

From this perspective, the guidance isn’t an admission of an asylum-seeker crime problem.

It is preventative integration.

🔴 THE RIGHT-WING VIEW

Why these particular messages?

There is another reasonable interpretation.

The Government hasn’t limited its guidance to practical information about living in Britain.

It has chosen explicitly to discuss gender equality, controlling behaviour, domestic abuse, sexual consent, rape, the age of consent and harassment.

That invites an obvious question:

Why did officials decide these subjects required explicit attention?

Countries around the world have different laws and social norms concerning marriage, women’s rights, sexuality, religion and individual freedom.

Recognising those differences does not mean everyone from a particular country holds the same beliefs.

Nor does it establish that they are more likely to commit crimes.

But integration shouldn’t require us to pretend meaningful cultural differences don’t exist either.

If government believes some of those differences warrant explicit education, voters are entitled to understand the reasoning.

Was this simply preventative integration?

Were there safeguarding concerns?

Did operational experience influence the decision?

Were particular incidents considered?

Or is this something ministers believe should always have been provided?

We shouldn’t invent the answer.

The Government should explain it.

⚖️ THE BALANCED VIEW

The guidance doesn’t prove either case

The existence of this guidance does not demonstrate that asylum seekers commit sexual offences at a higher rate than the wider population.

It doesn’t demonstrate that sexual offending among asylum seekers is increasing either.

Those are statistical claims requiring evidence.

And this is where the story becomes more interesting.

In September 2025, the Ministry of Justice was asked how many asylum seekers had been prosecuted for sexual offences during the previous year.

Its response said that while prosecution figures for sexual offences are published:

“Data held centrally does not include if a defendant was an asylum seeker or where they were housed.”

Read the parliamentary answer

The Office for National Statistics has subsequently been asked for crime statistics broken down by immigration status.

Its response was similarly clear:

“We do not hold breakdowns of crime by asylum seeker or migrant status.”

Read the ONS response

That doesn’t mean no government organisation possesses potentially relevant information.

Nor does it mean producing reliable statistics would necessarily be straightforward.

But it does mean the publicly available national statistics cannot readily settle one of the most contentious arguments surrounding asylum and crime.

That should concern both sides.

Beyond the Headlines doesn’t ask you to choose a side before you’ve seen the evidence.

Each article examines competing arguments, tests them against what we can establish, then tells you what I think.

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Missing data cuts both ways

Suppose reliable evidence demonstrated that asylum seekers were not disproportionately represented among people convicted of particular sexual offences.

That would matter.

It could challenge misinformation and help prevent crimes committed by individuals being attributed to thousands of innocent people.

Now suppose reliable evidence demonstrated disproportionate representation.

That would matter too.

Government could investigate possible causes, identify risk factors and decide whether different safeguarding or integration policies were necessary.

But even those statistics would require care.

Simply counting defendants who were asylum seekers wouldn’t establish disproportionate offending.

Meaningful comparisons would require appropriate population figures and consideration of factors such as age and sex.

Statistics can mislead just as easily as headlines when comparisons aren’t made properly.

There is another danger worth acknowledging.

Repeatedly placing the words asylum seeker and rape together can itself create an association in people’s minds that the evidence doesn’t establish.

That is precisely why evidence matters.

We shouldn’t avoid legitimate questions because they are uncomfortable.

But we should be exceptionally careful about the conclusions we attach to them.

What information does the Government have?

When somebody claims asylum in Britain, the Home Office creates an individual record.

Its operational guidance says screening includes fingerprints, facial images and mandatory security and identity checks intended to establish the claimant’s identity as far as possible and biometrically link that person to the biographical identity provided.

Those words — as far as possible — matter.

This doesn’t mean the Government has conclusively verified the true identity or nationality of every asylum seeker.

People may arrive without reliable documents, and identities can be disputed.

But government nevertheless holds substantial individual information about asylum applicants.

Read the Home Office screening guidance

So there is a legitimate policy question:

Could appropriately protected and anonymised asylum and criminal-justice data be linked to produce reliable aggregate statistics?

Perhaps it could.

Perhaps legal, technical, privacy, proportionality or statistical considerations make that difficult or undesirable.

If so, explain them.

The absence of published statistics should not itself be treated as evidence that government is deliberately hiding information.

But the information gap is real, and it leaves space for competing claims that are difficult for the public to test.

What does this cost?

Then there is the less dramatic but important question of money.

Government guidance costs money to develop. Translation, printing, distribution and updating may cost money too.

I haven’t found a reliable published figure for what this particular intervention cost.

So I’m not going to suggest it was expensive or wasteful.

It might turn out to be extremely inexpensive.

And if a relatively cheap intervention helps somebody understand British law, improves integration or prevents serious harm, it could represent excellent value.

But taxpayers are still entitled to ask:

What did it cost?

How much was spent developing the material?

What are the translation costs?

How many languages will be supported?

How is it being distributed?

What ongoing costs are expected?

Scrutiny should be proportionate to the amount involved, but the principle remains the same.

Public money should have a public purpose.

And how will we know whether it works?

This may be the most important question of all.

What is the objective?

If the aim is simply to ensure asylum seekers have been given information about British law, distributing the material might satisfy that objective.

But if the intention is to change behaviour, improve integration or prevent abuse and offending, evaluation becomes considerably more important.

What outcome does government expect?

And how will it know whether that outcome has been achieved?

Otherwise we risk introducing policies because they appear sensible without discovering whether they actually work.

Three questions for Government

After looking at the issue from left, right and centre, I think the Government should answer three straightforward questions.

1. What is the evidence?

Why was this intervention introduced?

Was it routine integration policy, a response to particular concerns, or some combination of the two?

2. What does it cost?

What are the development, translation, distribution and ongoing costs?

The amount may be small.

Tell us.

3. What does success look like?

What is the policy intended to achieve, and how will government determine whether it has worked?

These questions don’t assume the policy is wrong.

They are how we determine whether it is right.

What I Think

I started this article with a suspicion.

If the Government believes asylum seekers need explicit guidance about rape, consent and women’s rights, perhaps it knows there is a growing problem.

After examining the available evidence, I can’t substantiate that conclusion.

So I won’t make it.

What we can say is that the Home Office considers these subjects important enough to address explicitly with asylum seekers.

What we don’t yet know is precisely why.

And the published national statistics don’t allow us confidently to determine whether asylum seekers are disproportionately represented among people prosecuted for sexual offences.

For me, that makes transparency more important, not less.

If this is simply sensible preventative integration, explain the reasoning.

If evidence points towards a particular safeguarding concern, explain that too.

If government doesn’t have sufficient information to know, acknowledge the gap and examine whether reliable statistics can lawfully and proportionately be produced.

And tell taxpayers what the intervention costs and how its effectiveness will be assessed.

There is nothing inherently anti-immigration about asking those questions.

Nor does asking them require us to assume asylum seekers are criminals.

They are questions about government accountability.

Whenever government identifies a problem, intervenes and spends public money, voters should be able to ask:

Why are you doing this? What evidence supports it? What does it cost? And did it work?

Those questions should apply whether we’re discussing immigration, the NHS, defence, education or anything else.

Because accountability shouldn’t depend on whether we happen to agree with the policy.

Government doesn’t owe voters the answer they want to hear.

It owes them an explanation.

Sources

• Home Office, 19 August 2026: Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK: a guide for asylum seekers.

• UK Parliament, Written Question 71678: Ministry of Justice response concerning asylum seekers and sexual-offence prosecutions.

• Office for National Statistics: Crime by nationality and immigration status 2025.

• Home Office: Asylum screening and routing operational guidance.

About this format

This is a new Beyond the Headlines format.

Instead of starting with a political position and defending it, I present a credible Left View, Right View and Balanced View, test those arguments against the available evidence, and then tell you what I think.

The labels describe arguments, not everyone associated with a political tradition. Reasonable people on either side may disagree with them.

Criminal responsibility belongs to individuals and should be established by evidence. Nothing in this article attributes the criminal behaviour of individual offenders to asylum seekers collectively.

If you disagree with my conclusion, that’s fine. The point isn’t to tell you what to think. It’s to give you enough information to think about it for yourself.

I was christened in the Church of England. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. There was a time when those distinctions mattered considerably more than they probably do to many people today.

Religion was simply there. You went to church. You listened. You heard stories from the Bible and were taught what was right and wrong. Like most children, I accepted much of it because the adults around me told me it was true.

Then you get older, and you start asking questions.

That’s where things became more complicated for me.

Because today, if you ask whether I believe in God, my immediate answer would probably be:

No.

But that’s not quite true.

The God I stopped believing in

I don’t believe in the simple version of God I understood as a child: an old man somewhere above us, watching everything we do, answering prayers, rewarding good behaviour and eventually deciding where we go when we die.

As I grew older, I found that increasingly difficult to reconcile with the world around me.

If God controls everything, why does a child die? Why does one person’s prayer apparently get answered while somebody else’s doesn’t? Why do terrible things happen to decent people? Why have people killed one another for centuries while believing God was on their side?

These aren’t original questions. Human beings have been asking them for thousands of years.

But they’re my questions.

And I don’t think questioning something should automatically be regarded as rejecting it.

If a belief cannot survive being questioned, how strong was that belief in the first place?

God and religion aren’t necessarily the same thing

This is where I make an important distinction.

If God exists, God exists independently of the institutions human beings have constructed around belief. Religion is how human beings have attempted to understand, explain and organise that belief.

And human beings are complicated.

The Bible didn’t arrive on my kitchen table directly from God. Its books were written down, copied, collected, translated and interpreted by people over centuries.

Different Christians can read the same words and reach different conclusions. Different churches disagree with one another.

That doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist.

But it does make me cautious when another human being tells me with absolute certainty:

“This is what God wants.”

My immediate question is:

How do you know?

Perhaps we’ve misunderstood what some of it was for

There’s another possibility I find fascinating.

Religion may have performed enormously practical functions as societies developed.

Consider ancient religious rules around food, cleanliness, washing and behaviour. Today we understand bacteria, infection, contamination and public health. People thousands of years ago didn’t have that knowledge.

Some religious practices may therefore have had practical benefits as well as spiritual significance.

That doesn’t mean religion was simply an early public-health manual. Clearly it wasn’t. Nor does it mean we can confidently explain why every religious rule developed.

But it makes me wonder how many practices emerged from particular historical circumstances and were subsequently carried forward as permanent spiritual requirements.

That creates a question I cannot answer:

Which parts of religion represent timeless principles — and which reflect the societies in which they developed?

I don’t know.

And that’s precisely the point.

I understand why people go to church

It would be easy to turn this into an attack on organised religion.

That isn’t what I believe.

I’ve seen what churches can provide: community, friendship, comfort, somewhere to go when you’re grieving, people who notice when you haven’t turned up, rituals surrounding birth, marriage and death, and a sense that you’re part of something larger than yourself.

For someone who is frightened, lonely, bereaved or simply trying to make sense of life, that can be enormously valuable.

Modern society hasn’t necessarily found a good replacement for it. We can have hundreds of online connections and still be desperately lonely. We can communicate instantly with people around the world while barely knowing the person living next door.

Perhaps when church attendance declined, we didn’t just lose religion.

Perhaps we lost some community with it.

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But does attending church make someone a Christian?

Imagine two people.

One goes to church every Sunday. They know the prayers, know the Bible, and proudly describe themselves as Christian. But during the rest of the week they treat people badly. They’re dishonest, unkind and judgemental.

Now imagine somebody else.

They never attend church. They aren’t even certain God exists. But they help somebody who is struggling. They treat people with dignity. They forgive. They give without expecting anything in return. And when they’re wrong, they accept responsibility.

Which one is living closer to the message?

I know which one makes more sense to me.

Perhaps faith isn’t demonstrated by what building you enter on Sunday.

Perhaps it’s demonstrated by what you do on Monday.

The problem begins when questioning stops

This is where my difficulty with organised religion really sits.

Not with belief. Not with churches. Not with people practising their faith.

My difficulty begins when any institution says:

You must believe this. And you must not question it.

Questioning is fundamental to how I understand the world. I question politicians and governments. I question experts. I question things I read online.

Most importantly, I question myself.

Why should religion be the one part of life exempt from examination?

If there is a God, I find it difficult to believe that God would give human beings intelligence, curiosity and reason and then become offended when we use them.

Religion and power

Religion has provided extraordinary comfort and inspired enormous amounts of good. It has also been used by human beings to exercise power.

Kings have claimed authority from God. Wars have been justified through religion. Political movements have wrapped themselves in religious identity. People have been persecuted for believing the wrong thing — or believing nothing at all.

That doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about God.

It tells us quite a lot about people.

Human beings are exceptionally good at taking powerful ideas and using them to justify what they already want to do. Religion isn’t unique in that respect. Politics does it. Nationalism does it. Ideology does it.

The danger begins when somebody becomes so certain of their own righteousness that disagreement itself becomes unacceptable.

What about “Christian values”?

We’re hearing this phrase increasingly in political debate.

Britain is told that it needs to defend Christian values.

For many people, that is a completely sincere description of principles that genuinely shape how they live. I don’t dismiss that.

If Christian values mean compassion, forgiveness, helping strangers, caring for people in difficulty, personal responsibility and treating others as we would want to be treated ourselves, there is plenty there worth defending.

But those principles aren’t exclusively Christian. A Muslim can live by them. A Jew can live by them. A Hindu can live by them. An atheist can live by them.

Perhaps the values matter more than the label.

My concern begins when religious identity becomes political identity — when Christian, Muslim or any other religious label becomes less about how I should live and more about distinguishing us from them.

That’s when faith risks becoming tribalism wearing religious clothing.

So what do I actually believe?

Do I believe there is a man in the sky controlling everything?

No.

Do I believe every religious teaching should be accepted without question?

No.

Do I believe any religious institution has a monopoly on truth?

No.

But do I believe there might be something greater than us?

Possibly.

And perhaps that contradiction is where I’ve ended up.

I have something in my head that I still sometimes call God.

Not a person. Not necessarily a supernatural being.

More like a guiding light. A reminder of the person I should try to be.

A voice that asks:

Is this right?

Are you treating this person fairly?

Could you have done better?

You could call that conscience. You could call it morality. You could call it accumulated human wisdom.

Someone else might call it God.

I’m increasingly comfortable admitting:

I don’t know.

Maybe “I don’t know” is enough

Religion often offers certainty.

I don’t have that certainty.

I don’t know what happens when we die. I don’t know whether there is a creator. I don’t know whether prayer changes anything beyond the person praying. I don’t know whether the universe has a purpose.

And I’ve stopped feeling that I need to pretend otherwise.

There is something liberating about saying:

I don’t know.

Because once you admit that, you can start listening.

You can question and change your mind. You can respect someone else’s belief without pretending it must also be yours. And you can disagree with someone’s religion without believing you have to disrespect the person practising it.

Certainty can be comforting.

But perhaps humility has value too.

But I still believe in the message

This is where I’ve ended up.

I don’t know whether there is a God.

I don’t know whether any human being really knows.

But I know compassion matters. Forgiveness matters. Community matters. Helping somebody when they’re struggling matters. Taking responsibility for your actions matters. Treating people with dignity matters.

And hope matters.

Perhaps that’s something modern society should think carefully about.

Because if traditional religious belief continues to decline, we shouldn’t automatically throw away everything that came with it.

We still need community. We still need moral responsibility. We still need somewhere to turn when life becomes frightening.

We still need hope.

Perhaps we don’t need to believe exactly what our grandparents believed to retain those things.

Perhaps we simply need to understand why they mattered.

So when someone asks whether I believe in God, I’m no longer sure “no” is the right answer.

Perhaps the most truthful answer is:

I don’t know.

I don’t believe in God in the way I was once taught to.

But I haven’t stopped believing in compassion, forgiveness, responsibility, community and hope.

And if those were always supposed to be the important parts of the message —

perhaps I haven’t stopped believing after all.

A personal reflection

Third Act Life usually looks beyond the headlines at the institutions, arguments and assumptions shaping our lives. Occasionally I step away from the headlines and question some of my own assumptions too.

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Immigration has become one of those subjects where everybody seems to have a simple answer.

Stop the boats. Send them back to France. Leave the ECHR. They should have claimed asylum in the first safe country.

Then somebody else says none of those things would work.

For ordinary people trying to understand what is happening, it becomes a minefield of legal language, international agreements, political claims and statistics.

So let’s strip it back.

Someone arrives in Britain by an unauthorised route. Eventually Britain decides that person has no right to remain.

Why can’t we just send them back?

The answer is more complicated than either side often admits.

The argument in 60 seconds

Don’t have time for the full article? Here’s the argument.

• Britain can leave the European Convention on Human Rights. It chooses to remain.

• The ECHR can prevent some removals, but it is only one reason deportations can fail.

• Other problems include uncertain identity, unresolved asylum claims, British law, countries refusing to cooperate and administrative failure.

• Leaving the ECHR could give Parliament greater freedom over some deportation cases. It would not solve all of those other problems.

• Remaining also has consequences: Britain accepts limits on what its government can do in return for human-rights protections applying to everyone.

• The real question isn’t simply “Should we leave?” It is “What would leaving actually allow Britain to do that it cannot do today — and what would we give up in return?”

First, some numbers worth knowing

According to Home Office figures for the year ending March 2026:

• 39,271 people were detected arriving by small boat.

• 39,007 people were returned from the UK overall.

• 9,723 of those were enforced returns.

• Around 5,900 foreign-national offenders were returned.

At the end of March 2026, 97,519 people were receiving asylum support, including 20,885 in hotels.

These figures immediately tell us two things.

Small-boat crossings remain substantial. But Britain is also removing thousands of people.

So “Britain cannot deport anyone” plainly isn’t true.

The more useful question is why Britain can remove some people but struggles to remove others.

Start with France

Most small-boat journeys to Britain originate from France.

That produces an obvious question:

France is a safe democratic country. Why does reaching Britain create another opportunity to claim asylum?

There is a widespread belief that international law requires refugees to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.

It isn’t quite that simple.

The Refugee Convention does not contain a straightforward rule saying that somebody passing through a safe country permanently loses the ability to seek protection somewhere else.

Before Brexit, Britain also participated in the EU’s Dublin system, which provided a mechanism through which responsibility for some asylum claims could be transferred between participating European countries.

Britain left that system when it left the EU and subsequently needed different arrangements with European countries.

That brings us back to the practical question:

If someone has already reached a safe country, should an unauthorised journey from that country normally create an opportunity to establish themselves in Britain?

That is ultimately a policy question.

Why not simply return the boats to France?

It sounds obvious.

Intercept the boat, rescue anyone in danger and return the passengers to France.

The difficulty is that Britain cannot simply deposit people in another sovereign country without that country’s cooperation. Maritime rescue obligations and human-rights protections can also become relevant when governments take control of individuals.

Australia famously adopted a much tougher maritime-interception policy. Greece has also pursued aggressive border enforcement, although European courts have found human-rights violations in some Greek border cases.

Neither provides a simple blueprint for Britain.

But they raise an important question:

Should Britain’s objective be to process people after they successfully cross the Channel — or make the unauthorised crossing ineffective as a route to remaining in Britain in the first place?

Britain and France are already testing the principle of returns through their bilateral agreement.

So returning some Channel arrivals to France is no longer theoretical.

The argument is about how far that approach should go and whether it can become sufficiently effective to change the incentive to cross.

What happens when someone arrives without a passport?

Imagine somebody arrives and says:

“My name is X. I’m 22. I’m from Eritrea.”

There is no passport.

How does Britain establish whether that is true?

Authorities can use interviews, fingerprints, biometrics, immigration records, available documentation and other evidence.

There are documented cases in which identity documents have deliberately been destroyed or disposed of. But we should not turn those cases into a claim that everyone, or even most people, arriving by small boat deliberately destroys a passport unless reliable evidence supports it.

Government should therefore tell us more.

How many arrivals lack reliable identity documents? How frequently is deliberate document destruction suspected? And how often does uncertainty about identity prevent or delay removal?

Because even after Britain decides someone cannot stay, another question remains:

Where exactly are we sending them?

Britain decides someone must leave. What happens next?

This is where the argument becomes easier to understand.

Whenever you hear:

“Britain can’t deport this person.”

Ask:

Why not?

There are several completely different possibilities.

1. Identity

Britain isn’t sufficiently certain who the person is or where they come from.

Leaving the ECHR doesn’t establish someone’s nationality.

2. Destination

Britain knows someone’s nationality, but their government won’t cooperate, disputes their nationality or won’t provide the necessary travel documentation.

Britain can negotiate return agreements and use diplomatic or visa pressure. Leaving the ECHR doesn’t automatically make another sovereign government accept somebody.

3. Asylum

The person claims they face persecution if returned and their protection claim hasn’t been finally determined.

That is principally an asylum question. It isn’t automatically an ECHR question.

4. British law

A British court or tribunal may decide that removal isn’t currently lawful.

The important question then becomes:

Which law and why?

Saying “lawyers stopped the deportation” doesn’t explain very much. Lawyers make arguments. Courts and tribunals decide whether those arguments satisfy the law.

5. The ECHR

Convention rights may prevent a particular removal.

Only now can we accurately say:

The ECHR is part of the reason this person cannot currently be removed.

6. Government failure

There is one final possibility that shouldn’t disappear beneath all the legal complexity.

Government may have the necessary power but fail to use it effectively. A claim might sit unresolved for too long. Caseworking may be inadequate. Removal arrangements might not be secured quickly enough. Or a legally available removal might simply not happen promptly.

That’s not an unavoidable international obligation.

That’s administration.

ECHR and Human Rights Act: what’s the difference?

These two things are constantly mixed together.

The European Convention on Human Rights is an international treaty.

The Human Rights Act 1998 is British legislation that gives effect to Convention rights within UK law and allows people to rely upon those rights in British courts.

They’re connected, but they aren’t the same thing.

So leaving the ECHR and changing or repealing the Human Rights Act would involve related but distinct decisions.

How can the ECHR prevent deportation?

Consider a deliberately difficult example.

Britain wants to deport someone who has committed a serious crime.

Most people would understandably say:

Get them out.

But suppose that person demonstrates that returning them would expose them to a sufficiently serious risk of torture or inhuman treatment.

Article 3 of the ECHR prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.

That protection can apply even to someone who has behaved appallingly.

Critics understandably ask why someone who has committed serious offences here should continue receiving human-rights protection.

But turn the principle around.

Should a British government have unrestricted power knowingly to send someone somewhere they face torture?

That is the uncomfortable question on the other side.

And leaving the ECHR would not necessarily remove every restriction. Britain has other international obligations, including the Refugee Convention and Convention Against Torture.

The ECHR isn’t Britain’s only human-rights obligation.

What about family life?

Article 8 protects private and family life.

This is perhaps the Convention right that produces the most frustration in immigration debates.

The familiar example is the foreign offender who argues that deportation would interfere with relationships established in Britain.

But Article 8 does not mean:

“I have family here, therefore you cannot deport me.”

Claims can and do fail.

The European human-rights system also allows national authorities some room to balance individual rights against the wider public interest.

Nevertheless, the current government itself believes the operation of Article 8 in immigration cases needs reform.

The government’s position therefore isn’t:

“There is nothing wrong with the current system.”

It is closer to:

“There are problems, but we believe they can be fixed without leaving.”

What about last-minute interventions from Strasbourg?

The European Court of Human Rights can issue urgent Rule 39 interim measures where it considers there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.

These are temporary measures rather than final judgments.

They became particularly controversial in Britain after an intervention affected the first planned Rwanda removal flight in 2022.

That gave critics a tangible example of an international court affecting a British removal decision.

It is reasonable to debate whether an international court should possess that influence.

It is equally important to understand that Rule 39 is an emergency mechanism rather than the normal process governing every deportation.

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What happened to Rwanda?

The previous Conservative government attempted a different solution.

Instead of returning certain asylum seekers to their countries of origin or France, the Rwanda scheme was intended to transfer some people to Rwanda.

The policy became tied up in extensive legal and political controversy.

After the change of government in July 2024, the Rwanda removal policy was discontinued.

It therefore isn’t part of Britain’s current operational asylum system.

But the episode demonstrates something important:

Governments can attempt radically different solutions, but legislation, courts, international obligations, diplomacy, cost and practical implementation determine whether those solutions actually work.

The case for leaving the ECHR

Let’s take the withdrawal argument seriously.

Leaving could give Parliament substantially greater freedom over some human-rights restrictions affecting immigration and removal, depending upon what domestic legal framework Britain created afterwards.

A future Parliament could potentially establish different rules governing certain deportation and human-rights cases.

Reform UK supports withdrawal. The Conservative Party has also adopted withdrawal as policy.

Their fundamental argument is straightforward:

British politicians elected by British voters should ultimately decide Britain’s immigration rules rather than having those decisions constrained by an international human-rights system.

That argument deserves a proper answer.

The case for staying

Now apply exactly the same test to the other side.

The government’s argument is that ECHR membership protects fundamental rights while supporting a wider European system of cooperation.

European cooperation also matters for migration itself: intelligence sharing, law enforcement, tackling people-smuggling and negotiating returns.

And the Convention does not only protect migrants.

It protects ordinary people against their own government.

Privacy. Liberty. Fair trials. Freedom of expression. Freedom of religion. Protection against torture.

British citizens can rely upon Convention rights when challenging actions by British public authorities.

Supporters of remaining therefore ask a different question:

How much additional power should we give our own government in order to make deportation easier?

That argument deserves a proper answer too.

The morning after Britain leaves

Here is perhaps the simplest way to understand the entire debate.

Why can’t someone be removed?

Would leaving the ECHR solve it?

Britain isn’t sure who they are

No

Their country won’t accept or document them

No

Their asylum claim remains unresolved

Generally no

British legislation prevents removal

Not automatically

Article 3 ECHR prevents removal

Could materially change the position, but other treaty obligations may remain

Article 8 ECHR prevents removal

Could materially change the position

Government failed to process or execute the case effectively

No

That’s perhaps the entire argument in seven rows.

Leaving isn’t meaningless.

But neither is it a master key.

Are Britain’s benefits attracting people?

Another common argument is:

Britain is too generous.

Again, let’s test it.

At the end of March 2026, Home Office figures show 97,519 people receiving asylum support, including 20,885 living in hotels.

Those figures demonstrate the scale of the support system.

They do not demonstrate why people cross the Channel.

Someone might choose Britain because of family connections, English language, established communities, employment opportunities, perceptions about the asylum system, financial support or information supplied by smugglers.

Different people will have different motivations.

So the useful question isn’t:

“Are they coming for benefits?”

It’s:

Why does someone already safely in France believe crossing the Channel to Britain is worth the risk?

If financial support is an important incentive, changing it might matter.

If it isn’t, cutting support won’t stop the crossings.

Find out first. Then design the policy.

What about crime?

This is the most emotionally charged part of the argument.

When somebody who shouldn’t be in Britain commits a horrific crime, people understandably ask:

Why was this person here?

If government had already determined that person should leave, the question becomes even more serious:

Why hadn’t they been removed?

But terminology matters.

A foreign national isn’t necessarily an illegal entrant. An asylum seeker isn’t necessarily someone whose claim will fail. A recognised refugee isn’t the same thing as a failed asylum seeker. And somebody entering through an illegal route isn’t automatically a convicted criminal.

These categories are repeatedly mixed together.

Britain should publish sufficiently detailed anonymised information allowing legitimate questions about immigration status and offending to be examined properly.

If the figures demonstrate higher offending within a particular category:

Tell us.

If they don’t:

Tell us that too.

Don’t leave an information vacuum that politicians, campaigners and social media fill with whichever anecdotes support their existing position.

Give us the numbers.

If Britain leaves, what replaces the ECHR?

This is one of the biggest questions withdrawal advocates have to answer.

Leaving shouldn’t simply mean:

ECHR gone. Problem solved.

What replaces the Human Rights Act?

Which protections remain enforceable by British citizens?

Who decides when government has exceeded its powers?

What happens to Britain’s other treaty obligations?

And what happens in Northern Ireland?

The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement contains commitments involving the ECHR.

That doesn’t make withdrawal impossible.

But it makes withdrawal considerably more complicated than simply cancelling a membership.

Any government proposing withdrawal needs to explain how it would deal with those consequences.

Government has questions to answer too

Those advocating continued membership don’t get a free pass.

If government says:

“Britain can control its borders while remaining within the ECHR,”

then demonstrate it.

How many removals are actually prevented specifically by Convention rights?

How many fail because another country won’t cooperate?

How many involve unresolved identity?

How many involve outstanding asylum proceedings?

How many result from British legislation?

How many result from administrative failure?

And what exactly will proposed reforms change?

When ministers say:

“Our international obligations prevent us,”

that shouldn’t end the conversation.

Which obligation?

Why does it apply?

What would changing or withdrawing from it accomplish?

That’s accountability.

Those who want to leave have questions to answer too

The same standard applies to withdrawal.

Tell us what happens the morning after Britain leaves.

Who could Britain remove that it couldn’t remove yesterday?

Approximately how many people would that affect?

What happens when another country refuses them?

What happens to the Refugee Convention and other treaties?

What replaces existing rights protections?

How is Northern Ireland handled?

And most importantly:

Would leaving materially reduce Channel crossings?

If the answers are convincing, voters can judge accordingly.

But “leave the ECHR and take back control” isn’t enough either.

Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question

Whenever you hear about somebody Britain apparently cannot deport, forget the political argument for a moment.

Ask:

Why can’t this person be removed?

Identity? We aren’t sufficiently certain who they are.

Destination? Another country won’t cooperate.

Asylum? Their protection claim hasn’t been resolved.

British law? A domestic legal restriction prevents removal.

ECHR? Convention rights prevent removal.

Government failure? The state had the necessary powers but didn’t use them effectively.

Only then ask:

Would leaving the ECHR have changed the outcome?

Sometimes the answer may be yes.

Sometimes it will clearly be no.

The question every politician should answer

Imagine somebody crosses the Channel from France by an unauthorised route.

They have no reliable identity documents.

They claim asylum.

Eventually their claim fails and Britain decides they have no right to remain.

Walk us through what happens next.

If Britain cannot remove them, tell us exactly why.

Then tell us what you’re going to change.

If the answer is:

“We cannot do that because of our international obligations,”

there is another reasonable question:

Why are you choosing to retain those obligations?

There may be good answers.

Protection from torture matters. Human rights matter. Britain’s international relationships matter. The Good Friday Agreement matters. Protecting British citizens against excessive government power matters.

But border control matters too. Public safety matters. Public confidence matters. And government’s ability to enforce the rules it creates matters.

This isn’t simply compassion versus border control.

Nor is it simply human rights versus sovereignty.

It is about where Britain chooses to draw the line — and who gets to draw it.

So don’t tell us what to think.

Show us what Britain cannot do today and why.

Show us what staying in the ECHR protects.

Show us what leaving would allow Britain to do.

Show us what leaving wouldn’t solve.

And show us what we would give up in return.

Then let the public decide.

Sources

For readers who want to check the evidence themselves:

• Home Office — Immigration System Statistics, year ending March 2026: small-boat arrivals, asylum claims, asylum support, enforcement and returns.

• European Court of Human Rights — Rule 39: official explanation of emergency interim measures.

• UK Government and parliamentary material: ECHR, Human Rights Act, post-Brexit asylum arrangements and UK-France returns.

• Published political-party policies: positions on continued ECHR membership or withdrawal.

Statistics and political positions are current to August 2026.

Editorial note

This article deliberately distinguishes between small-boat arrivals, asylum seekers, refugees, people without permission to remain and foreign-national offenders. These categories are not interchangeable, and immigration status does not determine criminality.

A failed removal can result from different legal, diplomatic, administrative or practical obstacles. The article therefore does not assume that the ECHR is responsible for every unsuccessful deportation.

The purpose of this article is not to argue for remaining in or withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. It is to explain the practical choice in language non-specialists can understand.

The argument in 60 seconds

Don’t have time for the full article? Here’s the argument.

• The wildfire danger was real, and using an Emergency Alert was a defensible decision.

• But good public communication isn’t only about whether a message is correct. It also needs to anticipate what people are likely to do after receiving it.

• After the alert, fire services had to remind people not to call 999 simply because they saw someone using a barbecue or lighting a bonfire.

• Research suggests that the frequency, relevance and content of emergency warnings can contribute to warning fatigue, potentially reducing their effectiveness.

• Expertise matters, but so does frontline experience. The people who deal with the consequences can often spot problems that aren’t obvious on paper.

• Before a major announcement, government should stress-test the message: What is actually likely to happen when this meets the real world?

• The lesson isn’t to stop warning people. It’s to protect the credibility of important warnings by thinking beyond the moment the message is sent.

The bigger question: Should government sometimes say less, a little later — but say it properly?

On Friday evening, millions of phones across England and Wales suddenly made that unmistakable noise.

An Emergency Alert.

The reason was serious. Britain was experiencing exceptional heat and drought; firefighters were dealing with major wildfires, homes had been damaged or destroyed, and emergency services were under considerable pressure.

The government wanted people to stop doing things that might start another fire.

The message warned against barbecues, campfires, fireworks and anything else that could spark a blaze. It also told people to report fires immediately by calling 999.

There was nothing unreasonable about the objective.

Then came an unintended consequence.

Fire services had to ask people not to call 999 simply because they saw neighbours using barbecues or lighting bonfires unless there was a genuine emergency.

That doesn’t prove the alert was a mistake.

But it raises a question worth asking:

When government communicates with millions of people, is it enough for the message to be correct — or should it also consider what people are likely to do because they’ve received it?

First, the government had a point

It’s easy to criticise an emergency warning from the comfort of a home that isn’t on fire.

The wildfire threat was real.

By 14 August, the number of wildfires recorded in England and Wales during 2026 had already exceeded the previous annual record. Homes had burned, people had been evacuated, and emergency services were under considerable pressure.

The government was also using the Emergency Alerts system for something it was designed to address: a serious threat to life.

Not everybody watches television news, reads newspapers, follows government accounts online or checks weather warnings. An Emergency Alert can put important information directly onto millions of phones within minutes.

If that message prevented another wildfire, protected a home or stopped somebody being injured, ministers could reasonably argue that an intrusive alarm was justified.

That’s the strongest argument for sending it.

And it deserves to be taken seriously.

But accepting the danger doesn’t mean we shouldn’t examine the communication.

What did we expect people to do next?

Imagine receiving the alert.

Your phone makes an alarming noise. You’re told there is a serious wildfire risk. You’re warned not to light anything that could start a fire and told to call 999 if you spot one.

Later, you look outside.

There’s smoke.

Your neighbour has lit a barbecue.

What do you do?

Some people will look at it, decide there’s no immediate danger and carry on with their evening.

Someone else may think:

I’ve just received an emergency warning about fire. I’m not taking any chances.

And they call 999.

We could dismiss that person for lacking common sense.

But perhaps common sense works both ways.

If you’re sending an alarming message to millions of people, shouldn’t somebody ask beforehand:

What are people actually likely to do when they receive this?

Not what we want them to do.

What will they actually do?

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Most of us know the story.

The boy repeatedly raises the alarm. Eventually people stop responding.

Then the wolf actually arrives.

It has survived for centuries because it describes something recognisably human: warnings can lose their impact when people become accustomed to them.

Modern research has a rather less memorable name for something related to this:

Warning fatigue.

Peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management in 2025 examined over-alerting and warning fatigue in wireless emergency alert systems.

The researchers found that factors including frequency, relevance and message content can contribute to warning fatigue and potentially to people disengaging from alerts.

That does not mean this particular British wildfire alert will cause people to ignore a future emergency.

We don’t have evidence for that, and it would be wrong to pretend that we do.

But maintaining the significance and credibility of emergency warnings matters.

The government’s own research provides another interesting piece of the picture.

In its 2025 survey of more than 10,000 people, 29% of mobile-phone users said they had received a genuine Emergency Alert during the previous year.

Among those who said they had received one, 53% reported acting on the advice.

Thirty-eight per cent said they hadn’t.

Getting a warning onto someone’s phone doesn’t guarantee the desired response.

How people interpret the message matters too.

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Perhaps this is where common sense comes in

I’m wary of the phrase common sense.

It’s frequently used to mean:

This seems obvious to me, therefore everybody else must be wrong.

That’s not good enough for public policy.

We need evidence and professional expertise.

But we also need experience.

A firefighter understands fire behaviour.

A behavioural specialist can understand how people respond to warnings.

A 999 call handler knows the kinds of messages that generate calls.

Someone who has spent decades dealing with the public may recognise a reaction that looks completely obvious in hindsight.

None of those perspectives should automatically overrule the others.

Bring them together.

Then ask the embarrassingly simple question:

What happens when this meets the real world?

That is what I mean by applying common sense.

Not replacing expertise.

Stress-testing it against human behaviour.

Could the message have been better?

Perhaps the answer is no.

Perhaps the wildfire danger was serious enough that the government was absolutely right to use the Emergency Alerts system exactly as it did.

That’s a perfectly defensible position.

But we can still ask whether the communication could have been improved.

Could the distinction between seeing an actual uncontrolled fire and merely seeing somebody using a barbecue have been made clearer?

Could the message have anticipated unnecessary 999 calls?

Could emergency services have been better prepared for the public response?

Or was the additional demand simply an acceptable consequence of getting an urgent warning to millions of people?

I don’t know the answer.

But those are precisely the questions I want somebody asking before the message is sent.

Not left. Not right. Practical.

Government decisions inevitably contain politics.

A government has been elected to make decisions. Sometimes those decisions will be unpopular. Sometimes experts will disagree. Sometimes the public will disagree.

I’m not suggesting government should conduct an opinion poll every time it needs to act.

Nor should difficult decisions be abandoned simply because somebody objects to them.

But major communications and policies should be challenged before they reach us.

Bring in the experts.

Bring in the professionals who will have to implement them.

Listen to businesses and organisations affected by them.

Listen to frontline workers.

And don’t dismiss accumulated experience simply because the person providing it doesn’t have a policy qualification.

Older people can have something particularly valuable here: not automatic wisdom, but decades of seeing decisions made, consequences unfold and supposedly new ideas come around for another turn.

Younger people bring another perspective entirely.

And when politics is involved, deliberately find credible people who disagree.

Not because left and right can somehow be removed from politics.

They can’t.

But assumptions can be challenged.

Think beyond the announcement

Perhaps there’s a simple sequence worth considering.

Start with the evidence.

Bring in expertise.

Add experience from people who deal with the consequences in the real world.

Invite challenge from people who don’t already agree.

Then apply the common-sense test:

What is actually likely to happen when we do this?

Only then communicate.

The wildfire alert gives us a small but revealing example.

The danger was real.

The government’s intention was reasonable.

The warning may have prevented fires that otherwise would have happened. We’ll never know.

But the communication also produced a response significant enough for emergency services to remind people when not to call 999.

Both things can be true.

That’s important because public debate increasingly seems to demand that we choose one side.

Either the government was right or it was wrong.

Either the public behaved sensibly or stupidly.

Reality is usually messier.

Say less, later — but say it properly

I don’t want government to stop warning me.

Quite the opposite.

If my phone makes that distinctive noise because a flood is approaching, a wildfire threatens my community or another serious danger requires immediate action, I want to pay attention.

That’s precisely why the Emergency Alerts system matters.

And precisely why its use deserves careful thought.

So perhaps the lesson isn’t:

Stop sending alerts.

It’s:

Think beyond the alert.

Ask how people are likely to interpret it.

Ask what behaviour it might produce.

Ask the people who deal with those consequences every day.

Challenge the assumptions.

And then, after all the expertise and evidence, ask one final, ordinary question:

Does this make sense in the real world?

Sometimes government needs to communicate immediately.

Sometimes it needs to say something unpopular.

And sometimes perhaps it should say less, a little later — but say it properly.

Because the consequences of a government announcement don’t end when somebody presses Send.

That’s when they begin.

Sources & further reading

UK Government — Emergency Alert, 14 August 2026
Official announcement explaining the wildfire risk, use of the Emergency Alerts system and advice given to the public.

Reuters — UK wildfires, 14 August 2026
Independent reporting on the scale of the wildfires, evacuations, damaged homes and pressure on emergency services.

UK Public Survey of Risk Perception, Resilience and Preparedness 2025
Government research involving 10,536 respondents, including public awareness of and responses to Emergency Alerts.

Sutton & Wood (2025), Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
Peer-reviewed research examining over-alerting and warning fatigue in wireless emergency alert systems.

Beyond the Headlines is about looking past the announcement, questioning assumptions and examining what happens next.

I won’t tell you what to think. I’ll give you something worth thinking about.

If you’d like more, subscribe for free to Beyond the Headlines.

Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. Caldermere Hotels, Westmarsh and all characters, companies, officials and organisations in this story are invented. The story draws on broader public debates surrounding government accommodation contracts, corporate responsibility, public expenditure and consumer choice. It does not depict or make allegations about any real person or organisation.

Before anybody in Westmarsh spoke of principles, they spoke about weddings.

For more than half a century the Caldermere had stood at the end of Market Street, an old red-brick hotel with newer extensions that nobody particularly liked but everyone recognised.

Wedding photographs were taken beneath its stone arch. Christmas parties filled its ballroom. Local charities held dinners there and businesses booked its conference rooms.

Across the road, Thomas Reed’s parents ran a restaurant.

Friday evenings once had a rhythm. The six-ten train arrived from the city, taxis moved from the station towards the Caldermere, and hotel guests wandered back along Market Street looking for somewhere to eat.

Thomas could usually tell whether the hotel had a large wedding simply by looking at his bookings.

Three doors down, the florist kept a chalkboard outside.

CALDERMERE WEDDINGS — COLLECTIONS HERE

The hotel understood the relationship too.

Its advertising said:

YOUR HOTEL. YOUR COMMUNITY.

Then government needed rooms.

Eleanor Vane presented the proposal to Caldermere’s board.

Selected hotels could provide temporary accommodation for people going through the asylum system.

The commercial attraction was straightforward.

Ordinary hotels sold uncertainty. A room worth money tonight might earn nothing tomorrow. Weddings cancelled. Tourism fell. Winters were quiet.

Government-backed accommodation offered predictability.

“We have properties operating below sustainable occupancy,” Eleanor told the board. “This gives us dependable revenue while preserving employment and maintaining the estate.”

Westmarsh was included.

When the announcement reached the town, Thomas initially assumed life around Market Street would continue much as before.

It didn’t.

Conventional bookings disappeared from the Caldermere and the wedding trade vanished with them.

One morning Thomas saw the florist wiping the hotel message from her chalkboard.

“Not much point now,” she said.

She carried the board inside.

The first public meeting was ugly.

Some residents were angry about immigration. Others defended the people being accommodated. Some wanted only to know how much taxpayers were paying and who was earning what.

Thomas stood near the back.

“My objection isn’t to the people living there,” he said. “They didn’t negotiate this contract.”

Someone shouted from the other side of the hall.

Thomas continued.

“My question is what Caldermere owes the town that supported it for decades.”

A regional director answered for the company.

Caldermere remained a local employer. Its workers lived locally. The hotel continued buying goods and services, paying wages and maintaining the building. Government had required accommodation and Caldermere was lawfully providing it.

Then came the sentence Thomas would remember.

“We cannot reasonably be expected to reject a lawful and commercially advantageous opportunity simply because some neighbouring businesses preferred the previous arrangement.”

Thomas took a notebook from his pocket.

He wrote the sentence down.

Several months later, Thomas was locking the restaurant when he noticed a man and a little girl walking towards the Caldermere.

The girl was perhaps seven.

She carried a supermarket bag almost as large as her torso and was complaining to her father about something Thomas couldn’t understand.

Her father took the bag.

She immediately demanded it back.

He laughed and surrendered it.

Thomas watched them disappear through the hotel doors.

For months he had looked across the road and seen a government contract.

The child probably saw something entirely different: a room she hadn’t chosen, in a town she hadn’t chosen, perhaps in a country she had never expected to be in.

Thomas still believed Caldermere’s decision had harmed parts of Westmarsh.

But whatever debt he believed the company owed the town, he couldn’t see how that debt belonged to her.

He switched off the restaurant lights.

Westmarsh changed.

How much it changed, and why, became something people argued about.

Some shopkeepers said they had experienced more theft and antisocial behaviour. Residents exchanged stories online. Others said the town had always had crime and that every incident was now being attributed to hotel residents whether evidence existed or not.

Police attended disturbances around the Caldermere.

In some incidents, individuals living at the hotel were alleged or established to have been involved. Others involved demonstrations, threats or offences directed towards hotel residents.

Everybody seemed to possess an anecdote.

Nobody possessed the complete picture.

At another meeting a man demanded that Thomas speak about “what these people are doing to the town.”

Thomas refused.

“I’ll criticise Caldermere for something I can demonstrate Caldermere did.”

“What about the crime?”

“If somebody commits a crime, investigate them and, where the evidence supports it, prosecute them.”

The man persisted.

Thomas shook his head.

“I’m not accusing hundreds of people because somebody online says they know who committed something.”

He lost supporters over that.

He accepted it.

Years later, the accommodation arrangement ended.

Residents departed gradually. Builders arrived. The old bar reopened, flower baskets returned to the entrance and wedding brochures appeared in reception again.

Then one morning Thomas looked across Market Street and saw an enormous banner hanging from the Caldermere.

CALDERMERE IS BACK

Below it were two smaller words:

SUPPORT LOCAL

His anger surprised him.

It was no longer principally about the contract.

It was about the request.

When Caldermere hadn’t needed ordinary customers, commercial interest had been enough to justify choosing something more advantageous.

Now Caldermere needed Westmarsh again, and suddenly loyalty mattered.

Thomas went upstairs and found the notebook from the meeting years earlier.

We cannot reasonably be expected to reject a lawful and commercially advantageous opportunity simply because some neighbouring businesses preferred the previous arrangement.

He read it twice.

Then he began writing.

The campaign was simple.

No intimidation, obstruction or vandalism. No abuse of employees. No targeting former residents.

Spend your money somewhere else.

Thomas’s poster contained twelve words:

THEY WERE FREE TO MAKE THEIR COMMERCIAL CHOICE.

SO ARE YOU.

The campaign spread beyond Westmarsh.

Someone created a website recommending independent alternatives. Wedding bookings were cancelled. Companies moved conferences. Families chose different hotels.

Caldermere initially described the campaign as insignificant.

It stopped doing so when the booking figures arrived.

At headquarters, Eleanor was shown the proposed recovery campaign.

The marketing director placed an advertisement in front of her. A smiling Caldermere receptionist stood beneath the words:

SUPPORT THE HOTEL THAT SUPPORTS YOUR COMMUNITY

Eleanor stared at it.

“No.”

The marketing director frowned. “Research tested extremely well.”

“I don’t care.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

She pushed the page back across the table.

“They’ll remember.”

“Remember what?”

Eleanor looked at him.

“What we told them when we didn’t need them.”

Nobody answered.

The boycott nevertheless produced consequences Thomas hadn’t intended.

Emma Shaw came into Reed’s shortly before closing one Tuesday. Thomas had known her since school. She had worked at the Caldermere for eighteen years and now supervised housekeeping.

She didn’t order anything.

“They’re talking about redundancies.”

Thomas put down the cloth in his hand.

“How many?”

“They haven’t said.”

He understood why she had come.

“Emma—”

“No. You don’t get to explain the principle yet.”

Thomas remained silent.

“I didn’t sign that contract. The receptionists didn’t sign it. The kitchen staff didn’t sign it. But if you succeed, we’re the ones who could lose our jobs.”

“I never wanted that.”

“I know.”

She picked up her coat.

“That’s the trouble with consequences, Tom. They don’t care what you wanted.”

Caldermere eventually went on the offensive.

Eleanor appeared on national television.

She didn’t deny that the accommodation arrangements had provided secure revenue.

“The government required accommodation,” she said. “Caldermere lawfully provided some of it. The arrangements helped us maintain properties and employment during uncertain conditions.”

The interviewer mentioned Thomas.

“Mr Reed is entitled to spend his money wherever he wishes.”

“And encourage thousands of other people to do likewise?”

Eleanor paused.

“I don’t have to like somebody’s freedom in order to recognise it.”

Thomas, watching from Reed’s, hadn’t expected that answer.

Neither had the interviewer.

As bookings continued falling, representatives of the hotel industry sought meetings with ministers.

Companies warned about employment, closures and investment.

Caldermere attended.

Businesses meeting government was not, by itself, evidence of anything improper. Nor was there evidence that Caldermere had asked ministers to take action against Thomas.

Shortly afterwards a minister was asked about the boycott.

“Consumers are obviously entitled to make their own choices,” she said. “Government must nevertheless be concerned when organised economic campaigns threaten substantial numbers of jobs.”

The newspapers argued over what it meant.

One called the statement intimidation. Another called it common sense. A third asked what had been discussed between ministers and hotel executives.

Some of Thomas’s supporters declared that Caldermere had persuaded government to silence them.

Thomas wouldn’t.

A television interviewer pushed him.

“Are you saying Caldermere influenced the minister?”

“I’m saying Caldermere met government.”

“Before the minister criticised your campaign.”

“Yes.”

“So there was a connection?”

Thomas hesitated.

“I’d need evidence before saying that.”

The interviewer tried again.

Thomas didn’t move.

Suspicion didn’t become proof simply because suspicion suited him.

Three months later Caldermere Westmarsh announced redundancies.

Six people lost their jobs.

Emma wasn’t one of them.

She came into Reed’s after closing, and Thomas poured two coffees.

For a while neither spoke.

“Still think you’re right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Emma raised an eyebrow.

Thomas looked into his cup.

“Just not as right as I used to.”

She laughed softly.

“I’ll take that.”

Across Market Street, lights glowed behind the Caldermere’s windows.

Some rooms were occupied again.

Not enough.

Thomas thought about the little girl carrying the supermarket bag, the florist erasing her chalkboard and Emma’s six colleagues.

He thought about the people government had needed somewhere to accommodate, Caldermere’s employees, its owners, taxpayers and the businesses surrounding the hotel.

One decision had reached all of them.

It hadn’t reached any two of them in quite the same way.

The phrase appeared several weeks later.

Thomas didn’t invent it.

Neither did Caldermere.

It appeared in a letter to the Westmarsh Chronicle from a retired teacher named Margaret Vale.

She criticised Caldermere.

Then she criticised Thomas.

Finally she wrote:

Caldermere maintains that a business must remain free to make lawful commercial choices even when its neighbours dislike the consequences. Mr Reed maintains that consumers possess precisely the same freedom.

Perhaps we should call this the Caldermere Principle: a freedom we defend when exercising it ourselves must remain a freedom when exercised against us.

The editor printed the letter.

The phrase stuck.

Some believed it vindicated the boycott. Others believed the effect on employees demonstrated its limits.

Eleanor kept a clipping in her desk.

Thomas kept another above the restaurant till.

Neither particularly liked everything Margaret had written about them.

Neither threw it away.

Across the road from Thomas, the Caldermere remained open.

Some people returned.

Others never did.

And the argument outlived the campaign:

If freedom of commercial choice is a principle when exercised in our own interest, what becomes of that principle when somebody else exercises it against us?

A note on the factual background

The Caldermere Principle is fiction. Caldermere Hotels does not represent a particular hotel company, and the events involving Thomas, Eleanor, Emma, the boycott and government response are invented.

The broader setting, however, reflects a real public-policy debate.

The National Audit Office has examined the Home Office’s asylum-accommodation contracts, including their performance and profitability. The Home Office is responsible for providing accommodation to people seeking asylum who would otherwise be destitute, and hotels have been used as contingency accommodation where houses and flats are unavailable.

The story deliberately does not assert that asylum accommodation causes increased crime. Official information currently has important limitations when it comes to connecting migration or asylum status with recorded crime. For that reason, Westmarsh’s arguments about crime are presented as competing experiences, allegations and interpretations rather than a conclusion by the narrator.

The fictional question is therefore narrower than the politics surrounding it:

When a company asks a community for loyalty, is that obligation reciprocal?

And if commercial freedom permits the company to pursue a better opportunity, does the same freedom permit its former customers to walk away?

The story leaves that answer to the reader.

A Beyond the Headlines thought experiment

A note before you read

This isn’t a proposal to replace elected politicians with artificial intelligence. Nor am I suggesting that AI is unbiased, infallible or capable of deciding what is best for a country.

Quite the opposite.

This is a thought experiment about whether technology could give citizens another way of scrutinising decisions made in their name.

You may think it’s a brilliant idea. You may think it’s dangerous.

Either response is reasonable.

It started with something much smaller

When I’m developing an article, I sometimes use more than one artificial intelligence system to examine what I’m writing.

The original idea is mine, but I can ask AI to challenge an argument, look for weaknesses, question assumptions, suggest another interpretation or identify something I’ve overlooked. Sometimes the systems agree. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they tell me something I don’t particularly want to hear.

That’s useful.

I still decide what I believe. I still decide what gets written. And I remain responsible for what I publish.

Recently, though, this made me wonder:

What would happen if we applied the same principle to government?

Imagine this

Britain creates a national AI system operating at arm’s length from government.

Not an AI Prime Minister. Not an electronic Parliament. Not a machine with the power to make laws.

An adviser.

Its purpose would be to examine major policy proposals and expose the arguments, evidence, uncertainties, competing options and potential consequences surrounding them.

And, wherever legally possible, the analysis and evidence behind it would be available for the public to examine too.

Calling such a system “independent” is easy. Making it genuinely independent would be considerably harder.

Perhaps it could operate through a statutory body whose independence was protected by Parliament, with leadership, funding and auditing arrangements that couldn’t easily be changed by whichever party happened to be in government.

That wouldn’t guarantee independence.

But it gives us somewhere to start.

Give it a difficult question

Take irregular migration.

I’m choosing it deliberately because it is difficult. The debate involves law, economics, border enforcement, housing, public services, administrative capacity, labour markets, humanitarian obligations, integration, social cohesion and deeply contested political judgements.

Instead of asking:

“Is immigration good or bad?”

we might ask:

“What realistic options does Britain have for reducing irregular migration, and what would be the likely consequences of each?”

The system wouldn’t be instructed to produce the politically acceptable answer. It would be instructed to investigate the question as widely as possible.

That might mean examining British and international law, enforcement capabilities, fiscal costs, economic effects, housing and public-service pressures, labour-market consequences, administrative backlogs, integration and social cohesion, humanitarian consequences, crime and security evidence where reliable evidence exists, international comparisons and the underlying causes of irregular migration.

But I’d give it another instruction:

What important factors have we failed to include in the question?

That matters because our assumptions can enter an analysis before we’ve even begun looking for answers.

If reliable evidence supports a concern, report it. If reliable evidence contradicts one, report that too. If credible evidence conflicts, show us the disagreement.

And sometimes the most truthful answer may simply be:

We don’t have enough evidence to know.

Don’t give us one answer

I wouldn’t necessarily want one AI producing one recommendation.

I’d want competing analyses.

One part of the system could construct the strongest evidence-based argument for a proposal while another attempts to demolish it. Others could examine economics, law, individual rights, implementation difficulties and unintended consequences.

Then show us where those analyses agree and, perhaps more importantly, where they disagree.

Instead of:

“The computer says do this.”

we might receive several realistic options, each showing likely benefits, costs, legal issues, supporting and contradictory evidence, uncertainties and possible unintended consequences.

AI provides the analysis.

Then elected politicians make the decision.

Humans still decide

This is the line I wouldn’t cross.

AI should advise. Humans should decide.

Interestingly, that principle isn’t entirely removed from the direction government AI policy is already taking.

The UK government’s AI Playbook for the UK Government, published in February 2025, contains ten principles for the use of AI in government. One is explicitly about having meaningful human control at the right stages.

The guidance says humans should validate high-risk decisions influenced by AI. It also warns that AI models can produce unwanted or inaccurate results and calls for testing, assurance, monitoring and mechanisms for human intervention.

The government’s Data and AI Ethics Framework provides further guidance on the responsible development, procurement and use of data and AI across the public sector.

My proposal goes considerably further than either document.

But the underlying principle already exists:

Using AI doesn’t remove human responsibility.

In this thought experiment, government remains responsible. Parliament remains responsible. Ultimately, voters decide whether they approve of the choices politicians make.

AI doesn’t get a vote.

Suppose the analysis recommends Option A and the government chooses Option B.

That’s perfectly legitimate.

But imagine if the government then published its reasoning:

We considered the analysis and chose a different course because...

Now we’d have something valuable: a contemporary record of the evidence, alternatives and reasoning available when the decision was made.

Where practical, the analysis could happen before major policy decisions. Later reviews could compare what the system anticipated with what actually happened.

That matters for another reason.

AI needs accountability too.

If its predictions repeatedly prove wrong, we should be able to see that.

Beyond the Headlines explores difficult questions without asking you to adopt a predetermined answer. If you’d like to continue the conversation, subscribe to Third Act Life.

Don’t let the original disappear

The reports should be timestamped, cryptographically signed and permanently archived so subsequent alterations could be detected.

The particular technology matters less than the principle:

Once published, the original analysis shouldn’t be capable of being quietly rewritten.

Years later, we could look back.

What did the evidence suggest? What risks were identified? What did government decide? Why did it make that decision? What actually happened?

And importantly:

How accurate was the AI?

Politicians aren’t the only people — or machines — that should be accountable for their previous claims.

But democracy should work in both directions

So far, information has travelled one way:

Government proposes something → AI scrutinises it → the public sees the analysis.

That’s about accountability.

But the same architecture could work in the opposite direction:

A citizen proposes something → AI scrutinises it → a worthwhile proposal can potentially reach government.

That’s about participation.

Imagine someone sitting at their kitchen table who has spotted a problem nobody in Westminster seems to be discussing.

Or a nurse, builder, teacher, scientist, pensioner, small-business owner or university professor.

They submit an idea.

Their status shouldn’t determine its value.

The proposal gets tested against evidence. What problem does it solve? Is it legal and practical? What would it cost? Who benefits? Who could be disadvantaged? Has something similar been attempted elsewhere? What are the strongest arguments against it? What could go wrong?

Most ideas probably wouldn’t survive serious scrutiny.

That’s fine.

But occasionally one might.

Perhaps a genuinely useful proposal could rise because of its merits rather than because its author happened to have political influence.

Now let’s attack my own idea

There are enormous problems with this.

If government funds the system, can it genuinely challenge government? Who appoints the people overseeing it? Who trains the models, chooses the evidence standards and determines what constitutes a reliable source?

Then there’s something even more difficult.

Values.

Imagine two policies.

One produces greater economic growth but increases inequality. Another produces less growth but distributes its benefits more evenly.

Which is “better”?

Or consider liberty against security. Individual rights against collective interests. Short-term costs against benefits that might not appear for twenty years.

AI cannot magically turn those into objective questions.

They are political and moral judgements.

So perhaps the system shouldn’t pretend to be value-neutral at all.

If an analysis prioritises economic efficiency, individual liberty, equality, national security or some other value, that assumption should be visible and contestable rather than buried inside the system.

Moderation creates another problem.

A public system couldn’t simply accept everything submitted to it. Threats, illegal material and incitement would require moderation.

But the moment an authority starts determining which political ideas are unacceptable, another danger appears.

Who watches the gatekeeper?

Organised manipulation would also be a serious risk. Corporations, lobbyists, campaign groups, political movements and foreign governments could attempt to influence the system or overwhelm it with submissions.

And perhaps the most important problem of all:

AI can be wrong.

It can misunderstand evidence, reproduce biases and produce extremely convincing arguments that turn out to be false.

The government’s own AI Playbook explicitly warns that AI models can produce unwanted or inaccurate results.

Giving such a system political authority would therefore be dangerous.

Which is precisely why, in this thought experiment, it doesn’t get political authority.

This isn’t entirely science fiction

Britain already has something called the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard, or ATRS.

It provides a standardised way for public-sector organisations to publish information about how and why they use certain algorithmic tools.

Its mandatory scope currently covers central government departments and specified arm’s-length bodies. Within those organisations, it applies to certain algorithmic tools that significantly influence operational decisions with public effect or directly interact with the public.

But there’s an important distinction.

The government’s own guidance says this mandatory scope is aimed at tools influencing specific operational decisions about individuals, organisations or groups.

Analytical models supporting broad government policymaking will typically fall outside that mandatory scope.

So the system I’m imagining would go substantially further than today’s transparency requirements.

That’s important because it separates what exists from what I’m proposing.

The ATRS demonstrates that transparency around government algorithms is already an established principle.

My thought experiment asks:

What happens if we extend that principle to the analysis behind major government policy?

Would it improve democracy?

I don’t know.

It might expose weak evidence, make political decisions easier to scrutinise and allow worthwhile ideas from outside traditional political institutions to receive serious consideration.

It might make it harder for governments to say afterwards that foreseeable risks hadn’t been identified.

But it could also create an enormously powerful new institution.

Whoever controlled its architecture, evidence standards, funding or governance could acquire considerable influence over political debate.

And there’s another danger.

People might start trusting an AI recommendation simply because a machine produced it.

That could be every bit as dangerous as blindly trusting a politician.

So I’m not suggesting that we hand government to artificial intelligence.

I’m asking whether we could use artificial intelligence to make human government more accountable and public participation more meaningful.

The practical questions eventually come down to three:

Who controls it?

Who gets access to it?

Can everyone see how it reached its conclusions?

But perhaps there’s an even bigger question.

Would a system like this strengthen democracy — or would we simply create another powerful institution that we eventually learn not to trust?

I genuinely don’t know.

That’s why I’m putting the idea out there.

Don’t let me tell you what to think.

Over to you

Would you trust an independently governed AI system to advise government if elected politicians retained the final decision?

Would you submit your own idea to it?

What safeguard have I missed?

And if you think the entire concept is dangerous, I’d particularly like to hear why.

Sources and further reading

UK Government — AI Playbook for the UK Government
Government guidance covering safe, responsible and effective use of AI, including meaningful human control.

UK Government — Data and AI Ethics Framework
Guidance on responsible development, procurement and use of data and AI across the public sector.

UK Government — Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard
The government’s framework for publishing information about certain algorithmic tools used in the public sector.

UK Government — ATRS Mandatory Scope and Exemptions Policy
The detailed rules defining which central-government organisations and algorithmic tools fall within mandatory transparency requirements.

Don’t tell me what to think. Don’t tell me what to watch. Don’t tell me what I’m allowed to question.

And don’t punish me simply because my lawful opinion happens to be different from yours.

Of course, none of this should concern me. I live in Britain: a country with a long democratic tradition, where freedom of expression is protected and reasonable people are perfectly free to disagree with one another.

So I have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Do I?

Britain protects freedom of expression. So why can expressing a lawful opinion sometimes feel increasingly difficult?

That’s the question behind this article.

I’m not suggesting Britain has suddenly become a dictatorship. It hasn’t. Nor am I arguing that freedom of expression means we can say absolutely anything without consequences. It doesn’t.

Threats, harassment, intimidation and unlawful behaviour aren’t what I’m defending.

I’m asking something much more ordinary.

How comfortable are we becoming with disagreement — and who gets to influence what we’re encouraged to think, watch and believe?

Not got time to read the whole article?

Here’s the argument in brief.

• Freedom of expression doesn’t mean freedom from criticism.

• If an argument is wrong, challenge it with evidence. A label isn’t a rebuttal.

• Peaceful protest is itself free expression. Trying to prevent lawful speech from being heard is something different.

• Threats, intimidation and violence have no place in democratic disagreement.

• Governments, media organisations, campaigners, platforms and algorithms can all influence what reaches us. The government’s consultation on online prominence for “trustworthy news” closes on 31 August 2026.

• Sometimes nobody needs to silence us. Fear of the consequences can persuade us to silence ourselves.

Give me the evidence. Give me competing arguments. Then trust me to think.

You don’t have to agree with me

I’ve been thinking for myself for more than five decades. Britain has changed enormously during that time, and so have I. I’ve changed my mind about things, just as society has changed its mind about things.

Ideas considered perfectly normal when I was younger have disappeared. Things once regarded as unacceptable have become ordinary. Some of those changes have unquestionably made Britain better. Others I’m less certain about.

That’s part of living through social change.

But throughout those decades I’ve believed in a fairly simple principle: let me express my opinion.

You may disagree with me. I may disagree with you. Challenge my argument and I’ll challenge yours. Perhaps you’ll change my mind. Perhaps I’ll change yours. Perhaps neither of us will move an inch.

That’s fine.

We’ve both had the opportunity to speak. Surely that’s part of what living in a free society is supposed to mean.

Tell me I’m wrong

If I make an argument and somebody demonstrates that my facts are wrong, that isn’t censorship. If my reasoning is poor and somebody tears it apart, that isn’t suppression. If somebody tells me I’m talking nonsense, that’s their freedom of expression too.

Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from criticism.

Bad ideas should be challenged. False claims should be corrected. Assumptions should be questioned. My opinions shouldn’t receive special protection simply because they’re mine.

But there’s a harder test.

It’s easy to defend freedom of expression when somebody says something reasonable that we broadly agree with. The principle matters most when somebody expresses something we find offensive, objectionable or deeply uncomfortable — but which remains lawful.

I don’t have to approve of it. I don’t have to respect the argument. I can challenge it as strongly as I like.

But disliking an opinion and having the right to prevent somebody expressing it are not the same thing.

Challenge the argument, not the person

Imagine somebody expresses a lawful opinion that challenges a prevailing view.

One response is:

“I think you’re wrong. Here’s why.”

Excellent. Show me your evidence and I’ll show you mine.

Another response is:

“The fact that you even think that tells me what sort of person you are.”

Now we’ve moved away from challenging the argument and towards defining the person.

Right wing. Left wing. Woke. Racist. Bigot. Extremist. Elite. Ignorant. Snowflake.

Sometimes those descriptions may genuinely be justified by what somebody has said or done. But they can also become shortcuts that allow us to avoid dealing with the argument itself.

If my evidence is rubbish, expose it. If I’ve misunderstood something, explain it.

Attaching a label to me hasn’t answered my question.

When disagreement becomes an attempt to silence

Organisations, campaign groups and organised movements across the political, religious and social spectrum try to influence public debate. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

Campaigning is itself an exercise of freedom.

Publish a rebuttal. Organise a peaceful protest. Challenge the evidence. Tell people why you believe somebody is wrong.

That’s democratic debate.

But there’s an important distinction between saying:

“Don’t believe this person.”

and:

“This person shouldn’t be allowed to speak.”

This isn’t entirely theoretical.

In 2018, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights examined freedom of speech in universities. It did not find evidence of widespread censorship across universities, but it did identify examples where free speech had been inhibited, including through intolerant attitudes, unnecessary bureaucracy and some intimidatory behaviour.

That qualification is important.

Not every cancelled event proves a free-speech crisis. Not every protest is an attempt to silence somebody.

Protesting against somebody is itself an exercise of expression.

But deliberately trying to prevent a lawful viewpoint from being heard raises a different question.

And the principle has to apply to everybody: left or right, religious or secular, establishment or anti-establishment.

If I defend your freedom to speak only when I agree with you, I’m not really defending freedom of expression.

I’m defending my expression.

There is a line nobody should cross

People involved in public debate can face abuse, intimidation and threats. Whatever someone’s politics, religion, campaigning position or opinions, threatening them or using violence against them is not legitimate democratic disagreement.

Challenge their argument. Criticise them. Campaign against their ideas. Protest peacefully.

But threats and violence have no place in democratic debate.

That standard has to apply in every direction. We cannot condemn intimidation when it targets somebody we agree with and excuse it when the target is somebody we dislike.

Who influences the narrative?

I use the word narrative carefully because it can sound conspiratorial.

I’m not suggesting there’s a secret room somewhere deciding what Britain is allowed to think.

Influence is much more ordinary than that.

When I was younger, relatively few institutions had enormous influence over Britain’s public conversation. Newspapers, broadcasters, government, political parties, churches and universities all acted as powerful gatekeepers.

Editors decided what appeared on the front page. Broadcasters decided what led the evening news.

Those institutions still matter, but now we’ve added social media, algorithms, influencers, campaign organisations, corporations, independent journalists, podcasters, creators and millions of ordinary people publishing their opinions instantly.

Think about how much that has changed.

Thirty years ago, a small campaign trying to reach a national audience might have needed a sympathetic newspaper editor or broadcaster.

Today it might need a sympathetic algorithm.

The gatekeeper has changed. The gate hasn’t disappeared.

That can still be liberating. An ordinary person can challenge a politician, broadcaster, newspaper or major organisation publicly in a way that was once almost impossible.

But we haven’t eliminated influence.

We’ve created an enormous competition for it.

Which raises another question: should any single participant in that competition — including government — receive privileged influence over what reaches us?

Don’t tell me what to watch

That isn’t a hypothetical question.

On 23 June 2026, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published its Watch this Space Green Paper.

Among the ideas being explored are measures intended to make what the government describes as “trustworthy news” more prominent and discoverable on social-media and video-sharing platforms.

The government’s argument deserves a fair hearing. It is concerned about misinformation and about the changing ways in which people encounter news. It argues that making trustworthy journalism easier to find could help people navigate an increasingly complicated information environment.

Those aren’t imaginary problems.

Misinformation exists. Deliberate disinformation exists. AI is making convincing manipulation easier.

I don’t want people deliberately deceived any more than anybody else does.

But there is an equally legitimate question:

Who decides what is trustworthy?

What criteria would be used? Which organisations qualify? Which don’t? And should government have a role in influencing which news providers a platform places more prominently in front of me?

Importantly, these are proposals under consultation, not a system already imposed on YouTube or other platforms. The Green Paper discusses a voluntary-first approach while also considering possible future legislation.

The consultation also raises questions about plurality, transparency and user choice.

Good.

Because consultation is exactly when these questions should be asked.

And it remains open until 31 August 2026.

I may trust the BBC. You may not. You may trust an independent journalist whom I think is talking rubbish.

Neither of us should automatically believe something because an algorithm puts it at the top of the screen.

Look at the evidence. Compare sources. Question what you’re being told.

Then decide.

The difficult question is:

How do we combat misinformation without reducing the diversity of lawful voices we’re trying to protect?

And if you have a view — including one completely different from mine — the government is currently asking for it.

Don’t just complain about the proposal on social media.

Respond while the consultation is still open.

Read and respond to the government's Watch this Space consultation⁠

But algorithms already influence us

There’s an obvious counterargument.

Social-media companies already influence what we see.

There isn’t a perfectly neutral internet that government is suddenly interfering with. Algorithms determine recommendations, platforms establish rules and commercial incentives influence what receives attention.

So this isn’t as simple as:

Government influence bad. Platform influence good.

The more useful questions are: who has influence? How transparent is it? Can I control it? Can I choose something different?

And ultimately:

Who gets the final say over what I watch?

As far as reasonably possible, I think that person should be me.

Perhaps nobody needs to silence us

The part of this debate that concerns me most doesn’t necessarily involve government, campaigners or corporations.

Sometimes we silence ourselves.

You have an opinion about something contentious and start calculating the consequences. Will this cause trouble at work? Will somebody misunderstand me? Will I get attacked online? Will friends think differently about me? Will somebody attach a label to me?

Eventually you decide saying it isn’t worth the hassle.

So you keep quiet.

Nobody arrested you. Nobody banned you. Nobody necessarily told you that you couldn’t speak.

You simply decided expressing your lawful opinion wasn’t worth the possible consequences.

Legally, you may still possess freedom of expression.

Culturally, however, something different has happened.

When silence creates an illusion

Now imagine many people making the same calculation.

Someone privately disagrees with a prevailing view but believes they’re probably in the minority, so they remain silent. Other people who quietly agree do the same. Meanwhile, those willing to speak appear to represent everybody.

The apparent consensus can then make those who disagree even less willing to speak.

This is related to what political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called the spiral of silence: the theory that fear of social isolation can make people less willing to express opinions they believe are unpopular.

Social media didn’t invent that behaviour. But it has given us an extraordinary mechanism for witnessing approval and condemnation in real time: likes, shares, pile-ons, praise and public criticism.

Sometimes the lesson somebody learns from watching another person being attacked isn’t:

“They’re wrong.”

It’s:

“I’m not getting involved.”

And that should concern anybody interested in a genuinely plural public conversation.

Freedom comes with responsibility

None of this gives anyone the right to say whatever they want without consequence.

Freedom of expression isn’t absolute. Other people have rights. The law establishes boundaries. Employers have legitimate interests. Platforms have legitimate responsibilities.

And everybody else possesses exactly the same freedom to criticise me that I’m asking for myself.

Sometimes what somebody describes as being “silenced” is simply people strongly disagreeing with them.

That isn’t necessarily censorship.

That’s debate.

We need to be capable of telling the difference.

Then trust us to think

I don’t want a society where everybody agrees. I’d find that more worrying than disagreement.

I want a society confident enough to argue.

Tell me I’m wrong. Challenge my evidence. Question my assumptions. Make me defend what I’ve said — and I’ll give you the same opportunity.

Perhaps you’ll persuade me. Perhaps I’ll persuade you. Perhaps neither of us will change our mind.

That’s fine.

Freedom of expression isn’t supposed to guarantee agreement.

It’s supposed to make disagreement possible.

So don’t tell me what to think. Don’t tell me what to watch. Don’t tell me what I’m allowed to question.

And don’t decide that protecting me from bad information requires protecting me from competing information.

Give me the tools to judge the difference.

Let me make my argument. You make yours.

Put the evidence in front of us.

Then trust us to think.

Because you don’t have to agree with me, and I don’t have to agree with you.

But surely a free society should give both of us the opportunity to say why.

Your turn

Have you ever decided not to express a lawful opinion because you were worried about what might happen afterwards?

Not because you wanted to threaten or abuse somebody. Not because you believed what you wanted to say was unlawful.

Simply because you decided saying what you genuinely thought wasn’t worth the consequences.

If so, what stopped you?

And what would have made you feel able to speak?

Was that simply ordinary caution — or is that how a spiral of silence begins?

Sources and further reading

UK Government — Watch this Space Green Paper and consultation⁠

UK Parliament — Freedom of Speech in Universities inquiry⁠

Not got time to read the whole article? Here are the key points.

• We elect MPs, not the Prime Minister directly, and a manifesto is not a legally binding contract.

• Governments must be able to change policy when circumstances change. Sometimes breaking a manifesto commitment may be the responsible thing to do.

• But changing a promise shouldn’t mean escaping accountability for making it.

• When a significant manifesto commitment is abandoned, the government should explain what changed, why it changed, what evidence supports the decision and what replaces the original promise.

• A change of Prime Minister doesn’t automatically require a general election under the UK system.

• But if a new Prime Minister substantially changes the programme voters were originally presented with, it’s reasonable to ask where the mandate for that new direction comes from.

• Citizens should be able to challenge government policy without legitimate questions simply being dismissed with political labels.

• I don’t think every broken promise should trigger an election. Government would become unworkable.

• But if a government fundamentally abandons the programme on which it was elected, we should at least debate whether voters deserve another say.

• One possible reform would be an annual Manifesto Accountability Report showing which major promises have been delivered, remain in progress, have changed or have been abandoned.

The principle is simple: governments need the freedom to change course. But that shouldn’t mean freedom from explanation.

Every few years, Britain goes through the same ritual.

Political parties publish their manifestos.

Politicians travel around the country telling us what they will do if we give them power.

Tax.

Immigration.

Housing.

Pensions.

The NHS.

Public services.

The economy.

Promises are made.

We listen.

We argue.

And eventually, we vote.

Then the election ends.

A government takes office.

And sometimes the promises begin to change.

There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for that.

Circumstances change.

Wars happen.

Economies deteriorate.

Pandemics arrive.

Financial forecasts turn out to be wrong.

A responsible government cannot blindly follow a document written years earlier when the world around it has fundamentally changed.

I accept that.

But accepting that governments sometimes need to change direction raises a much more uncomfortable question.

When a government breaks a significant promise, what does it owe the people who voted for it?

Surely the answer cannot simply be:

Nothing.

A manifesto isn’t a contract — but it isn’t meaningless

Let’s get one important fact out of the way.

A manifesto is not a legally enforceable contract between a political party and the electorate.

Britain doesn’t directly elect its Prime Minister either.

We elect Members of Parliament, and our parliamentary system determines who is able to form a government.

But none of that makes the manifesto meaningless.

A manifesto sets out the policies and priorities a political party puts before voters.

Parties spend months preparing them.

Journalists analyse them.

Opponents challenge them.

Politicians quote from them.

Television debates revolve around them.

And voters can use them when deciding who they want to govern.

There is even a constitutional convention demonstrating the significance attached to manifesto commitments.

Under the Salisbury Convention, the House of Lords normally does not vote down at second or third reading government legislation implementing something included in the governing party’s election manifesto.

So manifestos clearly matter.

If a manifesto helps provide democratic legitimacy for implementing a government’s programme, shouldn’t abandoning a major part of that programme deserve serious explanation as well?

Who checks the promises?

This is where things become interesting.

The Electoral Commission regulates important parts of elections and campaign finance.

But it does not generally regulate the political claims contained in campaign material.

Nor does it verify or correct ordinary political claims made during an election campaign.

There are particular legal restrictions in specific circumstances, including rules concerning certain false statements about candidates.

But there isn’t an electoral regulator checking every manifesto promise before an election and subsequently enforcing its delivery afterwards.

Manifesto commitments are principally matters of political accountability.

Perhaps that’s unavoidable.

Turning every manifesto promise into a legally enforceable contract could make effective government almost impossible.

But if we’re going to rely on political rather than legal accountability, then surely that political accountability needs to mean something.

You can change the promise. But explain yourself.

I don’t want governments paralysed.

I don’t want a general election every time a Chancellor changes a tax allowance.

And I certainly don’t want a government continuing with a disastrous policy simply because somebody typed it into a manifesto several years earlier.

Governments need flexibility.

But flexibility and accountability aren’t opposites.

There is a simple democratic principle I think is worth considering:

You can change the promise. But you don’t get to pretend you never made it.

If a government abandons a significant manifesto commitment, tell us:

What did you promise?

What changed?

Why can you no longer reasonably deliver it?

What evidence supports that decision?

What are you doing instead?

Put the explanation on the record.

Let Parliament examine it.

Let journalists investigate it.

Let the opposition challenge it.

And let citizens decide whether the explanation is good enough.

That isn’t revolutionary.

It’s accountability.

Parliament already holds government to account

Britain already has substantial mechanisms for scrutinising government.

MPs question ministers.

Ministers make statements to Parliament.

Select committees investigate government departments.

Written parliamentary questions put information into the public record.

Parliament scrutinises taxation and public spending.

All of this matters.

But there’s a difference between a government being constitutionally accountable to Parliament and an individual citizen being able to understand what happened to the promises presented during an election.

Try something.

Take the manifesto on which the government was elected.

Choose one significant promise.

Now answer four questions:

Was it delivered?

Is it still being pursued?

Has it changed?

Has it been abandoned?

For something important enough to be presented to us when asking for our vote, shouldn’t answering those questions be straightforward?

What happens when the Prime Minister changes?

Then we reach another interesting feature of the British system.

The public doesn’t directly elect the Prime Minister.

At a general election, we elect MPs.

A governing party can therefore change its leader during a Parliament without automatically holding another general election.

That isn’t some constitutional trick.

It’s part of how Britain’s parliamentary democracy works.

And simply changing the individual at the top doesn’t necessarily invalidate the government’s mandate.

But suppose something more fundamental happens.

A Prime Minister leaves.

Another takes over.

And the new Prime Minister substantially changes the programme of government.

Now I think citizens are entitled to ask:

Where does the mandate for the new programme come from?

There is a strong constitutional answer.

We elect MPs for a Parliament.

We don’t elect a president with a personally binding programme.

A government capable of commanding the confidence of the House of Commons can continue to govern.

That’s an important argument.

We shouldn’t brush it aside simply because we don’t like the outcome.

But neither should it end the conversation.

If a government spends an election asking people to support one programme and subsequently governs on a substantially different one, surely citizens are entitled to ask what happened.

And perhaps, eventually, whether they should get another say.

Let people ask difficult questions

This matters.

Citizens should be able to question their government robustly.

That doesn’t mean every criticism is correct.

Something doesn’t become true because thousands of people repeat it on social media.

And freedom to criticise doesn’t remove our responsibility for what we say.

But legitimate questions deserve substantive answers.

If somebody asks why a manifesto commitment has disappeared, answer the question.

If somebody asks where their taxes are going, show them.

If somebody challenges policy on immigration, housing, the NHS, welfare, policing or public spending, address the argument.

Calling somebody left wing doesn’t prove their argument wrong.

Calling somebody right wing doesn’t prove their argument wrong.

Calling somebody woke, elite or establishment doesn’t prove them wrong either.

If an argument is wrong, demonstrate why it is wrong.

Evidence should win the argument.

Not the label.

These are questions citizens should be entitled to ask regardless of how they vote.

Should breaking a manifesto trigger an election?

Not automatically.

It sounds attractive until you think about how government actually works.

Circumstances change constantly.

Governments would become incapable of responding effectively to events if every policy reversal potentially triggered a national election.

But there is still a difficult question:

When does changing policy become fundamentally changing the programme people voted for?

One broken commitment?

Probably not.

Several?

It depends upon their importance.

What if the central economic programme changes?

What if the government’s fundamental approach to taxation changes?

What if a replacement Prime Minister abandons several defining commitments presented at the election?

There isn’t an obvious mathematical threshold.

But the absence of an easy answer doesn’t make the question invalid.

Here’s one idea

Perhaps we don’t need to turn manifestos into legally binding contracts.

Perhaps we need something much simpler.

Every government could publish an annual Manifesto Accountability Report.

Take every significant manifesto commitment and place it into one of four categories:

Delivered

In progress

Changed

Abandoned

For anything significantly changed or abandoned, explain why.

Tell us what changed.

Show us the evidence.

Tell us what replaces the original commitment.

And make the report accessible to everybody rather than requiring citizens to piece together the story from ministerial statements, parliamentary answers, government reports and news coverage.

Then Parliament can scrutinise it.

Journalists can interrogate it.

Independent organisations can examine it.

And citizens can make up their own minds.

No court cases.

No government paralysis.

No pretending circumstances never change.

Just accountability.

And what about a general election?

I’d go one step further.

But here I’m asking a question rather than pretending I have the perfect answer.

If a government fundamentally abandons the programme on which it was elected:

Should there eventually be a mechanism requiring it to seek a renewed mandate from the electorate?

That should be a very high threshold.

Governments need stability.

We cannot hold elections every time opinion polls move or a policy becomes unpopular.

But political power ultimately derives from the electorate.

If the programme becomes substantially different from the one placed before voters, there is at least a democratic argument that voters should eventually be allowed to decide whether they still support it.

The difficult part is deciding when that threshold has been crossed.

Government deciding for itself presents an obvious problem.

Parliament?

Possibly.

Some form of independent constitutional mechanism?

Perhaps.

I don’t know the perfect answer.

And that’s rather the point.

This isn’t an argument against one government.

It isn’t an argument for another political party.

It’s a question about how much accountability we should expect from whichever government happens to be governing us.

Where do we go from here?

Before an election, we’re repeatedly told that our vote matters enormously.

We’re presented with manifestos.

We’re courted.

We’re promised things.

We’re told we have a choice about the country’s direction.

Then the election finishes.

I don’t think democratic accountability should finish with it.

Government should be able to make difficult decisions.

It should sometimes make unpopular decisions.

And when circumstances genuinely change, it should be able to change course.

But with that power should come an obligation to explain itself.

If circumstances force you to break a promise, tell us.

If the evidence has changed, show us.

If the original policy was wrong, admit it.

If you’re changing direction, explain where you’re taking us.

And if the entire programme becomes fundamentally different from the one people were asked to support, perhaps we should at least be willing to discuss whether the mandate needs renewing.

A manifesto shouldn’t be an unbreakable contract.

But neither should it become a disposable election leaflet.

You asked for our vote.

We gave you power.

Surely we’re entitled to ask what happened to the promises that helped you get it.

Sources and further reading

UK Parliament — Parliamentary scrutiny and the role of Parliament

UK Parliament — Salisbury Convention

Electoral Commission — Claims made in campaign material

Electoral Commission — Engaging with campaign material at elections

• I grew up with less money but a stronger sense of neighbourhood community.

• Community hasn’t disappeared, but some measures of neighbourhood trust have declined.

• Modern convenience may have reduced some of the accidental encounters that connected us.

• I sometimes envy communities that appear to have retained stronger family and social connections.

• My argument isn’t that we should go backwards — it’s that we might have something to learn from each other.

• My challenge: learn the name of one neighbour you don’t currently know.

  Read the Full Article below:

I can communicate with people hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away.

But I can’t tell you the name of the man who lives four doors down.

There’s something slightly uncomfortable about admitting that.

I’m old enough to remember when it would have seemed unusual.

I grew up in a working-class family in the North of England. We didn’t have much money, and neither did many of the people around us.

Looking back, though, I realise we had something that now seems rather valuable.

We had community.

People knew each other. Neighbours talked over fences and on doorsteps. Children played outside. People borrowed things from one another. If somebody hadn’t been seen for a while, somebody noticed.

It wasn’t some perfect version of Britain. Neighbours argued. People gossiped. Sometimes everybody knew far too much about everybody else’s business. There was prejudice and exclusion too.

I don’t want to rewrite the past as something it wasn’t.

But there was a sense that you belonged somewhere.

I miss that.

And there’s something else I occasionally feel when I look around modern Britain.

Envy.

I envy the connection

Britain has changed enormously during my lifetime.

Today we live alongside people with different histories, religions, languages and traditions. Some families have been here for generations; others arrived much more recently.

Sometimes I see communities where extended family, faith, tradition or simply the habit of gathering together appear to have retained something I recognise from my childhood.

Several generations together. Families eating together. People gathering for religious or cultural celebrations. Neighbours stopping to talk rather than simply passing one another.

I look at that and sometimes envy it.

Not because I want somebody else’s religion or culture. And certainly not because I assume everybody within those communities has the same experience.

No community is homogeneous. There are difficult families, isolated people and broken relationships everywhere.

I’m looking from the outside, and I can’t know everything that happens within somebody else’s community.

But when I see genuine connection, I envy the connection.

It reminds me of something I remember having myself.

And it makes me wonder whether some of us gradually allowed something valuable to weaken without realising how much we would miss it.

But memory isn’t evidence

There’s an obvious problem with my argument.

I’m 67.

It’s very easy at my age to look backwards and say:

Things were better when I was young.

Nostalgia is selective.

So I went looking at the evidence.

And, if I’m honest with myself, it doesn’t completely support my memory.

The latest Community Life Survey found that 62% of adults in England still felt very or fairly strongly that they belonged to their immediate neighbourhood.

Community hasn’t disappeared.

But there are signs that something has changed. The same survey found that 40% of adults said many people in their neighbourhood could be trusted. At the beginning of the comparable survey series in 2013/14, that figure was 48%.

That doesn’t prove Britain has lost its sense of community.

It does make me wonder whether the better question is:

Has the way we experience community changed?

Source: UK Government — Community Life Survey 2024/25: Neighbourhood and Community

What did we exchange it for?

In many ways, our lives are considerably better than the one I remember growing up.

We have more choice, more technology, more entertainment and more independence.

We can order almost anything without leaving the house. We can bank without entering a bank. Many people can work without entering an office. We can choose from thousands of programmes rather than gathering around the same few television channels.

And we can communicate instantly with somebody on the other side of the world.

I wouldn’t willingly give most of that up.

But perhaps there’s another side to it.

Many of the things we once had to leave home to do can now be done without encountering another person.

Local shops still exist and remain important in many communities. But more shopping can now happen without a conversation.

The physical banking network has changed dramatically too. Thousands of UK bank and building-society branches have closed since 2015.

Pubs haven’t disappeared either, but their numbers have fallen substantially over the longer term.

A single closure doesn’t destroy a community.

But when places where people routinely encounter one another become fewer, I think it’s reasonable to ask what happens to those everyday connections.

Sources: House of Commons Library — Access to Cash and Banking Services and Hospitality: Statistics and Policy

The accidental hello

Perhaps that’s what I’m really missing.

Not some romantic version of Britain where everybody loved their neighbours.

The accidental hello.

The conversation you didn’t arrange.

The person you bumped into while shopping. The neighbour you saw while putting the bins out. The person behind the counter who knew your name.

Those tiny interactions rarely seemed important at the time.

Maybe collectively they were.

Today I can communicate every day with people I’ve never physically met.

Yet I don’t know the name of that man four doors down.

That’s a strange kind of progress.

Britain has many languages

Walk along almost any street in modern Britain and behind those doors you’ll find completely different stories.

Someone may have lived there for sixty years. Someone else may have arrived six months ago.

One household may speak English around the dinner table. Another Urdu, Polish or Punjabi — or one of the many other languages that now thread through British streets.

Different histories, religions and traditions.

Yet many of the ordinary things we want from life aren’t particularly different: a safe home, enough money to pay the bills, a decent future for our children, people we can trust and the feeling that we belong somewhere.

Perhaps we spend too much time discussing what separates Britain’s communities and not enough time asking what we could learn from one another.

That’s partly why I envy communities that appear to have retained stronger connections.

Instead of asking why they’re different from me, perhaps there’s a better question:

What might they know that I’ve forgotten?

Loneliness doesn’t ask how old you are

We often associate loneliness with older people.

I did too.

But the evidence tells a more complicated story.

Recent Office for National Statistics research found that 23% of adults in Great Britain reported feeling lonely often, always or some of the time.

What surprised me was the age breakdown.

Among 16-to-29-year-olds the figure was 27%. Among 30-to-49-year-olds it was 28%.

For people aged 70 and over, it was 16%.

That doesn’t mean loneliness isn’t a serious problem for older people.

It means loneliness reaches much further across society than we sometimes assume.

Source: Office for National Statistics — Public Opinions and Social Trends, Great Britain: January 2026

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.

The same technology that gives us extraordinary independence can also remove some of the reasons we once had to encounter each other.

Someone newly arrived in Britain can feel alone. So can somebody who has lived on the same street for forty years.

You can be surrounded by people and still feel disconnected from them.

We have extraordinary communication technology.

Perhaps what we’re sometimes missing isn’t communication at all.

It’s connection.

If you value thoughtful conversations about how Britain is changing — without being told what to think — subscribe to Beyond the Headlines.

The purpose isn’t to tell you what your opinion should be. It’s to give you something worth thinking about.

I’m not asking for the past back

I don’t want to recreate the Britain of my childhood.

The past wasn’t perfect.

Neither is the present.

Privacy matters. Independence matters. Greater freedom and choice have improved millions of lives.

And nobody particularly needs a neighbour monitoring their every movement from behind the curtains.

Maybe the answer isn’t going backwards.

Maybe it’s taking the best of what we had and combining it with the best of what Britain has become.

That might include learning from people whose backgrounds are completely different from our own.

And perhaps rebuilding community doesn’t require anything particularly grand.

The Five-Minute Community

Imagine you’re standing in a lift.

It stops.

Someone you’ve seen dozens of times steps inside.

You have thirty seconds together.

You don’t need to become friends. You don’t need to know their politics, religion or life story.

Perhaps you just need to become people who recognise each other.

Hello.

That’s the Five-Minute Community.

Learn the name of the person next door. Speak to the person you regularly see at the bus stop. Check on somebody you haven’t seen recently. Welcome the family who’ve just moved into the street.

Have a conversation with somebody whose life looks completely different from yours.

No politics. No social media. No algorithm deciding who you should talk to.

Just two people talking.

One question

Think about the homes immediately around yours.

How many of the people living there can you name?

Not recognise.

Name.

My answer isn’t as many as I would like.

Perhaps yours isn’t either.

Growing up, my family didn’t have much money.

But we had neighbours.

We had people.

We had community.

It took me getting older to understand how valuable that actually was.

I miss it.

Perhaps community isn’t something we need to wait for governments, councils or organisations to rebuild for us.

Perhaps it starts much closer to home.

For me, maybe it starts four doors down.

With the man whose name I don’t know.

Not yet.

A note about this article

This article begins a Beyond the Headlines experiment.

Britain speaks many languages, so I intend to make selected essays available in some of the languages spoken across the country.

Every edition will carry the same argument, evidence and editorial standards. The English article will remain the original, and translations will be clearly identified.

I’m not interested in giving different communities different messages.

I’m interested in inviting more people into the same conversation.

One country. Many languages. Shared conversations.

🌍 Prefer another language?

This article can be translated on request.

Translations are produced with AI assistance and may contain linguistic or cultural inaccuracies. The English version remains the original and definitive edition.

If you’d like a translation, leave a comment with your preferred language. Fluent speakers are also welcome to flag any translation errors.

Same article. Same evidence. Same argument. Different language.

Leave a comment

The argument in 60 seconds

Don’t have time for the full article? Here’s the argument.

• Government expects us to take responsibility for our decisions. We should expect the same standard from government.

• That doesn’t mean pretending government can control everything. Migration, wars, international agreements and economic events impose real constraints.

• On immigration, legitimate concerns about borders, integration, crime and public services shouldn’t automatically be dismissed — but neither should claims be accepted without evidence.

• Government should be clearer about what it can control, what it cannot control, what its policies are intended to achieve and whether they actually worked.

• The same principle applies beyond immigration: NHS waiting lists, housing, welfare, infrastructure and public spending should be judged by outcomes, not announcements.

• Politicians would probably earn more trust by occasionally being willing to say four simple words: “We got this wrong.”

The full argument — including the evidence and the challenges to my own assumptions — is below. ↓

Yesterday, 230 people crossed the English Channel in a single small boat.

Two hundred and thirty people crowded onto one vessel.

It was the largest number yet recorded making the crossing in a single boat.

That’s the headline.

Then comes the complicating fact: small-boat crossings in 2026 are substantially lower than they were at the same point last year.

Both things are true.

And perhaps that contradiction says something about where Britain finds itself.

Government can point towards statistics showing progress. Yet many people look at what is happening around them and feel something very different.

That gap matters.

This isn’t an article blaming the people sitting in those boats for everything that is wrong with Britain. Nor is it an argument that government can simply flick a switch and stop irregular migration tomorrow.

It is about something much bigger.

Responsibility.

Government expects a great deal of it from us. We are expected to manage our finances, look after our health, save for retirement, obey the law, pay our taxes and take responsibility for the consequences of our decisions.

That seems reasonable to me. Personal responsibility matters.

But if government expects that standard from us, shouldn’t we expect something similar from government?

Something has changed in the national mood

Immigration is no longer a marginal concern in Britain.

It has become one of the country’s biggest political issues.

That doesn’t mean everybody concerned about immigration thinks the same thing.

Some worry about small boats and border control. Others worry about housing and public services. Some are concerned about integration and community cohesion. Others worry about crime and public safety.

Some simply look at the pace of change within their communities and wonder whether anyone ever asked how much change was manageable.

Not every fear will be supported by evidence. Some claims circulating online are exaggerated or simply false.

But the existence of the anxiety itself isn’t imaginary.

And dismissing it doesn’t make it disappear.

The Channel provides an uncomfortable example

Home Office figures show that 39,271 people arrived by small boat in the year ending March 2026.

There is important context behind that number.

Since 2018, 95% of people arriving by small boat have claimed asylum. Of those whose claims had received a substantive initial decision, 60% had been granted asylum or another form of protection.

That matters.

The idea that everyone arriving in a small boat can simply be immediately deported doesn’t reflect how Britain’s asylum system actually works.

We have asylum laws. We have international obligations. Claims have to be considered.

But acknowledging that doesn’t eliminate the question of border control.

Whatever someone’s eventual asylum decision, these journeys take place outside the normal immigration system and are frequently facilitated by organised criminal networks.

So perhaps asking “Who is actually in control?” is too simplistic.

The better question is:

Is government using effectively the powers it actually has?

Government cannot control everything

This is where I have to challenge my own argument.

Britain cannot control wars that displace populations. It cannot control political persecution overseas. It cannot unilaterally control the French coastline. It cannot force every foreign government to accept somebody Britain wants to return.

Government cannot simply ignore British courts or international agreements whenever they become inconvenient either.

Perhaps expecting complete control over migration is unrealistic.

But that doesn’t remove accountability.

It changes what accountability should mean.

I don’t expect government to control everything.

I expect government to explain what it can control, what it cannot control, what choices it has made and whether those choices worked.

Government isn’t doing nothing

That also needs acknowledging.

Home Office figures show 39,007 returns from the UK in the year ending March 2026, including voluntary and enforced returns. That was 7% higher than the previous year.

Among them were 2,750 people who had previously arrived by small boat, an increase of 16%.

Of the 39,007 total returns, roughly three-quarters were voluntary and one-quarter enforced.

Britain works with France. Enforcement activity has increased. Organised immigration crime is being targeted.

So saying government is doing nothing would be wrong.

But activity isn’t necessarily success.

The test should remain:

What were you trying to achieve, and did you achieve it?

Europe is changing its approach too

Britain isn’t the only country wrestling with irregular migration.

Across the European Union, governments are operating under a substantially revised system for dealing with asylum, borders and returns.

The EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact came into application in June 2026. It introduces common procedures for screening and registering irregular arrivals at the EU’s external borders, alongside faster asylum and return procedures.

That doesn’t mean Britain can simply copy the EU system.

Britain is no longer an EU member. Our legal arrangements, geography and international relationships are different.

But the comparison raises an important question.

If European governments believe faster border procedures and stronger return mechanisms can operate alongside their international obligations, what comparable options are available to Britain?

If Britain genuinely cannot legally adopt a particular measure, explain why.

If Britain could adopt it but government chooses not to, explain that choice.

And if politicians are promising something the law makes virtually impossible, stop promising it.

That would at least be honest.

What about the ECHR?

The European Convention on Human Rights regularly enters this debate.

Sometimes it is presented as though it prevents Britain controlling immigration altogether.

That is too simplistic.

There is also the Refugee Convention, domestic legislation, British courts, international agreements and the practical problem of returning somebody when another country refuses to accept them.

But again, government has choices.

If ministers believe a particular interpretation of human-rights law prevents a necessary policy, tell us exactly which provision causes the problem.

Tell us whether domestic legislation could change it. Tell us whether an international agreement prevents it. Tell us what leaving or renegotiating an agreement would actually mean.

Then let voters decide whether the consequences are worth it.

What frustrates people is hearing politicians promise an outcome and later explain why they never possessed the power to deliver it.

What about crime and public safety?

This is one of the most sensitive parts of the immigration debate.

It is also one we shouldn’t avoid simply because it is uncomfortable.

There have been serious crimes committed by foreign nationals and migrants in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including sexual offences. Those individual cases understandably attract enormous public attention and concern.

But we also have to be precise.

Foreign national, migrant, asylum seeker and irregular migrant are not interchangeable categories.

Britain does not currently publish sufficiently comprehensive national crime statistics cross-referenced by immigration status to allow us to make sweeping claims about the offending rate of people who entered illegally or subsequently claimed asylum.

That absence of data creates its own problem.

People see individual cases. They see reports from Britain and elsewhere in Europe. They see claims circulating online. Then they hear completely contradictory interpretations of what those cases mean.

Government should answer that uncertainty with evidence.

If immigration status has no meaningful relationship with particular categories of serious crime, good statistics should help demonstrate that.

If sufficiently robust evidence identifies particular problems, government should understand them and respond.

Either way, the public deserves reliable information.

Pretending the question itself is unacceptable merely creates suspicion.

When legitimate questions become labels

This brings me to something I think is becoming increasingly damaging.

Some people no longer believe they can raise concerns about immigration, integration or changes within their communities without being placed into a political category.

Ask whether immigration levels are sustainable and you may be described as right-wing.

Raise concerns about integration and somebody may assume hostility towards immigrants.

Question spending priorities and the discussion can quickly become an argument about your motives rather than the question you asked.

And sometimes people feel that raising uncomfortable questions risks an accusation of racism.

Let’s be clear.

Racism exists. Hostility towards somebody simply because of their race, ethnicity or nationality should be challenged.

But challenging racism does not require us to pretend that every question about immigration is racist.

Those are completely different things.

Someone should be able to ask whether immigration is putting pressure on housing without hating immigrants.

They should be able to question asylum policy without opposing genuine refugees.

They should be able to ask whether integration is working without believing one race or culture is superior to another.

They should be able to raise concerns about crime without holding an entire community responsible for the actions of individuals.

And they should be able to ask whether government spending reflects the priorities of the people paying for it.

The evidence may show that some of those assumptions are wrong.

Fine.

Challenge the argument with evidence. Don’t dismiss the person with a label.

Because when legitimate questions become unacceptable questions, they don’t disappear.

People simply stop asking them publicly.

The frustration remains. The suspicion grows.

And eventually people conclude that nobody is listening.

Then there is the question of priorities

Britain has finite resources.

The NHS is under pressure. Councils are struggling. Housing is expensive. Social care faces enormous pressures. Welfare expenditure is substantial and defence spending is rising.

At the same time, Britain continues to spend billions through its international development programme and considerable sums supporting asylum seekers within the UK.

Those are different areas of government spending with different purposes and obligations. It would be misleading simply to add them together and suggest the money could automatically be transferred from one service to another.

There is also important context.

Britain’s overseas aid budget is being reduced, not increased.

UK Official Development Assistance was approximately £13 billion in 2025, down 7.4% from 2024. The government intends to reduce aid spending further, towards the equivalent of 0.3% of national income by 2027, as defence spending rises.

There is another complication that isn’t obvious when we talk about “foreign aid”.

Approximately £2.4 billion of Britain’s aid budget in 2025 was actually spent inside the UK supporting refugees and asylum seekers.

So this isn’t simply a question of Britain handing money to foreign governments while domestic services struggle.

Reality is more complicated.

But taxpayers are still entitled to question priorities.

That isn’t the same as saying asylum seekers should be left destitute. It isn’t the same as saying Britain should never help people overseas.

It is asking:

How much are we spending? Why are we spending it? What are we trying to achieve? And is it working?

If overseas aid advances Britain’s humanitarian, diplomatic or strategic interests, explain the benefit.

If substantial expenditure processing and accommodating asylum seekers is unavoidable, explain why — and explain what government is doing to reduce unnecessary costs.

If another approach would cost less or produce better results, examine it.

Public money always involves choices.

Government should be prepared to explain those choices to the people providing the money.

Welfare raises the same issue

Government forecasts put UK social-security spending at approximately £334 billion in 2025–26, with around 55% of Great Britain’s social-security expenditure going to pensioners.

That number doesn’t prove Britain spends too much.

A large number isn’t evidence of waste.

Britain has an ageing population. People become sick and disabled. Families lose income. Pensioners have contributed throughout their working lives.

But expenditure on that scale inevitably involves choices.

If government reforms welfare because it says the changes will help more people into employment, measure the outcome.

Two years later, tell us how many actually entered work.

If a new assessment system produces large numbers of successful appeals, publish that too.

Don’t simply announce a reform.

Show us what happened.

The same test works everywhere

This is why I don’t think this is fundamentally an immigration article.

Take the NHS.

If government promises millions of additional appointments, don’t ask us to judge the announcement.

Did patients wait less time? Could they get appointments? Did waiting lists fall?

Housing is the same.

If government announces a target for new homes, tell us how many were actually built and whether they were built where people needed them.

Infrastructure?

If a major project exceeds its budget or timetable, explain why.

The principle is remarkably simple:

What did you promise? What happened? What did it cost? What will you do if it didn’t work?

People don’t expect perfection

At least I don’t.

Government cannot control everything.

Wars happen. Pandemics happen. Economies change. Migration patterns change. International agreements constrain what countries can do. Policies that looked sensible sometimes fail.

That’s government.

But there is a difference between accepting complexity and accepting the absence of accountability.

Government asks us to trust it with decisions about our money, our health, our borders, our security and our future.

That relationship cannot work if responsibility travels in only one direction.

Nor can it work if people believe their concerns aren’t even allowed to be discussed.

Government doesn’t have to agree with every public concern.

Sometimes the correct answer will be:

Yes. There is a problem.

Sometimes it will be:

No. The evidence doesn’t support what you believe.

Both are legitimate answers.

What matters is answering the question.

Four words I’d like to hear

I don’t expect politicians never to make mistakes.

I would probably trust them more if they admitted them.

There are four words I would genuinely like to hear from government more often:

We got this wrong.

We made a decision. It didn’t work. The evidence shows that.

Here’s what we’ve learned.

Here’s what we’re changing.

And here’s how you can judge whether the replacement works.

That isn’t weakness.

That’s accountability.

Government expects us to take responsibility for our decisions every day.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect the same standard from the people governing us.

And perhaps listening is part of that responsibility too.

Not agreeing with everything people say. Not validating every rumour or fear.

Listening. Investigating. Publishing the evidence.

And answering legitimate questions without first deciding what political label should be attached to the person asking them.

Because treating people like adults means accepting that they are capable of asking difficult questions.

Government should be capable of answering them.

What do you think?

Are people genuinely being ignored when they raise concerns about immigration, public spending and social change?

Or has political debate become so polarised that neither side is particularly willing to listen to evidence that challenges what it already believes?

And would you trust government more if politicians were occasionally prepared to say:

“We got this wrong”?

Editorial note

This is an opinion and analysis article about government policy, accountability and public concern. Statistics and factual claims have been checked against publicly available sources available at the time of publication. References to immigration, asylum and crime distinguish between different legal and statistical categories where the available evidence allows. The views and conclusions expressed are my own.

Don’t have time for the full article? Here’s the argument.

• Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to threaten, harass or incite violence. Democracies need legal boundaries.

• My concern is something different: whether people are becoming less confident about expressing lawful opinions or asking difficult questions.

• The pressure to remain silent doesn’t only come from government. It can come from employers, social media, activist campaigns, religious or political groups, or fear of social and professional consequences.

• When people decide that staying silent is safer than speaking, public debate becomes poorer.

• Institutions can suffer from the same problem. Avoiding uncomfortable evidence because it might cause controversy can have serious consequences.

• There is a legitimate counterargument: restrictions on some forms of expression can protect people from intimidation and help others participate freely. That deserves serious consideration.

• Britain is not an Orwellian dictatorship. It remains a democracy with elections, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.

• My argument is simpler: a healthy democracy needs people who can disagree lawfully, respectfully and with evidence — and remain willing to change their minds.

The full argument, evidence and counterarguments are below. ↓

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” — George Orwell

Before you read any further, I want to explain why I wrote this essay.

It is not intended to inflame, divide or provoke conflict.

It is an invitation to think.

The purpose of Beyond the Headlines is to step away from the noise of daily politics and explore the principles that shape a democratic society. My aim is not to tell you what to think. It is to examine evidence, consider different perspectives and encourage thoughtful discussion.

Where I refer to official reports, academic research or the law, I have tried to rely on primary sources wherever possible. Where I express an opinion, it is exactly that—my interpretation of the available evidence.

Reasonable people will disagree with some of my conclusions.

I welcome that.

Because a healthy democracy is not one in which everyone thinks alike.

It is one in which people can disagree lawfully, respectfully and with evidence.

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A question that has stayed with me

Lately I have found myself asking a simple question.

Have we become less confident about disagreeing with one another?

Britain has never been free from disagreement.

We have argued about politics, religion, taxation, immigration, foreign policy, healthcare and countless other subjects. Those debates have often been passionate, sometimes uncomfortable and occasionally deeply divisive.

That is not a weakness.

It is one of the characteristics of a free society.

What feels different today is not that disagreement exists.

It is that many people appear increasingly reluctant to take part in it.

Some conversations end before they begin.

Some subjects are quietly avoided.

Whether that hesitation reflects reality or simply perception is open to debate.

But perception matters.

If people begin to believe that some lawful questions are no longer worth asking because the personal cost feels too high, confidence begins to weaken.

Freedom of speech and confidence

Freedom of speech has never meant freedom to threaten people, incite violence or commit crimes through speech.

British law recognises freedom of expression as a fundamental democratic principle while also recognising that rights exist alongside responsibilities. Every democracy draws legal boundaries around threats, harassment, incitement and other unlawful conduct.

The question has never been whether boundaries should exist.

The question is where they should be drawn and whether the public has confidence that they are applied fairly and consistently.

Reasonable people can disagree about that.

Indeed, they should be able to.

More than 160 years ago, John Stuart Mill argued that even mistaken opinions have value because they force accepted beliefs to justify themselves rather than becoming unquestioned assumptions.

The best response to a weak argument is usually a stronger argument.

Not silence.

Confidence is fragile

The more I reflected on this subject, the more I realised that my concern is not simply about free speech.

It is about confidence.

When I use that word, I mean confidence that our institutions act fairly, confidence that the law is applied consistently, confidence that citizens can raise lawful questions without unnecessary fear, and confidence that evidence matters more than outrage.

These forms of confidence are connected.

When one weakens, the others often do too.

Long-running public surveys suggest that trust in politics and public institutions has declined. That does not prove those institutions are failing.

It does suggest that public confidence has become more fragile.

Trust, once lost, is not easily rebuilt.

Why people remain silent

The law is only one influence on what people say.

Social pressure can be equally powerful.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence proposed that people often choose not to express opinions they believe will isolate them socially.

More recent research has reached similar conclusions.

People sometimes remain silent not because they fear prosecution, but because they fear misunderstanding, professional consequences or public hostility.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to free expression is not always legal.

Sometimes it is cultural.

Perhaps it is the colleague who stays quiet during a meeting.

The neighbour who changes the subject.

The parent who decides not to ask a difficult question at a school meeting.

None of these people has been prevented from speaking by the state.

Yet each has decided that remaining silent feels safer than joining the conversation.

Pressure can come from many directions

Pressure to remain silent can come from many directions.

It may come from governments through legislation, from employers through workplace policies, from social media through online outrage, from activist campaigns seeking to deplatform speakers, from religious or political groups attempting to discourage criticism, or simply from the fear of social or professional consequences.

The source of the pressure matters less than the principle involved.

In a confident democracy, lawful ideas should be met with argument and evidence rather than intimidation or attempts to silence them.

That principle applies consistently, regardless of who is applying the pressure or whose views are being challenged.

When people believe they can raise lawful questions, challenge prevailing opinion and disagree respectfully without fear of intimidation, democracy becomes stronger.

When they believe the personal cost of speaking is simply too high, public debate becomes poorer.

What institutions can teach us?

Individuals are not the only ones capable of avoiding difficult conversations.

Institutions can do the same.

History shows that organisations sometimes become reluctant to confront uncomfortable evidence because they fear reputational damage, public controversy or simply getting things wrong.

One example can be found in the independent inquiries into child sexual exploitation in several English towns.

Those inquiries documented catastrophic institutional failures over many years. They identified multiple causes, including poor leadership, failures to believe victims, inadequate professional practice and, in some instances, concerns among officials about discussing perpetrators’ ethnicity because of fears about community tensions or accusations of racism.

The lesson extends well beyond those inquiries.

When institutions become reluctant to confront uncomfortable evidence—whatever the reason—public confidence is damaged.

That is why transparency matters.

That is why accountability matters.

And that is why difficult conversations matter.

A democracy that can disagree

Questions about free expression extend far beyond the courts.

Universities, publishers, broadcasters and other institutions regularly face difficult decisions about open discussion, competing rights and institutional responsibilities.

There are no simple answers.

The challenge for any democracy is to preserve enough confidence that difficult ideas can be examined openly while protecting people from genuine harm.

That balance will never be perfect.

But it is a balance worth striving for.

Many people also argue that stronger action against some forms of speech protects democracy rather than weakens it. They believe the law should protect people from intimidation, harassment and incitement, and that unrestricted speech can sometimes silence others rather than empower them.

That perspective deserves serious consideration.

My own view is that these objectives should be pursued together wherever possible, and that restrictions on lawful speech should always be approached with great care.

Orwell’s real warning

George Orwell’s 1984 is often used as a political slogan.

I think it deserves to be read more carefully than that.

Britain is not Orwell’s fictional dictatorship.

We remain a democracy governed by elections, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.

The warning Orwell offers is more subtle.

He reminds us that people can begin to censor themselves long before anyone forces them to do so.

That is why confidence matters.

A democracy does not become stronger because everyone agrees.

It becomes stronger because citizens retain the confidence to question, to challenge and to change their minds when better evidence emerges.

The conversation worth protecting

Before I finish, I want to make one point absolutely clear.

This essay is not an argument for weakening laws against unlawful speech, threats, harassment or incitement to violence.

Those protections belong in a democratic society.

My argument is about something different.

It is about preserving the confidence to discuss difficult issues lawfully, respectfully and with evidence.

Freedom of speech is not valuable because we all agree.

It is valuable because we do not.

History reminds us that many ideas we now take for granted began as unpopular opinions.

Others were tested in public and rejected.

That is how open debate is supposed to work.

Perhaps the greatest strength of a democracy is not that everyone thinks alike.

It is that people have the confidence to disagree, to listen, to examine evidence honestly and to remain willing to change their minds.

If we can preserve that confidence, disagreement becomes something positive.

Not a threat.

But one of democracy’s greatest strengths.

Supporting References

1. Human Rights Act 1998, Schedule 1, Article 10 (Freedom of Expression).

2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).

3. National Centre for Social Research, British Social Attitudes 41: Damaged Politics? (2024).

4. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin (1984).

5. Commission for Countering Extremism & Ipsos UK, Freedom of Expression Survey: Findings Report (2025).

6. Alexis Jay, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013) (2014).

Editorial note: This article distinguishes between verified facts, official reports, academic research and the author’s own interpretation. Its purpose is to encourage evidence-based discussion rather than deepen division. Readers are encouraged to consult the sources and reach their own conclusions.

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This essay begins with a question, not a conclusion.

It is not written to criticise any religion, culture or community. Nor is it an attempt to persuade you to adopt my views.

I write from my own experience of living in Britain, supported by history, research and personal reflection. My aim is to explore how people with very different beliefs can continue to live together in a free and democratic society.

You may not agree with every observation I make, and that is perfectly acceptable.

My hope is simply that this essay encourages thoughtful conversation rather than division.

When I Was Growing Up

When I was growing up, Sundays were different.

Most shops were closed. The roads were quieter. Time seemed to slow down. Whether people went to church or not, Sunday felt different because society treated it differently.

I was christened into the Church of England.

My father was Catholic.

My mother was Protestant.

At the time, that was not always an easy combination. Religion shaped families, friendships and communities in ways that younger generations may find difficult to imagine today.

My father eventually fell out with the Church because of the way he was treated.

Despite their differences, my parents agreed on one thing:

Treat people with respect.

Looking back, I realise that lesson has stayed with me far longer than any religious tradition.

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A Country That Keeps Changing

Britain has never stood still.

I have watched it change throughout my lifetime.

Some of those changes have been wonderful.

Healthcare has advanced beyond anything my grandparents could have imagined. Medical science has given people longer, healthier lives. Society has become more accepting in many ways. Old divisions that once seemed impossible to overcome have gradually faded.

But change also raises questions.

During the last five years, I have noticed conversations becoming more anxious. Trust in institutions appears more fragile. Public debate often feels more polarised. Many people seem to believe they are being asked to choose sides rather than find common ground.

Whether that feeling is justified or not, it has become part of our national conversation.

Which leaves me asking a simple question:

What actually holds a society together when everything around it is changing?

Looking Beyond the Headlines

I sometimes sit in a café and simply watch people.

Families chatting over lunch.

Children laughing.

Friends meeting for coffee.

People from different generations and backgrounds sharing the same space without giving it a second thought.

It reminds me that ordinary life is often far more peaceful than the world presented through headlines and social media.

Most people are not looking for conflict.

They are looking for security.

Purpose.

A chance to build a good life.

A future for their children.

Perhaps we have more in common than we sometimes realise.

A Different Britain

Britain today is home to people from every part of the world, bringing different cultures, traditions, faiths and perspectives.

For many people, this diversity has enriched society. It has influenced our food, music, businesses, universities and understanding of the wider world.

For others, rapid demographic, cultural and technological change has raised questions about identity, integration and what Britain’s future will look like.

Both reactions exist.

Ignoring either one does not help us understand the country we live in.

The more important question is this:

How do people with different beliefs continue to build one society together?

History Offers a Clue

History reminds us that this question is not new.

Civilisations have always experienced migration, cultural exchange and religious diversity.

Sometimes those encounters produced remarkable achievements.

Sometimes they produced conflict.

One of the most important turning points in European history came during the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment thinkers, including John Locke and Montesquieu, helped develop ideas about toleration, constitutional limits and the rule of law.

They were asking a profound question:

How can people who believe different things live together peacefully?

The answer was not that everyone should think alike.

Nor was it that one religion or philosophy should dominate all others.

Instead, another principle gradually emerged:

The rule of law.

Not simply laws.

The rule of law.

The idea that every individual, whatever their beliefs or background, is subject to the same laws and entitled to the same legal protections.

That principle remains one of the foundations of modern democratic society.

The law does not require us to agree.

It requires us to recognise one another as equals.

Difference Is Not the Problem

One mistake we sometimes make is assuming that people who believe differently from us must somehow be against us.

In reality, most people—whatever their religion, politics or cultural background—want remarkably similar things.

A safe home.

Meaningful work.

A peaceful life.

A future for their children.

The real danger is not difference itself.

It arises when any ideology—religious, political or otherwise—claims that some people deserve fewer rights than others, rejects peaceful disagreement or replaces debate with intimidation or violence.

Ideas should always be open to challenge.

People should always be treated with dignity.

A free society requires both.

The Importance of Trust

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Britain is not diversity.

It is trust.

Trust in one another.

Trust in our institutions.

Trust that despite our differences, we still belong to the same national community.

Societies rarely weaken simply because people disagree.

They weaken when people stop believing they share a common future.

That is why respect matters.

Not because everyone thinks alike.

But because everyone accepts that they are part of the same society.

What Holds Us Together?

After nearly seventy years, I do not think the answer is one religion.

Or one political movement.

Or one culture.

I think it is something simpler.

A shared commitment to:

• respect,

• responsibility,

• freedom,

• the rule of law,

• and the belief that every person deserves equal dignity.

Freedom cannot survive without responsibility.

Rights are strongest when accompanied by responsibility towards others.

The balance between the two is what allows a democracy to flourish.

A Britain Worth Leaving Behind

Perhaps every generation believes the country they grew up in was somehow better.

I am not sure that is true.

The Britain of my childhood was not perfect.

It had its own divisions.

Its own prejudices.

Its own injustices.

I do not want my grandchildren to inherit yesterday’s Britain.

I want them to inherit a better Britain.

A Britain where people from different backgrounds live together peacefully.

Where religion has a place for those who choose it—not as something that divides us, but as something that offers hope, compassion and purpose.

A Britain that continues to embrace scientific progress and better healthcare while remembering that technology should always serve humanity.

A Britain where freedom is matched by responsibility.

Where disagreement is matched by respect.

Where confidence replaces fear.

Strong societies are not built because people think alike.

They are built because people choose to trust one another despite their differences.

That may not solve every problem.

But I believe it is where every solution begins.

I’d Like to Leave You With a Question

I do not write these essays to tell people what to think.

I write them because I believe difficult questions deserve thoughtful conversations.

So I would like to ask you one:

As Britain continues to change, what values do you believe we should never lose?

Continue Exploring

Research

• Office for National Statistics — Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021

• British Social Attitudes Survey

• House of Commons Library

Read

• John Locke — A Letter Concerning Toleration

• Montesquieu — The Spirit of the Laws

• Tom Holland — Dominion

• Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America

Reflect

• What holds a society together?

• Can people with different beliefs still build one nation?

• Which values should every generation pass on to the next?

Editorial Note

Beyond the Headlines explores contemporary issues through personal experience, historical context and evidence.

Its purpose is not to provide definitive answers, but to encourage thoughtful discussion.

If this essay has helped you ask better questions, then it has achieved its purpose.

Leave a comment

The letter in 60 seconds

Don’t have time for the full letter? Here’s what happened.

• I’m 67 and, like many people, occasionally need the NHS. Last month I needed it twice.

• Getting help from my GP no longer meant simply phoning for an appointment. I was directed towards a form that would be assessed before I knew whether I’d get a conversation.

• On another occasion, I went to A&E. I was triaged quickly and received tests, but then waited around eight hours to see a doctor.

• The waiting room and corridors were full. I spoke to a man with cancer who told me he’d been waiting 12 hours on a trolley for a bed.

• The NHS staff I encountered were working extremely hard in difficult circumstances. This isn’t an attack on them.

• My experience wasn’t simply about waiting. It left me wondering what happens when accessing a public healthcare system becomes difficult enough that people who can afford alternatives begin paying privately.

• I don’t claim to know whether what I experienced is the result of funding, demand, organisation, policy or some combination of them.

What I do know is what it feels like to be sitting in that corridor.

The full letter is below. ↓

I want to tell you about what it's like to need a doctor in Britain now. I'm 67. I've lived here my whole life. Last month, I needed one twice.

I occasionally need to call a doctor. I like to keep myself active, but I am a type 2 diabetic, which is common in the UK, and as you get older you do need the support of healthcare professionals, who do a fantastic job under difficult conditions.

Last month I needed to see my GP. For forty years, I called the surgery and asked for an appointment. Last month, I was told to fill out a form. Someone I have never met would read it and decide if my problem warranted a conversation. Or I could call 111, which lets you speak to someone, although there is usually a long wait, depending on the time of day.

In another instance I had to attend A&E. You are triaged quite quickly — I was. Then I had to wait about eight hours to see a doctor. The waiting room and corridors were completely full. Some people were on trolleys. To be fair, ECGs and blood tests came quickly. The delay was waiting for a doctor to read them.

The staff work damned hard in very difficult circumstances. I have seen them abused. I want to be clear: this is not their fault.

I was admitted around 8pm. By midnight, the hospital had gone quiet. I started talking to a man on a trolley next to me. He had drips and tubes everywhere — up his nose, in his arms. He told me he had cancer, and had been waiting twelve hours in a corridor for a bed.

I waited eight hours. NHS England's own data shows that last year, 40% of A&E patients waited more than four hours. The target is 95%. My wait was not unusual. It was the new normal.

I don't know whether this is mismanagement, arithmetic, or something more deliberate. What I know is the corridor. And what I know is that when a public system becomes this hard to use, and a private alternative exists, people with means will start to choose the alternative. I am one of those people. And I am wondering whether that was always the plan, or whether nobody in charge cares enough to stop it.

If you found this letter worth reading, The Third Act publishes weekly letters from Britain — on money, work, and what it means to live here now. No noise, just something worth sitting with.

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There’s an old saying, the kind that turns up at funerals and in pub conversations that go on a little too long: there are no pockets in shrouds.

It’s meant as a joke, mostly. A wry reminder that you can’t take it with you. But sit with it for a moment, and it stops being funny. If none of us can carry a single pound past the point of death, then what, exactly, has all the effort been for? What is money actually for — not in theory, but in the one life you get to spend it in?

This isn’t an article about tax law, inheritance thresholds, or which political party wants to raise or lower them. It’s a question that sits underneath all of that: who has the strongest claim to the wealth a person builds over a lifetime? The person who earned it? Their family? The society that, one way or another, helped make the earning possible? Or the generations still to come?

There’s no clean answer. But it’s worth asking properly — and it’s a question about to become far more urgent than it’s ever been. Analysts now put the value of assets due to pass between generations in the UK somewhere between £5.5 and £7 trillion over the next thirty years — the largest handover of wealth this country has ever seen. Most of us will be on one side of that handover or the other, quite possibly both.

If questions like this are your kind of thing, this is what The Third Act is for. New essays land every week — no noise, just something worth sitting with.

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What is money actually for?

Most of us never stop to answer this directly. We chase money because we have to, then because we’re used to, and somewhere in there the original question — for what? — gets lost.

Security is usually the first honest answer. Not having to panic when the boiler breaks or the car fails its MOT. After that, the answers start to diverge. For some, money means freedom — the ability to leave a job that’s making you unhappy, or simply to say no. For others it means experience: the holiday, the meal out, the thing that becomes a memory rather than an object. For some it’s status, whether they’d admit that or not. And for a great many people, especially past a certain age, it becomes less about themselves and more about the people they love — the deposit for a first home, the school fees, the safety net they never had.

None of these answers is more legitimate than the others. But it’s worth noticing which one you’d give, because it tends to shape everything else — including what you think should happen to money after you’re gone.

Legacy is bigger than money

It’s easy to slide from “inheritance” straight to “money,” but legacy was never only that. People leave behind property and savings, yes, but also knowledge, values, businesses, half-finished projects, photographs nobody’s sorted through, communities they helped build, and the particular way they had of making other people feel like they mattered.

Ask most people what they actually remember of a grandparent, and it’s rarely the amount in the will. It’s a way of speaking, a recipe, a piece of advice repeated so often it became a family in-joke, the sense of being loved without condition. Money is one form of inheritance. It may not even be the most durable one.

Why do we want to leave something behind?

The instinct to pass something on runs deep, and it’s rarely about the money itself. Sometimes it’s love, plain and simple — wanting to make life easier for people you won’t be around to help directly. Sometimes it’s a sense of duty, the idea that a certain amount is simply owed to the next generation because that’s how it’s always worked. Sometimes it’s fear — of family conflict, of being thought careless with what was built, of breaking a pattern nobody’s ever questioned. And sometimes, if we’re honest, it’s social expectation: everyone else seems to be doing it, so we do too, without ever quite asking why.

None of these motives is shameful. But they’re worth separating out, because they don’t all lead to the same conclusion about when wealth should be shared.

Spend it now, or leave it later?

Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough: would your family benefit more from your help now, or from an inheritance in twenty or thirty years’ time?

A gift given today — towards a deposit, a wedding, a business, a difficult year — often lands at the exact moment it’s needed most. An inheritance, by contrast, frequently arrives when the children are in their fifties or sixties, already established, sometimes already comfortable. There’s a strange irony in working a lifetime to leave money to people who may no longer need it in the way they once did.

There’s a case, too, for what we spend on ourselves while we still can. Behavioural research from the University of Texas found that people consistently get more happiness from money spent on experiences than from money spent on things — before, during and after the spending happens — because a memory tends to hold its value in a way a possession rarely does. It’s a small piece of evidence for something many people arrive at instinctively in later life: that a shared holiday or a family gathering paid for now may do more good, felt by more people, than the same sum sitting untouched in an estate.

None of this is an argument against saving, or against leaving something behind. It’s simply a question worth sitting with: is unused wealth, kept safe until death, really the wisest form of legacy? Or can the same money, spent deliberately and with intention while you’re still here to see the effect of it, create something inheritance alone never could?

Still with me? This is usually where people either agree with everything I’ve said or want to argue with all of it. Either way — subscribe and you’ll get the next one.

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What government does with it

Setting politics aside for a moment, here are the facts. In the UK, inheritance tax is charged at 40% on the value of an estate above the nil-rate band, which currently stands at £325,000 per person — a figure that has been frozen since 2009 and is set to remain frozen until at least 2030. Reliefs can raise the effective threshold: up to £500,000 for someone passing on a family home to direct descendants, or up to £1 million for a married couple doing the same. Because the threshold hasn’t moved while property values have, more estates are being pulled into paying it each year, and the Treasury now expects to raise close to £9 billion a year from it. That revenue — from this tax and others — funds public services: healthcare, pensions, welfare, education, defence, infrastructure. None of this is a value judgement. It’s simply how the system currently works.

The harder question sits above the mechanics: should wealth accumulated over a lifetime contribute something back to the society a person lived in, once they no longer need it? Or should it remain entirely within the family that built it, untouched by any wider claim?

Both positions have serious people arguing for them, and both rest on something true. One rests on the idea that no one succeeds entirely alone — that roads, schools, healthcare and a functioning society all played some part in any individual’s success, and so some return to that society isn’t unreasonable. The other rests on the idea that what a person has earned through their own effort and choices is theirs to direct entirely as they see fit, and that the state has no automatic claim on what was never its to begin with.

You don’t have to resolve that tension to see that it’s real.

Whose fairness?

Fairness, it turns out, means different things depending on where you’re standing.

Property rights say: I earned it, it’s mine to give as I choose. Individual freedom says: no one should tell me what to do with what I have. Social responsibility says: those with more have some obligation to those with less. Equality of opportunity says: children shouldn’t start life on wildly different footing purely because of who their parents happened to be. Intergenerational fairness says: today’s wealth was often built on tomorrow’s resources, so tomorrow has some claim too.

Each of these is a coherent, defensible idea of fairness. The trouble is that they don’t agree with each other, and there’s no formula that ranks them objectively. Which one feels most true to you probably says less about economics and more about how you were raised, what you’ve experienced, and who you love.

A few questions worth sitting with

What is wealth actually for, in your own life — not in general, but specifically yours?

When does “enough” quietly become “too much”?

Would you rather help the people you love while you’re alive to see it matter, or leave them something once you’re gone?

If the society around you played some part in your success — the school, the health service, the roads, the rule of law — does that society have any claim on what you leave behind?

Is dying with a large estate a mark of success, or a sign of opportunity never quite used?

There are no correct answers here. Only more honest ones.

A personal reflection

I’m further along in life than I am short of it, and questions about time have started to matter to me more than questions about money. That’s a fairly ordinary thing to notice at this stage, but it hasn’t made noticing it any less strange.

I don’t have advice to offer here. I’m thinking aloud, the way you do when a question won’t quite settle.

I’ve wondered, more than once, what I actually want my own money to do. Some of it, clearly, is security — the quiet reassurance of not having to worry. Some of it is experience, the things I’d rather do now than defer to some imagined later that isn’t guaranteed to arrive. And a good deal of it, if I’m honest, is about the people I care about — wanting to help them, not necessarily after I’m gone, but while I’m still here to see what that help actually does.

I don’t know what the right balance is between spending, giving, and leaving. I suspect there isn’t one right balance — only the one that fits the life you’ve actually lived, and the people you’ve actually loved, rather than the one convention expects of you. That’s not a comfortable answer. It isn’t meant to be.

Coming back to the shroud

There are no pockets in shrouds. Whatever we’ve built, whatever we’ve saved, none of it travels with us past the end.

Perhaps the real question isn’t how much we leave behind. Perhaps it’s whether we used what we had wisely while we were here — and whether our greatest legacy is measured only in money, or in the lives we touched, the opportunities we created, and the values we passed on.

That’s not a question with an answer at the bottom of the page. It’s one worth carrying with you instead.

Would you rather help the people you love now, or leave them something later? I’d genuinely like to know — drop it in the comments.

If this got you thinking, there’s more where it came from.

Sources & further reading

• UK inheritance tax thresholds and rules, 2026/27 — WillSafe UK

• Analysis of the frozen nil-rate band and its effect on ordinary estates — Ask Accountants UK

• Scale of the UK’s coming intergenerational wealth transfer — Unbiased

• Research on experiential versus material spending and happiness — UT Austin / McCombs School of Business

Figures on tax thresholds and reliefs are correct as of the 2026/27 tax year and subject to change in future Budgets — readers with significant estates should seek independent financial or legal advice rather than relying on this article for planning purposes.

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Here’s the fantasy: somewhere under all the recommendation engines, there’s a “real you” waiting to be dug out. Delete the apps, kill autoplay, and your true taste surfaces again, like it was buried, not erased. I don’t buy it. There was no pre-algorithmic self sitting around waiting for rescue. Taste has always been manufactured by something outside you — critics, radio DJs, whoever got to decide what went at eye level in the record shop, whoever in your friend group had the social capital to make something cool. The algorithm didn’t invent influence. It just got faster at it, and better at hiding what it’s doing.

Slave to the algorithm

Forget content for a second. The real complaint is architectural. These systems are built to maximise engagement, full stop, and engagement is not the same thing as your wellbeing. A friend who tells you about a song wants you to like it. A feed just wants you to keep opening it. So when people say they feel enslaved to the algorithm, that’s not really a metaphor. It’s a fairly literal description of an incentive mismatch: something is being optimised, and it isn’t you.

Breaking away

But “escape” has a hole in it. There’s no neutral, untouched ground you land on after quitting Instagram. You don’t rediscover some pure inner voice; you just fall back on whatever else is available: family, print, your own patchy memory of what you used to like before all this. Those are still algorithms. They’re just slower, and run by humans instead of servers. Somebody proud of having “broken away” because they now only read physical books hasn’t actually left curation behind. They’ve swapped one set of curators for another. That’s a real upgrade. It’s just not an escape.

Where this pattern actually came from

None of this started with an app. It’s worth tracing the lineage, because it shows the hook isn’t new — only the exit has been removed from it, one generation at a time.

Television soap operas built entire episodes around the cliffhanger: end mid-tension, make the audience wait a day or a week, and let the wait itself do the work of bringing them back. The format wasn’t a one-off trick — it got reproduced independently across British soaps, American daytime drama, and telenovelas around the world, because it exploits something basic about how curiosity works, not something specific to any one culture.

Advertising formalised a related idea. AIDA — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action — was formulated by advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, built around a funnel with an exit: get someone’s attention, build interest and desire, then get them to act — buy the product, and the loop resolves.

Clickbait strips the funnel down to a headline. It works by opening what psychologists call an information gap — a felt discrepancy between what you know and what you want to know. George Loewenstein’s 1994 paper on the psychology of curiosity described curiosity itself as a kind of deprivation, a state that builds precisely because a knowledge gap has become impossible to ignore, pushing a person to chase down whatever would close it. “You won’t believe what happens next” isn’t information — it’s an engineered gap. And because there’s no purchase to complete, no funnel to exit, the gap just reopens with the next headline.

Infinite scroll removes the exit at the level of the interface itself, not just the copy. The feature was introduced by designer Aza Raskin in 2006, originally meant to smooth out page-loading, before becoming the default engagement mechanic of nearly every major platform. It works on a principle borrowed straight from slot machines: rewards that show up unpredictably rather than every time train the strongest, hardest-to-quit habits of all. You don’t scroll because you’re always rewarded. You scroll because you might be.

The economics changed too, not just the psychology

Television and radio paid enormous sums to produce the content that built an audience, then sold that audience to advertisers. Platforms inverted the model. YouTube’s standard revenue split gives creators 55% of ad revenue on long-form video and 45% on Shorts, with the platform keeping the rest — but the creators are the ones supplying the labour, equipment, and time that television networks used to fund directly. TikTok’s effective creator payout is widely reported to run closer to 10–20% of ad revenue, a much thinner cut for the same unpaid production labour. Either way, the “ratings” that once came from Nielsen boxes have been replaced by likes, views, and watch time, generated for free by the public, and sold to advertisers at a fraction of what broadcast-era content cost to produce.

If the audience has effectively become unpaid production labour, the next question is whether that arrangement holds, breaks, or gets regulated — and that’s already in motion. The EU’s Digital Services Act now requires large platforms to explain how their recommendation systems rank content and to offer a non-profiling feed option where feasible, and in 2026 a Dutch court ordered Meta to provide a more durable opt-out to a purely chronological timeline rather than its algorithmic default. Neither undoes the underlying economics, but both are concrete signs that the “demand transparency” counter-movement is already underway, not hypothetical.

So is it possible to walk away?

Structurally, yes: people delete the apps and stay off them. But whether it’s a fair fight is a different question, and the honest answer is no. Infinite scroll, autoplay, and variable-timed rewards aren’t accidents of good UX — they’re deliberately engineered and continuously tested by teams whose job is to raise the number. Willpower against a product built by people paid to defeat it isn’t a level contest. That’s a sharper version of the “no neutral ground” point above: it’s not just that there’s no escape to a pure state, it’s that the loop you’re trying to leave was built by adversaries to your attention in a way a bookstore shelf, a radio DJ, or even a soap opera’s writers’ room never quite was.

Where this might be heading

Fiction got here before the trend lines did. One well-known dystopian TV episode imagined a world where a single aggregated score, built from peer ratings after every interaction, decided your access to jobs, housing, and social standing. It’s fiction, but it’s not pure fantasy — pieces of it already exist, just scattered rather than unified: a credit score here, a driver rating there, a follower count somewhere else, each with real but partial consequences.

The more plausible ten-year trajectory isn’t one number ruling everyone’s life — platforms have commercial reasons to keep their scoring systems proprietary and separate, not merge them into a single dystopian dial. What’s more likely is quieter and messier: today’s engagement scores mostly cost you visibility, but the real question is whether they start costing you access — insurance terms, hiring decisions, loan rates — the way credit scores already do for a narrower slice of behaviour. It’s also likely that a growing share of what fills these feeds stops being human-made at all, generated instead to hit the same engagement targets, which would break the “audience-as-unpaid-labour” model this piece has been describing, since the platform wouldn’t need anyone to produce anything — just to keep watching. And the transparency push described above — regulation, court rulings, chronological opt-outs — will likely keep expanding rather than fading, even as it runs up against platforms’ incentive to route around it.

None of that is a unified prophecy. It’s closer to: expect more of what’s already happening, in more places, with higher stakes attached, and a parallel market growing around the discomfort of it.

Where that leaves you

You were never going to be some sovereign, uninfluenced chooser. Nobody was, ever. So the fight isn’t for purity — it’s for which loop you’re in, and how much say you get inside it, and whether the people running that loop are being paid to help you or to keep you there. “Breaking away from the algorithm,” properly understood, doesn’t mean freedom from influence. It means trading a fast, opaque, engagement-hungry loop for a slower one you can actually see the workings of and steer. That’s a real difference. It’s just a smaller, less romantic one than the story we usually tell about it — and it’s the difference that will decide which version of the next ten years we end up living in.

Sources

• Loewenstein, G. (1994). The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin. Summary: https://psychologyfanatic.com/information-gap-theory/

• Collins, G. “Why the infinite scroll is so addictive.” UX Collective: https://uxdesign.cc/why-the-infinite-scroll-is-so-addictive-9928367019c5

• “YouTube Partner Program, Explained.” YouTube Blog: https://blog.youtube/creator-and-artist-stories/youtube-partner-program-explained/

• “YouTube Revenue Sharing: How the 55/45 Split Really Works” (includes TikTok comparison): https://ytmoneycalculator.com/blog/youtube-revenue-sharing/

• “E. St. Elmo Lewis and the origin of the AIDA model” (1898): https://www.toolshero.com/toolsheroes/elias-st-elmo-lewis/

• “36 Predictions for Social Media Marketing in 2026” — on the Dutch court ruling requiring Meta to offer a chronological feed opt-out: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/36-predictions-social-media-marketing-2026/802195/

• “Algorithmic Transparency Laws 2026: What Platforms Must Disclose” — on EU Digital Services Act recommender-system disclosure requirements: https://beyondtmrw.org/article/algorithmic-transparency-laws-what-platforms-must-disclose-in-2026

We like to believe that we control our own decisions: what to buy, what to read, who to trust, how to vote and even what sort of person we should become.

Yet every decision takes place inside an environment shaped by family, culture, institutions, technology—and the workings of our own minds.

We are not helpless or completely controlled. But our choices are shaped by psychological biases, social expectations, commercial design, authority and algorithms. Freedom may begin with recognising those influences.

I noticed this when I was considering a holiday in Turkey.

I felt apprehensive because of the continuing tensions and uncertainty across the wider Middle East. Turkey was not directly involved in the events worrying me, but the news still made me question whether travelling there would be sensible.

I began watching videos made by people who had visited the area. I also spoke to friends who had been there and to Turkish people who knew the destination well. Their experiences reassured me, and I eventually decided to go.

The choice remained mine, but it had clearly been shaped by other people. Their knowledge helped me look beyond my initial fear and make what I felt was a better-informed decision.

That experience made me wonder: when other people influence our choices, are they limiting our independence—or giving us the information we need to exercise it?

Control, influence or manipulation?

Control suggests force: someone gives an order or removes our ability to choose. Most modern influence is subtler.

An organisation chooses which information to release. An advertiser frames a product around fear or aspiration. A website places one option more prominently than another. A social-media platform decides what appears at the top of our feed.

None of these necessarily forces a decision. But each changes the environment in which it is made.

It helps to distinguish four ideas. Influence shapes a choice. Persuasion tries to change our minds through reasons, emotions or examples. Manipulation obscures relevant information or exploits vulnerabilities to produce a preferred response. Control removes or severely restricts meaningful choice.

Research into choice architecture shows how strongly presentation can matter. Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein found large differences associated with whether organ donation was presented as an opt-in or opt-out default. The underlying choice remained available, but the starting position influenced the result. Do Defaults Save Lives?

I have encountered a smaller version of this with subscriptions. Cancelling can involve several pages and a series of questions, while renewing requires no action at all. More than once, I have allowed a subscription to renew because cancelling it felt like too much effort. I cannot know the company’s intention, but the design certainly benefited it.

The question is not simply whether we remain technically free to choose. It is whether the design surrounding that choice makes one response much easier, more visible or more emotionally appealing than another.

Our minds take shortcuts

External influences only tell part of the story. Some of the strongest influences operate inside us.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that human judgement frequently relies on mental shortcuts. These shortcuts help us make decisions quickly, but they can also produce predictable errors, particularly when estimating probability, judging risk or working with incomplete information. Judgment under Uncertainty

We also tend to give greater attention to evidence that supports what we already believe. Psychologist Raymond Nickerson described confirmation bias as a widespread tendency appearing in many forms. We may search selectively, interpret ambiguous evidence in our favour or judge supporting arguments less critically than opposing ones. Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises

This matters because modern information systems do not encounter impartial audiences. They encounter people who already possess loyalties, fears, expectations and preferred explanations. Technology may reinforce these tendencies, but it did not create them.

That research made me reconsider a long-standing brand loyalty of my own. For years, I had favoured one technology company over others, trusting that my preference reflected genuine superiority rather than accumulated habit. After trying an alternative, I found that my loyalty had hardened into assumption. The other product worked perfectly well, but the more important discovery was that I had stopped looking closely at my own reasoning. Looking back, I suspect my attachment owed less to continued evaluation and more to years of effective marketing and the comfort of the familiar.

Looking back, I wonder how much of my loyalty came from positive experience and how much came from years of effective advertising and a powerful brand identity. The alternative product did not prove that my earlier opinion was entirely wrong. It showed that I had stopped examining it closely.

The power of belonging

Our beliefs are not merely conclusions. They connect us to families, communities, political groups, religions, professions and generations.

Henri Tajfel’s work on social identity showed how categorising ourselves as members of groups can influence judgement and behaviour. Even relatively minimal group distinctions can encourage people to favour their own group. Social Categorisation and Intergroup Behaviour

This helps explain why questioning a belief can feel so personal. Changing an opinion may involve more than admitting that one fact was wrong. It can raise uncomfortable questions: if I no longer believe this, do I still belong? What will my family or friends think? Was I wrong for all those years?

Belonging is not inherently restrictive. Families and communities provide identity, stability, knowledge, protection and meaning.

When I was growing up, I belonged to a community that looked out for one another. Neighbours protected each other’s children, and we felt safe in their homes. I saw my mother buy food for a neighbour to make sure her children were fed. I was taught to respect other people, and that principle has stayed with me.

That community demonstrated that influence can pass valuable principles from one generation to another. As I grew older, however, I also learned that trust should not mean accepting every person or claim without question. Belonging becomes restrictive when it requires us to stop asking questions.

Why we follow the group

Classic conformity research offers another part of the puzzle.

In Solomon Asch’s experiments, participants sometimes agreed with an obviously incorrect group answer when judging the lengths of lines. The research did not prove that people always conform, but it demonstrated that social pressure can affect even relatively straightforward judgements. Studies of Independence and Conformity

Stanley Milgram’s later obedience experiments produced more disturbing results. Under pressure from an apparent authority figure, many participants continued administering what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks. The study remains controversial, particularly because of its methods, but it became a landmark investigation into obedience and responsibility. Behavioural Study of Obedience

These experiments are sometimes presented as evidence that people are easily controlled. That conclusion is too simple. Some participants resisted, while others experienced considerable distress. Context, legitimacy, uncertainty and the perceived authority of the institution all mattered.

The deeper lesson may be that our behaviour cannot always be predicted from our values alone. Circumstances influence whether those values are expressed, compromised or temporarily surrendered.

I encountered a less extreme version of this tension at work. One familiar rule was that the customer was always right and that it was better to lose an argument than win one. In practice, verbal abuse was sometimes accepted as simply part of the job.

Respecting customers should not require employees to accept abuse. There is a difference between avoiding unnecessary confrontation and allowing unacceptable behaviour to go unchallenged. Have some organisations become so afraid of complaints and offence that they no longer defend reasonable standards of behaviour?

The algorithm is not a puppet master

It is tempting to blame algorithms for controlling what people think. The evidence is more complicated.

A large study of Facebook use during the 2020 US election found that people were commonly exposed to politically like-minded sources. However, experimentally reducing that exposure did not produce corresponding reductions in political polarisation during the study period. Like-minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarising

More recent research on X produced a different result. A 2026 experiment found that exposure to its algorithmic feed shifted some political opinions in a more conservative direction. This suggests that algorithmic effects can vary by platform, design, content, audience and circumstances. The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm

Algorithms clearly affect exposure: what we see, what is repeated and what receives our attention. But exposure does not translate mechanically into belief.

The relationship works in both directions. Platforms learn from our behaviour, while our behaviour adapts to what platforms reward. We choose whom to follow, what to click and which communities to join. Those choices teach systems how to influence us more effectively.

In Britain, adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online each day. More than half of that time is spent using services owned by Alphabet and Meta. That concentration gives a small number of companies considerable influence over the environments in which information, entertainment and advertising are encountered. Ofcom: Online Nation 2025

I have experienced both joy and anger while watching influencers. Like many people, I tend to follow voices whose concerns resemble my own. But I increasingly hesitate before commenting. Disagreement can quickly become personal, and the possibility of being reported, misinterpreted or targeted by other users sometimes makes silence feel safer.

That is significant influence. It is not evidence of absolute control.

Influence can also help us

Not every attempt to influence behaviour is harmful. Education influences us. Public-health campaigns influence us. Laws, warnings, product standards and social expectations influence us. Families encourage behaviours they believe will keep children safe.

Ofcom tested how different presentations of online content controls affected people’s choices. Giving users more detailed control options encouraged more than seven in ten participants to reduce their exposure to sensitive material. The intervention influenced behaviour while also giving users greater agency. Ofcom: Unlocking Choice

Influence can help people understand their options. Manipulation tries to obtain a preferred response by obscuring those options or exploiting vulnerabilities. The difficulty lies in deciding where one ends and the other begins.

I learn a great deal from YouTube and follow people who teach me useful things. That is a legitimate and positive form of influence. I am also aware that some creators have agendas they do not make clear.

It is tempting to think manipulation only works on other people. The research suggests that all of us have vulnerabilities, although they may not be the same ones.

Can we ever be completely free?

Probably not.

We cannot separate ourselves from biology, experience, language, culture, relationships, institutions or technology. Nor would complete separation necessarily be desirable. We depend upon other people for knowledge, cooperation, security and meaning.

Freedom may not mean living without influence. It may mean understanding enough about those influences to decide which ones deserve our trust.

Before an important decision, we might ask:

• Who selected the information in front of me?

• Which facts or alternatives might be missing?

• What emotion is this message trying to produce?

• Am I accepting a default because it is best or because it is easiest?

• Would I judge this evidence differently if it supported the opposing side?

• Who benefits if I make this choice?

These questions will not remove every bias. They will not make algorithms neutral, institutions completely transparent, or human beings perfectly rational. But they create something valuable: a pause between influence and response.

Perhaps that pause is where personal freedom begins.

Freedom, to me, means having the right to express an opinion—and accepting that others have the right to question it. I may strongly disagree with what someone says, but disagreement alone should not be a reason to silence them.

Freedom of expression does not remove responsibility. Restrictions may sometimes be necessary to protect people from direct threats, invasions of privacy or genuine incitement to harm. But discomfort, criticism and offence should not automatically be treated as harm.

Transparency should be the default. Restrictions should be clearly justified, proportionate and open to scrutiny. We may never escape influence, but we can become more conscious of it—and more deliberate about the influences we permit to shape our lives.

Question for readers

Which influence has shaped one of your decisions—and did it help you make a better choice or quietly narrow your options?

Sources and further reading

• Do Defaults Save Lives?

• Judgment under Uncertainty

• Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises

• Social Categorisation and Intergroup Behaviour

• Studies of Independence and Conformity

• Behavioural Study of Obedience

• Like-minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarising

• The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm

• Ofcom: Online Nation 2025

• Ofcom: Unlocking Choice