More than 800 businesses ask PM to make good on pledge, or risk more closures and job losses Hundreds of UK hospitality businesses, backed by celebrity chefs including Angela Hartnett and Heston Blumenthal, have asked Andy Burnham to lay out plans to lower VAT for the sector, urging him to make good on his previous pledge. More than 800 businesses have written an open letter to the prime minister as part of the #VATsTheProblem campaign, to warn that without a “fairer tax burden for hospitality”, there will be more closures and job losses, and fewer opportunities for young people. Continue reading...

A recent consultation on corporate reporting prizes the interests of shareholders over society. It’s a step in the wrong direction The question of what corporations are for is deeply political. In a 1970 article for the New York Times, Milton Friedman argued that the “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”. The idea that CEOs should worry about providing good jobs was “pure and unadulterated socialism”, he wrote. Friedman and his fellow neoliberals saw companies as vehicles for enforcing their politics. Their ideas endured: UK bosses are now paid 130 times more than average workers. Despite Andy Burnham’s pledge to end neoliberalism, a 12-week consultation recently launched by his government risks entrenching it. The consultation was first announced as part of the Starmer government’s crusade against “red tape”. The average annual report for some businesses now runs to 98,000 words, and no doubt there are areas that could be simplified. But the consultation proposes removing vital information and presumes that company reports primarily serve shareholders, rather than other stakeholders. Both are steps in the wrong direction. Continue reading...

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The man who once helped Richard ‘Dirty’ Desmond save a load of tax was wheeled out to face Laura Kuenssberg You wait years for one party donation of £36m and then two come along at once . Reform can hardly believe its luck. All hail the crypto billionaires. Tacky pale turquoise suits all round. And Nigel Farage won’t have to worry about spending any of his own money – if you can call the £5m freebie his own money – on his security. Nor do those champagne and oyster lunches to discuss loose change donations of £500k from people living overseas pay for themselves. From now on Reform won’t need to bother getting out of bed for anything less than eight figures. Fair to say that if it had been Labour or the Tories trousering £72m from Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo then Reform would be on full outrage rampage. How the political system was rigged against it and how the two main parties are hotwired cash machines. In bed with the super-rich. But since the money is heading towards its own bank account, everyone in the party is totally chilled. This is just the way life ought to be. Who wouldn’t want a country where two billionaires can attempt to buy the democratic process? Continue reading...

Harborne and Delo’s cash could buy a massive head start in an election, but spending big has possible pitfalls Nigel Farage once said he could spend his £5m gift from Christopher Harborne on Ferraris if he wanted to, given its unconditional nature. With the new donations to his party from Harborne and his fellow crypto billionaire Ben Delo of £72m over the past weekend alone, Farage’s party now has nearly enough cash to buy a Reform UK branded Ferrari for a party organiser in each of Britain’s 632 constituencies (though that would certainly be a waste and a bit of a tax headache). Continue reading...

As John Healey drafts his autumn budget, the US president’s policies continue to inflate debt servicing costs Britain is not entirely in control of its own destiny, from the rising cost of the weekly shop, to the vaulting cost of government borrowing. What is said and done in Westminster matters. But the global backdrop is making life tough, not least in the deeds and words of one man: Donald Trump. As John Healey drafts his plan for next month’s autumn budget, the perilous economic conditions the chancellor must navigate can be traced back to the door of the US president. Continue reading...

While fascists protest in UK ports and purvey nonsense and poison online, ever fewer people have the perspective or analytical tools to challenge them Imagine this. Quite by chance, your TikTok feed presents you with footage of the fascists who recently took part in highly organised shows of strength in Dover and Portsmouth (and, on Wednesday, outside the London offices of the Daily Mail , demanding a new house for the mother of their leader, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas). For as long as the images hold your attention, you see and hear flashes of explanation, but then, as usual, you scroll away to someone leaping off a tall building, a fight on the London Underground, or a trick-performing dog. Hypothetically, TikTok users are able to skip through 260 videos in under 35 minutes . And it’s this distracted, quick-fire way that so many people receive information that may be responsible for a worrying statistic from YouGov last week . Its poll on the Dover and Portsmouth events showed that 53% of people aged 18-24 years old simply didn’t have a point of view on whether the masked demonstrations were “a legitimate way of protesting”. Further, 43% of those of all ages were either unaware of the story, or not following it at all. Continue reading...

Party can boost its campaign power with funds from billionaire backers, but it can also lose support from ordinary Britons All things being equal, pretty much any political strategist would welcome a £72m war chest; a sum higher than the combined spending of every major party at the 2024 general election. But all things are not equal, and with such a huge amount comes risk. Reform UK has been vocal in its arguments that two sudden £36m windfalls from billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne merely “levels the playing field” with the bigger parties when it comes to funding. Continue reading...

A militaristic operation with features of influencer culture, the new anti-migrant movement seems to show a shift in tactics and rhetoric Shortly after 7am last Saturday in the English coastal town of Dover, livestreamed footage distributed by Britain’s newest anti-migrant movement showed dozens of men in paramilitary outfits jumping out from the backs of vehicles, their faces covered beneath balaclavas, their hands in black gloves. Within an hour, hundreds more masked agitators, dressed head to toe in black, some wearing silver crosses around their necks, were marching through the town’s streets, clapping and chanting “Stop the boats” and “Christ is king”, blockading the busy port for hours. Continue reading...

This week’s move suggests that, even in the age of Trump, Britain will once again have an ‘ethical dimension’ to its foreign policy. That’s good for the world Almost 30 years ago, the Labour titan Robin Cook announced his arrival at the Foreign Office by laying out what would become described as an “ethical foreign policy” . The UK, he said, “must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves”. Human rights would be “at the heart of our foreign policy”. In the 25 years since Cook was demoted, Britain has had a further 14 foreign secretaries – including seven in the past six years – few of whom can claim to have placed progressive ideals at the heart of their actions. Ed Miliband’s speech on Tuesday outlining the UK’s decision to impose economic sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank – and unveiling the international coalition he has built to support it – suggests that Cook may finally have a successor. Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer and a previous winner of the Orwell prize Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...

AI agents have hacked databases and taken on a life of their own – now is the time to pause risky research before it is too late Another day, another horseman of the apocalypse galloping over the horizon. Lately we have heard from so many AI doomers – tech whistleblowers popping up to warn that their work is probably going to kill us – that we’re becoming almost blase about it. Humanity wiped out within a decade? Well, only if another world war or the climate crisis doesn’t get us first. Since it’s never clear whether the tech threat is real, or just a twisted form of hype from an industry that drums up investment by making their products sound more powerful than they really are, most of us settle for trying not to think about it too hard. But something about the AI researcher Jacob Coxon’s very public resignation from the cutting-edge American lab Anthropic, via a post on X arguing that he can’t keep working for companies “gambling with our lives”, has cut through where bigger names have not. Most chillingly, he claimed that colleagues still at Anthropic aren’t staying because they think he’s wrong about the dangers of pursuing self-improving super intelligence – the holy grail of machines that are not just smarter than humans but capable of building their own even more powerful successors, evolving independently of humans – but because they’re afraid of ceding the field to people with fewer scruples. His colleagues, Coxon said, talk routinely about the “endgame” or the “ crunch time ”, meaning that what they do in the next year or two will decide the fate of humanity. Whether that’s true or simply self-aggrandising techbro delusion, what he describes is an industry now practically begging to be saved from itself. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Kneejerk reactions to overcrowding will do more harm than good. Ministers should focus on probation It is not hard to see why ministers are considering converting parts of the women’s prison estate for use by men. While Andy Burnham’s decision to narrow the early-release scheme was born of political necessity, it has made an already acute capacity problem worse. Excluding manslaughter and further sexual offences cut projected early releases from 6,000 to 4,500 . The family of PC Andrew Harper, who was killed on duty in 2019, welcomed the assurance that his killers would not be released early. But the change left overcrowded English and Welsh jails with even less room. The government is trying to innovate. Last week it was announced that £110m will be spent on creating new cells in existing jails, by converting underused spaces such as storage and laundry areas. Deportations are to be speeded up, if foreign governments can be persuaded to cooperate. There is an overdue and welcome commitment to examine how indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentences can be phased out. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...

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