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Many British people will be completely unaware of the fact that the UK's national electricity grid was privatised by the Conservatives back in 1990.

Nor are they aware of the scandalous fact that, just like the water industry, the privatised industry has pocketed huge profits, while failing to fulfil its core mission - to build a national grid fit for purpose.

More importantly, they will have no idea how much this is adding to their energy bills.

Last week I was able to highlight this scandal when asked to do so during a combative interview on Talk TV with Ian Collins, about an article in the Telegraph wrongly blaming wind-energy for the high cost of UK electricity, along with the energy analyst Andy Meyer from the Tufton Street-based think-tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) who produced the research the article was based on.

To the casual viewer, I was on a British TV station, discussing an article in a British newspaper, about a report by a British think-tank about the cost impacts of Britain's wind industry on Britain's national grid.

The reality was somewhat different, however.

In truth I was being interviewed on a US-Australian billionaire owned TALK TV station. whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, has been accused of using his global media empire to oppose climate action.

The news report itself was in The Telegraph, which is set to be soon jointly owned by US billionaire hedge funds and the Abu-Dhabi petro-dictatorship. It too is also notorious for endlessly attacking every aspect of climate and nature protection.

The IEA "think tank" under discussion has also previously been exposed as having received donations from multi-billion-dollar global oil corporations, while constantly producing "reports" attacking climate action.

Meanwhile, the National Grid itself is a privatised corporation partly-owned also by the Abu Dhabi petro-dictatorship and US billionaire owned hedge funds.

Thus while it may have looked like I was doing a simple interview, I was in reality wading through layer upon layer of a billionaire owned industrial-media complex whose own interests align with sabotaging Britain's transition to the clean energy economy.

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However, despite this, I was still able to highlight the above-mentioned national grid scandal.

In 2025 the annual Underlying Operating Profit for the National Grid plc was £5.36 billion. This was paid for by consumers energy bills, costing each household £187.

It could therefore add up to a staggering £53.6 billion over a decade. Yet despite pocketing these huge profits, it has failed in its core mission: building and maintaining a fully functioning grid.

In 2023 the BBC estimated that there was about £200 billion in clean energy projects awaiting connection to the national grid, with the longest waiting times in Europe to be connected.

Some projects were listed as taking up to 15 years to get connected, as the grid did not have the capacity for them.

And in addition to lack of capacity for new projects, the national grid also cannot cope with current levels of cheap green energy output when it is abundant on especially windy days.

These failures by the national grid add another two layers of costs onto bills.

As new renewables have for a number of years now, been far cheaper than fossil fuels, it means that the grid had to pay out billions of pounds more for expensive gas electricity, when it could have been taking advantage of the cheaper green electricity projects waiting for connection.

Secondly, consumers are having to pay for constraint payments to wind-ene...

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Russian forces renewed their campaign to knock Ukraine's interior lights out on Monday, striking at the heart of civilian life in the northern city of Chernihiv and the eastern hub of Kharkiv with guided aerial bombs aimed at combined heat and power (CHP) plants.

The blasts caused partial power outages in both cities, underscoring Moscow's evolving strategy of crippling the country's energy grid as temperatures across Ukraine begin to drop.

In Chernihiv, a northern region already reeling from months of intermittent strikes and shelling, power was lost completely in the early hours of the morning, causing a city-wide blackout. According to the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine, it has been unable to carry out necessary repairs on Tuesday morning as Russian long-range loitering drones "continuously circle over the damaged facilities, making repair work impossible and deliberately prolonging the humanitarian crisis."

City officials have urged residents to stock up on water while critical infrastructure has been switched to generator power. Officials in Kyiv have reported that Slavutych, a Chernihiv region city built to house workers after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, also suffered power outages as a result of the strike.

Earlier this month, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced an energy blackout lasting several hours after a power substation in Slavutych was hit in a Russian attack, leaving the New Safe Confinement facility, which isolates the destroyed fourth power unit of the decommissioned plant, without power. At the time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Moscow of attempting to create the risk of a nuclear incident, writing on Telegram: "The Russians could not have been unaware that a strike on facilities in Slavutych would have such consequences for Chornobyl."

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Meanwhile, in the northeast of Ukraine, the city administration of Kharkiv announced emergency power outages will come into effect after Russian forces launched six guided aerial bombs at the city, primarily targeting an industrial region of the city. Local officials in Kharkiv reported that the most recent attack used updated guided aerial bombs, capable of longer glide ranges, while last week the city of Lozova in the Kharkiv region was hit with a new rocket-powered guided aerial bomb.

What distinguishes this cycle of attacks from previous winter campaigns is the precision, persistence, and focus. Earlier in the war, Russia's air campaigns often struck multiple sectors simultaneously; energy, transport, military targets, and civilian zones in broad-brush assaults. This year, as the cold season begins in Ukraine, analysts say Moscow's tactics show a sharp evolution. Instead of broad waves of simultaneous attacks on many targets across the country, Moscow appears to be concentrating its firepower on critical facilities, repeating strikes until a target is destroyed. In doing so, it exploits the strain on Ukraine's air-defence umbrella, which, after more than three years of war, is stretched thinner and struggling to keep up.

The result is fewer dispersion opportunities for Ukraine's air-defence forces, who are already managing rising demands on radar, missiles, and interceptor assets. Technological advancements like ballistic missiles that can shift from their expected trajectory or cruise missiles which can release flares shortly before impact are also making strikes more difficult to prevent. For Ukraine, this presents a difficult challenge. With air-defence resources stretched, each guided aerial bomb, each hit on a CHP plant or sub-station, has long-last...

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When the TV presenter Eden Blackman died in June at the age of 57, after a long illness, the emotion some women felt was not sadness, but something closer to relief.

Byline Times can reveal that the late television personality, who co-presented Channel 4's (E4) Celebs Go Dating from 2016 to 2018, had been accused by multiple women of violent abuse both prior to and during his time on the show.

One woman, 'Sophia', knew of Blackman through two friends who, she said, he had previously dated and allegedly violently assaulted. Based on their warnings, she spent nearly a decade refusing his attempts to book her for modelling work.

Then, in March 2016, an email arrived from a modelling agent named 'Christian Buckley', looking to book her for an audition for what was claimed to be a talent show. This happened while the first series of Celebs Go Dating was in production, though Blackman had not yet been confirmed as a presenter.

With just her and 'Buckley' in the studio, Sophia alleged that he became violent.

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"It was about an hour [to the meeting] when he asked me to start modelling, to show what I could do. I did, and then he took his belt and started beating me. Then he got other implements and hit me with those…When he started hitting me, I realised who he was."

The supposed booking agent, she said, was Blackman - the man she had spent years avoiding. She believes it was retribution for avoiding his advances for so long.

"He ended up beating me very badly," she told Byline Times. "It's a situation where you don't know what to do. I remember this weird thing about being called 'Uncle' - he said 'call me uncle' or it would get worse…You do what you're told in that situation because it's a matter of survival, isn't it?"

After escaping, she called an ex of Blackman's who confirmed from her detailed description that it was him. They recognised the pseudonym too: 'Christian' referred to Christian Grey, the protagonist of Fifty Shades of Grey; while 'Buckley' referred to Jeff Buckley, Blackman's favourite musician.

Blackman later told a mutual acquaintance that the encounter was "all consensual" and that "she wanted it".

Nadia Essex, who co-presented Celebs Go Dating alongside Blackman, said that she became aware of concerns about his behaviour towards women during their time working together on the show.

Essex told Byline Times that she raised concerns about Blackman's alleged inappropriate behaviour towards women with Lime Pictures in October 2017. Lime Pictures investigated Essex's concerns, speaking to individuals who might have more information.

Following this investigation, both presenters entered mediation and agreed to continue working together. Essex's contract was renewed for Series 4 in November 2017, and subsequently for Series 5.

Lawyers for Lime Pictures emphasised that it takes all complaints seriously and investigated Essex's allegations - and another separate complaint - as thoroughly as it could within the constraints of what complainants were willing to do.

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The production company's lawyers said that, in 2018, Essex provided the production firm with written assurances that she was not linked to anonymous Twitter (now X) accounts "trolling" Blackman. She later admitted that she was responsible for those accounts. Essex was suspended and she resigned shortly afterwards.

Two accounts run by...

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New evidence suggests Jeffrey Epstein channelled millions of dollars through Russian-linked banks - as Byline Times reveals fresh details of the Kremlin-connected tech figures at the heart of his circle.

Three women close to Epstein - Masha Bucher, her sister Victoria Drokova, and model-turned-entrepreneur Lana Pozhidaeva - built venture-capital empires in Silicon Valley while maintaining hidden financial ties to Russian oligarchs, documents obtained by Byline Times show.

Together the three of them have continued to grow their interests in Silicon Valley, even as many of their former business associates have come under increasing scrutiny since the Kremlin's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Wyden has intensified his push, introducing legislation to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to release Epstein-related banking records. In a July letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, he wrote that Epstein moved 'hundreds of millions of dollars' through Russian banks now under US sanctions. Wyden in particular has continued to press for answers regarding Epstein's business life, particularly his transactions with Russian banks.

Epstein's PR agent

Before she rebranded herself as a Silicon Valley investor, Masha Bucher had grown up in Russia and became a teenage star of Nashi, President Vladimir Putin's nationalist youth organisation. She was featured in the 2012 documentary Putin's Kiss. Yet within a decade, she was running an American PR firm whose client list included Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2011 she joined Runa Capital, a deep tech venture capital firm started by Serguei Beloussov, a Russian businessman who has since shortened his name to Serg Bell. She also worked at Bell's cybersecurity firm Acronis. Bell was one of several Russian-linked tech leaders under scrutiny by US authorities investigating whether the tech firms were part of a Kremlin effort to obtain cutting-edge technologies.

While Bell has distanced himself from Russian money after the country's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he previously had the financial support of at least one Russian businessman who has run into trouble in the US.

According to the Pandora Papers - a 2021 leak of offshore finance documents reviewed by Byline Times - Bell's fund Phystech Ventures received a $2 million commitment from Intellect Capital (Cyprus) Ltd., owned by Russian oligarch Andrey Muraviev, later indicted in the US for illegal political donations from Rudy Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. An indictment against Muraviev was unsealed in 2022, although he is still believed to be in Russia.

In 2014, Bucher launched M&A PR Studio - later MA Family - whose clients included Jeffrey Epstein, though the nature of its work for the disgraced financier remains unclear. Bucher did not respond to questions about her agency's PR work on behalf of the billionaire who had previously pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from underage girls, or to questions about her travels to Russia.

At the same tim,e she also became an angel investor. It has now rebranded as MA Family and its clients include Bell's company Runa Capital, Cointelegraph and the Czech software company JetBrains.

Bucher's first notable angel bet was NTech Lab, the Russian facial-recognition developer behind the FindFace app and other state surveillance projects. Corporate records show she held 200 shares at end-2016 before exiting the following year.

She then launched Day One Ventures, rebranding herself as a Silicon Valley fund manager. In public, Bucher framed a clean break with Moscow: "It is toxic money since 2014, after Crimea," she told the Washington Post in April 2022.

Documents obtained by Byline Times contradict that clean break. Leaked Russian border-crossing records show at least 22 trips to Russia between August 2014 and August 2021. On 24 August 2021 sh...

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When police stopped Nathan Gill at Manchester Airport on 13 September 2021, they did so under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 - a power designed to detect hostile-state activity and foreign interference at UK borders.

Byline Times and The Nerve can now reveal that, when Gill was arrested, the former MEP had been invited to spend four days in Moscow at a major gathering of 'political technologists' from across the world, under the auspices of the Kremlin.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service indictment and Gill's own pleas, he accepted bribes from December 2018 to July 2019 from Oleh Voloshyn - a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP with longstanding ties to Viktor Medvedchuk, Vladimir Putin's closest political ally in Ukraine.

This new revelation ties Farage's closest aide even more directly to Russia and its state influence operations.

And, in a week when Reform UK celebrated becoming the first ever political party in the UK to receive cryptocurrency donations, we can also reveal that Gill had prepared a presentation about the electoral role of cryptocurrencies for his Russian sponsors.

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From Ukraine to Russia with Love

When Nathan Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery at the Old Bailey, for taking money to issue statements favourable to Russia while he was a UKIP and Brexit Party MEP, it was the first case under the Bribery Act for foreign political interference.

And it provided further proof that Nigel Farage's parties - like many other right-wing Eurosceptic groups across the continent - were consistently targeted by Putin's intelligence services and their proxies.

Five days after the first payment was made in December 2018, Gill - then a UKIP MEP - made a statement in the European Parliament to protest the planned closure of Medvedchuk's TV stations 112 Ukraine and News24. He was interviewed by the TV station's presenter and the wife of the man who had bribed him, Nadia Borodi (also known as Nadia Sass).

Borodi was also pictured with then UKIP Leader Nigel Farage - who sat as an MEP alongside Gill - outside the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, and then apparently inside Gill's parliamentary office.

The bribes from Voloshyn continued until July 2019, when Gill was one of the few UKIP MEPs to join Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party.

According to his then fellow MEP Rupert Lowe - who now sits as an independent MP in the UK Parliament after being suspended by Reform UK - Gill acted as the whip for Brexit Party MEPs. In a recent statement, Lowe described being called to a meeting by Gill at the European Parliament, where those in attendance claimed to be "very close to Putin".

This coincided with a roundtable event Gill hosted for Viktor Medvedchuk, during which 'Moscow's man in Ukraine' announced a new 'peace plan' for the country, which he then celebrated with President Putin the next day in the Kremlin, boasting of the support of British and other MEPs.

According to sources Byline Times has spoken to, Farage and Gill were "as thick as thieves" during this period, and it would have been "inconceivable" that Farage could not have known about Gill's Ukrainian connections and statements.

Farage himself has admitted that he knew Gill for some years and warned him about going to Ukraine - because it is "one of the most corrupt countries in the world", as he recently described it to the BBC.

But what about Russia, deeply entwined in its post-Soviet corruption through t...

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The young woman who attended the interview had brown hair, her face permanently anxious. Her name was Petra, and she came from the Czech Republic, in the hope of working for me. This was in the early 2000s, some four years after the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act came into effect and meant that disabled people were able to opt for receiving funds directly.

It was a novel, and at times unsettling, experience - the autonomy bringing responsibility - and I found myself learning fast about the process of recruitment and interviewing.

This was pre-Brexit, four years after freedom of movement became enshrined in EU law, and supported the influx of many young women who applied for work within the broadest context of the care industry. It was an eye-opener.

Within the first months of my recruitment process for two personal assistants, the majority of applicants were not 'native' to the UK. The first 10 to apply included three 'natives' across a broad age spectrum (21-69), who came with a standard agency mentality. The remaining seven were from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Zimbabwe.

To my mind, these seven were by far the better applicants. Some had a certain quality of pragmatism which I appreciated, and others an incredible work ethic. All of them were eager.

Unlike the 'natives', none of them had a patronising attitude, but were open to learning from me, and appreciated that I did indeed know my own needs (the primary focus of independent living).

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Their experiences of working in the UK varied - with many sharing, as trust grew between us, horrific experiences of exploitation and abuse.

Darling Petra, so keen to do her best, was also working as a cleaner for several non-disabled clients - probably not all 'on the books', but that was hardly her fault, and certainly not my business. But it became so when I detected abuse that rose to what I knew was criminal behaviour and urged her to report incidents to the police, which she did not do out of fear of her abuser, and of losing her right to stay in the UK. She eventually decided to move back to the Czech Republic.

Precious, from Zimbabwe, was a giggler. I was in awe of how far she had travelled. She bathed and dressed me with care and laughter, which lessened the white person guilt I felt very aware of. We had a lot in common, including a love of knitting. When I went out with Precious, I noticed a sickening difference in how others interacted with her compared to Petra - it was clearly racially motivated.

Then there was Gergana, a striking young woman from Bulgaria interested in social work and excited by the growing activism coming from the UK's disabled community.

There are numerous factors that make the type of work I offer appealing to these young women who are prepared to travel so far - and, in many cases, keep stoical in the face of the abuse and outright racism that coming to the UK sadly entails.

Still, the reality is that there remains the chance of a higher standard of living here, with a number of my PAs pointing out that to work in the UK care industry means better earnings, while the home-grown 'natives' balk at pay that scarcely scrapes above national minimum wage. Many of my own PAs also feel they gain insight and particular skills from working in the UK, despite evidence of exploitation within the more traditional agency work structures.

These young women can be emotionally scarred, with stories that remain shocking, if familiar. Foreign workers being lured into modern slavery traps - passports 'kept safe', meaning withheld; 'guaranteed accommodation' turning out to be...

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The same digital infrastructure used by Israel's military in Gaza has been quietly coded into the design of Gaza's proposed post-war administration, Byline Times can reveal. Poised to profit are the very American tech giants backing President Donald Trump, who plans to send US troops to Israel to monitor the new Gaza ceasefire.

A Byline Times review of the leaked Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA) framework, procurement guidance documents, and FEC filings shows that its digital-governance backbone - covering identity, border control, aid logistics and donor coordination - matches the Oracle-Palantir technology 'stack' of digital technologies currently used in Israel's defence network. They further suggest that the GITA board structure is planned to allow this stack an easy entry-point into reconstruction contracts.

The plan was drafted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), whose biggest financial backer is Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of tech giant Oracle Corporation. Since 2021, the institute received donations or pledges of at least £257 million from the Larry Ellison Foundation, an amount that dwarfs all other donors combined.

The funding has enabled TBI to expand across Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, embedding consultants in government ministries.

TBI insists that Ellison's money is "ring-fenced" for social and climate programmes. Yet Ellison's dominance in TBI's revenue stream makes such separation largely theoretical.

Ellison himself is a Trump supporter and Republican Party megadonor, who has given tens of millions of dollars to the party and embedded Oracle across the American federal government following extensive lobbying. Oracle is also poised to oversee TikTok's US algorithm after the completion of its US sale, under Trump's deal with China.

Ellison has close ties to fellow pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, through a little-known partnership between Oracle and Palantir, the surveillance and defence-analytics firm co-founded by Thiel.

Both companies have directly supported Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip. But the same companies are also in prime position to profit from the technocratic management of Gaza after the war.

The leaked draft first obtained by Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz outlines a sweeping post-war system: a unified civil registry and digital identity platform; centralised border and customs management; data-driven humanitarian logistics for aid and reconstruction; and an interoperable digital-governance backbone connecting donor agencies and local authorities.

These mirror the operational domains of the Palantir-Oracle technology stack.

The Ellison-Thiel Technological Axis

In April 2024 Oracle and Palantir announced a deep "strategic partnership" to deliver "mission-critical AI solutions to governments and businesses." It was a relationship nearly a decade in the making - back in 2017 Ellison had held exploratory talks with Peter Thiel about acquiring Palantir outright.

By July, Palantir and Oracle jointly unveiled deployment guides showing its Foundry and AI platforms running on Oracle's sovereign, government and "air-gapped" clouds, tailored for national security clients. In June 2025 Oracle launched its Defence Ecosystem including "Palantir for Builders."

Palantir has long become a cornerstone of Western military data infrastructure, and in January 2024 the company had announced its own "strategic partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defense" to supply operational software for the Gaza campaign. Palantir technology has also been instrumental in Israel Defence Force (IDF) AI targeting in Gaza.

Ellison's Oracle had made parallel moves. Through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) Jerusalem Region launched in 2021 - a sovereign data centre built "to ser...

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It's taken a long time but Keir Starmer's Government has finally admitted that Brexit has been a disaster for the UK.

"There is no doubt that the impact of Brexit has been severe and long-lasting", Rachel Reeves told Sky News, in her first big admission that leaving the EU has badly hit the UK economy.

This admission has been a long time coming. For years Labour's strategy has been to suggest that they could seize the "opportunities" of leaving the EU in order to "Make Brexit Work".

Yet with polls showing support for Brexit at all time lows, and support for "Mr Brexit" Nigel Farage at all time highs, Downing Street have decided to start linking the two.

The strategy has a double purpose. Not only do they hope that it will put the blame for the UK's faltering economy onto Farage, but they also hope that it will help pave the way for the tax rises that Reeves today explicitly stated will have to be introduced at her upcoming budget.

There are two big problems with this strategy. The first is that it is unclear how effective trying to blame a man for the UK's current economic stagnation, who has never been in Government before, rather than the two parties who were in charge of the country both before leaving the EU and since, will be. If Brexit is to blame for the economy then so are the two parties who voted it through and keep it in place.

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The second and bigger problem is that if Brexit has been such a disaster, which it has, then why is Keir Starmer's Government still so intent on continuing with it?

Since entering government the Prime Minister has repeatedly insisted that the UK will never rejoin the EU in his lifetime, while also ruling out any return to the European Customs Union or Single Market either.

There have been some slight but welcome tweaks to the UK's trading and regulatory relationship with the EU, with the overall trend under Starmer being a gradual shift towards a more pro-European and internationalist position. Reeves' comments today are undoubtedly a part of that shift.

Yet when it comes to making the sort of significant move back towards the EU that would actually make a meaningful difference to Britain's stagnant economy, Starmer remains firmly stuck in the Brexit mud.

Making Brexit Worse

This is particularly the case when you look at why Brexit has been such a disaster for the UK economy. On this the evidence is clear. By shutting off the UK from its main economic partners in Europe, Brexit put the breaks on British trade, while shifting the costs for this additional friction onto UK consumers. Most experts agree that one of the main reasons inflation remains so stubbornly high in the UK compared to most other European nations is because of the additional trade and Labour costs associated with being outside the EU.

The fall in the pound that followed Brexit, combined with the impact of depriving British companies of a skilled and relatively cheap European workforce, means that inflation in the UK is now significantly higher than it otherwise would have been. The result is that even now when forecasts suggest stronger economic growth in the UK in the years to come, most voters will continue to feel worse off because of ever-spiralling prices. The political beneficiary of this will inevitably be the same Reform UK leader the Government is now belatedly trying to shoulder with the blame for it.

Of course the obvious solution to this problem would be to remove those inflationary barriers, either through reversing Brexit altogether, or through negotiating re-entry into the Single Market and Cus...

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The recent investigations into Syria's "stolen children" have uncovered a bleak truth. Documents and testimonies indicate that children "disappeared" under Bashar al-Assad were hidden in so-called orphanages, including facilities run by the global charity SOS Children's Villages. Many were not orphans, but the sons and daughters of detainees and regime opponents.

The centres were used to extort and punish their families. Reporting by Lighthouse Reports, the Observer and the BBC details mothers denied answers, records altered, and children's identities changed. The Syria scandal demands answers, but what SOS truly needs is a reckoning with the very foundations of its model of care.

SOS is not a small organisation. It is a federation operating in more than 130 countries which presents itself as the world's largest provider of care for children without parental care. With revenues of €1.64 billion in 2023, the organisation operates with a level of power and influence comparable to some governments. That same year it claims to have provided "a range of care options" to about 69,000 children, while supporting 103,500 families to prevent separation, according to its own impact data.

At the heart of its system are the "villages", clusters of houses where one SOS "mother" cares for up to ten children. Marketed as "family-like care", these villages are essentially residential institutions. The idea is not new. A century ago, Barnardo's in the UK built "cottage homes" on the same model, later abandoned because children were stigmatised and segregated from community life. SOS has repeated this model for many decades on a global scale. With tens of thousands of children in its care, it holds enormous influence yet operates without democratic oversight.

The Syria scandal is not the first time SOS has faced serious questions. In 2021 SOS commissioned independent reviews of historical abuse after allegations surfaced across the federation. The organisation issued apologies and pointed to stronger safeguarding, but survivors and whistleblowers continue to ask who has been held accountable and how decisions were made. The federation highlights reforms including a revised child safeguarding policy, a strengthened code of conduct and the creation of a global ombuds system. Yet these measures raise questions about whether they represent genuine cultural change or reactive crisis management.

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The notion of the villages "family-like" care also falls apart under scrutiny. SOS villages are often built on the outskirts of towns, hidden behind walls and fences that cut children off from everyday community life. However well-intentioned, this segregation reinforces stigma and marks children and young people out as different. Inside the houses, a single adult is usually responsible for eight to ten children, and when one caregiver is stretched so thin, older children frequently take on the parenting of younger peers. Evidence shows it piles stress on children and harms their long-term outcomes. A recent review of studies comparing foster and residential care underline what practitioners already know: children thrive best in families rooted in their communities rather than in institutions by another name.

In my own research in Thailand, we interviewed children living in children's village settings, some run by SOS and some by the Government. Children described both the strengths and the strains of this model. They appreciated the stability of house mothers, but also spoke about the stigma of village life, feeling marked out at school as being different from their peers. Boys were separated at the age of 14 int...

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Having heard about my dear old party losing yet another set of marbles, this time deciding to ban journalists (including Byline Times) from its party conference this year, I felt it was my duty to provide some 'insider' coverage of what actually happened there.

So, what was the party trying to hide? For a start, the conference centre was very sparsely filled. At times you could literally hear wind wailing through it. The Manchester venue offers two conference halls next to each other, seating 2,000 people each, which can be, as in the past years, be put together around one stage. This year they were unused. A small auditorium with just 700 seats was prepared for the biggest event of the conference on Wednesday morning - the Leader's Speech.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher faced conference halls seating 3,000-4,000 at least, in Brighton, Blackpool and Bournemouth. In 1983, some 5,000 Conservative representatives descended on Blackpool. The scale has shrunk and so has the confidence.

Policy Vacuum

If the conference centre felt empty of people, so too did it of ideas. This is hardly surprising given there has not been any serious work done on policy for years.

Under Johnson, policy became fungible and vague. His slogan "Get Brexit Done" boxed the party into populist single issue politics with simple solutions, in contrast to the complex and hard policy work required for parties to win elections in true liberal democracies. There has already been academic work that explored this astonishing phenomenon. For example, in his essay "Conservative Party Statecraft and the Johnson Government," Hayton argued that Brexit was repurposed as the organising narrative at the expense of substantive governance and so it has proved.

Meanwhile, successive party leaders have seemed too scared to ditch immigration as our main obsession, despite its total irrelevance to the electorate's central concern: the state of the economy. If you ask leading economists to come up with the top ten reasons for Britain's economic problems, immigration will not feature in any of them. Some of the long-term weaknesses originate as far back as the global financial crisis of 2008. Some, like Brexit, are more recent. On that basis, the Conservatives could have used their superior economic experience to destroy Reform UK's platform completely. But they do not: the pull of far-right populism and the illusions of easy election gains are still far too powerful.

Past Glories

In the exhibitors' space at the Manchester conference, three of Margaret Thatcher's three outfits hang behind the glass like old skins, reminding the Party of its metamorphosis into something quite unrecognisable. Her success was built on hard-won policy victories, the result of long days (and nights) spent testing her ideas in argument with other politicians, economists, and experts.

Before launching her famous Monetarist Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) in 1980, Thatcher personally worked with the legendary economist Milton Friedman and her chief economic adviser Sir Alan Walters. She then forced it through against "wet" Conservatives such as Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour, who attacked the money-supply fixation in early-1981 debates.

The Right-to-Buy was designed in Keith Joseph's Centre for Policy Studies with Thatcher and her ministers seeing off Conservative rebel attempts to water it down

The "Big Bang", the deregulation of the financial services industry and opening the City of London to international banks in 1986 was driven by Nigel Lawson and Cecil Parkinson. Despite the City's protectionist resistance, who wanted to keep fixed commissions and single-capacity dealing, the Government backed the Bank of England's liberalisation timetable and abolished the cartelised rules in one stroke.

All that attracted the heavy-weight intellectual ...