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The Labour Party? You can't live with it, and you can't live without it. Debate about whether progressive change happens with or without Labour is as old as the hills. Since its formation, from the Independent Labour Party onwards, socialists have debated whether to change Labour or replace it.

This eternal debate has been given a shot in the arm by the possible, or even likely, creation of a new left party based around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. What's happening, why and what's likely to be the result?

Politics like nature abhors a vacuum. Since 2020, under Keir Starmer, or more precisely under Morgan McSweeney, Labour hasn't just veered right in values and policy terms in search of now mystic 'Red Wall' voters, but more importantly in terms of their narrow factional goals, have waged a relentless war not just to defeat the left in the party but to eradicate it.

By a miracle of political organising and determination, a tiny faction of hard right operators in Labour's ranks, who were facing extinction under Corbyn and Momentum, tricked the party into backing their 'Corbynism without Corbyn' candidate before turning their fire on the very party members they had cynically courted. Now the job was to ensure that nothing like Corbynism could ever happen again - the tomb would be sealed.

If you are on the left, why would you stay in such a hostile environment? Not least when Greens and Muslim independents have shown what is possible at the last election, and left-wing Labour MPs we're having the whip withdrawn for voting against government policies that would make the poor even poorer. But while a vacuum in politics is hard to ignore, it's still a difficult space to fill effectively.

Our democratic system is built around a two-party model. The voting system is designed explicitly to punish any party outside of the duopoly by making it almost impossible for minor parties to turn votes into seats.

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Neal Lawson

This duopoly is further embedded through the way parties are funded by the rich, the way parliament recognises and rewards His Majesty's Loyal Opposition and the way the media reports on politics as a battle between only two adversaries. It all adds up to party brand regime that looks more like Coke versus Pepsi than a genuine democratic choice.

It's therefore no surprise that since Labour replaced the Liberal Democrats as the main centre-left alternative to the Conservatives almost 100 years ago, that no other party has broken the stranglehold.

The SDP came close in the 1980s but wilted under the pressure of first past the post. Change UK couldn't resist what they saw as the vacuum to the right of Corbyn and flowered in the polls for a number of weeks before disintegrating. Scotland is of course different; there the SNP have made a historic breakthrough. And of course, Faragism in its various guises of UKIP, the Brexit Party and now Reform has dramatically impacted our nation, but is yet to lead a government.

So, what does this tell us? That the parliamentary two-party nut is very difficult to crack. And to do it requires remarkable levels of persistence and a big enough single issue to galvanise a substantial base in the country, Scottish independence for the SNP, Brexit for Nigel Farage. But then how to build from their gets really tough.

Where would the new left-wing party fit today? There is undoubtedly space to the left of Labour as is, in a host of cosmopolitan seats stocked with uber-liberals, public service workers, the precariat and racialised voters. This could be organised into a voting bloc. But breaking the stranglehold is not easy, not least because of course any new party adds to t...

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This coming weekend is the third anniversary of UK temperatures hitting 40C hit for first time ever. Since then, countless new records have been broken. In 2023, some areas had a quarter more rainfall than normal, making the year one of the ten wettest for England and Northern Ireland since 1836. May 2024 was the warmest on record and that Spring was the wettest and warmest ever too - until this year smashed that last record. There have been three heatwaves already this summer and June became the warmest month for England.

These facts and figures can sometimes feel as relentless as the heat, but put simply, as a new Met Office report on the state of the climate puts it, record-breaking and extreme weather has become increasingly commonplace over the last decade.

For the majority of us here in the UK, a nation notoriously obsessed with the weather, the effects of this change still feel relatively benign - sunnier days and longer, drier summers, what's not to like? However, headlines about Wimbledon running out of water and fans collapsing in the sweltering heat might hint at what's to come. So too might the extreme wildfire and drought warnings - reservoir levels fell at nearly three-quarters of sites in June and are below average in all regions.

Revealed: The £264 billion Price Tag of the UK's Carbon Capture Strategy

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Stuart Spray

But with the Government mostly silent about what we need to do to adapt to the ever-shifting new normal, most of us can be forgiven for thinking everything's under control.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The Government's own climate watchdog has warned that the UK's preparedness for extreme weather events is inadequate, disjointed and piecemeal. Despite that 40-degree watershed moment back in 2022, the Government doesn't even have a heat strategy in place. It hasn't introduced a maximum safe temperature for our workplaces, to mirror the minimum below which it's considered unsafe to work. And that has consequences for us all - for our communities, our public services and our economy.

Researchers at UCL and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have warned that extreme heat could lead to an extra 30,000 deaths a year in England and Wales by the 2070s, putting an already strained NHS under immense further pressure. London alone saw an estimated 263 people dying in the 23 June - 2 July heatwave. We are clearly in the midst of a public health crisis, and one that's barely being acknowledged by the Department for Health.

The fire services are having to respond to a much higher number of fires this year than normal, yet their funding is still being cut in real terms.

And when the Chancellor is so fixated on driving up growth as the sole way to fund those public services that are crucial when it comes to helping us all stay safe, there's precious little comfort in the findings of central bankers and financial experts that reckon climate change-driven extreme weather events could wipe almost five per cent off Europe's projected GDP over the next five years.

Alongside urgently ending our reliance on the fossil fuels that are driving climate breakdown, it's clear we should be making it much more of a priority to prepare properly for the impacts. We should be making decisions now that lock in resilience rather than vulnerability.

Take schools, for example. Most of us can remember sitting exams in stuffy gyms or assembly halls, desperate to be anywhere else. As temperatures continue to rise, it makes no sense to subject our children and young people to this ordeal at times of peak heat. We should instead be reimagining the school year so they can perform to the very best of their abilities befo...

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MPs today criticised UK tax authorities for failing to chase billionaires to ensure they pay their taxes, and not even knowing how many are failing to do so.

The report from the Public Accounts Committee comes as pressure mounts on the Government to introduce a wealth tax, and as Chancellor Rachel Reeves desperately tries to find new revenues to bridge the gap in public finances.

Despite creating 100 datasets to tackle people with high spending life styles who are not paying all their taxes, HMRC's one missing data set is the one that keeps records on billionaires.

HMRC defines the wealthy as anybody earning over £200,000 a year and with assets totalling over £2 million. But billionaires have huge wealth and can be worth 500 times more than those classified as wealthy by the tax authorities.

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David Hencke

Lloyd Hatton MP, Member of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "We already know a great deal about billionaires living in the UK, with much information about their tax affairs and wealth in the public domain.

"So we were disappointed to find that HMRC, of all organisations, was unable to provide any insight into their tax affairs from its own data - particularly given that any single one of these individuals' contributions could make a significant difference to the overall picture.

We found a similar apparent lack of curiosity in how wide the tax gap is both for the very wealthy and for wealth stashed away offshore

Lloyd Hatton MP, Member of the Public Accounts Committee,

Hatton continued: "Our report shows that, however you slice it, there is a lot of money being left on the table. HMRC must, under its new leadership, begin collecting the correct amount of tax from the very wealthiest - and this must include wealth that is currently squirrelled away in tax havens. There is certainly room for improvement. We hope that HMRC uses both our recommendations and the new funding it has secured in this area to do so."

The report states that the number of wealthy people in the UK jumped from 700,000 to 850,000 in the last five years - but it has lumped together those earning £200,000 annually with the super wealthy.

It has raised more money from the wealthy - rising from £2.2 billion to £5.2 billion in the last five years but there has been a big drop in prosecutions and penalties applied to the very wealthy.

Hundreds of Local Authorities Remain on the Brink of Bankruptcy, Despite Government Bailouts

An ageing population and successive cuts by the last Conservative Government have left local council budgets on the brink, reports David Hencke

David Hencke

In 2022-23, there were 1747 penalties applied to the wealthy but this dropped to 456 last year. The number of people prosecuted by HMRC dropped to 25 last year.

The report states: "It is particularly disappointing that HMRC has issued no penalties to enablers of tax evasion, despite acknowledging unscrupulous advisers often play a key role in helping the wealthy evade tax. We are also unconvinced that HMRC fully utilises the deterrent effect of publicising successful prosecutions, despite it acknowledging the value of publicising high value, high-profile cases."

Nor does it rely on all sources of public information on the wealthy. It follows disclosures in Forbes magazine but ignores The Sunday Times rich list.

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Reform's Durham County Council deputy leader Darren Grimes, who has previously described the European Convention on Human Rights as "utterly bent" is now planning to use it in a move which will make it easier to dismiss complaints by voters.

"Beard removal is now 'torture' under the ECHR", Grimes complained on June 25. He's also claimed that "the ECHR still runs our borders" and has mocked Keir Starmer as "the ECHR's biggest fanboy on the world stage".

Grimes has made no secret of his desire to quit the human rights framework, writing in 2024: "Leave the ECHR! Please wake up to how serious this is for democracy!"

But, it now seems Grimes is the ECHR's biggest supporter on the council stage. At least, when it suits.

EXCLUSIVE

Reform's Darren Grimes Accused of Lying After Police Deny Telling Him Not to Hold Council Surgeries for 'Security' Reasons

EXCLUSIVE: Local police have rejected the Reform UK deputy council leader's claim that they advised him not to meet his constituents

Josiah Mortimer

On July 16, at the full council meeting, Grimes will present a motion which will:

Incorporate a principle that there is "no right to not be offended by lawful speech" into the council's Code of Conduct.

Argue that as councillors are "democratically mandated representatives" with constitutional duties, they are not subject to workplace restrictions on (hateful) speech.

Prevent supposedly "vexatious" standards proceedings against councillors for controversial but lawful political views.

Amend complaint procedures to give "particular regard" to enhanced protection for political speech when assessing complaints against councillors.

Call on other North East councils to adopt similar measures to prevent "misuse of standards procedures to silence legitimate political debate"

But the provision which really stands out is this: "When assessing complaints involving freedom of expression, particular regard shall be given to the enhanced protection afforded to political speech under Article 10 ECHR and the democratic mandate of elected members to represent diverse viewpoints within their communities."

Article 10 of the ECHR protects people's right to hold their own opinions and to express them freely without Government interference. The convention is overseen by the Council of Europe and enforcement undertaken by the European Court of Human Rights.

As Byline Times has reported, Grimes has already faced complaints over his inflammatory social media posts - though at least one was swiftly dismissed, with the council claiming it was posted in a personal capacity. Reform swept to power on the council in May.

In the same council meeting this week, Reform will vote to rescind the Climate Emergency Declaration made by the council on 20 February 2019. It will become the first council to do so.

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Protesters will gather outside Durham's County Hall on Wednesday, with local campaigners calling on others to "bring your flags, banners and placards along to Durham County Hall from 9am before the full council meeting".

"Let's show Reform the strength of feeling about their decision making so far and how we feel about their agenda for the meeting which includes motions to change the councillor code of conduct to allow more heinous divisive rhetoric and one to deny the climate crisis," a Stand Up to Racism organiser said.

A Green councillor said that while the motions are set to pass given Nigel Farage's party's domination of the council, it will "expose the real Reform".

holding farage to account #reformwatch

While most the rest of the media seems to happy to give the handful of Reform MPs undue prominence, Byline Times is committed to tracking the activities of Nigel Farage's party when actually in power.

BREAKINGEXCLUSIVE

Reform's Darren Grimes Seeks Help From Euro...

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Elon Musk's X platform continues to be a breeding ground for violent anti-Muslim & anti-migrant hate, according to a new report from counter-hate researchers.

Analysis by the the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) - an organisation despised by far-right billionaire Musk - found that in the aftermath of the Southport murders last July, high-profile hate figures on social media platforms like Elon Musk's X "falsely linked the attack to Muslims and migrants, leading to widespread disorder and violent riots across the UK."

Now one year on from the 2024 riots following the Southport stabbings, new CCDH research finds that little has changed.

Research from the monitoring group found that "hateful influencers" garnered millions of views per day on X, with the platform "utterly failed to moderate this explosion of dangerous, violent content."

CCDH's findings led the UK's online safety regulator Ofcom to conclude that there was a "clear connection" between posts on social media and the eruption of the 2024 riots.

Worryingly, the group finds that the "same forms of violent and murderous rhetoric that precipitated and inflamed the 2024 riots" are still widely circulating, with scant moderation by the platform.

The findings are likely to add further pressure on the Labour Government to act, and to review its heavy use of X.

EXCLUSIVE

Reform's Darren Grimes Accused of Lying After Police Deny Telling Him Not to Hold Council Surgeries for 'Security' Reasons

EXCLUSIVE: Local police have rejected the Reform UK deputy council leader's claim that they advised him not to meet his constituents

Josiah Mortimer

The research shows how posts from six far-right or extremist influencers - Tommy Robinson, Paul Golding, Ashlea Simon, Andrew Tate, Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson - are the initial "parent" posts in an "intensely violent" series of replies from platform users.

Reply posts "encourage extreme acts of violence against Muslims and migrants: to shoot, to maim, and to kill."

And X then amplifies and monetises the influencers - and the engagement they generate on the platform - despite "continued breaches" of platform rules.

During the summer riots in England last year, X emerged as a "crucial vector of false information and hate," CCDH finds.

"Rather than taking steps to mitigate harmful and illegal content, Elon Musk, owner of X, personally amplified conspiracy theories, warning of an impending "civil war" in Britain to his hundreds of millions of followers," the authors write.

"Hate preachers" who had been banned from Twitter before being reinstated by Musk are still receiving millions of views per day.

Of the six prominent accounts identified by CCDH in the wake of the riots (Tommy Robinson, Paul Golding, Ashlea Simon, Laurence Fox, Andrew Tate, and Calvin Robinson), CCDH found that each remains active on X. All are 'verified' Blue Tick users, meaning their posts are actively promoted by the X algorithm. They are highly likely to generate income from X through their posts, through the platform's Creator Revenue Sharing programme, which channels ad revenue to high-engagement users.

Generating large numbers of replies boosts posts' engagement, and hate-filled content appears particularly likely now to generate high-engagement.

Keir Starmer's Government Says Elon Musk's X AI Chatbot Endorsing Hitler Is a 'Matter for the Company'

The Prime Minister's spokesman dismisses calls to leave the social media platform, despite its official 'Grok' bot posting a series of antisemitic comments

Adam Bienkov

Three of the six accounts analysed (Fox, Robinson and Tate) are also allowed to offer paid subscriptions to their content on the platform, enabling them to profit further from their content.

The report finds: "Today, [these influencers'] posts are still routinely followed by streams of rep...

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Labour MP Dawn Butler has told the Byline Festival that she is thinking about running for Mayor of London, as she declared that figures within her party need to start understanding that socialism "isn't a dirty word".

Speaking at the festival at Keele University, on Saturday, Butler was asked by Byline Times founding editor Peter Jukes whether she would consider running to succeed Sadiq Khan as London Mayor, and replied "yes, I would."

Sadiq Khan has yet to declare whether he will run for a fourth time to be London Mayor at the next scheduled elections in 2028.

However, it has long been rumoured that he is preparing to step aside, with Butler's name repeatedly mooted by senior figures inside City Hall as a potential anointed successor.

Butler was a former minister in Gordon Brown's Government and served in Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, but was not reappointed by Keir Starmer when he became leader.

Keir Starmer's Government Says Elon Musk's X AI Chatbot Endorsing Hitler Is a 'Matter for the Company'

The Prime Minister's spokesman dismisses calls to leave the social media platform, despite its official 'Grok' bot posting a series of antisemitic comments

Adam Bienkov

Asked about what she thought of the Government's performance so far, she replied that while she'd "rather be in Government than in opposition" she had been dismayed by its recent difficulties.

"I think government is difficult, but it doesn't have to be this hard" she told a panel discussion on women in politics.

In an apparent criticism of the current leadership, she added that, "I think there are too many people at the moment in the Labour Party that don't understand the Labour Party.

"They don't understand that we were born from the trade union movement. They don't understand that we are a Socialist Party, and that's not a dirty word, and they don't f***ing understand."

Butler was among 47 Labour MPs to vote against the Government's revised welfare plans last week, after Starmer was forced to abandon previous plans to make a series of cuts to disability benefits.

An outspoken figure on the left of the Labour party, Butler was famously thrown out of the House of Commons chamber in 2021 for refusing to retract her comments accusing Boris Johnson of being a liar.

Johnson was later suspended from the Commons for 90 days for deliberately lying to Parliament.

The 2028 London mayoral elections are set to be held again under the more proportional supplementary vote electoral system, following an announcement this week that Starmer's Government will reverse changes made by the last Conservative Government to change the system to first past the post.

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Nigel Farage has been making headlines recently by calling for the two-child benefits cap to be scrapped.

The limit, introduced by the Conservative Government under David Cameron in 2017, restricts support in Universal Credit and tax credits to two children in a family. Once families grow above this level, they get no additional support.

It effectively penalises children for coming from larger families, and has been blamed for pushing hundreds of thousands of them into poverty. PM Keir Starmer is under major pressure from his own MPs to ditch the limit.

But Cameron's policy didn't emerge in a vacuum. In 2015, one party demanded benefits be limited to two children.

It proposed "supporting a lower cap on benefits" and more specifically: "Limiting child benefit to two children for new claimants."

The party was the UK Independence Party, led by one Nigel Farage.

EXCLUSIVE

Reform's Darren Grimes Accused of Lying After Police Deny Telling Him Not to Hold Council Surgeries for 'Security' Reasons

EXCLUSIVE: Local police have rejected the Reform UK deputy council leader's claim that they advised him not to meet his constituents

Josiah Mortimer

The idea had been promoted in 2014 by the right-wing Policy Exchange think tank, which called for a stop to extra benefits at four children, and boasted at the time: "Many proposals by Policy Exchange, founded by a group including ministers Michael Gove, Francis Maude and Nick Boles, have found their way into Conservative manifestos in the past."

The electoral pressure of UKIP on David Cameron (as well as the deep blue roots of Policy Exchange) was, for all the hug-a-hoodie rhetoric, very significant. UKIP were polling around 12%, enough to block Conservative chances in dozens of seats.

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Cameron also, in that same election, adopted the UKIP policy of pledging a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union. As my colleague Adam Bienkov has noted, it was barely picked up on at the time, but led to the most profound and likely-permanent change to Britain's constitution in half a century.

That 2015 Conservative manifesto pledged to "work to eliminate child poverty" while also cutting or freezing certain benefits.

The two aims were contradictory, and by the end of Cameron's term, in 2019, the Child Poverty Action Group found that in the space of two years, "an estimated 160,000 families have been affected by the two-child limit to date…the majority are working families and the majority have just three children."

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Reform's leader, now an MP trying to dig the boot into a Labour Government, says he wants to make it easier for people to have children, having seemingly had a change of heart on what is - effectively - his own policy.

But Farage's arguably pivotal backing for a two-child limit in 2015 is now mostly forgotten in political coverage (though Farage did tell Sky News that what's changed his mind on the policy since 2014 is the 'cost of living' and the need for more 'British-born babies', and not, as the interviewer suggested, mere 'shameless opportunism').

Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, told Byline Times the about-turn was "yet more proof Nigel Farage is a political fraud."

"Farage cosplays as a champion of the working class, but was the architect of a policy that pushed hundreds of thousands of children into poverty."

The union confederation chief ...

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"We were beautiful and as such we should be remembered."

Her green eyes beam. Tea Tupajić looks at the man sitting next to her and her face is aglow. She is a Bosnian theatre director, who experienced the siege of Sarajevo as a child. His name is Olaf Nijeboer, and he is the chairman of the assocation Dutchbat III. Back in 1995, he was 19 when he joined the Dutch batallion of blue helmets, who were supposed to protect Srebrenica. Before being sent off, he was trained to stay strictly neutral and to avoid any personal contact with the local population. Their major warned the young conscripts, a random sample of boys and girls from all over the country who were looking for adventure, a decent paycheck or to make the world a better place, that the Bosnian Muslims were "pure scum".

Two days before the thirtieth commemoration of the genocide when Serb troops killed 8372 Bosniaks, mostly boys and men, we gather in an Amsterdam theatre. Olaf is here because he participated in a performance directed by Tea, in which eight Dutchbat veterans spoke about their experiences of guilt, indifference and shame. The occasion: the publication of her book Black Summer. Tea has transformed the Dutchbat stories into a composition of poetic, chilling effect.

As the host of this talk, I witness the trust that they have established among each other, and how they agree that nobody who survived Srebrenica emerged as a complete human being.

From Srebrenica to Gaza: Genocide Denial and the Long Struggle for Justice

On the 30th anniversary of the largest mass killing in Europe since 1945, Martin Shaw compares it with how the West is now treating the ongoing genocide in Gaza

Martin Shaw

Last year, the United Nations designated 11 July as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. These days, an exhibition at the headquarters in New York shows 200 portraits of those killed, alongside their personal belongings that were found in the forests surrounding the town. Down the road from Srebrenica, newly found human remains will be buried at the sprawling cemetery in Potocari, facing the former battery factory that served as the Dutchbat compound. During those sweltering days of the black summer, thirty years ago, this was where the men were separated from the women, children and elderly, never to be heard from again. Today, it is the home of the Memorial Centre.

Dutchbat has long gone. On the walls of the compound, it left behind graffiti, now carefully preserved, like: No teeth…? A mustache…? Smel like shit…? Bosnian girl!

For over thirty years now, Srebrenica has been a story of insult, neglect and denial. Both within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and between the country of the 8372 and the country of Dutchbat. It is a story of trauma passed on across generations, of deprecation and desperate warnings not to look the other way. A blueprint for what awaits new generations of genocide survivors.

Sitting on the other side of Tea Tupajić, in the Amsterdam theatre, is another Dutchbat veteran: Alice Schutte. Today, she is a cheerful public transport consultant with a blonde cowlick. Back then, she took pictures of Srebrenica citizens crawling, almost swimming through the garbage heap outside the UN compound. The Eaters, is what she used to call those people. "There is a photo of me. I am just twenty years old, but my eyes are empty and ice cold. I frighten myself. I was there and what I did was take pictures."

The first time she recounted this memory, Tea gazed at her in shock. "Those people could have been my family,' she said. 'We were not animals. We were beautiful."

EXCLUSIVE

British Doctor Bombed in Gaza by Israeli Planes Fitted with UK-Made Weaponry Speaks out for First Time

The attack occurred in a building that the Israel Defense Forces knew contained medics ...

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The past week has been a big one for disability-blaming. Forget migrants (for a moment), disabilities are now apparently the reason our economy and public services aren't working.

'Benefits Pay More Than Being In Work', said Thursday's Telegraph front page, furious that the sickest, or most disabled Brits, may receive more from the state than if they worked a minimum wage job.

The paper did not mention that being disabled can cost more than minimum wage. Nor did they speak to a single disabled person. But they were in good company. The Daily Mail front page declared: 'Proof Work Doesn't Pay Under Labour'.

Worth Reduced to Work: A Disabled Person's Experience of the Welfare Cuts Debacle

Penny Pepper explores the impact of the watered-down Welfare Bill and questions the very notion of 'work' as a marker of human value

Penny Pepper

Despite these alarming declarations, in the UK and US, welfare is taking a beating, and the primary targets are those in need of health welfare.

Donald Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' slashed MedicAid for 12-16 million Americans, while the UK moved to save billions on health-related benefits. Labour promised its Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment (PIP) Bill would "promote work and address perverse incentives". But it was forecast to push 250,000 people into poverty. Not jobs.

Brits are often told welfare is the biggest burden on our budget, yet we are rarely informed that we spend less on benefits than almost every other European nation. Comparing welfare spending as a share of GDP, the UK is right at the bottom of the pile, ranking 25th out of 28 European countries. We spend half what France, Scandinavia, Italy, Austria, Germany and Belgium do, falling just below Croatia, Romania and Hungary in the listings.

Both our front pages and frontbenchers are telling us a story. A narrative that comforts the well-off by casting benefit-claimants as freeloaders, letting privileged people off the hook. But let's assess the evidence. Because like most powerful lies, it has some grounding in reality.

The rationale is rooted in legitimate questions arising from a steady uptick in both health-related benefit spending and health-related non-employment.

Non-Disabled People's Delusions That Disability 'Is Nothing To Do With Them' Only Harm Disabled People

As Government cuts to disabled people's benefits lead to more dehumanising rhetoric, Penny Pepper reminds us that disability is an embedded reality of human experience as much as it always has been

Penny Pepper

Labour is targeting sickness and disability benefits because both have ballooned in recent years, largely due to a post-COVID spike in mostly mental health and obesity-related claims. But instead of reigning in spending by addressing the issues driving demand, Labour plans simply to tighten the purse strings. That's more likely to push people onto the streets than into work.

The evidence is in experience. Many disabled people will tell you the PIP benefit has been vital to enabling work. 'Personal Independent Payments' are designed to cover some of the day-to-day costs incurred by disability or chronic illness.

Lianna, a lawyer we spoke to, uses hers to afford accessible commuter routes. Rather than de-incentivising her labour, PIP enables it.

In many cases the disincentive isn't benefits, it's discrimination. Negative stereotypes fuel this and become self-fulfilling.

Ellen Jones, an accessibility strategist with lived experience, explained: "People with mobility disabilities will be considered as demanding 'special treatment' for having a ramp to get into their office. It's something I see over and over again. Peers think that a disabled person's getting special treatment, it causes conflict and makes leadership reluctant to hire disabled workers."

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Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives ...

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If the old oxymoron about Britain and America being divided by a common language is true, then it can also be said that our culture is coming between us. Specifically, our sense of humour.

Quite what a chasm it has become was brought home to me when I had to sit through two-and-a-half hours of Hercules at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, London.

It replaces Frozen at the venue which opened in 2021 and, once again, it's a show that's already been established by Disney as a strong money-spinning brand - it, too, was first a big hit on celluloid - and its executives across the Atlantic have thrown so much money at promoting the stage version that it looks like it's too big to fail.

Whether it deserves not to fail is another matter, however, and, unlike Frozen, which was directed by a British director in Michael Grandage - I'd say our very best - this one has an American at the helm in Casey Nicholaw.

Grandage understood something about his fellow countrymen and women: they may well have a weak spot for big budget spectaculars, but they also want at least a veneer of wit and sophistication. Above all things, they want the jokes to be funny. They don't like to have their intelligence totally insulted.

Regrettably, the American has ensured Hercules possesses not a single intellectual muscle - let alone a funny bone - and the boring, if garish and ostentatious, show that he has come up with has inevitably been panned by the critics as pre-packaged and homogenised theatrical Muzak.

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I wondered during Hercules how it was possible for its writers Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah to have scripted a show that lasts as long as this one without even once managing to raise a grudging smile or even a limp concession that something mildly interesting had just been uttered.

Among London producers I've heard anxious talk about the "Disneyfication" of the West End and, perhaps, in a time of globalisation, there is a grim inevitability to this happening.

Hercules is certainly a world away from the ideals of Laurence Olivier who used to say that theatre should "glamorise intellect" and help to humanise the punters and expand their emotional literacy. Generations of artistic susceptibilities certainly separate this musical from, say, My Fair Lady or Oklahoma! and it seems almost sacrilegious to mention them in the same sentence.

Disney's London theatre subsidiary might reasonably be said to be in the business of glamorising only inanity, and, so far from humanising theatregoers, it can reasonably be said to be zombifying them.

This opens up a wider point about how culture all over the world is now being dominated by fewer and fewer players and none of them, it would appear, are greatly appreciative of a good joke. Even British television, which used to be a lot more open to new talent and platforming often quirky but challenging performers, is these days dominated - so far as the BBC, the independent channels, and the streaming services are concerned - by just a small handful of omnipotent executives and favoured agents. This accounts for why we see the same ageing, unchallenging, and all-too-familiar faces on our screens night after night.

If all you ever watched was mainstream theatre or television, it would be easy enough to conclude that there is a generation coming up that has no discernible talent or any obvious sense of humour - but the opposite is actually the case.

The kind of snobby comics the Cambridge Footlights used to produce on a seemingly endless production line may now have petered out - Stephen Fry might be said to have delighted us quite enough - b...