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A huge backlog of cases at family courts is harming children, according to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO).

The report finds that just under 50,000 cases - including 10,121 involving children being taken into care and 37,541 related to custody disputes - are waiting to be heard. In the worst instances, around 4,000 children have waited up to two years for their case to be heard, due to insufficient court facilities and administrative delays.

The NAO reveals that the Coalition Government in 2014 introduced a statutory time limit of 26 weeks to resolve most public family law cases started by local authorities in England. That legal deadline has not been met since it was introduced 11 years ago. Private family cases, meanwhile, have no maximum legal deadline.

Delays can escalate when evidence or assessments have to be updated, and associated costs increase. Between 2018 and 2022, average legal aid spending per local authority case doubled from around £6,000 to £12,000. This represents an annual increase of £314 million in legal aid costs.

"Children may experience a lack of stability, disrupting friendships and education and creating anxiety," the report states. "Parents are also affected by delays, which can cause increased tension between parties and financial strain. Delays can mean less or no contact with children for non-resident parents for extended periods."

UPDATE

Ministry of Justice Slammed for Work Environment That Was 'Intimidating, Hostile, Degrading and Humiliating'

The MoJ has been found guilty of racial discrimination, harassment, and constructive unfair dismissal, in a landmark case first exposed by Byline Times

Iain Overton

Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee, said: "Too many children are suffering as a result of delays to family court proceedings, which are currently still far too long. The longer a case remains unresolved, the more likely it is that there are further delays - increasing the risk of harm to children and driving up public costs."

The report highlights regional disparities in how long it takes to hear cases. London is the worst-performing area, with local authority and private custody cases both taking over a year to be resolved. Family custody cases also take more than a year in Sussex and Somerset. This compares with 24 weeks for public cases and 18 weeks for private cases in Wales.

There has been some reduction in the backlog since 2021, when hearings were suspended due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The NAO also found that the Government does not know the total cost to the taxpayer of hearing family court cases, as responsibility is split across four departments - the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Education, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass).

By auditing all four, the NAO calculated that the Government is spending £1.8 billion a year on the family justice system.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: "The Government has a range of initiatives to improve family justice services, and the number of children waiting for court decisions is reducing. But many cases still take too long to complete and further action is needed to remove the barriers to a more efficient system, including poor quality data and fragmented decision-making."

A Government spokesperson told Byline Times:

"We inherited a justice system in crisis and recognise that delays children and families are facing have a real impact.

"We are working hard to improve their experience in the family courts further by expandin...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

There is still lots to be done to repair the damage caused by Brexit. But that shouldn't detract from a package of measures that goes significantly further than many - both in Brussels and the UK - expected even a few short weeks ago.

Despite how it has been reported in today's papers, the list of achievements from this deal is substantial, and goes further than the very limited ambition set out in Labour's 2024 manifesto.

The Government can sell the deal as a win for Britain in three big ways.

First - it keeps us safer. The security and defence pact will not only formalise collaboration in military training, planning and security, it allows Britain access to the EU's €150bn Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defence procurement fund.

Being part of the fund means that Rachel Reeves can borrow to invest in defence without imperilling her fiscal rules. Our military will be upgraded faster, coordination with European partners will be easier.

It also boosts British industry - EU states are obligated to buy from participating countries, now including the UK. Given our defence industry is one of the biggest in Europe that should bring business to Britain.

On policing, the UK regains access to the Schengen Information System (SIS), a database which gives member states real-time alerts on criminal suspects, and the EU's fingerprinting system, Eurodac. Increased UK engagement in Europol will be fast tracked.

Taken together the agreements on defence and policing make the UK safer not just now but for years to come, from crime and from Russia. The Government should shout this loud and clear.

The second big win is on the cost of living. New agreements on energy and food will bring down bills - a key ask of voters struggling with the ongoing cost of living crisis.

The agreement to reduce checks on food and agricultural products traded across the Channel will speed deliveries, cut costs for producers and exporters, and increase UK exports (which had fallen by a fifth since Brexit). Given the amount of fresh food we import from Europe the deal also strengthens food security - no bad thing in an era of increasing climate instability.

The final big win is on energy. The UK will be reintegrated into the EU's internal energy market. This had been a key ask of British energy and climate sectors, given it will cut the cost of energy trading and production, and will enable a much swifter - and cheaper - rollout of renewable energy infrastructure in the North Sea.

Eased trade will cut energy bills for consumers and business. It also makes UK energy more secure and makes blackouts less likely.

Third, the reset offers something for young people. Most under 30s were too young to vote in the referendum, yet they are the most restricted set of young people in Europe - cut off from the freedom to travel, study, apprentice, work, fall in love anywhere in Europe taken for granted by their peers.

Promise of a (limited) youth mobility deal and renewed membership of Erasmus+ is - as much as anything else - about generational fairness.

We should celebrate the wins. The new deal resolves some of the major barriers created by Brexit and - particularly for defence, energy and agriculture - is of real value. Businesses will grow, exports increase, Europe's defence capabilities will grow a little faster.

The caveat, however, is a big one. The Brexit settlement in effect put trade sanctions on our own economy - making it more costly, complicated and time consuming to import or export. The result is a 15% hit to both goods and services trade, a reality borne out by subsequent research.

That has resulted in ...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Over the past week, my X account has been flooded by a barrage of spam replies. Dozens of accounts with Bored Ape Non-Fungible Token profile pictures and barely coherent messages tagged me in praise of a supposed crypto trader named @GavinBrookswin.

Their syntax was robotic, their engagement artificial. But the impact was - it increasingly became clear - all too real.

At first, I thought it was just another passing scam. But then I noticed something odd: after instantly replying to my posts, these bot accounts blocked me.

This combination - reply and block - happened again. And again. And again. It was not random; it seemed to be strategic.

Then Phil Magness, an economic historian, dropped into my feed to give some advice. It had happened to him too, and what he said raised my suspicions. This wasn't about selling crypto. It was about something darker.

"The bots reply to you, then block you," he wrote. "This triggers the algorithm to think that your content is being mass blocked and should be deboosted."

It is hard to know if this is true, but what I did see was the effect. Deboosted it was. My engagement trickled off: likes receded, retweets faltered.

The intent of such manipulation is unclear, but I was being buried by the platform's own design. With so many spam accounts blocking me, I became a digital persona non grata.

'Total Information Collapse' and the Tribunal of Truth

Peter Jukes, Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times, on the urgent need for media accuracy and why joining Impress, the independent press regulator, is the best way for us to uphold those values

Peter Jukes

Why they had chosen me, I do not know. Others they had chosen seemed to be blue ticks but not journalists. Some of those targeted complained they were victims of censorship; others saw it as an attempt to discredit them. Whatever the case, it seems a new way that social media is being gamed.

This is increasingly becoming the case. Dr Emma L. Briant, a visiting associate professor at The University of Notre Dame du Lac in the United States and an expert on information warfare and propaganda, told Byline Times that "a common form of X harassment is to leverage the time-wasting, exhausting process of victims blocking and reporting a swarm of accounts. An attacker wants to aggravate their victim as much as possible, forcing them to block."

"Here the target is a journalist and the goal is algorithmic suppression," she explained about my case. "Blocking an account reduces its reputation score, so this lowers the journalist's visibility in the 'For You' feed.

X is enabling tools that could be deployed by anyone for algorithmic censorship

Dr Emma L. Briant, expert on information warfare and propaganda

It is, however, hard to prove intent in this case. As James Bachini, a block chain expert, told Byline Times: "Sybil attacks where bots imitate humans is a cat and mouse game where AI is pushing boundaries and enabling the scammers to scale out what works on any particular day. I'd suggest it is more of an unsolvable network wide problem rather than a politically motivated attack."

What is clear is that this form of digital manipulation sits within a wider malaise afflicting Elon Musk's social media platform. This week, Musk's AI chatbot Grok also came under fire for injecting far-right conspiracy theories into unrelated conversations. Users asked innocuous questions about baseball or scaffolding, and Grok, responded with references to "white genocide" in South Africa.

When probed, Grok claimed it had been "instructed by my creators" to treat the genocide claims as real and racially motivat...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Despite all the talk of peace, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine continues. In what now appears to be a regular feature of these bi-weekly updates, the time in between has yet again been marked by another mass missile and drone attack on Kyiv.

Two people were killed, and eight others injured, including four children, overnight on May 7 - just before another sham Russian "ceasefire" came into effect to protect Vladimir Putin from the humiliation of having to cancel his Victory Day parade in Moscow two days later.

Yet the peace process stumbles on, and this week all eyes were on Istanbul.

The 'Peace' Talks

The lead up looked promising - Ukraine, Europe, and the United States were demanding, with one voice, that Russia agree to a full, 30-day ceasefire.

Granted, Putin had already rebuffed them, and instead proposed direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, but the messaging from the West seemed to be united and in step.

And then Donald Trump blew it. Again.

Trump's 'Devastatingly Incompetent' Attempts at Negotiating an End to the Ukraine War

In his latest dispatch from Kyiv, Chris York details how Trump's 'Art of the Deal' just isn't working

Chris York

Volodymyr Zelensky had already called Putin's bluff, responding immediately to the Russian president's proposed talks by saying he'd be there and expected to see Putin there as well.

The Kremlin, caught off guard, responded with silence as they formulated a plan to get out of the situation they'd largely created.

Putin was never going to show up on the same stage as Zelensky - in his eyes, this would legitimise a Ukrainian president that he has always insisted is illegitimate.

So in his place, he sent a low-level delegation with no authority to make any decisions - just the latest in a series of moves that make it very obvious to everyone that Russia has absolutely no interest in peace.

Well, nearly everyone.

'Why Putin's Three-Day May Ceasefire Declaration is Worthless'

The Russian president announced the ceasefire - from 8 to 11 May - without even speaking to Ukraine

Chris York

Instead of recognising the situation for what it is and punishing Russia with those long talked about sanctions, Trump instead gave him a free pass.

"Why would he go if I'm not going?" Trump said before the two delegations had even sat down in the same room.

The appeasement continued after the talks, with Trump saying: "I always felt there can't be a meeting without me because I don't think a deal's going to get through…"

In Ukraine there was disbelief - a now regular feeling driven home time and time again by Trump's apparent total contentment with being played by Putin.

"Putin is mocking him, humiliating him," a Ukrainian lawmaker told me, adding: "What's the point in these negotiations?"

Trump also insisted that "Putin is tired of this whole thing", but the Russian demands laid out in Istanbul suggest anything but.

The Demands

To understand what Russia hoped to achieve in Istanbul, you need to look at who Putin sent.

Russia's delegation was headed by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky, who also headed the Russian delegation the last time the two sides sat down for talks in the early weeks of the invasion in 2022.

Back then, the situation was vastly different to what it is now - Russia occupied nearly a quarter of Ukraine, its forces were marching on Kyiv, and Western military support consisted of helmets and Javelins, rather than tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles.

From this position of strength, Russia demanded Ukraine's effective capitulation - the demilitarisation of the country, great swathes of its land, and a pro...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

For almost a decade now the UK has been paralysed by Brexit. From the moment 52% of Brits voted to leave the EU back in 2016, British politics has been caught up in a stultifying consensus which insists that this one vote must be "honoured", no matter what the cost to the country at large.

The result was years of political stasis in Westminster, followed by the passing of a particularly damaging form of Brexit which, with the single stroke of Boris Johnson's pen, cut the UK's longstanding trading and political ties with its closest neighbours.

In the years that followed, all of the big promises made by pro-Brexit politicians turned out to have been false. Food prices went up, red tape increased and the economy flatlined. International trade, which we were told would be liberated by breaking our "chains" with the EU declined as companies relocated from the UK in order to avoid the new barriers put up with Europe. None of the new international trade deals struck in the years following Brexit came close to making up even a fraction of what the UK had lost from leaving the EU.

Meanwhile immigration, which the Leave campaign promised would be returned to the control of British politicians, soared to new record highs, as the last Conservative Government opened up new visa pathways to fill the post-Brexit gaps in the Labour market.

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Josiah Mortimer

As each big Brexit promise evaporated, so too did public support for it. With every year that followed the referendum, the numbers of Brits still believing Brexit had been the right decision declined. And in an era of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the case for Britain to club together again with its former European partners became easier and easier to sell.

Yet as voters shifted their positions, the political and media consensus in the UK remained remarkably rooted in the past. In the run up to the 2024 general election not a single major party backed the UK immediately rejoining the Single Market, or customs union, let alone the EU itself. Labour's leader Keir Starmer, who had previously campaigned for a second referendum, instead insisted he would "make Brexit work" with his spokesman insisting that "we're not going backwards when it comes to Brexit."

Yet fast forward to this morning and going back looks to be exactly where we are going.

During a remarkably warm press conference in which the President of the European Comission Ursula von der Leyen repeatedly referred to the Prime Minister as "my dear Keir", Starmer welcomed the "landmark" deal he had struck with the EU which he promised would forge a "new era" that would be a "win win" for both sides.

In what appears to have been a calculated inversion of the pro-Leave rhetoric about the referendum nine years ago, Starmer insisted that his new deal "delivers on what people voted for last year".

The substance of the agreement may not entirely match up to the rhetoric. Independent analysis suggest that the new agreements on agriculture, trade, fishing and energy will only restore a small fraction of the economic growth the UK is forecast to have lost due to Brexit. Much of the biggest potential gains, like rejoining the customs union and single market, also continue to be ruled out by the UK.

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New polling finds a collapse in support for the Prime Minister among Labour voters, as he pursues a strategy that is also failing...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

On 13 May, a day that the temperature in London - according to Climate Central's Climate Shift Index - was 5.5°C hotter than normal, more than 150 scientists gathered in Westminster to urge MPs to stop ignoring science and instead deliver evidence-based policies to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.

The action was spearheaded by wildlife TV presenter and campaigner Chris Packham who was joined by climate scientists, engineers and ecologists from all over the UK .

Packham fears that science is "not getting the ear that it needs in Parliament" and accused the Government of not making the best-informed decisions based on the science.

"There are a lot of good ministers in the cabinet at the moment but they're not being given the leadership and they're not being given the funding or resources that they need. I don't think there's any ambiguity about that," he said.

When we look at what we need to do about fossil fuels, what we need to do about food, what we need to do about biodiversity, they're not sending out any of the signals that they're going to act upon that in the right way, or rapidly enough or broadly enough.

Chris Packham, campaigner

Former Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, accused the political system of failing the electorate and described the current trajectory as a form of "global suicide".

King said there was an urgent need to bridge the gap between science, policy, and public understanding and highlighted the wealth of public support for climate action - over 89% globally. He added that politicians are disconnected and remain captive to vested interests and short-term political ends.

"We are destroying our ecosystems, and we are destroying ourselves in the process. Politicians need to listen to the scientists and stop listening to the oligarchs," King explained.

A case in point is the Labour Party's proposed Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

The Government's Housing Bill Branded a 'Licence To Kill' Protected Species for Property Developers

Environmental groups and conservationists slam the Government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Stuart Spray

Green MP Dr Ellie Chowns is adamant that politicians "have absolutely got to pay attention to science" and warned that environmental protections would be dismantled if the proposed Bill is passed in its current form.

Although the Government claims its plans to speed up the planning system won't reduce safeguards for nature, Chowns, who sits on the committee currently considering the Bill, and her Green-Party colleagues, have "serious concerns".

The Bill, she explained, shifts the approach from one that requires thorough ecological surveys and damage avoidance, to one that skips straight to "offsetting" payments often without even knowing what is being destroyed or harmed.

"Science has to underpin the politics of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill," she said.

Packham has also condemned the Bill for undermining the Habitats Directive, a crucial piece of environmental law, and his legal team at Wild Justice has initiated a judicial review to challenge it.

Angela [Raynor] said that basically the Bill as it stands, won't harm wildlife. Well, legally, we've looked at it and it will harm wildlife. So we need Angela to go back to the House of Commons and tell the truth about that. Before that bill is voted on

Chris Packham, campaigner

Simon Oldridge, science adviser for Zero Hour, says policymakers should base climate decisions on science, not short-term political agendas. "It's time we stopped letting politics override what the science tells us must be done," he said.

Oldridge criticized the UK Go...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

For someone who thinks they know their own mind and has a clear view of their beliefs and what matters, there are a range of issues which I've struggled with all my life. Should people have the right to send their children to private schools, should borders be open, what rights come with what responsibilities?

One particular dilemma has bugged me for decades. It's whether significantly more people should go into higher education, which has been the case since New Labour effectively made a target of half of us 'enjoying' that experience from 1998? I still don't know what I really think - and here's why.

What drives me politically more than anything is how the talent and ability of people is wasted, primarily for themselves but also for society. The fact that we exist at all is a miracle and our lives can be long, full and beautiful, or short, empty and ugly. But all of us are capable of the most amazing feats of ingenuity and creativity, when given a chance and the support needed to realise our incredible potential.

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Melissa Chemam details the multifaceted resistance mobilising against far-right groups, Islamophobia and racism across the Channel

Melissa Chemam

University, or more precisely for me Trent Polytechnic, was a vital stepping stone on the journey to unlock the modest potential I could boast. I came from a family in which no one had ever got near a sixth form, let alone a university. My mum, one of those smart working-class women who left school at 15 and worked in shops and offices all her life (while running the home and the family), somehow thought that college might be good for me without any direct knowledge of what it actually meant. She asked Dave, in the big house over the road, to talk to me about it and to give me a nudge. Duley prodded I eventually found myself emersed in Frankfurt School Marxism, student politics, football and endless joyful fun. Not least, I see retrospectively, because I was given a grant to live off. For those under 55 let me explain - the state or more precisely your local council gave you the money for rent and food. And there were no, I repeat, no tuition fees. Can you believe it?

This public largess was deemed financially feasible while only 10% of the country went to university.

As an interregnum between youth and adulthood, it provided not just three golden years, but a lifetime of brilliant friends and stepping stones to jobs and opportunities my mum could only dream of (but would have succeeded in given half a chance). For me it was priceless. So why shouldn't everyone who wants to go, get to go?

When New Labour launched its plan to open up universities to half the country I was instinctively opposed. Tuition fees sounded the death knell of higher education as a place in which the public good was paramount. Fees simply embedded the commercialisation of both the student and the institution. The learn, to earn, to spend treadmill was now complete. People would increasingly see themselves as their own individualised private company and brand, worthy of investment to guarantee a return on themselves. Meanwhile the institutions would expand dramatically and recklessly and along with it, the pay and prestige of their once humble administrators.

"The economy is the means, the goal is to change the soul" Mrs. Thatcher famously remarked. She also crowed that her greatest achievement wasn't the conversion of the Conservative party to Thatcherism but the conversion of the Labour Party. And so, with tuition fees, her claim rang true.

I thought tuition...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Recently, the UK Government briefed the media on what sounded like a success story: a new "ChatGPT-style" tool that would allow them to cut the amount of time caseworkers spend on asylum claims, summarising information in order to save "44 years of time".

What they didn't mention were some of the alarming findings contained in a Home Office evaluation of the tool, quietly published on their website on April 29, the same day Dame Angela Eagle, the Minister for Asylum and Border Security, told LBC: "We can cut nearly half the amount of time it takes for people to search the policy information notes, and we can cut by nearly a third, the amount of time it takes for cases to be summarised, and that means there are significant increases in productivity here."

The pilot is pitched as a success - but the picture is less rosy when you look at the details. The tool being trialled uses a 'Large Language Model' (LLM) to "extract and summarise information from existing asylum interview transcript documents."

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Mathilda Mallinson

The problem is that it made a substantial number of mistakes. Nearly one in ten of the summaries it produced were found to be inaccurate, or had missing information. These summaries were so faulty they had to be removed from the study altogether.

The Home Office evaluation reads: "Technical specialists reviewed all summaries for accuracy prior to use in the pilot. A small proportion of summaries produced (9%) were deemed to be inaccurate or had missing information and were therefore removed from the pilot."

Context reported last week that half of the caseworkers who tested the tool said it gave them incorrect information with some users saying it did not provide references to the asylum seeker's interview transcript. Nearly a quarter said they were not "fully confident" in the summaries provided.

The evaluation described the mistakes as a "small proportion." But if this tool is unleashed on asylum claims - which can be a very real matter of life or death - then can faulty information in one in ten cases really be seen as 'small'?

At the end of 2024, the government had 90,686 asylum cases awaiting an initial decision, official data showed.

'Keir Starmer's Government Is Now Even More Anti-Migrant Than Its Conservative Predecessors'

Hopes that Labour would abandon the Conservative trend of treating incomers as disposable and lesser beings have been dashed, argues Daniel Sohege

Daniel Sohege

Sadly this isn't our first experience of the UK Home Office seizing on dodgy tech 'fixes' for complex challenges.

Here at Foxglove - a non-profit which works to make tech fair for everyone - we successfully stopped the Home Office using a racist algorithm to help it process visas.

In 2020, after we brought a legal challenge against an algorithm which discriminated against people based on their nationality, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel backed down and agreed to withdraw it.

One thing we found was that that algorithm suffered from "feedback loop" problems known to plague many such automated systems - where past bias and discrimination, fed into a computer programme, reinforce future bias and discrimination.

This same concern also applies to the AI 'LLMs' that are now hyped as an answer to just about everything. These models hoover up vast quantities of material from the internet as part of their 'training'. They do so...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

It was hard not to feel a degree of nostalgia watching Sir Ian McKellen playing a man who could make or break theatrical productions in the heyday of newspapers in the recent film The Critic.

I have sat in the stalls reviewing shows for the past 30 years and must reluctantly concede no modern critic wields anything like that sort of power today.

Praise from a few social media influencers with big followings, innovative online campaigns, and - crucially - a hugely popular actor in the leading role are what now make the difference between success or failure for a show, rather than the verdict of any one critic in a state of either reverence or revulsion.

The balance of power shifted not long after the turn of the millennium, when newspaper managements began to dispense with the services of the most revered and expensive critics as theatre advertising migrated from print to online.

Now, Michael Billington - still happily reviewing for Country Life in his eighties after retiring from the Guardian - is the last of the old guard with a real hinterland and passion for theatre whose opinions still count for a great deal with seasoned punters and professionals alike.

FREE PREVIEW

The Death of the Critic: From Cultural Visionaries to Vacuous Performers

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Iain Overton

Those of us who sit alongside the great man either fulfil the function as a labour of love - with day jobs that pay the bills - or were the former deputies to star critics who have succeeded by default on a fraction of their salaries as they've nowhere else to go. We make for what might at best be described as a desultory sight in the stalls, and more than one theatre impresario has admitted to me that he still furnishes us all with complimentary tickets for nostalgic rather than practical reasons.

So many of the old conventions - beginning a first night at 7pm rather than 7.30pm to allow for the deadlines of print newspapers and perching us at the end of rows to enable us to dash out immediately after the curtain comes down to file our reviews - now seem not so much nostalgic, as anachronistic when so few printed newspapers bother to accommodate a theatre opening in the next morning's paper.

I saw the last days of serious theatre criticism with Jack Tinker still reviewing for the Daily Mail, Nicholas de Jongh at the London Evening Standard, Charles Spencer at the Daily Telegraph, Benedict Nightingale at The Times, and of course the indestructible Billington of the Guardian - and it was exciting as well as educational talking to any of them about a show. They were, every one of them, passionate about theatre and, in their own ways, worthy successors to Kenneth Tynan of the Observer, and James Agate of The Saturday Review and later The Sunday Times.

What is sad about the decline and fall of the critics is great theatre requires that a conversation should begin about it after the curtain comes down and my fraternity played their parts in stimulating and informing it.

Actors, playwrights, set designers, and directors - and all the others who make their living in the theatre - often insist they take no notice of critics, but secretly, at least in the past, a lot of them unquestionably did. Constructive, intelligent criticism - of the kind I still see from Billington in Country Life - genuinely does enrich theatre.

Online there are now some excellent critics and observers of theatre - Rebecca Vines of Broadway Baby, and Mark Shenton come to mind - but none are resourced in the way that the...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Clickbait media has apparently made it impossible to pass intelligent migration policy. Keir Starmer's white paper announcement was a cry for help from the "structured, evidence-led" policymaking he promised voters, traces of which were fighting to be heard over cantankerous layers of clickbait.

His colleague, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, blamed the media, and told me she feared Starmer was walking her party into a second Windrush Scandal.

"When politicians act in this way, it is to play up to the media. But language has consequences, our policy decisions have consequences… We said we learned lessons from the Windrush Scandal and that's exactly the type of thing that's happening."

Before I trained as a journalist, I worked in the asylum sector and in border-lying camps, and I am often amazed at the ignorance of editors and reporters when it comes to basic immigration law, terminology, and context. I also do not believe that accuracy is their priority.

When I interviewed Ribeiro-Addy, who represents my own Windrush-heavy constituency of Clapham and Brixton, for Middle East Eye, she remarked that we seemed different from other media, because we refused to echo Starmer's binary distinction between the 'legal immigration' he spoke about this week, and the asylum routes he'll be speaking on in the Summer.

We were simply reflecting what is accurate. Entering countries without papers in order to claim asylum is a right enshrined in human rights law to which the UK is signatory. The late Conservative Government did indeed pass a bill to criminalise it (leaving judges to wrestle between national and international law), but our media had been using the term "illegal migrants" without a single grounding in legal reality for years.

'The Media Is Silent About Female Asylum Seekers - Yet Fixated About Men Arriving in the UK'

There's a reason news outlets never focus on the many women seeking refuge in the UK, argue Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia

Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia

The first thing that struck me watching Starmer's speech was the cavernous disconnect between what he told us the policies are designed to do, and what they will achieve if enacted. Measuring policies against their stated intention is a simple, unbiased metric of accountability that I wish more media had used to analyse his white paper.

It was, frankly, painful watching Starmer sing of his own integrity, while dancing an 'Us vs. Them' pantomime at the pulpit. He paired bombastic, nationalistic rhetoric with the insistent logic of bettering UK labour conditions and promoting integration. He denigrated foreign residents as "strangers", and then immediately leapt to his own defence, saying: "People who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I'm doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in."

Let's assess that.

Labour's 2024 General Election Manifesto did indeed pledge to reduce net 'legal' migration (p.42). It justified this aim specifically and exclusively using traditional Labour values: "to upskill workers and improve working conditions in the UK."

Echoes of this were heard in Starmer's speech. He acknowledged that "pulling up the drawbridge" would "hurt the pay packets of working people," but reasoned, "we do have to ask why parts of the economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour, rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community". Among his proposed policies are a few that catered to this goal.

Power, Visas, and the Pol...