The climate crisis means that UK summers have been becoming hotter and drier for some time now. But little has been done to mitigate the impact of higher temperatures on hospitals and clinics.

In today’s The Lead Untangles, we take a look at the human cost of heatwaves and how they are impacting our National Health Service.

Context

The UK Health Security Agency issued a red ‘heat health alert’ in the June heatwave for temperatures that pose ‘significant risk to life’ even to those not considered to be at risk in hot weather.

A couple of weeks ago, the UKHSA estimated there were 2,877 excess deaths associated with the heatwaves 24-27 May and 21-28 June. Last year the sum total for the summer was just 1,504. The record for the UK was for 2022, when 2,985 heat-associated deaths were observed across 5 heat episodes. Given both May and June have nearly reached that figure, 2026 is on track to make a new record.

Whose health is at risk in hot weather?

People under 5 and over 65 struggle to cope with heat compared with adults, as do pregnant people.

Some medications make it harder to regulate things like hydration, sweating and body temperature: for example SSRI antidepressants, antihistamines, blood pressure medicine, insulin and antipsychotics (for use in schizophrenia and dementia).

The NHS warned that people with heart, respiratory, kidney and mobility problems should all consider themselves at higher risk in heatwaves. People with diabetes, Parkinson’s and substance use problems may also struggle.

Homeless people are at higher risk because of a lack of access to water and cool spaces.

People without pre-existing conditions are at higher risk if they work outside, or spend time outside exercising.

The NHS also warns that people living alone are at higher risk in a heatwave if they are unable to care for themselves – for instance due to mobility or cognitive problems.

How are doctors coping?

A survey of more than 1,100 doctors and healthcare workers by Doctors’ Association UK found that 83 per cent of respondents described their workplace as ‘very hot’ or ‘dangerously hot’. Some 94 per cent worked without air conditioning and 68 per cent of respondents said the heat had affected patient safety.

The same survey asked doctors and nurses to record the temperature at work and one participant reported 45C.

The UK’s independent adviser on climate change published a report in May saying air conditioning should be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next ten years, but the majority of NHS workers need these adaptations now.

In the June heatwave, vulnerable patients were encouraged to stay home for their own safety, resulting in cancelled appointments and creating a backlog for clinicians. Some hospitals declared critical incidents as cooling units and equipment such as scanners stopped working, again creating a backlog for services.

Yesterday a UN ambassador used an article in the Health Service Journal to call for the government to create a summer version of the winter pressures strategy, first introduced in 2013/14. Importantly, extra funding was attached to help services cope.

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How are other countries coping?

The UK is not alone in this. Europe has already recorded over 10,000 excess deaths this summer, of which over 5,700 in France, 5,000 in Germany and 1,222 in Belgium.

The death toll shows the urgent need for adaptations to homes and infrastructure across the continent. For example, researchers estimated that Australia recorded around 1,000 deaths over four years in a population of around 28 million. By contrast the UK has nearly tripled that number in a single year for a population of around 70 million.

What have doctors and nurses said about the heatwave?

Dr Alice Clack, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist and member of Health for XR, said: “Experiencing this year’s heatwave has been deeply distressing.”

Dr Naomi Adelson, a GP in London who’s also a member of Health for XR, said many patients’ homes are not designed to cope with extreme heat: “The heatwaves just seem never-ending this summer and they hit the most vulnerable hardest. We urgently need adaptation of homes and public buildings to protect our population and reduce the strain on the NHS.”

Two weeks ago the Royal College of Nursing said that employers must commit to basics like providing access to drinking water and allowing them breaks during heatwaves.

RCN Head of Health, Safety and Wellbeing, Kim Sunley, said: “The heatwave shows little sign of slowing down in parts of the UK.

“This summer, we told our members the key actions employers should be taking to keep them safe. With temperatures still regularly topping 30 degrees, the need for this is greater than ever. Health and care employers have a legal duty to protect staff and must get the basics right.”

Are doctors and nurses allowed to campaign for climate solutions?

Yes and no. Technically, nothing stops clinicians protesting in a personal capacity.

But since 2022, registered doctors have been suspended and even imprisoned for climate protests that hit the news.

Dr Patrick Hart, a GP from Bristol, was imprisoned for a year. He became the first doctor to face a medical tribunal and have his licence to practice suspended as a consequence.

Dr Sarah Benn, also a GP, went to prison for 32 days for taking part in Just Stop Oil protests in 2022. She is still suspended from practicing.

A third GP, Dr Diana Warner, also had her licence suspended.

There is a fast-increasing awareness of the urgency of the situation amongst healthcare workers in the UK, particularly as individuals are directly affected by global heating.

Dr Matt Lee is the sustainability lead for Doctors’ Association UK and a hospital doctor in Wales.

He’s volunteered and worked in the area of climate change and human health for a number of years. Nevertheless he has been alarmed by the temperatures this summer: “It still came as a shock having to prepare a ‘just-in-case’ evacuation bag whilst watching wildfire smoke from my house.

“The realities of climate change and what it means for our friends and family are feeling closer than ever. While it motivates me to keep advocating for climate action, I worry about what the future holds for my loved ones and those who I care for in hospital.”

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What next?

Doctors may have been disappointed by health secretary Yvette Cooper’s response. Earlier today she told LBC that the NHS must ‘prepare’ for heatwaves, but made no reference to new strategy or funding to prevent heatwave deaths. Another heatwave has been forecast for mid-August and time is running out for the government to announce emergency support to prevent further deaths. Last year the heat episode with highest mortality occurred in August, with those aged 75 and over at greatest risk. Hospitals registered significant deaths in this period.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski has called for higher taxes on oil and gas profits to fund wildfire prevention. In his speech he specifically highlighted the risk posed to older people and those with pre-existing conditions. He framed the speech as a ‘reality check’ for the new Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has made no notable announcements on the UK heatwave since he came into his new role on 20 July. Fears emerged that he would revoke the ban on North Sea exploration licences for oil companies but he has maintained the ban to date, despite showing some support for UK oil and gas.

A coalition of MPs and public figures has also called for a ‘National Emergency Briefing’ to address the impact of the heatwaves, but its petition has not yet reached the threshold for a parliamentary debate.

Without firm funding commitments to adapting houses and hospitals, the NHS is unlikely to be able to affect the number of excess deaths next summer. ■

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About the author: Ellie Broughton has over 12 years’ experience writing about health and wellbeing for titles including The Guardian, the i paper, the Huffington Post, Lifehacker, patient.info, Stylist, The Independent, Refinery29 UK and Vice UK.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email zoe@thelead.uk

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You may have noticed we’ve not been hearing as much from Nigel Farage lately.

After the self-indulgent diatribe about a media conspiracy against him — which ended with him resigning his Clacton seat and triggering an entirely unnecessary by-election — for the most part, Farage has been mercifully quiet.

Even before that, he’d been retreating.

Over the past few months, scrutiny of Reform’s finances had intensified after the reveal of an undisclosed £5 million gift from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne, plus questions over George Cottrell’s financial links to senior party figures. What was once a loud, outsider movement constantly dominating British politics had suddenly become a mainstream party quietly managing the same transparency questions it once levelled at others.

Only a few months ago, it felt like British politics had entered a new era. Reform seemed unstoppable, with Farage holding weekly press conferences to announce another predictable slice of new-right policy. The Tories were outflanked and Labour looked exhausted. Westminster’s only real preoccupation was how high the party could go.

Now, it would be foolish to declare the era of insurgency is over. British politics is too volatile for sweeping predictions, and the conditions that fuelled Reform’s rise (disillusionment, poorly regulated tech, falling living standards, distrust) haven’t gone away. But insurgency runs on momentum and a sense of inevitability that’s as much perceived as real.

For months now, Reform has publicly faced rough seas. A series of poor by-election results, mounting scandals, fractures across the populist right, and a shifting international climate, has produced genuine headwinds. When Farage retreats rather than braces for the storm, that tells you something important.

Andy Burnham has undoubtedly enjoyed a honeymoon. The “Burnham bounce” has seen the prime minister take a four-point lead ahead of Reform for the first time in fifteen months. Goodwill is politically valuable, and the new PM has projected optimism and competence, pairing quick wins like the bus fare cap and energy bill discounts with longer-term ambitions on social care reform and devolution.

In contrast, Reform UK remains almost entirely a party of grievance. Rather than a offering a vision of a more prosperous, productive or communitarian Britain, it doubles down on punitive proposals, like deploying the Royal Navy to intercept and forcibly return small boats, already dismissed by military figures and immigration experts as impractical, diplomatically inflammatory and potentially unlawful.

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It’s politics built for headlines, not for reality. The disappointing by-election run points to the same problem, as does Farage’s decision to resign his seat and seek a fresh mandate. What is intended as a show of confidence has exposed raw vulnerability.

Then there’s the fading anti-establishment sheen. Reform has billed itself as the clean alternative to a corrupt establishment (never an easy claim for a party fronted by a former City trader and career politician, privately educated, who’s made £2 million in additional earnings on top of his MP salary). The question was always how quickly that would unravel, and the undeclared donations from Harborne and Cottrell, alongside a string of police and financial investigations, have answered it. Now, perception is shifting — recent YouGov polling found almost three quarters of Britons now regard Farage as sleazy, including 40 per cent of Reform’s own 2024 voters.

There’s trouble on the right flank too. The splintering of Restore Britain under Rupert Lowe, Farage’s former colleague, has rather complicated things. Lowe has become a figure of influence for those who think Reform is too focused on Farage himself, and who favour a much more extreme far-right politics of mass repatriation and division. He is backed by Elon Musk, whose platform, X, amplifies Lowe to his enormous following.

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And even attempted peace talks have collapsed into more public fighting: within hours of Farage signalling openness to talks, Lowe accused him of “outright lying” about their private conversations. None of this projects a movement confident in its own supply.

As I’ve written before, the international backdrop that propelled the hard-right across the globe is possibly collapsing too. Donald Trump, once proof of concept for populists everywhere, looks more like a mad man than a strong man. British voters have little patience for a president who holds the UK economy hostage, enriches himself in office, and tramples norms for his own thin ego. Politicians like Farage — who have long tied themselves to the Trump brand — are slowly coming to regret it.

Now, I wouldn’t want to be the one to write Reform’s obituary too early. The party still commands a large vote share and benefits from deep malaise in mainstream politics. But Reform are starting to feel more and more uncertain, and their leader unmoored.

Momentum rarely dies in one dramatic moment, especially for populists who push norms and write explosive headlines every day. But it can erode through an accumulation of setbacks; like bad elections, awkward headlines, internal rivalries, shifting moods, and formidable opponents. For the first time since Reform’s emergence, all those trends are moving the same way.

If I were Farage, I’d be quiet too.

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Long awaited planning reforms — published at the start of the month — will speed up decisions on housing schemes and other forms of development by delegating nearly all decisions to planning officers.

The new regulations and statutory guidance will severely restrict the ability of local authorities to decide whether elected councillors or unelected officers should make decisions on planning.

The government believes planning reform is essential as it struggles on its way to a target of delivering 1.5 million new homes over this Parliament and backs “the builders, not the blockers”.

But critics say further delegation of planning powers reduces democratic oversight by sidelining the role of local elected representatives, setting the scene for a political row.

Reform UK politicians locally have immediately moved to suggest the changes will result in local councils being unable to block HMOs.

We’ll unpick how much truth there is to that.

The current system

Currently, local planning authorities have their own system of deciding how planning consent matters are split between planning officers and elected members sitting on planning committees.

According to the Local Government Association (LGA), whether to refer decisions to the planning committee can be influenced by a number of factors, including the level of interest from local residents, whether the matter is contentious or differs from council policies, and its impact on the local community.

Wirral Council, for example, publishes its system on its website, where it includes applications for large-scale major developments and applications attracting petitions of objection of more than 25 signatories or 15 individual written objections as ones needing to be decided by committee. But the LGA says many councils merely include details in the body of its constitution, making them difficult to access.

In addition, ward councillors have call-in powers allowing them to step in and divert a decision from officers to the planning committee where they have a specific planning concern.

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What’s changing

The government’s aim with the new regulations is to ensure there is “greater clarity and consistency” about planning decision making, by dividing all planning applications into two schedules, which all local planning authorities are expected to follow.

Applying to all authorities except development corporations, the Homes and Communities Agency, national park authorities and the Broads Authority, the guidance says planning committees should focus on the “key proposals that matter to an area”, with the rest made by planning officers.

Schedule 1 matters must be delegated to officers. They include householder development, minor commercial development and residential development of up to nine dwellings.

Schedule 2 functions include large outline planning permissions, applications concerning listed buildings and tree preservation orders. The “over-riding presumption” is that these will be delegated to officers, but exceptions can be made to refer to planning committee if a nominated officer and a nominated member of the planning committee agree the application meets certain criteria, most notably if it “raises an economic, social or environmental issue of significance to the local area”.

The regulations also reduce the size of planning committees to no more than 13 members and require mandatory training for them.

The politics

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook insists he recognises the vital role planning committees play in ensuring decisions are shaped by local residents and communities but that significant variation across the country creates “risk and uncertainty” in the system.

The new delegation scheme will create “greater consistency and certainty”, he says.

Property industry figures agree. Estate agent Savills says the changes “should in many cases provide greater certainty over their route to a decision and potentially reduce delays”.

The Home Builders Federation welcomes the new two-tier approach but argues it does not go far enough in delegating even more applications to officers, meaning it will “fail to have the transformative impact on decision making timescales that it has potential to do”.

The Royal Institute of British Architects and the British Property Federation are also in support.

The LGA is among critics, warning of the “potential erosion of local democracy and the limited flexibility created by a highly standardised national scheme of delegation”.

The Town and Country Planning Association says there is no systematic evidence that the current system is in need of radical reform. “We should make no mistake that the effect of these new regulations is to silence community voices in decisions,” says TCPA director of policy Hugh Ellis.

The new system may also fuel anti-migrant sentiment over the flashpoint issue of houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). Many asylum seekers already live in HMOs and that number is set to grow as the government tries to move more out of hotels.

Reform UK councillors on Preston City Council and Lancashire County Council are among those who have complained that Labour’s changes mean local elected representatives will no longer be able to block HMOs.

“The Labour government knows Reform councillors like me will continue to oppose problematic HMOs, so now they’re forcing the decision through unelected council officers and relying on them to blindly approve,” says Rob Walsh, who sits on Preston Council.

Labour politicians deny the claims about HMOs. Portsmouth Labour councillor Graham Heaney accused critics of “scaremongering” and “exaggeration”, insisting the council had “one of the strongest HMO policies of any local authorities in the country”.

Labour-controlled Bolton Council says as many as 35 proposals have been turned down since June 2025 when it introduced rules that all plans for new HMOs for three or more people require full planning permission. Councillor Sean Fielding blamed Conservative deregulation for a proliferation of HMOs.

Local authorities including Warrington, St Helens and Preston are among those considering similar moves to Bolton to limit HMOs.

Indeed, Preston City Council implements strict planning controls already across its main urban area to tightly manage and restrict new HMOs. This means the authority has more - not less - control over this type of accommodation.

Reform UK is making clear efforts to frame HMOs as an immigration issue - and one that they can therefore take ownership of. But in Preston, Labour councillors know that there are too many HMOs, describing the supply as “more than are necessary to meet local needs.”

What people are saying

A Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government spokesperson said: “This will speed up decisions and ensure they are being taken at the right level so we can get Britain building again.”

Conservative former shadow housing secretary Kevin Hollinrake said: “The democratic role of councillors in decision-making is the backbone of the English planning system, and this should not be diminished.”

What happens next

It’s not clear the changes will have much impact other than as a government statement of intent. Already 96 per cent of decisions are taken by planning officers.

The role of the nominated member in determining whether Schedule 2 applications can be referred to a planning committee – and the vague language of referral criteria – hold open the possibility of democratic oversight, even if diminished.

“If the nominated member strongly believes that one of the criteria applies, it is difficult to see how the nominated officer could resist referring the matter,” write Chrisa Tsompani and Nigel Hewitson, partners at law firm Davitt Jones Bould.”

That applies to HMOs of more than nine dwellings as much as any other contentious development, and they can also be challenged through the licensing process. And HMOs of fewer than nine dwellings were already delegated to officers anyway, not the preserve of councillors.

The abolition of councillor call-in powers, however, will remain a source of frustration at a local level.■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share it with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

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When Angela Rayner returned to government last week - back again as housing secretary but this time under the hyper-energised prime ministership of Andy Burnham - she faced an immediate attack. Labour has failed to make much progress on the promise to build 1.5 million new homes in a single term of government, she was forced to admit. The global economy, the cost of materials and a huge skills shortage in the construction sectors are all working against it. Day two in the job, and Rayner knows those numbers now look ambitious at best.

Perhaps unfortunately for her, Burnham is ambition in human form. A man who just “won’t have it” if you tell him it can’t be done. Rayner is falling in step with his positivity: it will be like running a marathon in under five hours, she says, but she is “hell bent” on meeting that target.

Burnham has made job even harder for her by promising that it will be achieved by creating a new generation of council housing - something this country hasn’t achieved in more than half a century. Most social housing built today is built by housing associations.

So far Burnham has been riding high on summer vibes but his big 10-year plan for the country will involve much more of a hard sell. Polling carried out by Opinium suggests only 17% of the British public think that the government can meet its housebuilding goals. He has also promised to eliminate rough sleeping, a policy that if achieved would cost relatively little to improve the national sense of wellbeing in our towns and cities. The only problem is that it is almost impossible to achieve because so many rough sleepers are suffering from many social problems that do not actually include the lack of a place they can call home.

Can Burnham and Rayner really turn a whole sector around in three years? The evidence is promising that they will have a good shot. The prime minister’s record on housing and homelessness in Manchester is not flawless, but it is solid.

In the seven years to 2025, 18,433 affordable and social homes for rent were completed in the Greater Manchester area. Of these, 2,368 were homes specifically for social rent, according to the combined authority he led. In 2025 alone, 611 new social homes were built. That’s not amazing, but it far exceeds our national record over the same period. He similarly managed to slash rough sleeping in Manchester by 57 per cent in three years by providing money for accommodation first, before providing other social support such as drug rehabilitation. Yes, numbers rose again – but they remain lower than comparable cities.

Burnham’s big idea is to bring the solutions that worked in Manchester to the rest of the country and solve the housing crisis by tackling pent-up housing needs at the bottom of the property ladder first, providing a stable, affordable social housing for those on the lowest incomes. Who could possibly oppose that?

You’d be surprised. One of the biggest barriers that Burnham faces in meeting this ambition is a growing mood of dissent around the purpose of social housing and who is granted an affordable tenancy. Though there is very little truth in it, the idea that wealthy people are able to snag a cheap social tenancy and hang onto it, while others in desperate need are forced to pay very high rents, is taking hold. There has been a wave of commentary on how housing allocation policies work, a building tide triggered by a report from the right-wing Centre for Social Justice on the issue of housing affordability, published in the aftermath of the pandemic. It reached its zenith last week with figures published by the Times showing that more than 114,000 households in the top 20 per cent of earners were living in social housing.

That statistic is true, but it is not actually that surprising when you dig into the data. The top 20 per cent of earners by income (not wealth; that is important) includes any household taking home £78,700 before tax. That would include, for example, two nurses, or a bus driver and a council administrator, or two retirees claiming a public sector pension each, as well as their state pensions. A household with two people both earning a below-average salary before tax is still in the top fifth for income. Are these really not the families social housing is for?

Income means very little when we’re talking about the right to secure housing. In London, a family with two parents and two children in the top quintile by earnings will still find it impossible to rent a home large enough without help from Universal Credit. Meanwhile, the majority of homeowners in this country own without a mortgage. A large percentage of those are retired, with low incomes. They would not appear in the top 20 per cent of earners, but they may be incredibly wealthy when you factor in their assets.

See how easy it is to manipulate these figures to tell the story you want?

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As the CSJ pointed out five years ago, there are sensible questions to be asked about whether it is right that so much money is being spent on universal credit because private renting is so expensive and home ownership remains completely outside the reach of a growing proportion. Around 60 per cent of private renters have less than £100 in savings. They are not suddenly going to be able to buy a share in a property. The think tank’s response to this, from the right, is to suggest new forms of low-cost housing but which, crucially, are not low-rent social housing preserved in state or not-for-profit ownership for future generations.

The left already has its own answer, and Burnham has articulated it: build much more housing for social (not “affordable”) rent. But he will only be able to achieve this if the general public agree that’s the right answer, and feel that their communities will benefit. He has to take on the widespread misinformation and growing disinformation about social tenancies and how they work if he wants to succeed.

There’s a huge amount of evidence for his team to draw upon. Analysis by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, based on surveys of the G15 group of large London housing associations, showed that social tenants contribute more than £9 to the economy for every £1 they receive in housing benefit. They are able to do this because they have long-term housing stability. Any model that kicks out a tenant as soon as they start to improve their economic standing only disincentives ambition and economic participation. When you start to interrogate the criticisms of social housing for retaining better-off households, they fall apart very quickly.

The new prime minister has already demonstrated he can take a quick decision. Burnham and his team are also brilliant at social media. If they can use it to explode the myths about social housing that keep its opponents in the news, there is every chance that this new generation of council housing will get the local support it needs.

Burnham doesn’t just need to build these homes, he needs to sell them to voters. ■

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Our award-winning Lead Local network has been looking at reaction to Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister and particularly his vow to eradicate rough sleeping.

Not surprisingly there's been some questions over exactly how he plans to do that, although as Jamie Lopez heard in Southport the sentiment is warmly received. And Lauren at The Valleys Lead asks what his proposal is for Wales where homelessness and housing is devolved.

Helen Dalley has been gauging the reaction in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire to Burnham's premiership, and we will have more this week on reaction from homelessness charities in Stoke to the PM's announcement too.

About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing. She has a special interest in inequality, poverty, housing, education and life chances.

👫Agree with Hannah? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

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Before we get into this week’s story, we want to know what you think of the new prime minister. He has promised to end rough sleeping, build more council homes, give regions more power, bring greater public control to water and energy, reform social care, protect the future of pubs and move closer to Europe.

Let us know: Which of his promises matter most to you, and do you think he can deliver them? Email directly to ed@thelead.uk, or simply reply to this email, with your responses.

Open water has become a symbol of relief this summer. As relentless heatwaves batter Europe with record-breaking temperatures, people flock to rivers, lakes and beaches desperate to cool off.

And there is a crisis playing out beneath the surface – one that is brought into sharp focus this World Drowning Prevention Day. Drowning remains one of the most under-discussed preventable causes of death globally, and who is most at risk remains deeply unequal. In the UK, Black children are 3.5 times more likely to drown than their white peers.

The dangers of this were rarely clearer than on Thursday when Shally Rahman, 41, and Samiha Rahman, 15, died in the water at West Mersea. Tragically, Essex Police believe they died trying to help a seven-year-old boy - a family member - who had gotten into difficulty.

That urgency sits at the heart of No Lifeguard, a new documentary by filmmaker and water safety advocate Ed Accura.

The film travels from Ghana to Sri Lanka – countries with some of the highest rates of drowning globally – tracing how open water is a daily threat in communities where swimming is not taught and safety systems are absent. It is stark viewing, as children play metres from danger, and families are forced to live alongside constant risk and fear.

Watch No Lifeguard

“Anyone can get into trouble in the water,” Accura tells The Lead, “even the most advanced swimmer can drown.”

His central point is simple: water safety must be preventative, not reactive. A lifeguard, he argues, should be understood as an ecosystem, not a single role, with responsibility shared between community understanding, government action and individual accountability.

“Ask yourself: ‘what will happen if I get into difficulty in that water?’ ‘Am I very clear about my skill?’ ‘Do I have a plan?’ If I can answer all these questions comfortably, then I’ll get into the water.”

A summer of warnings

In May, during an early heatwave, 15 people died in water-related incidents across the UK – the majority of them children and teenagers. By July, as temperatures hit 35C on six separate days for the first time on record, two teenagers died in separate open-water incidents within days of each other.

These deaths are typically reported as isolated tragedies. But taken together, they reveal a pattern of increased risk among certain demographics. And not all young people are equally prepared, or equally protected.

The deaths of three Black sisters off the coast of Brighton earlier this year prompted intense speculation and online commentary. For Black communities, tragedies like these can reinforce a longstanding, uneasy relationship with water that has been shaped by exclusion and scrutiny.

Research published in 2023 – the first study to categorise child drowning fatalities by ethnicity in the UK – found that Black children are significantly more likely to drown than white children. Children from more deprived backgrounds face double the risk. Underpinning those figures are deep-rooted structural gaps; lack of access to swimming lessons is a key one. According to the latest research from the Black Swimming Association, 31 per cent of survey respondents reported finance as a barrier to aquatic activity. Sport England’s Active Lives survey found that 95 per cent of Black adults and 80 per cent of Black children in England do not swim.

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But for Accura, the problem runs deeper still.

“We talk about access to pools, we talk about funding… but those are superficial issues,” he argues. “The problem is relativity. Black people do not relate to water.”

For Accura, water safety is shaped by familiarity as much as access. Communities historically excluded from aquatic spaces are less likely to feel confident or prepared in them. Accura – who didn’t learn to swim until adulthood – believes the conversations around access and safety must happen concurrently.

He tells the story of his tween nephew who was adamant he didn’t want to do swimming lessons at school. The boy told his uncle swimming was “for white people” and said he could prove it. He pulled up pictures of the majority white Team GB swim teams as evidence that he would never belong.

“Swimming and water needs to be part of our culture,” Accura says. “It needs to be part of the youth culture. It needs to be part of the Black culture.”

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“Water safety isn’t prioritised”

“While anyone can drown, drowning is not equal,” Seren Jones, cofounder of the Black Swimming Association and Head of Marketing and Comms, tells The Lead.

“Water safety isn’t prioritised in schools, swimming clubs, or even conversations at home. Yet marginalised groups and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more vulnerable. Black communities across the country fit into this bracket.”

On belonging, Jones is cautiously hopeful. While swimming has historically been dominated by middle-class, predominantly white groups, she says that is beginning to shift.

“In 2026, you can find classes for women only, people of different sexual orientations, different religious backgrounds, and different ethnicities – but this wasn’t the case just six years ago,” she explains. “The rapid growth in the number of community and grassroots groups exploring aquatics has greatly increased participation and helped change attitudes towards being in water. They’ve also helped dismantle a cultural barrier – where people don’t feel like water, swimming and aquatic spaces were designed with them in mind.

“Things like introducing inclusive swimhats, and costumes for all different types of physiques, show barriers are being brought down, but there’s still plenty of work left to do.”

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That work requires a dual focus on infrastructure and cultural change. Water safety is not just about what is available – the presence of a lifeguard – but what feels possible.

“As these heatwaves become our new normal, we have a responsibility to ensure that everyone, especially those considered higher risk, has access to vital education and knowledge to prevent future drownings,” says Jones. “If water safety is not prioritised by those in power, we will see this trend of fatalities not only continue but increase.”

No Lifeguard — produced by Ed Accura, SpaceDNA Studio and directed by Mysterex, UK — is available to watch for free from July 23.■

Watch No Lifeguard

About the author: Natalie Morris is a freelance writer, author and journalist and host covering social justice, inequality, health and community.

👫If this article resonates with you, comment, share and spread the word. We always love to hear your feedback, or if you have own experience to share – of lacking parental support, or another story we should be shining a light on – email zoe@thelead.uk.

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At the moment in the UK, anyone can call themselves a counsellor or psychotherapist, but a new petition hopes to change that.

A petition has been launched calling for both professions to become protected titles, regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), Just over 6,000 signatories have supported the petition at the time of writing.

The HCPC protects 15 professions in the UK, including art therapists and psychologists. But counsellors and therapists are not. Many professionals in the therapy industry want to see this change — but some therapists and clients disagree.

Context

There are two issues at stake at the moment.

The first is that anyone can call themselves a counsellor or therapist, because it’s not a protected title. Secondly, there is no way to stop counsellors and therapists from working if they are not fit to practice, because they are not registered with a statutory body.

According to the petition: “Unregulated ‘influencers’, ‘life coaches’ and in some cases negligent practitioners can cause iatrogenic harm and family breakdown without, in our view, proper accountability. We believe some struck-off practitioners can rebrand without oversight. Statutory regulation could end the ‘Wild West,’ restore public confidence, and protect the integrity of the profession by ensuring all practitioners meet national safety and ethical standards.”

One of the accredited bodies, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), reports on the complaints its receives. While numbers are still relatively low (involving less than 1 per cent of its membership), complaints have risen year on year since 2020, jumping 26 per cent between 2022 and 2023.

Most therapists and counsellors join an ‘accredited register’ to reassure clients that they adhere to a professional code of conduct. If an accredited therapist makes a mistake, the client has some reassurance that they can raise a concern to the accrediting body. The BACP runs a confidential phone and email service where clients of any therapist can advise on concerns about a practitioner.

But for many practitioners and clients, this isn’t enough. There is currently no statutory threshold for what qualifies a person to practice as a therapist or counsellor in the UK. There is also no way to prohibit a person from practising as a therapist, even if they are denied or removed from one of the accredited registers.

For example Michael Lousada was prosecuted through the civil courts in 2024 after he sexually assaulted a client during a therapy session. But even if no register will accredit him, nothing stops him resuming his practice as a therapist — bar his reputation — because the title is not protected by law.

For some, regulating the industry has become an increasingly important political goal. MPs Chris Webb, Rachel Maskell and Nadia Whittome all recommended that the industry be regulated to protect patients and clients in 2024.

How would legislation work?

When someone registers with the HCPC, anyone can look them up on its public register. It works similarly to the General Medical Council (GMC)’s register of doctors and the Nurses and Midwives’ Council (NMC)’s register of clinicians: anyone can check the status of someone claiming to be a qualified clinician.

The HCPC then protects the public by fielding concerns about a clinician’s ‘fitness to practice’ and in some cases, removing them from the register.

But the industry is already experiencing upheaval over something called the Scope of Practice and Education (SCoPEd). Six bodies, including the BACP, along with the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS), and UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), are trying to create a shared framework to categorise therapists according to training and experience. They say this would create more of a framework around which therapists have the competency to do work, but the work has been heavily debated and the union (the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union – the only one unique to the profession) opposes it.

Who is in favour?

One of the big membership bodies is tentatively supportive.

Ellen Dunn, the UK Council for Psychotherapy’s policy and research manager, said: “UKCP has spent the past year engaging extensively with practitioners, sector stakeholders and experts by experience to develop clear principles for what statutory regulation must achieve.

“Membership of an accredited register is not compulsory, and that limits what any voluntary body can do to protect the public.”

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Who is against it?

Two other accredited bodies say that the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) have been doing great work to strengthen the Accredited Registers programme this year.

Meg Moss, head of public affairs and advocacy at the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society, said: “Regulation that simply seeks to protect titles isn’t going to protect the public, and even in statutorily regulated professions harm does still occur; but better public awareness of how to choose a qualified, accountable therapist on an Accredited Register will mitigate the issues around unqualified therapists.

“Despite the fact that it’s voluntary, joining an accredited register has become the de facto form of regulation in that the requirement to belong to one is standard for most employers.”

Meanwhile Dr Lisa Morrison, chief regulation and standards officer at the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, said that regulation might just end up confusing would-be clients even more

Dr Morrison said: “We do not believe that the statutory regulation of protected titles is the silver bullet to public protection that it is often regarded as. The main risk is that if not developed appropriately, statutory regulation can add to public confusion and provide too many loopholes to enhance public protection.”

The Psychotherapy and Counselling Union is critical of the petition – and warns that if therapists are regulated then their employers should be too.

Liz Martin, general secretary of the union, said the petition’s scope was too small: “The issue of client safety has to be central to any discussion of possible further regulation – however, this cannot be all of the consideration. Regulation of therapy training, or procurers of therapy such as employee-assisted programmes, platforms and insurers, must also be included, as the burden of further regulation cannot fall exclusively on the psychotherapist and counsellor.”

Legislating therapy could make the profession safer but it could also make it more costly for practitioners (and clients, as a result). At the moment joining the HCPC costs around £123 a year with a one-off fee of £86. At the moment, therapists don’t have to pay any statutory fees to work, although many pay to join accredited bodies.

What happens next?

If the petition hits 10,000 by 3 August MPs are obliged to respond. But at the moment, it’s a long way off the number of signatories needed for a parliamentary debate.

If therapists became a regulated profession, they would likely have to register with a body (such as the HCPC). Without registering, they wouldn’t legally be allowed to practice – and it would be easy for a member of the public to look them up on the register to check they were fit to practice.

The drawbacks might be that not every therapist would be able to register – for example, those with less experience or training – which could have unintended consequences such as two-tier therapy, higher costs for clients, or narrowing the definition of who can call themselves a therapist.

But for some clients – and practitioners – narrowing the definition is the point. ■

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About the author: Ellie Broughton has over 12 years’ experience writing about mental health and wellbeing for titles including The Guardian, the i paper, the Huffington Post, Lifehacker, patient.info, Stylist, The Independent, Refinery29 UK and Vice UK.

She specialises in topics including emerging modalities, depression in chronic conditions, therapy efficacy, bias and psychoanalytic ideas.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

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So there we have it: another new face in No.10.

Yesterday, Andy Burnham became the sixth prime minister in seven years, pledging to “bring back hope” to a country that has almost entirely lost faith in the ability of politicians to improve their lives.

He wasted no time. A new prime minister’s first day is always more than a reshuffle, setting the tone for what country this government is about to create. New cabinet appointments, policy announcements and their first address to the nation are all carefully crafted to reveal their instincts long before they have legislation to point to.

Burnham has made a confident start. His first speech was refreshingly optimistic. He spoke without notes, without a lectern, in the language of possibility. He wasn’t quite triumphant — there was no sweeping personal mandate, after all — but he certainly gave voters a sense that whatever had been missing from Westminster could still return.

Whether tone matters more than delivery is an interesting question. Governments cannot survive simply on good vibes, but they also rarely succeed without giving voters a reason to believe. Starmer’s premiership started in the face of doom and gloom and essentially never recovered.

The substance of Burnham’s opening moves matched the message. Cost of living had to be an immediate priority, and today’s announcement that the government would cut VAT on household electricity bills is an intervention that people will notice. It will not solve Britain’s affordability crisis in its entirety, but here, it’s the symbolism that is important. This is a government that sees the struggle and understands it has a role in relieving that.

Equally significant was his first instruction to ministers to prioritise rough sleeping. This sends arguably one of the most important signals about the kind of country Burnham wants to govern: one that judges success not simply by GDP figures, but by whether fewer people are forced into homelessness.

The cabinet itself contains some intriguing choices. John Healey’s appointment as Chancellor was a big surprise. Healey brings experience not just from the Treasury but from housing and defence, two areas that increasingly define Britain’s long-term challenges. Housing affordability, planning reform and chronic under-supply continue to shape living standards across generations, while his high profile resignation as Defence secretary drew attention to the ineffectiveness of a treasury as a tool for long-term change in the face of rising security threats. In many ways, Healey reflects Burnham’s broader political project of reconnecting economic policy with the practical concerns of everyday life.

There are other appointments that fit that mould too. Angela Rayner’s high-profile return to Housing shows Burnham wants to put someone with lots of political capital at the heart of Labour’s domestic agenda, while experienced ministers remain in several major departments to provide continuity during what could prove a turbulent first year.

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But some areas raise more questions than answers.

Burnham’s decision to retain Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary raised eyebrows. Mahmood has become the proud public face of an increasingly punitive immigration strategy designed to neutralise Reform UK by adopting ever tougher rhetoric and policy. Instead, it often had the opposite effect, legitimising immigration as the defining issue of British politics while still failing to convince voters it had the answers. Keeping her in post raises questions about why exactly Burnham feels continuity is the best approach here.

There are also early questions over climate policy. His decision to resume North Sea oil drilling has already prompted heavy criticism, not least because it arrives during another punishing summer heatwave. The government’s argument — that domestic production improves energy security and protects jobs — may resonate with voters in areas of deindustrialisation, but it is dangerous to ignore the broader context. Limiting global warming, and strengthening our national resilience, requires us to reduce our fossil fuel reliance.

Read more:

Burnham may have in the back of his mind his relationship with US President Donald Trump, who has consistently pushed allies to expand domestic energy production. But if Starmer’s diplomacy taught us anything, it is that bending to Trump’s demands tends to create more problems than it solves.

These are the kinds of tensions that will define Burnham’s premiership. If first impressions count for anything, he has cleared his first hurdle. His opening speech struck the right note and his focus on the cost of living and homelessness demonstrated a welcome attention to the problems voters actually experience. His cabinet contains some thoughtful appointments.

But some parts are missing, and some, perhaps, feel cowardly. He still has to prove he has the stomach to make truly difficult decisions. The hardest part is yet to come.■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Wiktor Weglarz was only planning a brief adventure when he arrived in Scotland 10 years ago after graduating from university in his native Poland.

He had taken on a temporary contract through an agency to work in hospitality in a small town.

A decade after the EU referendum, he’s living in London with a successful career in fundraising for an arts centre – one of 5.8 million EU, EEA and Swiss citizens with settled status in the UK.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so me and my friends decided to go abroad and earn some money,” says Weglarz. “Initially it was just going to be a short stay – I was meant to be here for three months.

“After a month, we decided to move to London, so we ended the contract and took on another adventure. And it turns out I have found something for me here in the UK.”

The EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) opened in 2019 under the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, with an initial deadline for applications of June 2021. It offered settled status to EU, EEA and Swiss citizens who had been living in the UK for a minimum of five years. Those with less than five years could apply for pre-settled status. Campaigners persuaded the government to make it a free process.

For Weglarz, who now calls the UK his home, the process was straightforward, as it was for many who applied before the deadline. But as time went on it became harder for people to amass the residential, employment and travel evidence the Home Office required.

Following a successful judicial review by the Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens’ Rights Agreements (IMA) in 2022, the Home Office simplified the process, granting extensions to pre-settled status, taking pragmatic decisions on required evidence and eventually automatically converting pre-settled to settled status.

But it has now begun removing pre-settled status from those without continuous residence, and has stopped funding organisations that can assist with applications. For the 1.4 million people with pre-settled status, many of them vulnerable or digitally excluded, the future is far less certain.

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“For a lot of people, the process has been fine,” says Kate Smart, CEO of Settled, a charity set up in 2019 to help EU citizens living in the UK. “They went through it at the earliest opportunity. It was successful. They’ve got on with their lives.”

Nevertheless, Brexit was a shock for those who witnessed it at close quarters. “The whole of the Leave campaign felt like one lie after another,” says Birgit Briem Anglesey, who moved to the UK from Sweden in the late 1980s to be with her English husband.

“My husband was absolutely horrified, and so were the rest of my family – that people had been lied to to that extent.”

“The next morning when Nigel Farage said about the £350 million to the NHS pledge that it was just a suggestion, then we knew that it was going to be absolute chaos, and it turned out to be absolute chaos,” says Briem Anglesey, who taught in primary education in Huddersfield, where she lives, and Bradford. She is also a member of the IMA’s citizens panel.

“Britain has got poorer. It’s not just economics for me – it’s that freedom that you have within the EU. Difficulties for postal services between countries, getting hold of Swedish food, pet owners wanting to travel – “it’s just like shooting yourself in the foot”, she says.

Wladislaw Jagiello had been living in the UK for 13 years at the time of the EU referendum and considered it his home. But in his mind he was cast back to his teenage years in Poland.

“I remember going to the shop and somebody refusing to serve me, saying I should wait because I’m not British,” says Jagiello, recalling a Leave campaign that professed to have principled objections to the EU’s structural weaknesses but also played on the “the very deep racism and notions of discrimination against others” in the UK.

“I’m a gay person and the first thing when the referendum happened was a feeling of being back when you were 17 and couldn’t do anything openly because you were scared of being beaten up. It was clear, that othering notion.”

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Jagiello, fluent in English, had moved to the UK after his studies, attracted as much by its diversity as the prospect of furthering his career. He took a job in multicultural Leicester – “an experiment that worked well”.

He’s worked in the public and charity sectors since, covering sexual health, migration, learning difficulties, LGBT people and now social care.

When the notion of Brexit first reared its head, Jagiello, who studied politics, thought the belief that the European project was based on peace and solidarity would prevail. “Why should you leave such a strong, robust union that basically improves your life rather than disadvantages it?”

Data on EU people in the UK and their circumstances is incomplete. People have children or want to bring elderly relatives over, meaning numbers are fluid.

“What we are finding, year on year is there are still people who haven’t applied [for settled status], who didn’t know about it, and who’ve applied and been refused,” says Smart. “It’s a continual stream of people – even though it’s years after the deadline – who are needing help with their cases. Not everybody has gone back to a feeling of being secure and welcome here.”

In a survey of more than 2,200 EU people last year, IMA found that 97 per cent were aware of their rights to work, live and travel, but one in five had difficulties accessing them. Of those, a third were from an ethnic minority background and 53,893 had applied on the full citizenship pathway in the most recent figures available for the year up to June 2025.

A third of those surveyed said they felt discriminated against by public bodies since Brexit – half of those from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Miranda Biddle, IMA chief executive, describes people with settled status needing to go through an additional layer of proof of entitlement when accessing public services.

Now eVisas have replaced physical documents to show immigration status, EU migrants have to be able to get a shared code to prove who they are. That requires them to be online – and the system not to be down.

Biddle said: “Even if the policy and the legislation says, for example, you have access to healthcare, that might not be how it feels when you’re accessing those services,”

And yet, as Biddle points out, EU citizens make a significant contribution to the UK economy. They make up 8 per cent of the UK population (including 460,000 Irish passport holders born in Northern Ireland) and 7 per cent of the total in paid employment. “That sort of contribution across all sectors and different groups is evident,” she says.

That includes people like Weglarz and Silvia Malnati, who moved to the UK from Milan in 2019 to pursue her ambition to work in radio and her passion for music. She had put those to one side for financial reasons, needing to take a job in advertising.

From Italy she had interviewed a UK record label owner, who told her of some shift work available in a nearby record shop. “I was fine in Milan,” says Malnati. “But I had this idea that London is still the place for music.”

Her dreams remained on hold amid the hardscrabble of making a living in London, working shifts, reluctantly taking a job back in advertising, having to find a place to live and then to find a guarantor to convince the landlord. Yet the process of getting settled status itself was straightforward – especially for someone used to Italian bureaucracy.

Malnati has had positive experiences when accessing healthcare and public services, and has been able to pursue her ambitions once more. She’s an audio producer, working on BBC programmes including Gilles Peterson’s show on Radio 6 and Radio 3’s Late Junction, and is co-founder of experimental record label Sagome.

“I do what I would have never been even able to dream of,” she says. “All the struggles and the work and then eventually managing to find this – it feels like it was really worth it.

“The good thing about London is it’s really hard, but if you are driven by passion and hard work, you really can achieve stuff.”

Like Malnati, Weglarz is fulfilled in his job, feeling it’s one with purpose, and made good friendships. He values the lack of homophobia compared with rural Poland, where’s he from, meaning London “is a place where I can be myself”. And he wishes he could play an ever fuller part in society through being given voting rights in a general election.

But he’s feeling the cost of living bite and sees how investment and development in Poland are levelling up his home country to the UK, which feels economically stagnant. He knows of a number of people who have moved back not only to Poland but to Portugal, Spain and Italy as well.

The figures bear him out. According to the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, net migration of EU nationals to the UK turned negative in 2022. Between mid-2021 and mid-2025, the number of EU nationals living in the UK decreased by 162,000 because of migration outwards.

Possible reasons include “uncertainty about the political and social situation in the UK after Brexit, and a fall in the value of the pound, reducing the value of earnings in the UK”, says the Migration Observatory.

Should this continue, the damage to the UK’s economy, with its ageing population and skills shortages, will increase.

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Meanwhile, uncertainties continue to mount. Late last year, the Welsh Senedd’s Equality and Social Justice Committee warned that a new Windrush scandal is in the offing if thousands of EU citizens in Wales don’t apply for settled status.

The committee’s concerns particularly related to vulnerable groups including older people, children in care, the Roma community, victims of abuse and homeless individuals. Like Windrush, the EUSS “places the burden of proof on individuals to prove residency when they may not have the necessary documentation”, it says.

As with Windrush, the danger often only becomes clear after many years of living in the UK in apparent security. Adults with settled status often don’t recognise they must also apply for their children.

This is compounded by problems with the eVisa and related UK Visas and Immigration accounts, with log-in failures, system outages, incorrect information and account retrieval delays all causing profound anxiety.

“There was one day when I was Nigerian,” laughs Cesare Ardito, who is from Rome and now a mathematics lecturer at Manchester University. The glitch didn’t affect him at the time but as a registered legal adviser with Settled and elected member of Comites de Manchester, which represents Italians in the north of England, he’s interacted with an estimated 10,000 cases.

Ardito, who holds dual UK-Italian citizenship, says the EU Withdrawal Agreement does safeguard EU nationals’ rights. But he is highly critical of the digital-only system and how EU nationals were used as its guinea pigs, saying people are “super-scared” of being questioned at a border, for example, and stressing the need for some sort of back-up system. And this only highlights a darker, looming problem.

Every time Reform or the government make some announcement threatening migrants’ rights, concerned calls to organisations like Settled rise – even though the proposed policy may not concern EU nationals. And if a future UK government were to get even harsher on migrants, that anxiety might turn into real fear that settled status might be taken away.

This has prompted Malnati to join many others in paying the £1670 needed to move to full UK citizenship, “so I can be 100 per cent sure they can’t kick me out, even if things change, because everything changes so fast that it’s better to be safe than sorry”.

Ardito says: “Not everyone is acutely aware that something has fundamentally broken here. Freedom of movement is gone, and every right you have here is the subject of an international agreement that needs to be protected. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023.

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🇪🇺 This story is the latest part in our series examining the impact voting to Leave the European Union had on the UK since June 2016. We’ve dug into the numbers around the economy, immigration and more since the EU Referendum and also heard how Brexit has left our universities in a bleak position. And we welcomed Naomi Smith from Best For Britain as she argues why the time is now re-joining based on the public mood and our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald penned an exclusive essay on how the EU Referendum paved the way for Reform and we also visited Dover which has always enjoyed strategic importance when it comes to relations with the EU. See the full series and if you’ve enjoyed our series make sure you upgrade today to help us do another deep look at the issues, people and places affecting the UK right now - we need 30 new subscribers to help us do another one. And you can use this link to get 30% off an annual subscription.

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Fire services are battling dozens of wildfires across Britain after another spell of hot, dry weather, adding to growing concerns that the UK is entering a new era of wildfire risk.

The UK’s fire services are facing “extreme pressure”, with wildfires burning across the country.

As of Monday, there were 19 wildfires active in England and Wales. Major incidents were declared in Conwy, north Wales, and in Glossop, Derbyshire, on Sunday. Hampshire, Durham, West Sussex, East Sussex, Devon and Somerset were also affected over the weekend. Blazes have also been reported in Orpington in London and in the Peak District.

A warning is also in place in Scotland, issued by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the Scottish Wildlife Forum, for central Highlands, southern and eastern Scotland from Wednesday, lasting until next Monday.

From 6 July to Monday – just one week – data from the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) showed that fire and rescue services in England and Wales responded to 342 wildfires. By comparison, they responded to nearly 1,000 wildfire incidents in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2022.

There is no single official definition of a wildfire, but fire services generally classify them as large outdoor fires that require significant resources because of their size, duration or threat to people and infrastructure.

Is climate change making UK wildfires worse?

With heatwaves becoming the norm, is the UK more at risk of wildfires?

According to the annual State of the UK Climate analysis, published in the International Journal of Climatology, the UK’s climatic extremes are becoming increasingly normal, with last year the hottest on record and further “unprecedented changes” likely to break the record again soon.

Tuesday this week was the 10th consecutive day that anywhere in England recorded a temperature above 30C. Meanwhile, large swathes of England have so far recorded 0% of the rainfall they would normally expect in July, while most areas of Wales have seen less than 10% of the usual July average.

According to the NFCC, most wildfires in the UK are caused by human activity, including leisure activities or deliberate acts. However, the impacts of climate change increase the risk and severity of wildfires.

Can the UK cope?

Last month, the government announced it was strengthening its wildfire resilience heading into summer, including stationing specialist-trained firefighters within reach of communities and investing £97 million to upgrade fire and rescue assets, including kits and off-road vehicles.

The wildfire teams will be located strategically and hosted by fire and rescue services in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Northumberland, London and South Wales. The teams visited South Africa and Poland to learn from international communities that have more experience of wildfires.

As our sister title The Knot in Staffordshire reported, followed a near miss incident at The Roaches in when Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) were called to extinguish a blaze, Staffordshire County Council issued urgent emergency pleas in June banning all barbecues, warning that the parched terrain had created a highly volatile, extreme wildfire risk.

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The Staffordshire Wildlife Trust launched a summer appeal to raise £15,000 to create and maintain firebreaks and restore damaged habitats, and later increased its fundraising target to £20,000 to help it meet the extra pressures it faces during heatwaves. Teams are on high alert across reserves so it can support the Fire Service where needed and help wildlife and habitats recover where fires have caused damage.

According to experts, the big future danger in the UK is the risk of more fires at the point where rural landscapes meet inhabited ones, also known as the rural-urban interface. These require different tactics because of the need to take account of housing, and UK fire services have not had much experience with them.

The UK does not currently have a fit-for-purpose Fire Danger Rating System (FDRS), which would assess fuel and weather conditions and provide broad estimates about fuel flammability and the potential fire behaviour under those conditions. However, one is being developed and should be disseminated soon, although it’s not clear when.

What happens next?

As the country gets used to hotter, drier summers, steps are being taken by the government and fire services to become more resilient. Individuals may also need to change their habits, such as by sweeping up dead and dry leaves and not growing vegetation up against buildings.

For now, people also need to be aware of the increased risks and take steps to avoid igniting fires by not throwing cigarettes on the ground, taking care with barbecues and paying attention to any bans or warnings. ■

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About the author: Ella Glover is the audience engagement editor at The Lead. She is also a freelance journalist specialising in workers’ rights, housing, health, harm reduction and lifestyle.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share it with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

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It feels like every week we ask the same question at The Lead: just how low will Nigel Farage go?

When counter-terrorism police took over the investigation into Ann Widdecombe’s death yesterday, Reform UK declared vindication. Just days earlier, the Farage had been criticised for describing her death as a “premeditated murder” while police were still investigating and urging people not to speculate.

Now, after new evidence prompted counter-terrorism officers to take control of the case, Reform figures like Richard Tice are insisting critics “must now apologise”.

Whether Farage ultimately turns out to have been right about this particular case is beside the point. He has a habit of intervening before the facts have been established. During the 2024 Southport riots and the 2026 Belfast riots, he used his platform to amplify grievances while authorities were desperately trying to establish the facts and keep the public calm. For a politician whose success depends on dominating the conversation, being correct is much less important than being first.

The UK’s criminal justice system is far from perfect. But the rule of law and the institutions designed to uphold it remain vital cornerstones of our democracy. Police investigate before reaching conclusions, courts hear evidence before delivering verdicts and journalists verify before publishing. These processes can be frustratingly slow, but they are slow for a reason: to ensure everyone is treated fairly.

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Politics increasingly operates by different rules. Modern populism is built on speed. Move fast and — hopefully — break things. On social media, the first explanation often becomes the dominant one, even better if taps into people’s pre-existing concerns. Every hour of uncertainty becomes an opportunity to fill the vacuum. For politicians who rely on grievance, moments of public confusion become opportunities for publicity.

Farage is fully aware of conventions around commenting on live criminal investigations, as well as the importance of protecting investigations from political pressure and preserving the fairness of future trials. But deference to institutions is increasingly far beyond Farage’s agenda.

This is how it will work. If subsequent events move towards Farage’s position (as Reform now argues they have in the Widdecombe case) supporters will say he was right all along. If they do not, questions quickly follow about what authorities are failing to disclose and why official accounts keep changing. Either way, trust in institutions is weakened. No matter if his careless rhetoric compromises the criminal investigation into the killing of an elderly woman. What seems to be more important for Farage is that he put himself in the narrative.

Farage’s speech last week showed this in full force. He attacked the media, his parliamentary colleagues and the government, suggesting they were intentionally endangering and slandering him. In justifying the huge personal donations he had received and not declared, he argued they were necessary because of the exceptional security costs associated with being one of Britain’s most recognisable politicians.

There is no doubt that the risks facing politicians like Farage are real. The murders of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess permanently changed the conversation about MPs’ safety, while Farage himself has faced intimidation, abuse and physical attacks over many years. Every elected representative deserves appropriate protection and any attack on a serving or former politician should be regarded as an attack on democracy.

Last year, Farage reportedly declined the taxpayer-funded security package offered to him, including a trained driver, vehicle and close protection officers, because he considered it “inadequate”. The package was broadly comparable to the protection provided to senior Cabinet ministers and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.

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Farage is entitled to believe the protection offered does not match the threat he faces. But if the argument is that the state is failing to protect politicians like him, what would count as sufficient protection? Rejecting the security that is available — while continuing to present yourself as uniquely exposed — raises questions about what’s more important: being protected, or being persecuted?

Perhaps that is because this debate is not really just about security. It feeds a much larger political story: that Reform exists under a level of threat that the establishment not only refuses to acknowledge but directly contributes to. This sense of permanent siege helps populist movements, because every controversy can be written off as some powerful force attempting to silence the party.

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The Widdecombe investigation will eventually establish what happened and it may or may not vindicate some of Farage’s instincts. But by the time the facts are established, the first version of events has already circulated on social media.

And this is where Farage’s two arguments meet. The claim that Reform is being unfairly targeted rests on a wider belief that the institutions around it are compromised or acting in bad faith. And that belief is strengthened every time those same institutions are portrayed as incapable of telling the truth or protecting people.

And that's the real damage, and how Reform corrodes society. Not necessarily that people believe Reform's version of events, but that they stop believing a true version exists at all. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

👫Agree with Zoë? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

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The Lead has been keeping a close eye on Reform UK and its leader who is looking increasingly desperate following his Clacton by-elections stunt: from his ‘lottery-equivalent’ donation from Harborne to the self-proclaimed anti-establishment leader’s silence on Epstein. More recently, we dug into his inflammatory (and false) claims about two-tier policing and, for our recent 10 years of Brexit series, Zoë charted the trajectory that got us here.

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With Andy Burnham firmly likely to become Prime Minister, campaigners are calling for rent controls.

While the previous government shut down any potential rent freeze in April, the former Greater Manchester mayor has made no secret of his support for capping rents.

In 2023, he called on the government to freeze private sector rents. The move would “immediately relieve pressure on millions of people and halt an eviction crisis that would have a devastating social impact”, the letter – also signed by the mayors of Liverpool and London – argued. And in his speech at the People’s History Museum last week, Burnham said the government is “forced to chase rents in the private-rented sector through the benefits system”.

Clara Collingwood, director at the Renters Reform Coalition, said any attempts by the next Prime Minister to address the cost-of-living crisis without regulating rent “will be like trying to fill a leaking bucket”.

Even before the leadership chaos, there was growing support from politicians, campaigners and trade unions for rent controls to address the crisis, with think tank reports from both the IPPR and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation released in May and a fresh call for rent controls by campaign group Generation Rent.

But critics say controlling rents has perverse consequences, reducing housing supply and making it more expensive.

Context

The new Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force in May, addresses housing insecurity but does little on affordability.

Rents in the private sector as a proportion of income soared after the financial crash and have continued to rise sharply since – meaning 2.4 million private renting households live in unaffordable housing, according to the think tank IPPR.

Although private sector rent rises have levelled off in recent months, they have grown by nearly 8 per cent in the two years since the general election from an already high base.

For many of the 12.9 million people living in the private rented sector (PRS) in the UK – who pay more for their housing than those holding mortgages or in social housing – that’s an intensification of an affordability crisis. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), rent as a share of income in the PRS was around 11 per cent in the late 1970s but reached 29 per cent in 1993 after rent controls were ended. It’s now 34 per cent of income – 46 per cent in London. But 30 per cent is widely considered to be unaffordable.

“Millions of renters are being pushed to the brink by a housing market that simply isn’t working for them,” says Dr Maya Singer Hobbs, senior research fellow at IPPR.

“This is no longer a marginal issue affecting a small group – it is a mainstream cost-of-living crisis hitting working households across the country. Without action, things will get worse.”

Rent controls are in force in many areas across the world, including Ireland, France, Germany and Spain. In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s promise to freeze rents was a key pledge in his successful mayoral election campaign.

In the UK, the new Renters’ Rights Act prevents landlords from raising rents more than once a year. Landlords must give tenants two months notice of an increase and rises must be in line with market rents. Tenants can challenge “unreasonable” rent increases at the First-Tier Tribunal. But there is no set limit on increases beyond what an already inflated market indicates.

The government opposes further measures, saying it “does not support the introduction of rent controls, and nothing in the Act restricts landlords raising rents in line with market prices”.

How do rent controls work?

There are many forms of rent control, ranging from outright caps to temporary freezes and limits on increases.

Rent rise limits can apply only to existing tenants, or in between tenancies, to prevent landlords evicting tenants in order to boost their profits.

They may apply only to specific areas, such as in Ireland, or nationally, as is the case in Sweden.

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Who is in favour?

Mayors Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham and Greens leader Zack Polanski are among UK politicians who have called for rent controls. As well as JRF and IPPR, think tanks and charities in support include the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and Shelter.

Campaign groups across the country including the London Renters Union, Bristol Fair Renting Campaign, Lancashire-based Tenants and Community Union and Greater Manchester Tenants Union are backing the national Resist Rent Rises campaign.

Who is against?

Not only Labour but the Conservatives. The Lib Dems call instead for rises to be limited to a “fair” amount annually. Reform is firmly against, and would even repeal the Renters’ Rights Act.

Right wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs argues rent controls are harmful. Property industry and landlord organisations in opposition include Propertymark and the National Residential Landlords Association.

Why do they disagree?

Those against rent controls often claim they are not just protecting landlords’ profits but furthering the interests of society as a whole. Controlling rents would push landlords out of the sector, they say, reducing overall housing supply and making matters worse for tenants. The impact on supply of rent controls would “inevitably drive new rents still higher”, according to Ben Beadle, chief executive of the National Residential Landlords’ Association.

Critics point overseas for examples supporting them: a widely quoted study in San Francisco finding a 15 per cent drop in supply and higher rents; a “wide range of adverse effects” in Berlin, including reduced supply, reduced mobility for those seeking to move, and higher rents in unregulated homes; and longer waiting times for flats in Sweden. The counter-argument is that these adverse effects can be designed out with cannier policies, and there are examples from elsewhere in the world the UK can draw from.

NEF says controls in Paris that cap rents at a maximum determined by property size and age have seen rents decrease by 3.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent on average, “with no evidence of negative impacts on rental market supply”. It also points to new rent regulations in Ireland and Spain as “directly relevant models for an English housing system under comparable structural strain”.

JRF has now put forward a model it says would benefit tenants without harming landlords. It calls for a cap on rent increases in-tenancy at the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure of inflation, and between tenancies at CPI plus 2 per cent. That could save renters almost £1,200 per year on average within six years.

To balance that, it calls for the restoration of full mortgage interest relief to protect landlords. To pay for it, applying national insurance contributions to rental income would capture “inordinate profits”.

Even with these measures, JRF says its policy would lead to fewer landlords making a loss by 2030.

“Targeted tax reforms would capture the extraordinary profits landlords have experienced and tax all income from rents more fairly, while also protecting the most exposed landlords,” says Rosie Worsdale, senior policy adviser at JRF.

“Together this would create the conditions where rents could be capped, easing the squeeze on renters, without detrimental consequences.”

What happens now?

Burnham would put housing higher up the agenda if he were to seek the Labour leadership — even if he waters down his previous commitment to a rent freeze. But the landlord lobby remains strong, and its ostensibly “grown up” arguments against rent controls will be hard to break down. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

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There’s a specific kind of panic that no amount of media training can disguise.

It is vicious and snarling, like a wounded animal. It usually precludes something fatal; the moment when a politician’s carefully controlled public persona gives way to the more primal instincts of fight or flight.

Just ask Nigel Farage. It started with an altercation at Heathrow airport, where Sky News asked a relatively straightforward question about George Cottrell, the convicted fraudster who the Sunday Times revealed has been privately funded him for years.

Instead of answering, Farage turned on the cameraman, accusing the broadcaster of harassing his family and warned there would be “serious consequences”. Sky says nobody has contacted his family.

The crisis has deepened. Just now, Farage held a surprise press conference. During a long, rambling speech where he declared men in London cannot wear watches, compared donor rule changes to living in a communist country, and accused the Times editor of "directly threatening" his daughter's security, Farage somewhat buried the lede and announced he is resigning as an MP, forcing a by-election and will contest the seat. “This will be a people versus the establishment by-election,” he declared, with not a hint of fascism. “It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.”

Underneath the familiar rhetoric, something has changed in Farage. This isn’t the man voters know. The image he has carefully cultivated for decades; an impish public school boy, impossible to rattle, happy to spar with journalists, always ready with a joke and a pint, is no longer there. That mask has slipped, and beneath it lay an angry, conspiratorial man.

For all the talk of political courage, the decision to call a by-election looked less like a bold gamble than an act of desperation. Farage may have bought himself some time by forcing the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to suspend its investigation into his donations, but the manner of his response marks the beginning of a series of far larger questions that he must now answer.

The first is what it says about the company Farage keeps. Farage accepted staff, security and the use of a townhouse near Buckingham Palace from ‘Posh George’, a crypto financier convicted of wire fraud in the United States, who served time in prison and is now reportedly seeking a pardon from Donald Trump.

Reform UK’s defence is that none of this needed declaring because it predated Farage becoming an MP and was personal rather than political. That itself is a questionable defence — Farage served as Reform’s honorary president between March 2021 and June 2024, during which he received the support from Cottrell. On 3 June 2024, he confirmed he was returning as party leader and for Reform in Clacton-on-Sea. Under parliamentary rules, new MPs must declare financial interests and “registrable benefits” received in the 12 months before their election.

But of course, legality isn’t the only question. Cottrell appears to accompany Farage almost everywhere, from fundraisers to overseas trips. Why a man who wants to be Prime Minister has to be so closely trailed by a convicted fraudster is an entirely reasonable question — and one that, so far, has not received a convincing answer.

Nor is this the first time that Farage’s friendships have raised eyebrows. It is the second opaque funding story to engulf Farage this year, following the £5 million donation from Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Farage insists Harborne wanted “absolutely nothing” in return. Yet taken together, the pattern is uncomfortable. Two immensely wealthy benefactors and two relationships that Farage saw little need to disclose fully at the time. Curiously, in today's rant he found full-throated gratitude for Harborne, yet Cottrell's name never came up. If Farage were totally confident in both his relationships, why not give Posh George a shout-out, too?

The second problem is Farage’s selective transparency. The rules governing MPs’ interests are not especially complicated. Gifts or benefits that could reasonably be connected to political activity should be declared, and MPs manage this without much difficulty.

Yet every time Farage finds himself under scrutiny, the explanation is another technicality. He wasn’t yet an MP; it was a personal arrangement; it predated the register. This is coming from the very same man who branded Keir Starmer “Free Gear Keir” after accepting — and declaring — glasses and the use of a flat from a Labour donor and peer. Farage seems hot on the rules when it comes to his political adversaries but pretty lax on his own obligations.

The third problem is the money itself — and exactly what it might buy. Neither Cottrell nor Harborne are simply wealthy businessmen who happen to admire Farage. Both are deeply embedded in the world of cryptocurrency, one of the least transparent corners of modern finance. That world is lightly regulated and highly secretive, an attractive proposition to those who prefer money to move quietly.

That does not mean every crypto entrepreneur is suspect, of course. But when two of the politician’s biggest benefactors emerge from precisely that world, voters are entitled to ask why. The insistence that these men simply expect nothing in return —that extraordinary generosity is just part of their nature — asks the public to suspend an awful lot of disbelief.

Perhaps it is merely coincidence that Farage privately urged the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, to abandon plans for a state-backed digital currency that could have competed with Harborne’s Tether. Perhaps it is coincidence, too, that Reform UK has quietly dropped its promise to make Britain a “crypto powerhouse” from its website. But if so, he owes the public a better explanation than “nothing to see here”. After all, people do not generally hand politicians £5 million out of simple admiration when there are countless other causes that might benefit from such.

So, what can we conclude from this extraordinary saga?

Make no mistake, this is a serious gamble. Forcing a by-election hands the establishment he claims to despise the one thing they couldn’t otherwise get: a direct verdict on him, personally, mid-scandal.

The bet, presumably, is that Clacton backs him regardless, and he can then wave the result around as proof of concept — the will of the people, move along. But elections are blunt instruments, and this one risks revealing something Farage may have intended to keep quiet: Fifteen minutes of a man convinced the world is out to get him, snapping at anyone who suggests otherwise. That’s not the rogueish, unbotherable Farage of the last decade. It’s thinner-skinned, grumpier, and considerably less fun, and swing voters who tolerated the schtick because it came with a shrug may find they have far less patience for the snarl.

Underneath the funding rows and the flashes of temper, Farage has inadvertently raised some key questions. What happened to the Farage who was authentic, independent, impossible to buy? Watching him today — rattled and lashing out — it's hard not to conclude that Farage no longer exists. Perhaps it never did.

That image is the whole business model. Without it, the Farage mirage starts to disappear. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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The Lead has been keeping a close eye on Reform UK and its leader: from his ‘lottery-equivalent’ donation from Harborne to the self-proclaimed anti-establishment leader’s silence on Epstein. More recently, we dug into his inflammatory (and false) claims about two-tier policing and, for our recent 10 years of Brexit series, Zoë charted the trajectory that got us here.

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A town and a port that’s always been a crucial place in our national story, finds itself once again at the frontline of British politics. A place to pass through, and yet a home to many, we see what life has been like in Dover since the EU Referendum and the impact of Brexit.

It’s a sunny spring day, and the town’s high street is relatively busy; warmed by unseasonable rays, plenty of people are happy to stop and chat. But ask about how the town’s identity has been shaped by the local port — which is Europe’s biggest ferry port, handling over 11 million passengers each year — and most locals offer a gloomy outlook.

“It doesn’t invest anything into the town, it does nothing to keep the passengers in the town,” says Janet. “The Harbour Board just rules it, and nobody else gets a say.”

Dover, Kent, is Britain’s closest point of connection with the European mainland. Looking out over the English Channel, the northern coast of France is just 18 nautical miles away. There are countless signs scattered about in French and German, medieval churches and a majestic castle built by the Normans, and constant waves of tourists from the EU traversing the paths up the White Cliffs.

And yet, in recent years, this proximity to the continent has primarily been used as a reason for greater hostility and mistrust of outsiders. Dover has extraordinary symbolic value: in UKIP billboards and promotional videos for Reform, Nigel Farage has repeatedly used the famous image of the white cliffs and the seas beyond to evoke a kind of vague Second World War spirit, rooted in misguided nostalgia and the sewing of hatred. That symbolic value has been exploited to make this border the most hotly contested battleground in UK politics. How did it happen?

Beside the seaside

In 2016, this town voted decisively to reject closer ties with our European neighbours, with Leave collecting 62.2 per cent of the vote in Dover. This was part of a much broader national phenomenon that saw the vast majority of former English seaside resorts back the Leave campaign.

In the fallout from Brexit, pundits identified a widening North/South divide, with towns in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ Labour heartlands shifting right on immigration and seeking to punish the establishment for decades of deindustrialisation and decline inflicted on their communities. Around this period, there was also plenty of analysis of the difference between urban constituencies and more provincial or rural areas, with the latter being far more likely to vote for Brexit.

But perhaps the biggest indicator of whether a town would vote leave – and something that’s often been brushed over in Brexit-related commentary over the last decade – was its proximity to the sea.

“English seaside resorts reverberate noisily with the ghosts of their history,” writes Madeleine Bunting in The Seaside, a text which identifies how “incomers in search of cheap housing drive a coastal pattern of deprivation in England and Wales”. Research suggests deprived coastal towns have some of the country’s highest rates of antidepressant prescription , and given the way these places have been gutted by decades of austerity, job depletion, and tourism decline, that’s hardly surprising.

Their response in 2016 was to kick back. Many of the areas of England that recorded the highest leave vote in 2016 were deprived English coastal towns, many of which had previously been popular resorts: Boston and Skegness (75.65 per cent), Clacton (73 per cent), Kingston Upon Hull East (72.8 per cent), Great Yarmouth (71.5 per cent), and Great Grimsby (71 per cent) are all classic examples.

Farage and co. successfully took the justified rage of these towns and turned it against migrants arriving from the EU (as highlighted by this striking electoral map). But the issues that led to the vote haven’t been resolved. In many of these communities, poverty, housing, job insecurity, and lack of opportunities for young people have only worsened.

Child poverty in Dover wards like Town & Castle and Tower Hamlets has increased to 32 per cent and 31 per cent respectively, and the town has one of the south east’s highest youth unemployment rates. Back in 2016, voters were famously promised £350m more per week for the NHS; instead, health services in Dover and other parts of Kent have faced huge deficits and had to take cost-cutting measures.

They were also promised tougher borders, with ‘immigration’ one of the two main reasons people voted to leave, alongside ‘sovereignty’. Whatever your view on this issue, there’s no denying that the subsequent increase in net migration between 2021 and 2025 led to a breakdown in trust amongst a large section of the electorate.

The issue of migration has also become far more visible, as the UK’s scrapping of safe routes for asylum seekers via the EU’s Common European Asylum System (CEAS) ended up creating the small boats crisis that now dominates headlines. In turn, the increase in legal non-EU migration in the aftermath of Brexit under Tory PM Boris Johnson — seen as a negative shift by those on the populist right — has led to the popularisation of the term ‘Boris-wave’.

Dover’s geographical location means the town has moved to the centre of an increasingly volatile national debate, as Reform UK and other voices on the populist right, such as Restore Britain, have exploited this rise in human trafficking across the Channel.

Nigel Farage’s consistent portrayal of the rise in small boat crossings as a “national security emergency” and his use of the language of “invasion” have become worryingly normalised. His position as an outsider has allowed him to first blame the Conservatives’ record and now the Labour government’s.

This is, of course, highly ironic given Farage’s status as one of the chief architects of Brexit, and the fact that Brexit-induced labour shortages and the withdrawal from the Dublin Agreement were what led to increases in non-EU migration and small boat crossings.

“I think Nigel Farage and Reform are the best option,” says Ruzie Knight, a young man who grew up in Dover. “A lot of governments say, ‘we’re doing this, we’re doing that’, and then they don’t [change anything]. But if they get a lot of votes, things might change.”

“There needs to be stricter rules on illegal immigrants,” he says, before adding, “I do feel sorry for the kids, to have to be involved in that. They obviously want a life, which is understandable, but this country can only put up with so much.”

“I’ve seen no improvement since Brexit,” says Janet. “The main problem has obviously been the immigration and the small boats. And as far as I can see, nothing has been done to stop them. If anything, we encourage them.”

This view is held by a large number of people living in England’s deprived coastal towns, and in 2026, they responded by voting for Reform: the party won control of numerous coastal councils, including Sunderland, Gateshead, and Hartlepool, plus counties like Essex and Suffolk with plenty of Brexit-voting seaside constituencies.

Three of the four seats with the highest proportion of Brexit voters (Boston and Skegness, Clacton, and South Basildon and East Thurrock) went Reform in 2024. Of the top 10 Brexit-voting seats, only Ed Miliband’s Doncaster North is not currently projected to swing to Reform.

That being said, on the streets of Dover, the public express much more nuanced positions on small boats than the mainstream press may lead you to believe. Like Ruzie, even those who are concerned about immigration figures often display sympathy for those coming over, and you get the impression that if the material factors driving discontent were addressed, they’d very quickly lose interest in the arguments pushed by Reform.

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Antisocial media

The far-right’s portrayal of Dover as a community under siege, a critical frontline being “invaded” by hostile foreign forces unsurprisingly doesn’t match up to the reality on the ground.

Social media may be awash with footage of people arriving in the area in small boats and being processed at the local port, but the impact on the town itself is minimal. ONS data shows that the proportion of Dover residents born in England actually increased between 2011 and 2021, while the town’s population remains overwhelmingly white (around 95 per cent at the last census).

“There’s a lot of misleading information on social media,” says Mohamed J., a chef at town centre café Brunch who moved to the UK from Morocco over 20 years ago. “Some [people] think minorities are basically getting everything. They need to understand the situation properly: they don’t know what most immigrants are going through. I see them sleeping in the street in Dover. They are really struggling, it’s sad.”

“A lot of people have lost humanity,” he continues. “Most people come here to work, or they’ve got no choice. I didn’t have a choice to come. I also loved living back home, where my family are. For example, today’s a big celebration [Eid], and I’m working. Would you want to be working at Christmas?”

But the misinformation has clearly taken root. Despite a persistent scepticism about Reform and their ability to govern, an increasing number of people in Dover are willing to take a punt on them if it means reducing the flow of asylum seekers and migrants into the UK.

Paid subscribers to The Lead can listen to an exclusive podcast with Fred about his visit to Dover and what he heard and felt

Current polling suggests that if a general election result were held tomorrow, Reform would take the Dover & Deal constituency from Labour, whose local MP Mike Tapp assumed office in 2024 after 14 years of Tory rule (we contacted Tapp for comment, but had no response).

The 2025 Kent County Council elections showed just how much progress Farage’s party has been making in this corner of England. Reform took control of the KCC (the country’s largest county council) after winning 57 seats, including all seven seats in Dover. Each of these seven wards were seized from the Conservatives, reflecting the widespread hostility felt toward the former ruling party.

In terms of the national picture, 2026 saw Farage’s party gain 1,451 council seats across the country, profiting from anger and resentment built up after years of austerity, inequality, and the lack of resolution provided by Brexit.

The trend of coastal towns lurching to the right also accelerated with Restore Britain’s local offshoot Great Yarmouth First winning all nine seats it contested in the East Norfolk town. Rupert Lowe’s party is making inroads across the country, threatening Reform from the right (their 7 per cent share of the vote in the recent Makerfield by-election being a key example of this).

Although it’s unclear whether this pattern will extend to east Kent; while several KCC councillors expelled by Reform last year have since joined Restore Britain (most of them based in Maidstone), right-wing politics in Dover appears to remain dominated by Reform, for now.

“At the last election, I voted for Labour. Now, I’d choose Reform,” says Ruzie. “I think a lot of people are on the same page.”

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The footfall problem

Talking to people across the town, we encounter lots of frustration that the enormous amount of traffic experienced at the port hasn’t materially benefited the local economy. Brexit has restricted the easy flow of tourists and school trips from across the Channel, but regardless, if even a fraction of the people passing through the port today were encouraged to explore local landmarks and historical sites, and spend money in high street shops and cafes, the impact could be profound.

“We get cruise ships in and they take people to Canterbury or other towns, and I’m like, ‘stop here!’” says Carmina Ballantine, who we meet in the beer garden of historic local pub The White Lion. “Dover is overlooked for all its history: the castle, the Saxons… you’ve got all the green around, you’ve got the sea, the cliffs. This town has so much going for it.”

Jason Gilbert runs the charity shop Help Our Town CIC, which focuses on raising funds for anyone struggling in the town. According to Gilbert “things are getting harder and harder. Wages aren’t going up the way the cost of living is. The energy caps are just going up again. Daily things that we all have to pay for, all going up: bills, food, shopping, it just doesn’t equate to what we’re earning these days. Rental prices for everyone are extortionate, and obviously for people who have been lucky enough to have a mortgage, they’ve gone up as well.”

Almost everyone else we speak to identifies rental prices as a huge issue. Dover is a working-class town, and it hasn’t experienced the levels of gentrification seen in other coastal Kent communities like Folkestone, Margate, or Whitstable; however, its location in the more affluent south-east means rents and the broader cost of living are still higher here than in many other deprived coastal towns. In the last year, average rents in Dover increased by 5.8 per cent.

Rent doesn’t just affect people struggling to get affordable homes; lots of buildings remain empty, with Matthew Angliss, who runs a gaming shop with his wife, only able to make it work because the building owner offers him a favourable rate for the lease. “We’re purely high street-focused, and people say that shops like ours are the reason they come into town,” he says. “But it goes to show how limited it is: online shopping kills the reason for people popping into town.”

The future of Dover

So what do towns like Dover need more of?

“More effort put into the high street, special community events,” says Matthew. “I don’t really see the reason [for] putting walls up around ourselves… it comes across as selfish of us, not being willing to help others outside. Here in Dover, they do have [anti-immigration] protests at times, and all I see is people having a big drink up. We’ve had the protest police come through and we’ve literally decided to close shop early to prevent any aggro. The flags and stuff, people see that and don’t want to travel to that town. It’s very unwelcoming.”

Anti-immigration protests, many of them with links to far-right organisers, have become more common in Dover in recent times. In July alone, two protests have been organised, with groups like Pink Ladies UK and Kezza’s Pink Patriots brandishing flyers with slogans like ‘Unite the Right’ and ‘Take Back Our Country’. Given that figures from Restore Britain and other far-right bodies have previously organised in Dover, expect more of the same over the summer.

While the seeds of this hostility and division were sown in the decades before, its continued presence in mainstream British politics ultimately stems back to the Brexit campaign. Coastal towns like Dover played a decisive and often unappreciated role in swinging that vote, and in the 10 years since, their problems remain unsolved, and their frustrations have only worsened.

It’s clear that people in Dover, as in many other parts of the UK, are sceptical of Reform, whose leader clocks in with a public net favourability of -31 according to YouGov. Nigel Farage remains a deeply divisive figure, and the thought of him in Downing Street concerns people. But they’re feeling reckless. They want to make their voices heard.

Right now, Reform’s populist right-wing message feels like the only way of cutting through. But if the material concerns of voters are addressed, and if measures are taken to make the cost of living less overwhelming, there’s an appetite for an alternative path. If not, Dover may well be one of many coastal towns that Reform could seize at the next general election. ■

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About the author: Fred Garratt-Stanley is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics, football, and pubs. He's based in London and has written for a wide range of publications including The Lead, The Guardian, NME, Huck, and Pellicle.

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🇪🇺 This story is the latest part in our series examining the impact voting to Leave the European Union had on the UK since June 2016. We’ve dug into the numbers around the economy, immigration and more since the EU Referendum and also heard how Brexit has left our universities in a bleak position. And we welcomed Naomi Smith from Best For Britain as she argues why the time is now re-joining based on the public mood and our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald penned an exclusive essay on how the EU Referendum paved the way for Reform.

Next we’ll be exploring what life’s been like for EU migrants living here. Sign up now to make sure you receive it first.

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He found that the issues that led to the vote haven’t been resolved. In many of these communities, poverty, housing, job insecurity, and lack of opportunities for young people have only w…

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In 2022, a rumour surfaced that Burnham’s wife, Marie-France van Heel, would gain financially from the selection of the electric vehicle (EV) charging company Be.EV for a contract with Transport for Greater Manchester, to maintain and grow the region’s electric vehicle charging network.

But Van Heel’s relationship to the company was widely exaggerated online, mostly by critics of Greater Manchester’s Clean Air Zone (CAZ).

Now, the same rumour is being used to imply corruption.

Context

Van Heel does have some links to Be.EV. At the time, she was the chief strategy and managing partner of a small marketing and brand agency called Heavenly, which involved her working with clients including Iduna Infrastructure Limited.

The latter owned Amey MAP Services Limited, which had a contract with Transport for Greater Manchester to operate the public electric vehicle (EV) network.

However, neither Van Heel nor Burnham had any shares in the company at the time and Burnham, who was the Mayor for Greater Manchester when the contract was signed, was not involved in the deal.

He declared his wife’s employment by Be.EV at a Greater Manchester combined authority (GMCA) meeting in September 2021, so that he was not part of the decision-making.

He said: “Even though this is a minor private interest in relation to EV charging – and not directly related to the CAZ – I still chose to declare it, and remove myself from any decision-making, so that there could be no perception of a conflict of interest nor any suggestion of privileged information being misused.

“More broadly, we do not own any shares in any company and receive no income other than our salaries.”

Van Heel eventually left Heavenly to work in the sustainability sector and now in 2024 became the chief customer officer at Be.EV and is listed as a director and chief marketing officer at Iduna Infrastructure (the parent company of Be.EV), where she also holds a 0.2 percent share of the company.

The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) confirmed Burnham was given legal advice that no further declaration was necessary because he had already declared Van Heel as an employee.

There are strict rules about politicians awarding public contracts to companies they hold shares in, which are designed to prevent conflicts of interest.

Under ministerial code, they are required to disclose all relevant financial holdings, including those of close family members, to their department’s Permanent Secretary. The Procurement Act 2023 specifically defines a conflict of interest as any direct or indirect personal or financial interest.

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Where did the rumour come from?

The rumour started in January 2022, in a Facebook group set up to oppose Burnham’s plans for the Clean Air Zone. It said that Van Heel had “shares in the company” which will supply “the monitoring cameras” for the CAZ, none of which was true.

The rumour gained traction locally, and eventually morphed, with claims that Van Heel would receive bonuses from the firm if their profits increase as a result of the CAZ, and that she and Burnham had a financial interest in the cameras used to monitor vehicles entering the zone.

The rumour died down quite quickly following Burnham’s rebuttal, but has since resurfaced and was shared by former Sun columnist Jon Gaunt to his 60,000 Facebook followers. It has since been shared widely by right-wing influencers.

It was also amplified by former comedian John Cleese, who shared the story with his five million X followers, demanding an “Investigation, please”.

Reform UK appeared to lean into the rumours when it announced its mayoral candidate for Greater Manchester, Sian Astley, on X.

“Sian has pledged to scrutinise contracts previously awarded by Andy Burnham to firms during his time as mayor,” it wrote.

All while its leader, Nigel Farage, is facing severe scrutiny and a parliamentary investigation over the undeclared £5 million gift he received from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

What happens next?

A new report from the Social Market Foundation found that local misinformation on social media is not only growing but going unchecked. Nearly half of Brits seek out local news through social media, yet 2 in 5 local Facebook groups and over four-fifths of X searches featured at least one piece of misinformation in their last 1,000 posts, with misinformation surging during elections.

Last week, the government outlined plans to make it easier for people to discover trusted news sources on social media. Among other things, it will consult on options to require social media companies and video sharing platforms to make sure that news content from public service media (PSM), which includes the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, S4C and 5, and other trustworthy providers, is prominent and easy to find on their platforms.

But in the immediate term, with Burnham likely to become the new leader of the Labour party, and a mayoral by-election to be held next month, we can expect the rumour mill to go into overdrive.■

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About the author: Ella Glover is the audience engagement editor at The Lead. She is also a freelance journalist specialising in workers’ rights, housing, health, harm reduction and lifestyle.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

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🇪🇺 And as the conversations about the of the legacy Brexit referendum continue, we’ll be back in your inbox this weekend examining the impact of the Leave vote on Britain’s seaside towns Make sure you’re subscribed to receive it first.

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There was a line buried in Andy Burnham’s speech yesterday that mattered more than almost anything else.

Britain, he argued, doesn’t simply need a change of government. It needs “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen.”

For years, politicians have promised to mend the NHS, build houses and grow the economy. But Burnham’s intervention was important, because it started with the fundamentals: the way Britain is governed is itself part of the problem.

Britain is unusually centralised, more so than many of the democracies in the developed world. Decisions affecting millions of people are still funnelled through Whitehall departments and ministers who often know little about the places they’re making decisions for. Local leaders lament spending as much time bidding for funding as they do actually governing. Its an absurd way to run a country anyway, especially one that contains economies, demographics and needs as different as Manchester, Cornwall, Teesside and London.

Burnham’s proposed No.10 North and a new wave of devolution is therefore an encouraging place to begin. His speech yesterday was refreshingly optimistic, good-humoured and a direct challenge to Treasury orthodoxy and the political stagnation that has left the country listless. He certainly looked and sounded like the next prime minister.

But the diagnosis is easy — it’s the cure that’s tricky. Devolution is one of those ideas that has been tried, tested and flirted with by almost every political party. You are highly unlikely to hear a policy wonk or commentator worth their salt calling for more centralisation, and less power to local communities.

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The problem is the realities of governance. Whitehall has a long history of announcing decentralisation while quietly retaining control over the money, the rules and the ability to intervene whenever ministers feel uncomfortable. Genuine devolution requires a government with an appetite for relinquishing control, something that five year terms, FPTP and partyocracies don’t really leave space for.

Nor is devolution a magic wand. Scotland and Wales demonstrate its possibilities and its limits. Both have developed distinctive policy agendas and strong national political identities, but so too do they have sluggish productivity, stretched public services and difficult financial trade-offs.

England presents an even greater challenge. Metro mayors may have transformed local leadership in places such as Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, but their powers remain patchy and heavily dependent on what the treasury is willing to give. Different areas operate under different deals, leaving local government feeling more of a confusing patchwork than a coherent concept.

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There’s another challenge, too. Burnham is right that Britain’s political system has lost public confidence. Trust in politicians is historically low, and Reform UK is building momentum on convincing voters that Westminster simply doesn’t work.

The temptation for any insurgent is to lean heavily into that argument, but Burnham must be careful with his outsider shtick. He cannot afford to become just another politician telling people everything is broken. If voters conclude the entire democratic system is irredeemable, it won’t be Labour that benefits, but Nigel Farage, and as soon as Burnham looks to become part of that establishment picture, voters will become suspicious.

That means Burnham needs to walk a careful line. He must be honest enough to acknowledge institutional failure, but optimistic enough to persuade people those institutions can still be repaired. That means reforms beyond devolution.

As I’ve previously written, the next prime minister should take a serious look at cleaning up Westminster. Things like tighter standards for MPs, banning second jobs, strengthening independent ethics enforcement, and finally confronting constitutional questions that have sat untouched for years — including electoral reform — would all signal that a promise that extends beyond speeches, is happy to remove the temptations of power, and demands high standards from elected representatives.

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And then there’s the economy. Devolution can make Britain govern itself better, but that will not magically plug our economic blackhole. If the country genuinely wants sustained, progressive growth, higher productivity and rising living standards, it will eventually have to confront bigger questions about Britain’s relationship with Europe. Burnham has previously only said he wants to see the UK rejoin the EU in “his lifetime”. This conveniently long-term vision alongside some constitutional rewiring cannot fully compensate for the trade barriers created by Brexit.

And in the meantime, Burnham also needs short term wins. Voters struggling with mortgages, food prices and energy bills won’t wait years for constitutional reform to bear fruit. His plans on housing, high streets and the cost of living matter a huge amount to, and his government must work out how to quickly show that government can still improve people’s lives.

But that's ultimately what this speech recognised. Britain's crisis isn't simply one of public finances or public services, but of government, institutions and politics itself.

Most importantly, Burnham is signalling that carefully managed decline is no longer an option. He is willing to grapple with the deeper causes of Britain’s stagnation, not just its symptoms, and understands that the country has little patience left for technocratic tinkering. Whether that ambition survives contact with governing reality is another matter entirely. Good luck, Andy. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Enjoying our series on a decade on since the EU Referendum? Zoe’s essay on the rise of Reform since Brexit paved the way is available to catch up on, along with the case for closer ties with Europe, the impact Brexit has had on our universities and drilling into the data around what Brexit did to the economy.

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Brexit was supposed to be the answer. For decades, the nature of Britain’s relationship with Europe had been the question that would just not go away. It destroyed political parties, consumed governments and ruined family dinners. It divided towns, generations and worldviews. But the referendum of June 2016 was meant to settle that nasty chapter once and for all.

Ten years later, Britain has left the European Union, but the anxieties that powered the Leave vote remain as potent as before. Concerns about immigration, national identity, economic insecurity and political distrust have become organising principles in British politics. We stand, in many ways, on the very same footing.

Rather than ending an era of populist nationalism, Brexit legitimised and institutionalised it. And today, we find ourselves trapped in a strange political loop: arguing over the same issues, with all the same protagonists, but a darker and more confident populist force at the wheel.

Brexit’s broken promises

Despite the Brexiteer fantasy of a shiny new Singapore-on-Thames, our decision to leave the world’s largest single market has — unsurprisingly — left the UK economy around 6-8 per cent smaller than expected.

The reasons are hardly mysterious. Leaving the EU’s economic bodies created barriers where there weren’t any before: customs declarations, regulatory checks and new frictions. As William Bain of the British Chambers of Commerce observed, Brexit has become “an ongoing, gnawing issue that is holding back trade.” For businesses, this means higher costs, more paperwork and greater uncertainty.

While Brexit was far from the only economic shock Britain faced in the last decade, those additional costs filtered through the economy. Consumers were already grappling with soaring energy prices, rising interest rates and post-pandemic inflation. Brexit added another drag on growth at precisely the moment the country could least afford it.

The result was a sustained squeeze on living standards. Inflation hit a 41-year high of 11.1 per cent in October 2022. Prices rose faster than wages and disposable incomes in 2024 were lower than in 2019 — the first fall across a full parliamentary term since records began.

Behind those figures were real and accumulating pressures for voters. The weekly shop cost more, energy bills climbed. Millions suddenly faced higher mortgage repayments. Life simply became more expensive.

Taken together, these pressures have created a mood of sustained, simmering frustration. Ministers speak endlessly about growth while avoiding the Brexit-shaped elephant in the room. By April 2026, even Keir Starmer was only just publicly acknowledging what economists had argued for years: Brexit had inflicted “deep damage” on the British economy.

The more interesting question is why so little of that frustration was directed toward Brexit.

By the 2024 general election, the cost of living topped the list of voter priorities, yet just three per cent of Leave voters cited Brexit as a major factor in deciding how to vote. Only eight per cent of Britons overall considered it one of the country’s most important issues. The pain was being felt keenly, but Brexit was not being blamed. Instead, public frustration found other targets, and that target was migrants.

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The immigration paradox

The Brexiteers promised to take back control of Britain’s borders. What they delivered was precisely the opposite: more immigration, more visible immigration, and no trust in anyone’s ability to manage it.

EU net migration did briefly turn negative after 2016, with more EU citizens leaving than arriving, but that was never the full picture. Industries like healthcare, construction and hospitality still needed workers, and with the EU route closed off, non-EU immigration rose to fill the gap. Net migration hit a record peak of over 900,000 in the year to March 2023 – nearly three times the 321,000 recorded in the year before the referendum.

Then came a second, compounding issue: small boat crossings, a phenomenon barely visible before 2016. In 2018, just 299 people arrived by this route. By the year ending March 2026, around 39,000 were crossing annually, making up approximately 90 per cent of all arrivals by irregular means. Before Brexit, the UK relied on the EU’s Dublin Regulation to return asylum seekers to their country of first arrival. The withdrawal agreement replaced that with nothing, so returns became far harder, and crossings grew exponentially. In raw numbers, boats remain a tiny fraction of total immigration, but as images, they were everything. Dinghies on the water gave perpetually unsatisfied nationalists a visual shorthand for broken promises that no statistic could match.

The Conservatives under Boris Johnson made this worse on a third front: lies, damn lies. Desperate to be seen delivering the will of his people, Johnson declared Brexit a success by sheer force of repetition. He won his 2019 landslide on “get Brexit done,” and he did, in the narrowest sense, break the parliamentary deadlock that had paralysed his predecessor Theresa May.

But the immigration system he now controlled outright saw numbers surge to record levels on his watch, as the economy stalled. For voters already primed to distrust the establishment, this was confirmation. The Brexit coalition had been built on the idea that elites lied and tried to put a lid on the will of the masses. Johnson — the Leave campaign’s figurehead in Tory camps — was the supposed outsider. He made promises he wouldn’t keep. He turned out to be exactly what they’d suspected all along.

With no Brussels to blame, on the right, this got its own name — the “Boris wave” — a symbol of a ruling class that promised one thing and did entirely another.

So when official figures now show the numbers falling — net migration down to 204,000 in the year to June 2025 — nobody believes it. Only 16 per cent of people think migration has fallen in the past year, while 49 per cent think it’s risen.

“Brexit supercharged ‘control’ as a political concept but it also exposed how hollow it can be,” Naomi Smith, chief executive of Best for Britain explains. “We ‘took back control’ — if you accept that framing — of our borders, and net migration subsequently hit record highs.”

“What that tells you, is that the anxieties driving the immigration debate were never really about the EU at all. They’re fuelled by far right narratives that exploit economic insecurity, pressure on overstretched public services, and a political class that hasn’t been straight with voters about the trade offs and economic realities we face today. Those conditions haven’t gone away - in fact quite the opposite - so neither has the dissatisfaction.”

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Same faces, new grievances

Voters who had been promised prosperity, control and national renewal instead found themselves facing higher costs, record immigration and a political class insisting everything was working.

The grievances remained and trust collapsed. Brexit had created an electorate primed to feel betrayed and looking for someone to blame. All it needed was a skilled operator to channel that anger into a new political project.

Enter Nigel Farage.

Farage had spent over two decades as the most persistent advocate for British withdrawal from the EU. He forced David Cameron’s hand on a referendum the Conservative party never wanted, and when Leave won in 2016, he resigned as UKIP leader within days. “I have never been, and I have never wanted to be, a career politician,” he told reporters. “My aim in being in politics was to get Britain out of the European Union [...] I don’t see what more I can achieve.” Many took him at his word: his job had seemingly become obsolete.

That didn’t last long.

Within three years Farage was back, founding the Brexit Party in 2019 to pressure a Conservative government he decided to be too slow and too amenable to Brussels. He stood candidates down across swathes of the country in December 2019 to clear Johnson's path, then receded again once Brexit was “done”. The Brexit Party was rebranded as Reform UK in January 2021 in opposition to COVID lockdown measures and a broader anti-establishment platform. Farage stepped back from leadership of the party at that point, leaving his now deputy Richard Tice in charge.

So when in May 2023, Farage appeared on BBC Newsnight and told Victoria Derbyshire that “Brexit has failed”, it wasn’t a man discovering a new cause. Rather, it was the third time he’d reactivated the same one.

“We’ve not delivered on borders, we’ve not delivered on Brexit. The Tories have let us down very, very badly”, he lamented. Farage had found a whole new way to launder his reputation. He did not need to take accountability for the failures of Brexit, because he had decided they weren’t his to take. The betrayal of higher costs, less control, and a diminished place in the world was an execution error. And so he had to return: his job was unfinished.

This propelled Farage back to the frontline of British politics. By June 2024, he had resumed the Reform UK leadership and won the Clacton seat — his eighth attempt to enter Westminster. He would no longer campaign on Britain’s relationship with the EU, instead focusing on immigration, social cohesion, and — increasingly — what he calls “Judeo-Christian values”.

As of May 2026, Reform sits on 25 per cent in voting intention polls, ahead of Labour on 18 per cent and the Conservatives on 17 per cent. This year, the party swept local elections, winning overall control of 10 councils and 1,257 seats.

The referendum was supposed to settle the defining question of his career. Instead, it provided the foundation for a new one. Farage successfully repositioned himself as Brexit’s betrayed champion.

“Nigel Farage and Reform UK aren’t creating something new but harvesting something old,” Smith explains. “Just as the Leave campaign of 2016 did, they’re making false promises and whipping up xenophobia, blaming the country’s problems on others rather than being honest about the economic damage of Brexit, the dangerous man in the White House and their billionaire mates cream-skimming wealth from the public.”

The numbers bear this out. Farage’s party is now the most popular party among over-50s — drawing 34 per cent of voters aged 50-64 and 33 per cent of those 65 and over. These are precisely the demographics most likely to have voted Leave in 2016. Almost seven in ten of the British public now feel that society is in disrepair — a sentiment shared across all parties, but felt most acutely among his supporters. The unresolved tensions on immigration, identity and economic disappointment that his Brexit surfaced gave him and his party an endless pool of anger to draw from.

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Brexit…forever?

The question now is how long we will let Brexit destroy our politics — burning through leader after leader and dividing us further.

Reform has a long journey to Downing Street, but it already leads polls, controls councils, and is dominating political discourse. Keir Starmer is the latest casualty in the Brexit fallout, his early departure reflecting not only the abysmal economic outlook, but also the pressure Reform has exerted on the centre ground. In an effort to counter Farage’s rebirth, Labour shifted decisively right on immigration and social policy, attempting to park their tanks on his lawn. But in doing so, they alienated huge swathes of their own, while propelling Reform’s hostile brand of politics into the limelight.

But this is not just a story of electoral positioning. The money and networks surrounding Reform point to something more sinister still. Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto investor, has donated £9 million to the party and made a £5 million personal gift to Nigel Farage, which was not properly declared and is now under investigation. Questions about what such extraordinary generosity is buying have not gone away, despite Farage insisting that the money was “a wholly private matter” unconnected to his political activity.

The party’s questionable links don’t stop there. Just look to Nathan Gill, former UKIP MEP and the Leader of Reform UK in Wales, now serving a decade in prison after he was admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for spewing Russian propaganda.

And then there’s the hard-right US legal networks that have been cosying up the Farage, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian campaign group central to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They have been working Farage into Trump-aligned circles and facilitating MAGA political ties. Reform is now increasingly filling its ranks with fundamentalist advisors and anti-abortion hard-liners, and Farage himself has now started openly questioning abortion term limits.

Taken together, Reform’s emerging programme speaks to the darker aftershocks of Brexit: fierce hostility to immigration, suspicion of liberal institutions and values, and a crueller, more divisive politics. The party has pledged to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act, and scrap the Equality Act , as well as introducing the mass detention and deportation of foreign nationals. What has been created in the last decade is not some settled post-Brexit order, but a looser, more volatile politics shaped by new money, shadowy alliances and a hostility to progressivism.

“Brexit was sold as a full stop but turned out to be a comma,” says Smith. “The promise was that leaving the European Union would draw a line under a decade of political turmoil. Instead it created a new set of questions that Britain is still wrestling with today: what kind of relationship do we want with our nearest neighbours, what kind of country are we, and who does our politics actually work for?”

Those questions may remain unanswered, but Farage remains the man most willing to exploit the silence. He has trained the electorate to see betrayal everywhere they look, helped create the conditions for his voters’ hardship and ensured they would never blame him for it. And the parties and politicians around him have remained complicit, too afraid to name Brexit’s failures and too blinkered to contend with its damage.

What comes in the next decade depends entirely on whether Britain’s mainstream politicians can finally do what it has spent the previous decade refusing to: tell the truth about what Brexit did, who bears the cost, and why the man promising to fix it helped cause it all in the first place. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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🇪🇺 This story is the latest part in our series examining the impact voting to Leave the European Union had on the UK since June 2016. We’ve dug into the numbers around the economy, immigration and more since the EU Referendum and also heard how Brexit has left our universities in a bleak position. And this morning we welcomed Naomi Smith from Best For Britain as she argues why the time is now re-joining based on the public mood.

Next we’ll be exploring what life’s been like for EU migrants living here and life in the coastal town which has seen Brexit first-hand. Sign up now to make sure you receive it first.

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Andy Burnham has uncovered a new problem that every would-be Prime Minister dreads: a policy area with hardly any safe ground left to stand on.

This week, the freshly-elected Makerfield MP and Prime Minister-in-waiting was among the 332 who voted to adopt the UK’s seventh Carbon Budget, the government’s plan for cutting CO2 emissions.

The latest budget, which is based on the independent Climate Change Committee’s advice, includes an ambitious target of cutting emissions 87 percent by 2040. This would be achieved by electrifying transport, heat, and industry with a huge boost in electric vehicles and heat pumps. It also supposes the government will keep its ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences. This is the sort of thing a talented politician could tell a compelling story about.

But this agenda is squeezed between competing political revolts over oil, gas and net-zero. Facing a backlash from the political right, Kemi Badenoch declared her Conservative Party’s recent victory in the Aberdeen by-election to be “a referendum on oil and gas”, and clearly believes she has found a winning policy to lift the Tory gloom.

North Sea drilling is the issue she talks about most now, along with defence spending.

It’s won her friends in low places. This week she spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, a gathering of cranky right-wingers, conservative Christian groups, and Donald Trump fans.

An investigation by Unearthed and DeSmog has revealed that the event was largely funded by oil and gas investors, along with uber-rich donors to President Trump and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Speaking of pressure, Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright (himself a former oil and gas executive), beamed into the ARC event by video link on Tuesday to express his wish for Britain to join the “shale gas revolution”.

He also appears to have thought a record-breaking heatwave, during which several people have already died, was the moment to tell a London audience that “cold is a vastly larger killer than heat”. If you want to know where much of the push for more fossil fuels is coming from, you need only look Trumpwards.

Trump on Burnham: “I hear he’s extremely liberal, extremely, so that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea.”

At the ARC event, Badenoch repeated her call to “repeal the net zero by 2050 legislation, the Climate Change Act”, which “would abolish the Climate Change Committee”. Then, she said, “we would be able to drill our own oil and gas in the North Sea. There’s £25 billion of revenue that’s there. Let’s get that out, let’s use it”.

Reform UK agrees, but unlike the Tories, its leaders don’t feel the need to pretend they believe in man-made climate change. It’s worth noting that both parties have received a fortune from donors with financial interests in oil and gas.

Badenoch went on to attack Wright’s UK counterpart, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, as the “villain in the story of Britain’s de-industrialisation”, adding: “We need to make sure that Andy Burnham understands that this man should not be let anywhere near the levers of power – not in the energy department, not in the Treasury.”

This latter point followed reports (better known as “rumours”) that Burnham might make Miliband his Chancellor of the Exchequer, putting a man the Right calls an “eco-zealot” in charge of the UK’s economy.

But things aren’t so easy on the left flank, either. Oddly, this move was also opposed by Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, the country’s largest trade union. She told the press that Miliband was “rushing Britain to net zero with almost no thought for jobs, skills and national security”, and that a Chancellor Miliband “would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs”.

Her remarks were rejected by 40 progressive economists who wrote a public letter rejecting her claims. They pointed to an analysis commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a pro-green think tank, which found that the net zero economy was worth £100 billion per year, and provides more than a million jobs at higher than average wages.

But Graham is no lone union voice. Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, which represents many oil and gas workers, has been a long-time basher. Earlier this month he claimed the government’s energy policies are “closing factories, hitting investment and hitting jobs”, and driving his members to vote for Reform UK.

Meanwhile, former health secretary Wes Streeting – who after the Makerfield by-election dropped his leadership ambitions (for now) and endorsed Burnham – suggested in May that Miliband should grant new oil and gas licences, citing the calls by Unite and GMB. This followed Tony Blair’s call for Labour to shelve net zero and “use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources”.

For what’s worth, I don’t think the point about oil and gas workers’ jobs should be waved away with some stats and the promise of a green future. If the energy transition is going to be a just one, these workers need to be supported. But you don’t help them by propping up a dying industry, (and one which is the leading cause of climate change), while trashing the net zero and renewable energy sector, which is growing.

Burnham has drillers to the Left of him, and drillers to the Right. When asked a few weeks ago about new North Sea licences, he said: “I’ve got something of an open mind, you know. I don’t have a sort of fixed position.” That sounds like he “sort of” hasn’t thought about it at all.

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For all the noise, climate action is a popular policy, and it’s already a net positive for the economy. If Burnham wants to help post-industrial areas, he’s going to have to decide what he wants them to make. Through all the talk of “growth”, the net zero sector is growing perhaps three times faster than the rest of the economy.

It’s also a useful point of difference with the Right. If Burnham wants to “beat Reform”, he could point out that Farage wants to chain us to the fossil fuel market, with all the wonderful results for “cost of living” and “national security” we see around us – along with the little matter of heating the planet.

There’s an opportunity here for a new administration. All Burnham would have to do is adjust his crown and read the Carbon Budget for which he just cast his vote.■

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About the author: Adam Barnett is UK News Reporter at DeSmog and a freelance journalist. He writes a politics column for the Big Issue and has reported for The Guardian and Private Eye.

👫Agree with Adam? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

🇪🇺 This month, we’re examining the impact voting to Leave the European Union had on the UK since June 2016. We’ve dug into the numbers around the economy, immigration and more since the EU Referendum and also heard how Brexit has left our universities in a bleak position. And this morning we welcomed Naomi Smith from Best For Britain as she argues why the time is now re-joining based on the public mood.

Next we’ll be exploring what life’s been like for EU migrants living here and how Brexit paved the way for Reform. Sign up now to make sure you receive it first.

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Plus take advantage of our special offer and get 30 per cent off an annual subscription (usually £49, use this link to get it for £34.30 instead) to help us write more in-depth original series like this, going deep into the issues affecting people, policy and place in the UK right now.

What was Keir Starmer’s original sin?

Was it winter fuel? The freebies ‘scandal’? His unambitious tax and spend plans? Peter Mandelson? Was it his dullness, his lack of charisma, his strange refusal to dream?

What if I told you that Starmer’s fate was sealed long before he ever set foot in Downing Street?

Before he crafted his manifesto, before he became Labour leader, perhaps even before he entered frontline politics. What if Starmer’s fatal flaw wasn’t his at all - but one he inherited, refused to confront, and eventually succumbed to?

Today marks 10 years since Britain voted to leave the European Union. Over this month, The Lead is commiserating, with a series of essays and features exploring the long fallout from that decision: its economic consequences, its cultural legacy and the ways it continues to shape our politics.

Later this week, I’ll be writing about how Brexit helped create the conditions for Reform UK’s rise, while our other contributors chart Brexit’s impact on universities, coastal towns and our economy.

But perhaps the most immediate reminder of Brexit’s enduring influence arrived yesterday, almost as if it had been planned. Brexit claimed its latest casualty; after months of pressure, Starmer is stepping down.

Let’s wind back a little, and remind ourselves: we’ve been here before.

‘Starmer refused to look Brexit in the eye.
That may prove to be his defining mistake’

David Cameron gambled his premiership on a referendum he never expected to lose. Theresa May spent three years trying and failing to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of Leave voters, her frothing backbenchers and economic reality.

Boris Johnson succeeded in “getting Brexit done” but struggled to govern the fractious country that emerged afterwards. Liz Truss inherited an economy with little room for error and attempted to grow her way out of Brexit-induced stagnation with catastrophic consequences.

And Rishi Sunak, much like Keir Starmer, struggled to convince a permanently angry electorate that a technocrat could grapple with the challenges of post-Brexit Britain. Now, for the first time, a Labour leader joins the list.

Of course, Starmer’s downfall was not caused solely by Brexit. His premiership was damaged by entirely predictable internal Labour rebellions and growing public frustration that the promise of change had not translated into anything meaningful.

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He seemed committed to governing as though he were permanently campaigning for the next election, pursuing a lost tribe of voters who barely existed in the first place while alienating much of his core support in the process. It was a masterclass in poor political management. Ultimately, he had to go.

Yet all of those problems existed within the political and economic landscape Brexit helped create.

Labour under Starmer did have achievements; some modest, some genuinely significant. The Employment Rights Bill and Renters’ Rights Bill immediately reduced insecurity for millions of workers and tenants. The government began the process of renationalising the railways. It introduced breakfast clubs for hungry children across the country. It eventually abolished the two-child benefit cap, lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty overnight.

The problem is that the political landscape in which these stories existed had been permanently altered by Brexit. The turmoil, anger and intrigue unleashed by the referendum fundamentally changed our politics; forever altering the media ecosystem, and our public expectations of politicians, and creating a political environment in which incremental progress struggles to cut through. Good news rarely survives the news cycle because, ultimately, editors want psychodrama.

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On the day the Health Secretary resigned, it was announced that NHS waiting lists fell by 110,000 in March — the biggest monthly drop outside of Covid since 2008. But this fact was barely acknowledged; it was the cutting words of Wes Streeting’s resignation letter that made the front pages.

The irony is, of course, that Starmer had the opportunity to break the cycle. He was the first prime minister not tied to a fundamentally pro-Brexit project and had spent years arguing against withdrawal.

He was surrounded by advisers and colleagues that knew about the huge elephant in the room: the economic self-harm, the diminished influence, the vulnerabilities Britain had imposed upon itself. Instead, Starmer chose to cosy up to an increasingly erratic US president after distancing ourselves from our closest European allies, and allowed his premiership to be haunted by small boats and immigration – issues that Brexit was supposed to solve but instead elevated to the centre of political life.

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Ultimately, Starmer refused to look Brexit in the eye. That may prove to be his defining mistake.

That is not to say every problem Britain has faced over the past decade stems from Brexit. The pandemic happened, Russia invaded Ukraine, all of this was set in the backdrop of thirteen years of austerity. Governments made mistakes entirely unrelated to leaving the EU.

But Brexit damaged Britain on two fronts. First, it left the UK economy around 6-8 per cent smaller than it would have been had we remained. Trade became more difficult, labour shortages emerged across key sectors, business investment lagged behind comparable economies, growth weakened and public finances suffered. Those consequences matter because politics ultimately depends on delivery. Governments survive when people feel their lives are improving. That is the defining story of our last decade.

But Brexit also changed our national psyche. It normalised a deep suspicion of elites, from Brussels to Westminster. It reinforced the idea that experts, institutions and politicians were conspiring against the public will. Immigration became not simply a policy issue but a symbol of unfairness, decline and grievance, and we became more isolated, more distrustful and more cynical at precisely the moment Britain needed confidence and cooperation.

The rise of Reform did not happen in a vacuum. It was built on the same frustrations, resentments and unfulfilled promises that powered Brexit itself. And Starmer too often chose to engage with Brexit’s assumptions rather than challenge them. He rarely confronted the architects of Brexit over their promises, their failures or the damage they had inflicted. Instead, he positioned his premiership in the framework they had created.

Starmer’s government made plenty of errors. But 10 years on from the referendum, it is worth asking whether any were quite as consequential as his refusal to confront the defining political event of his generation. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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🇪🇺 This story is the next part in our series examining the impact voting to Leave the European Union had on the UK since June 2016. We’ve dug into the numbers around the economy, immigration and more since the EU Referendum and also heard how Brexit has left our universities in a bleak position. And this morning we welcomed Naomi Smith from Best For Britain as she argues why the time is now re-joining based on the public mood.

Next we’ll be exploring what life’s been like for EU migrants living here and how Brexit paved the way for Reform. Sign up now to make sure you receive it first.

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Plus take advantage of our special offer and get 30 per cent off an annual subscription (usually £49, use this link to get it for £34.30 instead) to help us write more in-depth original series like this, going deep into the issues affecting people, policy and place in the UK right now.

We all know the cursed ratio off by heart - 52:48, a tiny victory for the Leave campaign, and certainly no roaring mandate for the very hard version of Brexit we ended up with. Almost immediately after that vote back in 2016, Best for Britain was set up and began publishing its ‘Brexit Shift’ reports, using a then little known polling technique called MRP to track the shift in sentiment from anti to pro-EU membership on a constituency basis. We were surprised how quickly lots of seats that had voted leave, were flipping to Bregret.

A decade on, and the clamour is even louder. Support for rejoining is highest, unsurprisingly, among Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green voters, above 80 per cent in each case. But almost two-fifths of Conservative voters and nearly a fifth of Reform voters also back it.

This is the majority position, held across the political spectrum, and it is growing. The government’s current reset strategy commands broad, but not deep, support: 61 per cent back it, but only 19 per cent feel strongly about it. A membership commitment would generate a movement and propel us in the right direction, and secure the much needed votes for progressives.

The Brexit debate is moving from a culture war to a conversation about realities and charting a path to the kind of country we are ambitious to see realised.

The referendum result was a howl of frustration from communities that had watched their high streets hollow out, wages which fell behind the cost of living and a sense of being ignored by those in Westminster. Being tough on the causes of the vote matters enormously, because it is key to understanding why the conversation has changed and why it can change further still.

The evidence has accumulated to a point where it is simply very hard to overlook. The Bank of England estimates that Brexit has reduced UK GDP by 6 per cent. NBER calculates that business investment has reduced by 12-18 per cent due to leaving the EU. Haulage firms in the UK have been going bust at twice the rate than the five years prior to Brexit. I could go on. I won’t, but what we have is nearly a decade of data and economic loss that has compounded the background of every budget, every NHS waitlist, every unaffordable home, and commensurate polling to show voters would now opt to go back in.

What changed? Views on Brexit are shifting because they are now being formed by lived experience rather than identity or anger. People cannot see their GP any more easily than they could ten years ago. Their weekly shop costs more. Jobs have been lost. And tensions stoked as problems then wrongly blamed on Brussels are now being falsely pinpointed on immigration.

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Our latest research has found that reinstating our membership of the EU, our largest trading partner, could generate £92bn in GDP; creating the economic boost we desperately need to fund social services, infrastructure and growth. As we look towards the next ten years, and ask where we want this country to be, the numbers are pointing us in one direction only.

The current government’s instinct has been to dip a toe in the proverbial EU membership pool: a youth mobility scheme here, sector-by-sector agreements there. Partial arrangements deliver partial benefits. They require lengthy negotiations, unavoidable trade-offs, and they do not resolve the underlying challenges that people are facing every day.

The significant economic shift needed to positively impact people’s lives will not come from concluding another incremental agreement, but from signalling a credible intent to pursue membership. That signal alone would begin to change investment decisions, business confidence, and Britain’s standing in a world where our most important friends and neighbours happen to be in the European Union. This would make a real difference in our lives.

Anniversaries often inspire reflection on the past. The question for this anniversary is whether Britain is finally ready to have the honest conversation about where that course has led and where we plan to go. The public, it turns out, is ready. They have been for some time. ■

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About the author: Naomi Smith is the chief executive of Best For Britain, a group of researchers, data scientists, strategists, and activists, fixing the problems Britain faces after Brexit

👫Agree with Naomi? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

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🇪🇺 This story is the next part in our series examining the impact voting to Leave the European Union had on the UK since June 2016. We’ve dug into the numbers around the economy, immigration and more since the EU Referendum and also heard how Brexit has left our universities in a bleak position. Next we’ll be exploring what life’s been like for EU migrants living here and how Brexit paved the way for Reform. Sign up now to make sure you receive it first.

Plus take advantage of our special offer and get 30 per cent off an annual subscription (usually £49, use this link to get it for £34.30 instead) to help us write more in-depth original series like this, going deep into the issues affecting people, policy and place in the UK right now.