For the last year I've been helming the development of Progress, a new British political movement beyond left and right, for whom I have been acting as founder and leader. Today we are publicly releasing our policy testament, and with it, introducing our party and organisation for the first time. If you've been reading this feed over the past fortnight you'll have some idea of what we think is wrong with Britain. The tweets were not an exercise in commentary. They were the opening argument of a case we intend to prosecute through the coming years, made by a group of highly able everyday citizens who have spent years looking at the parlous state of the country in which they live and feel summoned to duty. Progress' philosophy is a best-of-both-worlds approach to the mixture of political spectrum positions. We believe in industrial development, real wage increases for the worker, skills and training, healthy public services (including and especially the NHS), and giving everyone in Britain a fair stake in their society; we will do more for working people on these issues than Labour have in living memory. We will do more to secure Britain's streets from crime than the Tories have in a century. We are committed to answering the public's repeat and clear wishes on immigration in a way that is both uncompromised and robust, as well as utterly civilised. We are in step, and side-by-side, with the median voter on these issues because Progress was founded by the median voter, for the median voter. We are the proud and natural home for the politically homeless. You may ask, "Why not Reform or Restore or the Greens?" In short, we at Progress understand implicitly the scale of the problems that face our country. We know that only organisations capable of the highest performance have a chance of wresting those problems to the ground. We look at Reform and Restore and the Greens and, like you, are left in no doubt that they are incapable of the level of performance required. They are conventional political organisations capable only of conventional things. Britain needs something far greater than that. The policy testament we are sharing with you today is the richest, longest, and most comprehensive integrated vision for the future of Britain written yet this century, a document that will continue to evolve as our understanding of how to best serve our people grows. We invite you to read it. It was written by people who take you and your needs extremely seriously. And yet, for all that, half a million words of policy is the easy part. The real challenge comes now, in building a political machine up and down the country not merely capable, in time, of contesting elections, but capable in the immediate term of providing value to the communities in which they are embedded. This is the essence of our aim: not to beg trust but to win it through service, without being asked and without asking anything in return. At Progress, we call this 'CIV', or 'Community Investment'. Our work may elapse over a generation before it bears fruit. Fate may intervene to bring it to resolution, good or bad, long before that. In the chaos of our world there's no way to know. But what is in our control is our drive and ability to build, and "build" is what we're doing and what we’re going to do. We require community leaders, active and would-be, to help support our existing CIVs up and down the country and build more. We require experts and technicians of every stripe. Outsized and unusually shaped talent is the alpha and the omega of our organisation. We require, above all else, any and everyone who has looked at what Britain has become and concluded that responsibility for fixing it must lay with the people, not with a professional failure class. Never doubt that, as dark as things seem in this land of ours, there are those fighting, hard and earnest, to right the course. If you’re stirred by duty, if you wish to work with a British political organisation that can do things others can't, then come and give us your hand. It Can Be Done. progressforbritain.org/

Late in September, on a disused airfield at Machrihanish on the Kintyre peninsula, a scaled-down orbital rocket was bolted to a stand and fired for 45 seconds, and every subsystem held for the full duration. The rocket belongs to Skyrora, which is the only company in Britain building a vehicle to put satellites in orbit from British soil. The full-size version, the Skyrora XL, is 23 metres tall, 3 stages, built to carry 315kg to orbit, and its 70kN engine runs on hydrogen peroxide and kerosene in a staged-combustion cycle that no commercial engine in history has been qualified on. The engines are made in a factory in North Lanarkshire. The company's chief operating officer, Dr Jack James Marlow, said the thing that engineers say and governments never do: "You don't build confidence in an orbital launch vehicle by waiting until the finished rocket is on the launchpad." The firing is the part of the story Britain can be proud of. The rest is the part Britain should be ashamed of, because at every stage the slowest component in this programme has been a permission. In 2021 Skyrora built what it called the largest mobile spaceport in Europe, in Iceland, for a suborbital flight set for that September. It then waited over a year for the Icelandic government to issue a licence, and when the rocket finally flew, in October 2022, it fell into the sea with a software fault. So the company came home and applied to the Civil Aviation Authority for a licence to launch from SaxaVord in Shetland. It applied in August 2023. The licence arrived in July 2025. 23 months, for a permit that covers suborbital flights only: 1 launch of the small Skylark L, plus up to 15 more inside a year, each of which must go back to the regulator for separate approval before it can happen. The orbital vehicle that fired at Machrihanish has no licence at all yet. The first orbital flight is now pencilled in for 2030. A rocket engine on a test stand in Argyll is a good deal more than a rocket engine. It is machinists in Cumbernauld, a supply chain in Scotland that did not exist a decade ago, a test range on an airfield the RAF left in 1997, and a generation of engineers who chose to build the hardest thing in their field in this country rather than in Texas or Bavaria. Everything in that list is a bet that Britain will let them finish. Nothing in the record of the last 5 years says it will. The engineering was ready before the paperwork every single time. Progress has written the space industry onto the face of an Act. Prosperity Zone 8, Space, Satellites, Critical Minerals and Advanced Materials, is designated in statute, distributed across Cornwall and Devon and SaxaVord, with a Sandpit Authority holding autonomous governance powers so that the people deciding what gets built in the zone are inside it, accountable for it, and measured on it. The principle underneath is the one that runs through the whole of our planning programme: a decision deadline in law, and deemed consent when the state misses it. Permission is the state's job, with a date on it. The rockets are somebody else's, and they are already firing. 45 seconds at Machrihanish. 23 months at the CAA. It can be done; it is being done; the only question is whether the country gets out of the way in time to take the credit.

Regular pay in the public sector rose 6.3% in the year to August. In the private sector it rose 3.0%. Those are the Office for National Statistics' figures, published yesterday, and they are the fairest summary available of how Britain is being run: the state givesitself a pay rise at twice the rate permitted those people who pay for it, and in a year when the people who pay for it stopped hiring. And they have stopped. Vacancies fell to 691,000 in the 3 months to September, the lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014, and the ONS says the fall is "concentrated mainly within smaller businesses", which cite the cost of employing people. Payrolled employment is down 111,000 on the year. Pay growth across the economy, 3.7%, is the lowest since 2020. Among young people not in full-time education, 13.3% are unemployed, 446,000 of them, and the number is rising. Then this morning: inflation 3.5%, above the forecast, with motor fuel up 29.8% in a year and energy up 17.9%. Real pay growth across the economy is 0.8%. For the private worker on 3.0% against inflation of 3.5%, it is a pay cut. You pay more. And everything gets worse. The danse macabre that constitutes the experience of being British in 2026 rills darkly, merrily on. What's happened to our small businesses, the lifeblood of our economy and culture, and to set them so much on the back foot? Well, the burden they are citing has a date and a name. In April 2025 employer National Insurance went from 13.8% to 15% and the threshold at which it starts fell from £9,100 to £5,000, so that the tax on employing someone on £20,000 rose by half. It was sold as funding for the NHS. What it funded, on the evidence of yesterday's release, was a 6.3% settlement for the public payroll and a hiring freeze for everyone else, which is the natural result of taxing the act of giving somebody a job in order to pay people whose jobs cannot be lost. The Budget is days away, and the measure being briefed as its centrepiece is a rise in the bank surcharge from 3% to 8%. The Chancellor's answer to a country that has stopped hiring is a tax on the institutions that lend to employers. Indeed's economist asked this week "whether the Budget gives employers a reason to start swimming". It will give them a reason to keep still. The Progress programme begins where the damage began. The Tax Reset restores employer National Insurance to 13.8% and the threshold to £9,100 from the first April after Royal Assent, which puts the cost of the 1st hire, the 2nd and the 10th back where it was before the state decided that employment was the thing it could most afford to tax. And it requires HMRC to print the True Tax Rate on every payslip, income tax and both National Insurances in a single number, so that the 3.0% worker can see what the 6.3% settlement costs him, every month, in his own hand. The state has awarded itself 6.3% and left the people who pay for it a hiring freeze and a fuel bill. We intend to reverse the old order, here as elsewhere. Join us.

Matthew Caton holds the children's portfolio on Wakefield Council, which makes him the man answerable, in law, for the safety of every child in the district. In that district stands Urban House, an asylum accommodation centre of more than 300 beds, with somewhere between 200 and 260 people inside it on any given day. He does not know who they are. He is not permitted to know. "How am I meant to protect the children and young people of this district," he asked the council last week, "when I have no idea who's coming in and out of this facility?" The council, he said, has not one single eye on them. In under a month West Yorkshire Police have made 5 arrests at Urban House for alleged rape and child sexual assault. Yes, that's right. FIVE. One man has been charged with sexual offences against a child under 13 and will appear at Leeds Crown Court; the others have been released on bail, and nothing more can be said about any of them until a jury has spoken. What can be said is what the council did. Every member of it, of every party, voted to ask the Home Secretary to close Urban House and the Cedar Court Hotel. But the council has no power to close either. The leader, Karl Johnson, put the position in a sentence: "We cannot carry on like this." He cannot carry on, and yet he cannot stop, because the building is not his. The Home Office called the allegations "sickening", said it "will not tolerate criminal behaviour", promised that anyone convicted of a serious sexual offence would have his claim refused and be removed at the first opportunity, and pointed to 80,000 people returned since the election. West Yorkshire Police confirmed reassurance patrols. And yet it keeps happening, doesn't it? More children; more women; more innocent, blameless citizens. And as Gosport shows, you;'re going to have to keep taking it. Because you are, aren't you? The people who govern you reckon that you will. Gosport themselves might resist. So might Wakefield. But who else among you? Perhaps it's because of who this stuff most affects. Asylum accommodation is procured as beds, and beds are cheapest in the towns where wages are lowest, which are also the towns where nobody has a solicitor on retainer and the council leader has to ask the Home Secretary's permission to know who is living on his own streets. The risk goes where the resistance is weakest. The department that decides this does not live next to the result, is never asked to, and has built an entire vocabulary of "dispersal" and "contingency" and "community cohesion concerns" to avoid the sentence that explains it, which is that Wakefield was chosen because Wakefield could be made to accept it. Either way, Progress is going to end the category of building. Under PP1.3 every asylum claim made by a person who arrives irregularly is processed offshore, on British sovereign territory, under British law, with transfer within 72 hours of arrival and a statutory 28-day determination. Arrival on the mainland no longer buys a bed in a Yorkshire town. There is no room for an Urban House in that system, no Cedar Court, and no 260 strangers a council is forbidden to know, and no portfolio holder for abused children. Sod the patrols. It's time the decisions were ours again. Join us and we'll make it happen.

We were told, before festivities had really begun, that the riots developing in France, and which came to a head on October 17th, grew out of a protest about schools. The truth is they grew out of nothing, and were intended to return all they touched to nothing. A building at the University of Rouen was burned on the night of the 16th, and school libraries shredded and donanted pianos broken into pieces and lavishly assembled brand new wood-based school buildings set alight, before a single marcher for the 'official' cause had even set off. The date itself was chosen on TikTok, in September, by an influencer who picked it because it opened the school holidays, a day selected for the convenience of people who intended to spend it breaking things. By nightfall on the 17th there were 3,000 wrecked shops. We have all seen the town hall at Limoges, standing since 1883, with its bell tower fallen into the fire. The tourist office at Bellecour in Lyon. An apprentice training college and a children's leisure centre in Valenciennes. Bookshops in Paris, Grenoble and Strasbourg. The prefect's residence in Bordeaux. And the bust of Marianne, which somebody in Marseille carried out of the Hôtel de Ville to throw her down on the floor. 2,400 arrests. The Paris prosecutor reports that most of those arrested, when questioned, have nothing to say and no demand to make. Naturally. They have no grievance. The destruction was the point from the first night. These are people who are, in some cases avowed and intellectualised, enemies of civilisation, with a point to prove. A shortage of teachers at a lycée in Créteil and the design of a university admissions website and 'lack of funding for schools' is not even an alibi. France is a country whose state spends 57% of everything the nation earns, the highest share in the OECD; which pays out 14% of GDP in pensions and lets its citizens draw them at 64; whose public sector is unionised to the last stapler. There is no austerity in France. There is no class of young Frenchman to whom the state has given nothing. The people who burned Limoges have had more spent on them, per head, than almost any population in the history of the world, and they burned it anyway, because their meaning is in the fire. Emmanuel Macron went on television on Sunday night to speak of his anger and his shame, and to insist that the hundreds of thousands with "legitimate claims" must never be confused with "those who destroyed, smashed and looted". Macron knows, however, that there are no legitimate claims. There was one small crowd, who believed in earnest that they were being ill-served by the state because they cannot do maths (perhaps they have a point in which case), and their achievement was cover for the ruin. Macron can try to hide behind them, because he cannot bring himself to believe that people who would destroy books and schools and sack France's gorgeous public realm would do this for its own sake, so he must furnish them with a cause, and having furnished them with a cause he must treat them as petitioners. Petitioners get a crisis cell. They got one, on Monday. They did not get a state of emergency, or a curfew, or the plain statement that what happened on the 17th was an attack on France and would be answered as one. Macron had the word for it 3 years ago, when he told his cabinet that France was undergoing a "process of decivilisation". He has had the word ever since, but seems to have lost both nerve and vision since. What does it mean for us? Well, Britain looks like a haven of calm by comparison. The picture of us as unique among Europe in our brokenness is entirely misleading. But the crowd to make such things happen exists here, of course it does. And we have the conditions, too, produced by decades of Metropolitan class government. I wonder, if it were to all begin here, in Birmingham or East London, if the state will find it within itself to stand between the honest citizen and the youngster with the jerrycan?

This adorable little fellow's name was Finlay Roberts. He was 2 years and 11 months old when, in July 2024, his mother, Liz, took him to the Whittington Hospital in north London with a stomach ache. He spent 9 hours in the emergency department, most of it in a corridor. There was no cubicle, so she sat on a chair in a public area, took off his nappy in full view of everyone and gave him a suppository, because there was no other way to give it. At about 1am they were sent home. A few hours later she found him not breathing in the bed beside hers. He had a twisted bowel, a rare condition and a recognised one, and in 9 hours at a hospital he had been given 1 partial set of observations. The senior coroner for inner north London, Mary Hassell, recorded that the absence of serial nursing observations was "a fundamental omission" from his care, that the medical staff had not noticed it was missing, and that the right care that night "would have given him a chance." On June 20th 2025 she sent a Prevention of Future Deaths report to the Whittington, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal College of Nursing, warning that a lack of observations "may be a much wider issue than is recognised." It was. This week ITV published a snapshot taken across 165 emergency departments in March 2025 by the Trainee Emergency Research Network: in the specialist children's A&Es, almost 7% of children were treated in a waiting room, the back of an ambulance or a corridor. Across every department that sees children, 15% of those admitted were treated in such places. Hundreds of children a month. Thousands a year. NHS England's response to that figure was that the survey "is over 18 months old, and bears little resemblance to what is happening in the NHS today." The coroner's report is 16 months old. Finlay has been dead for 27. On Sunday the Health Secretary apologised to Liz and David Roberts on television, on behalf of the NHS, and said she had asked the chief executive of NHS England to draw up new standards for children's A&E care, including a plan to eliminate corridor care for children. She also acknowledged that children in corridors are not being properly counted, and that measures to count them were introduced this summer. So the sequence runs: a child dies in a corridor; a coroner writes to 4 institutions a year later; a year after that, the state begins counting; a year after that, it asks for a plan. The Whittington, for its part, says that when demand exceeds capacity patients "may receive care in temporary clinical areas, including corridor spaces", which is the sentence you write when the corridor has become a department. The apology was sincere. The plan will be sincere. Neither will say why the corridor exists: Britain has 2.35 hospital beds per 1,000 people. Portugal has 3.51. Germany has 7.82. Over 30 years the number of overnight beds in England has been cut in half, by decision, on the theory that a bed is a cost rather than a place to put a sick child while someone checks on him every hour. The corridor is the theory's output, and a plan to abolish corridors that leaves the theory standing will produce a corridor with a different name. Progress will set a statutory minimum of 120,000 general and acute beds in NHS England, up from 105,000 today, delivered within the first Parliament, with 3,000 of them back in service within 12 months from wards that are mothballed now. And within 90 days of Royal Assent, NHS England will issue binding guidance that corridor care is not an acceptable standard of care under any circumstances, with every trust that resorts to it required to report it immediately. A rule with a bed behind it. The one without the bed is a press release. Liz Roberts gave her son his medicine on a chair in a corridor because the country had decided, decades before he was born, not to have a room for him. We intend to build the room. Join us.

Karen Haynes has sold her house. She is 54, a special needs teacher from Wales, and she is packing boxes with her daughter, 26, and her son, 17, to emigrate to the other side of the world under new names. Her ex-husband, Christopher Haynes, 59, was convicted of coercive and controlling behaviour across the decades of their marriage and sentenced to 2 years. Under the Sentencing Act he walks at a third. She asked the government to hold him until March so she would have time to get out. The answer was November. "We have sold the house. We are packing boxes and we will leave as soon as we can. There is no alternative." She has a lifetime restraining order and an exclusion zone, and she knows what both are worth, because HM Inspectorate of Probation published the figure this month: 55% of GPS and radio-frequency tags fitted on time, 1 in 5 offenders waiting over a fortnight, some waiting 5 months. "You could walk in and out of my exclusion zone and no one is going to pick it up." So the 2-year sentence is being served. It is being served by her, in full, with no remission, at the price of a house, a career, a country and a name, while the man it was handed to serves 8 months and is then asked to wear a bracelet that has a 45% chance of arriving late. 700 men went out on October 1st. The 2nd tranche went on the 13th. 4,500 will go over 10 months, and coercive control, stalking, harassment and assault were never on the list of exclusions. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner told ministers before tranche 1 that survivors would be "looking over their shoulder and living in fear". More than 100 domestic abuse specialists wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to stop the scheme. The Justice Secretary's reply was that "if we hadn't made these changes, we would be running out of prison places in November." The Prime Minister's was that "the truth is I wanted to go even further." The prison estate is a fixed quantity and the sentence is the variable. When a place is short, the state takes the time back off the sentence instead of building the place, and hands the shortfall to whoever is cheapest to ignore. The abuser cannot be made to absorb it, because he has rights and a solicitor. The woman can, because she has already absorbed 26 years of it and will plainly absorb more. Nobody in the Ministry of Justice would put it that way. All of them have signed off on it. The Progress position is that a sentence is a promise made by a court to a victim in public, and the state keeps it. No prisoner leaves before the end of the sentence handed down, except the terminally ill and cases of exceptional compassion signed personally by the Lord Chancellor. If a judge says 2 years, it is 2 years. We will build 100,000 net new prison places under an emergency construction programme beginning within 60 days of Royal Assent, the first 30,000 inside 15 months, so that the arithmetic that put Karen Haynes in rented accommodation never has to be done again. The political convention in this country will not even pretend to hide the degree to which it hates women, how little it cares for their wellbeing. Progress is different. Join us.

Police in England and Wales recorded 74,727 rapes in the year to March. It is the highest figure in the country's history, 4% up on the year before, and it accounts for a 3rd of all recorded sexual offences. It's interesting that we had a national-panic-alarm-alert on Friday for the sake of scolding the public about disposable barbecues, but not one for this figure. It's interesting what such self-professed instruments of global humanism like the UN and Human Rights Watch will deign to declare humanitarian crises, and what it won't. When an estimated 20,000 women were raped in Kosovo, Human Rights Watch called it a weapon of ethnic cleansing. When 20,000 to 50,000 were raped across 3 years of war in Bosnia, The Hague prosecuted it as an instrument of genocide, and Europe swore its oaths of 'never again' once again. But England and Wales are recording more rapes than either war, every 12 months, the highest figures in our history. A number of that size has architecture behind it: three load-bearing walls. The first is a migration system run without the most basic accounting. What little the state knows about who commits sexual violence, it publishes only when forced: Ministry of Justice data, extracted by freedom of information request, shows foreign nationals took 26% of convictions for sexual assaults on women in 2024, against 10.9% of the population, and that foreign national convictions for sexual offences grew 62% across 3 years while the British figure grew 39%. Campaigners put certain nationalities at up to 20x the British per-capita rate; critics attack their population estimates; but even on the critics' own corrected arithmetic, the over-representation among sexual violence statistics stands at 3x or more. The row is unresolvable by design, because no official series exists. In the state's own conviction records, 614 sexual offenders have their nationality marked "unknown". Not one dataset in the official architecture connects the 74,727 to the immigration status of the men responsible. And while it declines to count, the state disperses. Middlesbrough and Hartlepool carry among the highest concentrations of supported asylum seekers in England, placed there because the housing is cheapest, by the same contracting machine that once painted the doors of its Middlesbrough properties an identical red. Those two towns now top the national table for recorded sexual offences. The state that arranged the co-location cannot tell you, and has chosen never to learn, what exact relationship the two facts bear to each other. I can't tell you; the point is that no one can (except perhaps the women who live there). Whatever, our Prime Minister's answer, delivered this week, has been to extend the dispersal of undocumented men who've entered our house illegally to nicer postcodes. The second wall is the dereliction of the forces meant to secure the safety of women. The patch with the highest sexual-offence rate in the country was policed, through the relevant years, by Cleveland Police: theirs is the first force in the history of inspection to be rated inadequate at everything, "rudderless" by its own staff's account, and in special measures for 4 years. Middlesbrough alone recorded 349 rapes last year. This column has documented what the wider institution believes: there is always an officer for the tweet, the reassurance visit and the awareness campaign, and a 97-in-100 no-charge rate for the woman with the file. A force reflects what its masters consider unforgivable, and for 20 years the unforgivable thing has been appearing harsh, rather than failing the innocent. The third wall is what Britain has done with its most vulnerable children, who are the next generation of these statistics on both sides. 84% of children's homes are privately owned. 9 of the 10 largest providers answer to private equity. The biggest 15 ran operating margins of 22.6% on public money. A placement can cost the council more per child than Eton charges, for outcomes measured in missing-person reports! 41% of England's children in care, more than 30,000 of them, are placed outside their home authority, shipped along the same cheap-housing gradient as the asylum contracts, into the same towns, where hundreds of children have gone missing from their homes. Looked-after girls have been over-represented in the grooming inquiries from Rotherham onward, and the Casey audit found the ethnicity of perpetrators missing from 2 in 3 of the case files. Below the large corporate groups, even the ownership of the homes is opaque. The state cannot say who profits from a given child, and has chosen never to learn that either. Three systems and one signature. Each concentrates its risk on women and girls with the least power to object, and each keeps no records in exactly the places a record would demand action. The blindness is a decision, renewed annually, by a class that has judged the cost of knowing higher than the cost of the women; a state that can fine a widow for a television licence could count the nationality of a convicted rapist any afternoon it chose. Progress has written the repairs into law we intend to pass. Our Open Justice Act prohibits the reporting restrictions that conceal the demographic characteristics of offenders and the patterns of their offending: the counting becomes mandatory. Our sentencing legislation raises statutory minimums for sexual offences. Our Bill of Rights removes the deportation resistance that keeps foreign offenders in this country after conviction, and PP1 rebuilds the enforcement and removals machinery around a principle stated in our programme: a country that cannot enforce its own borders has an open door with a suggestion box. Zero-Crime Britain is the ambition, and it is measured in Japanese numbers, never in improvements on last year's disgrace. 74,727. If the women of this country were a foreign population, what Britain tolerates being done to them annually would sit before an international tribunal. But they are our own; the state's answer is a filing system built so that they can be easily lost in it. Come and help us tear it out. Progress is where the rebuilding has started, and the safety of our people is a sacrosanct principle, load-bearing in the design.

The headline from yesterday's ONS release reads...ok, at a glance: GDP up 0.4% in Q2, in line with forecasts, 1.2% up on the year. The composition is where the truth lives. Services drifted up 0.5%. Construction managed 0.3%. But production, the making of physical things, the activity that built every town this column has ever mourned, registered zero. April shrank outright; May was flat and got revised down; and then the entire quarter was rescued by a 0.3% jump in June. And half the growth that did arrive came from a single industry. Information and communications contributed more than any other sector, on the back of £22.1bn of capital spending on machinery and equipment in the quarter, which the ONS attributes largely to computer hardware. Everyone in the industry knows what that hardware is for. Strip the quarter to its skeleton and the British economy in mid-2026 is a services sector treading water while datacentre kit, designed in California and fabricated in Taiwan, is bolted into racks on the M4 corridor. 0.4% is above zero, and above zero has become the British definition of triumph. The new Prime Minister inherits the print 6 weeks into a non-honeymoon conducted at the pace of an announcement a day. Highly 'productive', but then Whitehall announcements are a services industry too; they also add nothing to actual production. We've said it a million times before - lower productivity makes you poorer, and as such your being-poorer is a matter of central government choice. A factory here pays more for its electricity than a factory anywhere else in the developed world. An employer here pays a tax premium on every person he hires. A producer who wants a new shed enters a planning process we have measured, in this column, in units of years-per-runway-metre. Each of these is a policy with an author, and the authors' economy, the seminar and the podcast and the consultancy retainer, sits comfortably inside the 0.5% of services drift. Production is something that happens to other people, in towns the authors visit for by-elections. Progress wrote its answer before this print and every recent print like it. E1 delivers the cheapest energy on Earth within 10 years, because nothing is reshored to the dearest socket in the developed world. E2 builds Prosperity Zones where a manufacturer signs once and finds the grid connection, the consent and the tax treatment already agreed, so that his first year is spent manufacturing. E4 makes the default answer to a factory yes. Britain has the producers; what it has lacked, for decades, is a state that wants production, and the lack has lasted so long that a quarterly 0.0 no longer even makes the bulletins. It should make yours. If you make things for a living, or would like to live in a country that does, the 0.0 is your entire political situation in a single digit. We are building the government that reads it the way you do. Bring your trade to Progress; the rebuild will need it.

And so history that began as farce has repeated as tragedy, with Jason Arday being found dead at an address in south London on Friday. 41 years old, and what must have been nine truly and overwhelmingly agonising days after his resignation of his Cambridge professorship, and his fellowship, at Jesus College. Arday systematically defrauded one of the country's great institutions, and by extension the hundreds-to-thousands of individuals who gave him work, tenure, funding and honours on the basis of his fraudulent claims and ostensible plagiarism. The scale of his astonishing deceit became a matter of the public's appalled fascination; so did his and his institution's attempts to fight a rearguard of intimidation against the people who blew the whistle on him and on them. He lost, for he could not possibly win having sinned so prolifically; and he has chosen suicide (which, whatever you are told, is no coward's way out; of all the vices which he may be duly assigned, a man with this level of chutzpah, to live as though there is no such thing as a lie, cannot be faulted for lacking a certain, very twisted kind of bravery) rather than living with the consequences. His family's first statement speaks of a "campaign of harassment". However intense, what dogged Arday was mere scrutiny; scrutiny arriving late, against the odds, of claims he had spent a career inventing and inviting the world to applaud. To those who say Arday was treated unduly harshly because he was a black man, we remember the death of UNCW's Mike Adams, the North Carolina criminology professor hounded from his post in 2020, who died alone and uncomforted of suicide for the far lesser crime of writing tweets that his co-faculty did not approve of. He is but a single example among many individuals likewise pushed out of their jobs by Metropolitan class cadres in the heady early 2020s for the sake of political differences. Many remain broken and in intractable career compromise. Without face and without crown. Few-to-none of them have had a single powerful champion declare for them, let alone the fully-mobilisied mixed-institutional machinery Arday found were out in his defence. I read and then lost track of a brilliant post this morning contemplating the lack of recourse available nowadays to those who destroy their own lives through errant decision-making; the absence of a road by which those who are in disgrace, but not in jail, might make amends and support themselves and their families. In the past, a man who broke his share of the social contract could join the forces, or enlist on a ship. Nowadays cancellation, even where ostensibly justified, is too absolute to allow for much of this. I thought the point was extremely well made. For people who have put themselves into such social disgrace as ruins their credibility and jaundices the public's ability to trust them, as Arday's deeds did him, there ought to be channels into work that serve as both life-preserver and penance-propulsion. The work should be incredibly tough; the kind that obliges the wrongdoer to begin reflecting harshly on the decisions that led him there, rather than merely leaving him space to do so at his leisure; and with it the means to the restoration of honour and self-respect that can beget proper rehabilitation. Infinitely better that Arday have had such a path open to him, and taken it, than have ended his life. Arday's fraudulent career was both an institutional and a personal failing. It was rooted in Arday's defects of character, and in the defects of character possessed individually by the preposterous individuals who enabled him; people who, in having doubtless passed over black men and women of real talent and serious intellect to hand a silly larker like Arday the privileges he enjoyed, must be reckoned with not just in their incompetence but in an especially bizarre kind of racism, the kind most often exhibited by the Metropolitan class types who would most loudly forswear racism as the European original sin. There will be no posthumous ransom due for any of this, however. "Abet and tolerate fraud, lies, and career-grade dishonesty, or suicides may result" stands in particular ignominy among manipulative sentiments; and manipulative sentiments are at the heart of this matter. They are what Arday preyed upon to advance himself, and what he and his associates deployed to try to protect the racket they had formed. There must always be consequences; and the higher your station, and the more egregious your corruptions, the harsher they must be. It is a terrible shame, for the sake of the family he left behind, that Arday was not able to face up to those demands, and pay those penalties. Had he done so, there is no reason not to suspect that he, like many who had done wrong before him, might have come good.

On a Thursday morning in April, in a theatre at St Bartholomew's Hospital, a 76-year-old retired detective named Ian MacLeod had a lung cancer operation performed by a surgeon sitting several metres away from him. Sasha Stamenkovic, Director of Robotic Surgery at Barts Health, worked the operation through the da Vinci 5, the most advanced surgical robot in the world: his hands on a console, the machine's arms at the table, a high-definition 3D camera inside MacLeod's chest, instruments moving with a precision no human wrist can match. MacLeod was the first patient in the NHS to have lung cancer surgery this way. 30 minutes after returning to the ward, he was on his feet. He left hospital with a single stitch. Inside a week he was driving his wife to the garden centre for coffee. He had survived cancer before, through old-fashioned keyhole surgery, and remembers a recovery of a different order; this time, he said, the whole thing "didn't faze" him. He is a volunteer diving coach from Romford, and is back at the pool doing what he loves best. 4 in 5 NHS trusts still keep some patient records on pen and paper. The government's contribution to the robotic future MacLeod has already lived is a target: 9 in 10 keyhole operations robot-assisted by 2035, a roadmap pointed at a decade hence, announced about a procedure a Barts surgeon simply performed in April. The men and women at the theatre table are living in 2026; the apparatus above them is filing in 1974 and planning for 2035. This keeps happening, and I keep writing it, because it is the single most consistent fact about this country: the excellence is from below. The fusion engine ignites in Bletchley, the interceptor arrives ahead of schedule, the robotic programme at Barts runs a world-class theatre, and none of it is the system working; it is particular, brilliant people succeeding inside a system that files their triumphs under communications opportunities. Our NHS programme starts from that fact: strip the apparatus back to basics, pay the people who carry the excellence properly, and get everything that is neither care nor competence out of their way. Somewhere in Romford this week, a 76-year-old man who has beaten cancer twice is coaching people to dive. The hands that saved him are British, the theatre was British, the nerve was all his. This column holds the country's failures up weekly; accuracy about what still works matters just as much, because the rebuild will be made from exactly this material.

On Sunnyside, in the village of Aughton in West Lancashire, stands a house with a £180,000 extension containing a kitchen, the boiler, and a bedroom partitioned down the middle for 2 of Suzie Cavadino's 4 children. By order of the state, she must now demolish it, and with it, very possibly, her ability to keep the house at all. Cavadino bought the house about 20 years ago, moving out from Bootle. She decided to replace her conservatory with a 2-storey extension, and her builders advised her she would not need planning permission, a sentence that functions in modern Britain as a kind of dramatic foreshadowing that ought to come with its own characteristic 4/4 string ostinato in D minor. The work finished in December 2022. The council issued an enforcement notice. The Planning Inspectorate upheld it, the window for a High Court challenge closed in December, the extended compliance period ran out on 24 April, and the order is now live. And the order says 'Tear it Down'. The inspector, KA Taylor, gave the reason in a single sentence: the extension is "causing harm to the character and appearance of the host property and surrounding area." The host property is her house. She is the host. The state has appointed itself protector of her home's character, against her, at the price of her home. The building half of the planning system approved 39,170 homes in a recent quarter, which is among the worst on record; the average project waits 475 days between application and a spade in the ground; approvals for larger housing schemes have collapsed 43.8% since 2016/17. That half is a ruin. The un-building half, the enforcement arm, though, works beautifully: it has pursued one mother in one village through 4 years of process, to the brink of homelessness, over an aesthetic opinion about a kitchen. A machine that cannot produce a home has kept one muscle in perfect condition, and it is the muscle that deletes them. The belief underneath is legible in Taylor's sentence. The drawing in the file is the reality; the family living in the building is the irregularity. Nobody gains a home when this order is executed. 5 people lose 1. The net housing contribution of the whole exercise is minus one bedroom, minus one kitchen, minus one boiler, delivered at public expense by professionals, and everyone involved will consider the system to have functioned. Under Progress' Planning Liberation Act the default answer to "can I build?" becomes yes, and the burden of proof moves to the objector to demonstrate specific, material harm. "Character and appearance of the host property" does not survive that test, and was never meant to; a family's home is not the state's aesthetic project. We will build a planning system that treats the creation of homes as an act of national value, not a harm to be grudgingly tolerated, and leaves the Suzie Cavadinos of England in peace in the houses they paid for. Her deadline has passed. The machine is moving. If reading that puts a knot in your stomach, good; the knot is correct. Progress is being built by people who felt it and decided the machine, and the class that runs it, should be frightened of the public again, and there is room beside them for you.

As of the beginning of August, the Renters' Rights Act is in force. Section 21 is abolished. Every tenancy in the country became periodic in May; rent in advance is now banned; and taking an offer above the advertised rent is banned. The most tenant-protective statute in British legal history is now fully armed and operational. The first results are in, and they're arriving this week through the trade press. Knight Frank, reporting on the lettings market where data lands fastest, says the Act is, to the surprise of no one bar the people who drew it up, backfiring. Rents in prime outer London is up 3.2% in a year, new rental listings running 14% below the 5-year average, landlords selling up under the combined weight of the Act, the margins and the looming EPC deadline. One detail from their lettings desks is worth the whole white paper: with bidding wars banned, landlords have stopped pricing to attract offers and started, in the agency's delicate phrase, "taking a more confident approach to pricing". The ban on paying over the asking rent has simply increased rent prices. And the listings that are growing, up 19% on the 5-year average, sit above £1,000 a week: the cheap end of the market is being priced out. Every landlord body in the country told them this would happen in consultation, for years: make tenancies harder to end and the marginal landlord exits; ban the pricing mechanism and prices get set defensively; pile on standards with deadlines and the oldest, cheapest stock gets sold rather than upgraded. The people who wrote the Act believe housing is a distribution problem, that a statute can offset the fixed-in-stone hardships produced by a housing shortage, and that the landlord is just a controllable utility. But the landlord is not. And the tenant who pays is the marginal one, every time. When a tenancy is nearly impossible to end, the rational landlord underwrites like a bank: the applicant with the thin file, the CCJ from 2021, the new job, the dog, the kids, is politely declined in favour of the safest professional couple in the queue. New families are put at a disadvantage to the single; the old favoured over the young. The Act's authors have made the strong tenant a little stronger and the weak tenant near-homeless, which is the reliable signature of Metropolitan lawmaking: the cost lands on the people who least deserve to have to pay it. Rents rise for one reason that survives all the commentary: there are not enough homes, and the state has made building them close to illegal. Approvals for housing schemes of 10 or more homes have collapsed 43.8% since 2016/17, to their lowest level in over a decade; in a single recent quarter England approved just 39,170 homes. The average development waits 475 days between submitting a planning application and starting on site. You cannot regulate your way to cheap rent inside that arithmetic; you can only rearrange who gets hurt. Progress will attack the arithmetic. Under our Planning Liberation Act the default answer to "can I build?" becomes yes; the burden of proof falls on the objector; no minor application takes longer than 90 days and no major one longer than 6 months, enforced by deemed consent when the clock runs out; judicial review of planning is restricted to genuine points of law with costs against failed challengers. Build until the landlord competes for the tenant, and every protection this Act pretends to offer arrives by itself, priced in nobody's rent: that is the only tenants' rights programme that has ever worked anywhere on Earth. A renter's monthly statement is the truest political document in Britain just now. If yours keeps saying what the podium says cannot be happening, stop waiting for the 4th relaunch of the people who did this. Come and build the surplus with us instead; Progress has the drawings ready.

The Burnham government is going to set new high-watermarks in failure, and they will put paid to the old Metropolitan class consensus for good, while also putting the final nail in the coffin of Labour. This week we saw the era of the Small Boats end and the era of the Big Boats begin. A Mega-dinghy arrived at Dover carrying 230 illegal migrants. That's 15 metres of factory-made inflatable, ordered from manufacturers in China, built for exactly this: the largest vessel ever during the entire crossing era. The record it broke, 165 aboard, was set only in July 2026. French coastal authorities had counted 9 of these mega-dinghies even before the one that capsized on 4 August with 173 people on it. 900 arrivals landed in 3 days. In fact, Channel smuggling is currently the only sector in Britain posting double-digit productivity growth. When a 40-man dinghy failed, 40 lives were in the water; the new model wagers 200 at a time, and the men selling the tickets have priced that in with the total equanimity so characteristic of men of their trade. Andy Burnham's response to the arrival of the 230-seat people-carrier was to promise, and I quote, to "change tactics". His new tactics are distribution. After the protests at the new camp of illegal migrants set up at Piddington, outside Bicester, he remarked that "we cannot have a situation where it's only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers. I do believe all parts of the country need to work, to play their part." There's your manifesto, folks. Ending migration, legal or illegal, is not on the agenda. Spreading the misery around, however, is. The 13 hotels he's closing will empty into dispersal HMOs across the country. The shires are being told to ready themselves, and permanence is the premise of the whole scheme. This is why you can hear the death knell sounding not far off. The Prime Minister has now stood at the edge of the towns that represent Labour's last faithful hold-outs - the last people insulated from their work, the last ones the Labourite war on the working- and middle classes has not touched - and told them their turn is coming. As electoral strategy, remarkable. Once the respectable classes turn against the migration doctrine, it's done. Labour will find themselves with even less of a reason to exist than the Tories presently do. The waves of energy unleashed by their next-election wipe-out will be visible from the ISS. And it's put Burnham on the fast track to the public's deepest and most vitriolic contempt, as well. Don't believe the rubbish you see from the official pollsters. There is no 'Burnham bounce', never was one. The demographics who decide the outcomes of elections in this country reserve every bit of the ill-feeling they had for Starmer for the Barm-Cake Boy. Our own position was written down before he arrived. A country that cannot enforce its own borders has no immigration policy; it has, as our programme puts it, an open door with a suggestion box. Progress will disapply the Human Rights Act mechanisms in migration cases by primary legislation, rebuild the removal machinery the last 2 governments dismantled, and hand the smuggling networks to the Malebranche, whose statutory remit covers organised immigration crime, to be dismantled the way you dismantle any other criminal industry: at the bank account, at the supply chain, at the factory gate. Burnham has told you his plan for the boats: bigger ones, shared out more fairly. If you heard that and felt the floor drop, the work of replacing these people is hiring now, and it is the only work in British politics worth an able adult's time. Progress is where it is being done.

Next month the Treasury starts putting up the price of petrol. The 5p cut in fuel duty, introduced as a temporary kindness in March 2022 and extended ever since, begins expiring in stages from September; by next March duty is back to 57.95p a litre, and from April it rises with RPI every year after, automatically, with no vote and no announcement. A permanent ratchet, installed in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, timed for the month the summer holidays end. What minister concerned with their career would ever read the driver's full ledger out loud? Tax makes up around 53% of the price of a litre of petrol now: 52.95p of duty, then VAT charged on the fuel and on the duty itself, the state taxing its own tax. A household running 1 car for 8,000 miles a year buys roughly £1,960 of fuel, of which about £1,040 goes to the Exchequer. Fuel duty brings in £24.4bn a year. And when you park the car, the meter keeps running: motor insurance is the 1 purchase the law compels you to make, and the state adds 12% Insurance Premium Tax for your obedience. Obeying the law in Britain is a taxable event. It costs the average driver £67 a year on a premium of about £560, and it costs the 17-year-old staring at a £1,695 quote considerably more. Put together, a 2-car working household pays over £5,000 a year to stay on the road before the car itself is paid a penny of. The belief underneath this is never spoken but perfectly legible. Whitehall regards the driver as a revenue base wearing a seatbelt: driving is treated as a vice to be priced, when for most of the country outside zone 2 it is the way you get to the job, the school, the hospital appointment the NHS moved 40 minutes away. The people who design these schedules take the Tube. The people who pay them drive a 9-year-old Vauxhall because the carer's rota starts at 6am, and there is no bus. They know, too. A government that believed its own "temporary" label would have let the cut lapse in 2023. This one kept the label through 4 years of nervous extensions, and has now scheduled its reclamation plus an RPI escalator, while freezing rail fares only for the 45% of tickets it regulates and letting the rest float. The word temporary, in Treasury usage, means awaiting reclassification. Progress has the ledger priced the other way, in the programme, costed. Fuel duty cut to 45p a litre, permanently, from the first April of a Progress government; the September rises cancelled; RPI indexation never reintroduced, and any future increase requiring an affirmative vote of both Houses of Parliament, on the record, in daylight. Insurance Premium Tax abolished on motor insurance: £67 back on the average premium, £135 for the young driver the current system bleeds hardest. About £200 a year back into the 8,000-mile household against the rates now scheduled, and the principle worth more than the money: the state stops treating your compliance as a harvest. Until that happens, we'll just have to look forward to when the ratchet starts to crank. The men who built it are counting on you sighing at the forecourt and paying up, the way you always have. Sigh, pay, and nothing changes; or put an hour and a pair of hands behind the outfit that has already written the repeal. Progress is building the government that cancels the September rise. Drivers welcome.

In 2013, the man who would become Anurag Mohindru KC told the panel interviewing him for a prestigious position 23 Essex Street that he had studied at Oxford. Asked for his CV so the claim could be checked, he edited it to say he had read medicine there for a year, and because he's a man of taste and saw that his fraudulent resume required some leavening texture he added a cricket blue he never won. After all, who ever heard of a less-than-well-rounded Oxford man? The Bar's tribunal called Mohindru's false claim a "reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie", found he had "doubled down", and disbarred him. On 3 July in the High Court, however, Mr Justice Johnson restored Mohindru to the practice of law with a sentence that deserves engraving above the door of every chambers in London: "It would be wrong to impose the ultimate sanction merely because dishonesty is present." 'Merely.' Mohindru is now is free to resume his career spent testing other people's honesty under oath. It seems like Britain is running an epidemic of fraudulent self-invention at the moment, and running a second epidemic underneath it: the organised defence of the people caught doing it. Jason Arday resigned his Cambridge chair and his Jesus College fellowship on 5 August, the day the university finally opened an investigation into his academic record. You've heard it all by now. The allegations, raised in July, are that passages of his thesis and published papers copy other scholars without attribution, and that celebrated elements of his life story sit awkwardly beside the available record. He denies the lot; Liverpool John Moores examined the plagiarism claims against work done there and found "honest and reasonable error"; nothing is yet proven, and the investigation can take its course. Cambridge stood by him for weeks and, on the day he resigned, announced it would "continue to provide support to him". The Good Law Project circulated a letter, signed by more than 24 academics and politicians, describing the examination of a public academic's public record as a "smear campaign". Validating a man's CV is now an act of aggression, provided the man is the right sort. Elsewhere, Zholia Alemi practised as an NHS psychiatrist for 22 years on a forged University of Auckland degree, having left her course in its 1st year. She detained patients. She was convicted of 20 offences of fraud and forgery in 2023, sentenced to 7 years, and has since been ordered to repay £406,624 of the £1m-plus she drew in salary. The forgery was exposed by a local reporter in Carlisle, who managed in an afternoon the check the General Medical Council had not performed in 22 years. Still elsewhere, more than 700 healthcare workers have been guilty of obtaining or seeking UK nursing registration through tests sat by paid proxies at a single test centre in Nigeria; the investigation swept up nearly 2,000 nurses; hundreds of them stayed on wards while it ran; 48 were asked to sit the exam again. The scheme was described in the proceedings as fraud on an industrial scale, and the regulator processed it at the pace of a parish council. And 2 weeks ago, on 24 July, Maidstone Crown Court gave Amran Hussain, 40, of Westerham, 4 years. Hussain applied for 2,071 NHS posts and landed 13 of them, worth £168,072.41, on the basis of him supposedly holding MSc degrees from Oxford and Birkbeck that nobody could verify, memberships of professional institutes that nobody could confirm, a directorship at an NHS trust he never held, and references supplied from NHS email accounts he himself controlled: the service wrote to ask whether Hussain could be trusted, and Hussain replied warmly that he could. Once he got in-post he went off sick until each contract died; how laughably appropriate that his one sincere engagement with the NHS was its sickness policy. 4 years, richly deserved. Hussain had no college behind him, no chambers, no campaign group, no letter with 24 signatures. The institutions doing the forgiving hold a doctrine. The CV may be a genre of self-marketing, and everybody may round the odd number up; but outright self-invention is quite another thing. Still, these places allow it. To them, dishonesty is just a lapse, an episode in a wellness journey, treatable with reflection and a statement about learning. Consequences are for outsiders. To them, the audit and the reckoning is the real offence, to be called disproportionate, vindictive or racist according to the defendant's profile and connections. Who pays? The candidate who told the truth and came 2nd, 13 separate times, to Hussain. The junior barrister who put her real university on the form at 23 Essex Street. The patients detained on the judgement of a psychiatrist with 1 year of study and 22 of practice. Do they know? The judge wrote "dishonesty is present" into the reinstatement itself. It is on the record in his own hand. This must all end. It is a practice of formalised dishonesty not known in public life in these isles for centuries. It will not be brought back. Progress's National Anti-Corruption Act stands up a 500-strong unit, the Malebranche, at the centre of government, with independent power to investigate and prosecute white-collar crime, procurement fraud and institutional corruption, and it pays whistleblowers up to 10% of recovered funds for exposing fraud inside public or private institutions, with criminal sanctions for any employer who retaliates. The first line of that policy reads: "If you're a white-collar criminal, there will be no worse place to be in Europe than Britain." We wrote the sentence before this summer's parade of the forgiven, and the parade has been making our argument for us ever since. This country runs, hour by hour, on the honesty of people whose honesty is rarely if ever honoured, merely taken for granted: the electrician whose certificate is real, the nurse whose exam was her own, the accountant whose letters were earned. Above them sits a class that treats truthfulness as a courtesy, extended and withheld among friends. A thoroughly Third World attitude. The defenders of the fraudulent are organised, lettered and funded. Organise against them. Progress is where that is being done, and the entry requirement is the one Mohindru failed: be what you say you are.

Since January 1st 2026, 765 people have filed sickness reports with Surfers Against Sewage after bathing at 406 locations around the British coast: gastrointestinal illness, ear and throat infections, skin complaints, respiratory trouble. 322 of those reports have arrived since May 1st, as the heat drove the crowds to the water. Bournemouth, the flagship resort of the English seaside, tops the table. This did not ever happen. There was never, heretofore, any risk that came with swimming in English seas. Well, there is now. Last year, for the first time, the water companies were made to tell the Environment Agency what their storm overflows do when there is no storm. An overflow is legal in one circumstance only: exceptional rainfall. A dry spillage, with under 0.25mm of rain on the day and the day after, is illegal every time it happens, and lands on the beach undiluted. The companies went to their own monitors and filed the total: 187,241 hours of illegal dry-weather dumping in 2025, reaching 105 designated bathing waters. Run that figure through a calendar and it comes to more than 21 years of continuous crime, compressed into 1, self-reported, in spreadsheet form, to a regulator that read it and issued a press notice. And the sign at the top of the slipway still says Excellent. That classification is a 4-year average of samples taken on a published schedule through the bathing season; the samplers keep a diary, and the sewer does not consult it. Of the 20 illnesses SAS could tie directly to a confirmed illegal dry-day discharge last year, 17 occurred at bathing waters rated Excellent. The board on the beach describes the paperwork. The pipe reports to a different department. Absolutely insane. Harlyn Bay is a family beach on the north Cornwall coast: sheltered, shallow, the kind parents choose when they want to get away somewhere in the coutry. South West Water discharged raw sewage onto it on 231 occasions between 2016 and 2021. This year the company pleaded guilty to 18 criminal charges covering Harlyn, Bodmin, Playing Place, Polperro and Plymouth, including 336 illegal spills into the River Camel, a protected salmon river. It was fined £2.15m in 2023 for the previous batch of offences, and £1.85m in June for the Brixham drinking-water contamination. Pennon, its owner, booked £135m in profit in 2025-26, which prices the 2023 fine at 6 days of the year. That's what so criminal about this. These buggers believe the fine is a price, and a fair one; that a guilty plea is a communications event to be managed; that the sea off Cornwall is a shitbucket with a view. The people who pay for this particularly evil kind of market economics are a child in Bournemouth spending 3 days of her family's single summer holiday on a bathroom floor with a bug that'll stay in her gut biome for a decade, and the seaside towns whose whole economy rests on strangers trusting the water that laps on the shore. This is the driest summer in memory. The reservoirs are low, the hosepipes are banned, and the drought halved the legal storm-spill total, from 3.61m hours to 1.87m, for the simple reason that there were fewer storms to hide behind. The illegal dumping carried on through the sunshine regardless. The one flow this industry never once interrupted all summer ran straight to the beach. Progress has written its answer to the men who run this arrangement into our programme. Whistleblowers who expose criminal activity inside public or private institutions, the treatment-works operator with the discharge logs included, will receive absolute protection from retaliation, with criminal sanctions for employers who do retaliate, and rewards of up to 10% of recovered fines. Confessed, repeat, industrial-scale crime will be met the way we intend to meet every other kind: ended, and its authors made to fear the law they have spent a decade pricing in. So if you stood in the sea this month with your children, trusting a sign paid for by the people dumping behind it, you already understand what this industry thinks of you. The anger is earned, and 765 entries in a charity's database prove how widely it is shared. What the anger lacks is an instrument. Building one is the work Progress exists for, and there is a place in it with your name on.

"Don't walk alone. Only carry items you need. Be prepared to give up your cell phone, purse or wallet. Do not argue or fight with the criminal. Be prepared to describe the suspect. Above all, be afraid. Be very afraid." That is, in so many words, the Minneapolis Police Department, in August 2020, telling the public they serve how to be robbed properly. British and American politics don't share all that much in common, excepting a few governing air currents and shared fundamentals borne of our mutual cultural ancestry. But every word of that announcement could have been issued in Britain, in 2026, by an urban police force, and none of it would have surprised anybody. We are already living under the same instructions. Don't take your phone out on the pavement. Keep your car keys in a metal tin by the front door. Don't leave anything on the passenger seat, or in the boot, or in the car at all. Walk in pairs after dark; in 4s if you're a girl, and especially if you live in neighbourhoods where clean-up crews lurk. Take the long way round. Order a taxi to the door. Fit the second lock, the camera, the tracker, the shutter. Carry a spare bike wheel at all times. In a growing number of shops butter and coffee now sit behind a plastic gate, and the cashiers are better reinforced at and more confined in their positions than inmates talking on a prison phone, because the state has withdrawn from the question of whether it should protect the public from criminals. Because the public, like the wider governing establishment, expects you to just accept that this is the way it's going to be. That the days of safe streets, high trust, and neighbourhoods so secure you could leave your front-door unlocked or your garage open overnight, are gone and never coming back. Just in the same way that they expect you to accept that certain kinds of terrorism are an unavoidable fact of every day life and should be merely borne with grace - they are not, and you should not - they expect you to understand that crime cannot be stopped, will not be stopped, indeed should not be stopped, and that you will live under it forever. From that follows everything you have been told. Move your phone. Move your keys. Move your route home. Move yourself. It's not a coincidence, any of this. Not here, and not in Minnesota. The city of Minneapolis issued the leaflet summarised above in 2020, and over the years that followed the same state was drained of hundreds of $100,000,000s through a child-nutrition programme its own officials were too frightened to audit, because the fraudsters had sued them for racial discrimination and the auditors put down their pens like cowards. The same thing that allows your tax money to be stolen is what allows you to be menaced on the streets. The reflex is identical and so is the excuse. Progress will restore the charge rate to 15.5% and double the police force to make that arithmetic possible, because a crime nobody is charged with is not illegal in any sense a criminal recognises. Crime data will be published openly, by area and by offence, so that no chief constable can tell a town it is imagining what it can see from the window. And we will be the hardest government in Europe on those who steal from the public purse, with no exemption for the files that are awkward to open. Ultra-low-crime societies exist. People are living in them today. They are not the product of some special national temperament, and there is no reason on Earth that a British city cannot be one of them. Like in so many other areas, we showed the way first. And, having lost our way like so much of the world, upon finding it again, we will be the ones to remind our neighbours of how it was and will be again.

A woman walked into a police station in Tottenham in January last year. She had been raped in a car park. She had a broken collarbone. The officers ran her name, found a community order she had breached, and put her in a cell. Consider what that took. Somebody had to be free to process her. Somebody had to key in her details, take her property, and walk her down the corridor. The Metropolitan Police had the manpower and the paperwork and the will to lock up a homeless rape victim on the same morning it decided her rape was too difficult to investigate. They said afterwards she had given the wrong date once, that the car park had no cameras, and that she was hard to reach because she had nowhere to live. In March, Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, was found dead. They arrested Simon Levy within days. They found his DNA on her body. They STILL did not open a murder investigation. In August, Sheryl Wilkins, 39, was murdered in that same Tottenham car park. Then, and only then, the machinery moved. Yesterday a jury convicted him of killing them both and of raping the woman with the broken collarbone. He had convictions for attacking women going back to July 2018. In 2022 he sexually assaulted a female prison officer while inside HMP Brixton. Between October 2023 and May 2025 he assaulted 10 more women on the Underground and the suburban lines, and for those 10 women he was given 6 years. Every institution that handled him knew who he was, what he was, and the level of threat he posed to every woman who was unfortunate enough to cross his path. Not one of them treated it as urgent. The polite version of this argument says our police are overstretched and doing their best. They are not overstretched when it comes to the things they believe in. There is always an officer available for the man who posted something coarse on the internet, always a unit for the reassurance visit, always budget for the strategy, the action plan, the lanyard and the away day. There is always a diversion scheme, always a report explaining that the perpetrator was himself failed, always a mechanism to let him out early because the estate is full. The money and the manpower exist. They are pointed somewhere else, deliberately, by people who have decided what the police are for. What they are not for, evidently, is women with broken bones, who have been violated in the most deeply personal and abhorrent fashion; for women dead in a stairwell. Well if you're not for those kinds of women, you're not for women at all. This is a class with an ideology, and the ideology says that the criminal is a product of his circumstances, that punishment is a failure of imagination, that a force's reputation for sensitivity matters more than its clear-up rate, and that the one unforgivable sin in British public life is to appear harsh. Every part of that costs something, and the people who hold the belief never pay it. It is paid in women. And to those who hold that ideology, their message to women. "We will sacrifice as many of you as necessary to ensure that our ideology is served." They know the price. They will make you pay it. They have been making you pay it, case after case, for 20 years. Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, the Angiolini review, and now a car park in Haringey. It is written in a charge rate of 2.8% for rape and 4.2% for sexual offences, and in the plain fact that a man could assault 10 women on public transport across 19 months while the state looked at its phone. Progress will double the police force, because 2.8% is what happens when nobody knocks on doors. Rape will carry a minimum of 10 years, and 15 where there are multiple victims. Sexual assault will carry a minimum of 3 years, so that 11 counts against 11 women cannot come to 6. Repeat offenders will face compound sentencing, so that a record running back to 2018 counts against a man rather than being read out as background. And we will publish these decisions, every one, so the next family finds out what was known and when without waiting on a watchdog. Above all we will put people in charge of British policing who believe that the safety of its people is the first duty of the state, and that the rights of the law-abiding and innocent shall never be drawn to compete against the interests of the criminal. We shall do these women honour, though it can only be too late. Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo was 53. Sheryl Wilkins was 39. The third woman has no name in any of this, and she walked into a police station bleeding only to come out in handcuffs. They were sacrificed to an idea. We are coming for the idea.