Comparisons between Farage and Trump are inevitable. Both represent the populist side of the right, which has made some cold, hard, political gains as of late. These comparisons are not unwarranted, but a little perspective is always warranted. When Boris was elected in 2019, he quickly received the moniker of ‘British Trump’ owing to his inheritance of the Vote Leave campaign which was characterised by a more populist stance on national policy. However, in time, it was shown that the only thing Boris and Trump had in common were their waistlines.

So perhaps when Farage returned to politics to lead Reform, people naturally shifted their associations of ‘British Trump’ from Boris to Farage. These comparisons are equally ill-advised.

On the first point, that everything runs through Trump - this is flatly false. US senators have large amounts of power, and entire states larger and wealthier than the United Kingdom in which to exert their power and prove themselves as leaders. While none of them have come close to challenging Donald Trump, this is owing only to the hold Trump has on the Republican base and not because anyone in the Republican party would sooner see a Democrat win than elect President Ron DeSantis. It’s simply that when stacked up against Donald Trump, they come up short. Regardless, they still have and exert this power with minimal to no interventions from Trump. They run their local organisations, campaign, fundraise, and court special interests fairly detached from the auspices of the President simply due to the second big difference between Farage and Trump: The party Trump runs is one half of a two-party system.

The task before Trump and the task before Farage are two completely separate beasts. Trump has successfully taken over one of the two major parties in the American democratic system. There is no real challenger on the right, and Trump himself remarked on this during a Joe Rogan interview - he is intimately aware of the fact America is a two-party system and his desire to change the country could only be carried out if he took over the mechanism of the Republican party. Farage however, is attempting to oust the most successful political party in (global!) parliamentary history. It is yet a total unknown if Reform will even repeat its feat at the last election. Other third parties have come much further, and fallen from far greater heights. The Liberal Democratss had 62 seats in 2010, and they enjoy far more play with the general public than Reform. The job for Reform is to show that it can produce talented MPs who can handle their constituencies well and provide serious opposition to Labour, if it fails to do this then things will likely revert to the mean and people will begin to vote Conservative again provided they come across even slightly competent at opposing Labour.

This is not an issue for Trump. The Republican party existed long before Trump, and will likely exist long after him. There are plenty of capable senators and potential senators in the ranks of the Republican party. If you asked anyone “could the Republican party produce a president without Donald Trump”, there is no-one on any side of the political aisle who could seriously say no. If you asked the same question about Reform, I would not be surprised if even a sizeable portion of Reform voters said that the party was not there yet. The Republican party will not cease to exist should Trump die tomorrow, Reform would almost certainly die without Farage.

This is further evidenced by the simple fact that despite good polling owed almost entirely to Tory failure, discussions around Reform only picked up pace upon Farage’s return. Taking the year of 2024 up until election day, we can see a doubling of the average interest - which never returns to its previous average - on June 3rd, when Farage announced his return.

The previous peaks on the 3rd of May were also not jumps for Reform out of genuine interest, but instead the day Farage declared he would not stand for the party. You only have to go back a decade to see what a Republican party without Trump looks like, it is impossible to separate Farage and Reform without relegating it to the irrelevancy of Tice literally yelling at clouds.

These two factors: the need for Reform to produce talented MPs, and its current existence depending solely on one person is the crux of the issue. Articulated first by Ben Habib, and now by Lowe. Reform has not yet shown itself to be capable of winning elections or even attaining political relevancy without Farage at the helm. Trump does not need to “democratise” the Republican party or divest power because the machinery he inherited was already sufficiently divested to allow talented politicians to rise the ranks, rival and oust the leader, and then take these new leaders into the highest office of state. If Reform is to survive, then it will have to provide its members and representatives with power to enable them to prove themselves. As I said in a recent Critic article, the personality of Farage will not permit that. He will oust potential rivals before their nascent political careers can take off.

Not even Trump is so clueless as to rid himself of a potential rival within his party, and is even willing to forgive them and bring them into the fold should they change their minds. Upon receiving the nomination, Trump faced a wave of Republican figures who opposed him and declared themselves ‘Never Trumpers’. One of these was Mitt Romney, who resigned his post. Another was Liz Cheney, where Trump endorsed another candidate in a primary to get her ousted, thereby keeping the seat Republican but removing internal opposition. The last, and most important being JD Vance. While Vance switched sides, it’s important to note Trump tolerated Never Trumpers in the party, allowed them to switch sides, and left open the possibility of them receiving the second highest office of state for joining his side.

Farage’s ousting of Lowe is not a Trumpian move to ensure the party can stay a steady course and continue making gains, it was an attempt to remove a talented potential rival before they could ever see success. His refusal to democratise the party is not to keep Reform agile, it is done out of a mistaken belief that his star power has no upper limit, and his party can continue making gains as long as he is the leader. This may well be enough to win 5 seats in an election aimed explicitly at punishing the Tories, but it is not enough to convince people to elect Reform MPs, especially now that they’ve seen that capable and talented MPs are not what Farage and therefore Reform is looking for.

In fact, the only social media network the attacker was known to have used was Telegram, and was a listener to the hate preacher Anjem Choudary. Choudary was legally banned from having social media accounts, and when the legal conditions of the ban expired – was banned within 10 days of joining Twitter and Facebook. The most charitable interpretation is Francois knows little about social media, and thinks it’s all just Twitter and Facebook. The less charitable interpretation is Francois wants to talk about the most high-profile people because it’s more sensational than the lesser-known CEO of Telegram. Additionally, Facebook and Twitter are quite compliant with governments, and so it’s easier to score “wins”, even if they do not make the public safer. Telegram and Signal however, are more privacy focused, and have threatened to withdraw services from countries that seek to break that privacy.

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The response to the recent riots across the United Kingdom similarly miss the mark. Calls to restrict social media anonymity are removed from the reality that we know Tommy Robinson’s real name, and the current protestors are not wearing facemasks or hiding their identities at all. These individuals are open and upfront with what they are thinking and doing, and in the case of Rotherham, clearly motivated by issues that run deeper than the recent tragedy in Southport. In this clip from the BBC, we can see again that as a country we refuse to acknowledge that these issues are conflated in the minds of protestors because we feel they ought not to be conflated.

At the time of writing, it does not make sense to conflate the Southport attack with the events in Rotherham. The Southport attacker was the child of Rwandan immigrants, whereas the Rotherham offenders were Pakistani. The Southport attacker was a Christian, the Rotherham offenders were Muslim. This does not matter to protestors, regardless of ideology. Jacob Blake was reaching for a knife, yet this, and many other events similar to it, lead to protests with damages comparable to what we have seen in Rotherham. None of this justifies the damages or actions of any protestor, what it does do is highlight that protestors cannot be won over by explaining simply why they are wrong.

In which case, it may seem prudent to remove social media anonymity and to crack down on social media. If protestors cannot be talked out of their actions, then perhaps they can be prevented from co-ordinating by cracking down on the sites they use to co-ordinate? Not so. Firstly, the event that incited these protests, the Southport attack, was not caused by the attacker being on social media. The protests in response were people in the area coming together in response to that attack, social media would not have prevented them from protesting any more than it would have in a pre-internet era. As for removing internet anonymity, Tommy Robinson has promoted a number of protests on his Twitter account and is willing to do so with no consideration at all for anonymity.

One Guardian article put the blame on Telegram, Bitchute, Parler, and Gab. But this also mistakes how these services came to exist to begin with. Prior to the election of Trump, a number of figures who used these services were on mainstream platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. When they were removed after the focus on the ‘alt-right’ came with Hillary Clinton’s speech and Trump’s election, they shifted to these services to interact with their audiences. Social media censorship already created these ‘alternative information ecosystems’ to begin with, further action from the state would either need to be so severe as to make social media companies seriously reconsider their participation in the UK market, or ineffective.

Moreover, Telegram is free and open source software. Anyone can download and use the code. Equally, the seriously dedicated can set up their own websites. Nick Fuentes, for example, has his own website for livestreaming after being banned from YouTube and DLive. If people want to communicate, they can and will. If they need to make their own encrypted channels, they can watch any number of YouTube videos to do so. If they need to livestream to millions of people, they can use peer-to-peer communication to do so.

What both the death of Sir David Amess and the Southport attacks have in common is not technology, which is ubiquitous and therefore common in all cases, but extended and prolonged failings of the British state. In this case, it appears the individual was never referred to an anti-extremism unit. In the former case, the subject was referred to multiple anti-extremism organisations, and nothing was done. Both of these events could have been avoided had the British state both been more vigilant, and acted upon those it had found. The unwillingness to tackle extremism in one population directly feeds into the extremism of the others. In the case of the Manchester protests, where a white police officer kicked the head of a non-white suspect, Kier Starmer emphasised he shared their concerns. In the case of the Gaza protests where Nazi salutes were given, we saw little to no enforcement at all. Those rioting now are playing by the rules set for every other group. They saw an event in which members of their group were attacked by a member of another group, and took to the streets in anger.

The reason Kier Starmer and the Chief of the Met cannot deny the accusations of two-tier policing is because it is true. And as long as that basic reality is in place, no amount of social media bans are going to stop the violence.

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As a result, 40% of instructors have increased their prices, while 28% have removed discounts and deals on lessons. And it looks like the market has responded. Both 2022 and 2023 saw a roughly 60-70% increase in those attempted to become Approved Driving Instructors over the previous 2020 high.

So what happened with driving tests? The graph below paints a fairly obvious picture about the lasting impact of Coronavirus on driving tests. While driving tests did fall some 18.5% from their record high pre-corona, from a high of 1,762,363 in 2007 to a low of 1,436,481, on a per-capita basis they fell by 21.8% in 2012.

While I try to find less simplistic answers to questions in this publication, sometimes the simple solution is the correct one. The driving test crisis really is caused by the lasting effects of Coronavirus. The only real evidence to the contrary is the slow, declining number of tests post-2010. Even then, this looks to be more a question of demand rather than anything else. The number of tests conducted increases post-2020 once we leave the European Union, and the supply of Light Goods Vehicle drivers is limited. The number of tests conducted shoots up as private enterprise begins to raise salaries for drivers, and so people became LGV drivers. If we were limited on capacity to test, we would expect to see a slight bump to signify demand but limited tests being conducted.

Astute readers will note the post-2010 dip is when the Conservatives got into power, and so I wondered if driving test centres were being closed down under the austerity of the period, so I found each centre which was marked as closed in the data and logged the last year in which it was actively performing tests.

Surprisingly, the number of closures carried out by Labour between 2007 to 2010 was 54, and between 2010 to 2023, the number of closures carried out by the Conservatives was 64. We can also find the number of new centres by recording when new centres appear in the data. Using 2007 as a reference, between 2008 and 2010, Labour opened 34 centres. In contrast, the Conservatives opened 346 centres in 2010 and beyond.

Take these figures with a grain of salt. If locations are renamed, this would count as a closure and an opening. Moreover, two years of Labour data isn’t particularly thorough. Regardless, there’s little evidence of austerity measures impacting the DVSA, this is likely because it was run as a Trading Fund, a government department that operates basically like a business. Under Labour, it was run as the Driving Standards Agency. It was then folded into the DVSA in 2014 under the Conservatives. Under Labour, DSA ran fairly efficiently, with a turnover of £184m (£278m in 2024) into 2009 and suffering a deficit of just £8m for that year (which is attributed in their reports to the weather and economic conditions.) Reading a report from 2008 to 2009, we can see that the DSA actually ran a modest surplus for most of the early noughties.

This table also paints an obvious picture. Until 2008, DSA ran a modest surplus. Post-2008, DSA ran a deficit. The most obvious answer being that the 2008 financial crash turned consumers away from unnecessary spending, and the DSA became one such casualty. Ten years later, in 2018 to 2019, the DVSA ran much more inefficiently, with a £58m deficit and expenditures at £448m with revenues at £399m. Costs are up nearly 50%, and yet less tests are being performed and potential drivers are being saddled with the costs of extra lessons and long wait times to get a test.

I began this article hoping to find some secret sauce to solving the driving test crisis, and perhaps point to factors that may have been missed in the obvious damage of Coronavirus, or find some other country doing things differently and better. In reality, there’s little reason to blame any political party or individual. The story of the DSA and DVSA is as boring as a story about the institutions in question would suggest: We had a modestly profitable government department, a wonderfully rare and nice thing to have, which was made unprofitable by the financial crash. It then ran a deficit for a further decade until it was made into just another government department in 2021. That same year, it had to severely limit operations due to a pandemic, and has been playing catch-up ever since.

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Into that void, private companies have sprung up to resolve the issue. Websites and applications such as Testi and Driving Scout will crawl DVSA for new tests, and then provision them quickly to students at their desired times. Instructors are now block booking tests for their students in an attempt to get them preferable times, and if you’re sad enough to read the comment sections of DVSA announcement posts – other instructors are claiming some even sell these more convenient tests at higher prices. Anyone who has booked a driving test understands how annoying the process can be, with anti-bot measures making it difficult for legitimate users to use the service – which makes the bots which can evade the measures even faster at booking tests.

The boring solution to this boring problem about a boring department is fairly simple: make the IT services better, and clear the backlog. The former could be done by simply embracing the private sector standards for provisioning tests: students enter the times and days they’d like a test, and they’re provisioned a test in that bracket when it becomes available. As for the backlog, this could be solved by opening new test centres and hiring more examiners (who will become unionised, most likely) or by evading the unions, hiring privately and using them to clear the backlog. This would be unlikely to be worthwhile politically, however. Disempowering unions is not always popular, and it doesn’t play well politically, and clearing the driving test backlog is not a public priority.

On that note, if you’ve read this far – you’re probably within the < 1000 people in the UK who is both interested in politics, and interested in the boring details of issues such as this. So while the driving test backlog will likely slowly close up over time, it will pass unmarked by the political climate of the country at large.

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Just recently, the music industry launched its first real assault on generative AI. Ultimately, this was inevitable. Whereas the huge swathes of text used to create ChatGPT were mostly public, and the huge swathes of art used to create AI models such as Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, and DALL-E were held by artists who lacked the resources or organisation to properly fight AI companies. In contrast, the music industry lacks these constraints. AI has finally met its first real legal threat from outside the political arena.

The legal precedents set down now will shape the future of AI development, and therefore the future wealth and prospects of first-world countries. They also mark an emerging trend in the world of technology: the attempt to keep the institution of intellectual property alive in a world that has lapped it. Generative AI offers us the ability to create artwork en-masse, and could make the creative element of the marketing budget of nearly anyone who wants to create a product to near-zero. The amount of wealth and resources this could free up for spending in other industries is in the billions, protecting generative AI at all costs is in every country’s economic self-interest.

Japan has lead the way in this regard, removing enforcement of copyright law for any material used to create AI. Meanwhile, China has a long history of disregarding Western copyright law almost as a matter of foreign policy. The Western world is not just risking losing its first-mover advantage in AI by continuing to entertain intellectual property, it is almost guaranteeing losing out to the Eastern world. No matter how much money the Western world has in venture capital and cheap debt, without fresh data to train AI models on, the money will enable them only to purchase fractions of the data our Eastern counterparts possess.

Remember, everything created from this point in time forward is under intellectual property rights, and thanks to the efforts of Mickey Mouse, they won’t be available to train AI on for 70 years. As creative output grows exponentially in proportion to the human population, over time, the percentage of works that are protected by copyright can only increase. If Eastern countries have the best AI models, then Western companies will inevitably use them as a cost-saving measure, thus sending more data out of Western world and into the Eastern world, where it will be used to, again, train better models that solidify their advantage in the AI space.

Britain may well be the only Western country well-situated enough to avoid this AI ratched. We are not lobbied relentlessly by the music industry, unlike America. We are not in Europe, and thus not beholden to their onerous AI legislation. We are relatively wealthy by global standards, and have a long history with AI and technology. We could, with enough effort, save the Western world from losing a critical industry to our Eastern rivals.

Our AI strategy however, has been lacking. So far, we have purchased 5,000 GPUs from NVIDIA, meanwhile OpenAI have twice that. We are investing £250m, meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested we may well see AI models costing nearly four times that. Coupled with this are the huge energy resources used to train AI, while OpenAI and Microsoft develop literal power plants to create energy for their AI development, we struggle to build the energy resources to keep the lights on. A kilowatt-hour costs 44 cents in the UK. In the USA, it’s 17 cents. The relationship between energy abundance and wealth is already well-established, and only going to increase when AI becomes a mainstay in people’s lives.

We have claimed we want to lead the world on AI Safety. So far, the AI Safety Institute has been the biggest success of our strategy. It’s well-regarded by experts in the field, and acts as a resource to draw in talent and researchers from around the world. However, you cannot lead from behind. Asking the UK to lead on AI when we are yet to produce a company comparable to America is like asking a country with no nuclear weapons to lead the world on the policy around nukes. The changes needed to make the UK a country with a world-leading AI industry mean we must move beyond the vibes politics of just talking about leading, and actually leading by upsetting entrenched and well-established interest groups. Economically, it will mean going against the music industry and other well-funded groups. Politically, it will mean crushing NIMBYism. The leader that can do this will win Britain a strong position on the world stage, and looking at the references to vague ‘requirements’ for AI models in the Kings Speech, I do not see that person, and fear we will once again lose an opportunity to make not just this country, but the world a better place.

The policy not only failed to save Boris Johnson from resignation, but also failed in what it attempted to do embarrassing the government in the process. For reference, 130 people were intended to be sent on that first flight. By the time the flight was due to take off, it was down to just seven. A later intervention by the ECHR reduced that number to zero. Despite there clearly needing to be a number of lessons learned, there has never been a serious autopsy of why Rwanda failed. That topic will remain for another article, but the lack of lessons learned are important. The main take-away from figures such as Suella and Sunak has been that leaving the ECHR may be necessary. Glance back at those figures: 130 were notified they were set to be sent on that first flight, only seven were removed by the ECHR. 123 of those were removed by domestic law, and a High Court document revealed some were even removed by the then-Home Secretary Priti Patel, for reasons unknown.

The lessons learned by figures such as Matt Goodwin have been to support Rwanda because ‘it’s the only game in town’. Supporting something because it’s the only thing on offer is foolish, unimaginative, and destined to result in bad policy. Most policy suggestions are, simply put, bad. It takes willpower and a lot of boring and unsexy work to get things right. This article is the product of a lot of boring and unsexy work, including independent research. But the outcome has been a collection of data which is probably the most comprehensive on the subject until the Migration Observatory updates their page on the subject.

The Asylum Revolution

Before 1990, asylum was fairly simple. We had the Refugee Convention of 1951, which applied only to Europe, and the 1967 Protocol, which applied to the world. These two documents afforded people the right to seek asylum in any country that was a signatory. However, it was ultimately infeasible for people to come to the UK. The Channel Tunnel (1994) did not exist and Europe was still focusing on rebuilding post-World War II. Moreover, communications technology such as the mobile phone had not yet become popular. However, as the world became richer, more interconnected, and its people became more mobile - much of the world realised what they were missing out on in the West. And in 1989, many of them decided to come to the UK.

From 1979 to 1989, asylum applications per year ranged from 1563 to around 6000. The overwhelming majority of these would be accepted, with acceptance rates rates between 75-90%. In 1989 however, the applications then nearly triple to 16775. A year later, they double to 38195. Then in 1990, another year later, they nearly double again to 73400. Asylum applications have increased exponentially over these three years, and an asylum system based on principles set down three decades prior are now being tested. The Conservative government responds in the worst way possible: by secretly granting Exceptional Leave to Remain to 44% of all asylum seekers in an attempt to clear the backlog in 1992. In 1993 they repeat the feat by granting Exceptional Leave to Remain to a further 11,000. Exceptional Leave to Remain is designed for those who do not fit the definition of refugee under the Refugee Convention, but are deemed to be needing to be granted leave to remain due to ‘exceptional’ circumstances. Considering the use of Exceptional Leave to Remain, the fact the Conservatives did not announce this, and only allowed it to be discovered in the statistics - this has all the hallmarks of an attempt to clear the backlog. Alongside this, they also began rejecting asylum claims en-masse, with the acceptance rate dropping from above 80% to below 50% in just one year. Britain was being flooded with unfounded claims. Coupled with the high rate of claims and a large backlog, asylum rules prior to 1993 meant that anyone who saw a significant delay in their application would have this apply as a point in favour of approving their application. This rule had to be removed, as a number of unfounded claims were approved as they had been waiting a long time for their claim to be reviewed.

By 1996, one year prior to election, the Conservative government passed yet-more legislation. This time to cut benefits to asylum seekers. Home Office documents suggest this had a minor effect on reducing claimants but the main effect was to further alienate the Conservatives from many London constituencies. As most asylum applicants arrived via plane, they tended to land in Heathrow. As a result, most asylum claimants ended up in London boroughs and changing the local communities. By stripping them of their benefits, many asylum seekers became destitute. A 1996 court ruling then found that local authorities would have to provide them with the benefits the central government refused to provide. The Conservative policy of granting ELR to rid themselves of the backlog, and cut the benefits in an attempt to dissuade people had ultimately caused many London boroughs to inherit large populations of homeless asylum seekers the local councils were now responsible for looking after.

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How New Labour Solved Asylum

Against this backdrop, New Labour came to power. Tony Blair appointed Jack Straw to solve the growing asylum issue. The increased rejection rate had seen the numbers drop from 73400 in 1991 back down to 32300 in 1992, but the trend was towards increasing numbers of asylum seekers, not less.

In July 1998, Fairer, Faster, and Firmer was published by Jack Straw, outlining the plans for asylum under New Labour. Central to this was the consideration of the asylum and immigration systems being viewed as one and the same. Contemporary politics discusses legal and illegal immigration as separable, but ultimately the two are intertwined. A person who wishes to enter the country legally will do so illegally if entering illegally is easier, and vice-versa. Consequently, Fairer, Faster, and Firmer tackled both the asylum and immigration systems, which saw the introduction of the following into the asylum system:

• A single management structure, the Joint Entry Clearance Unit, to handle visa entry clearance.

• New technologies, such as fingerprinting, and entering the UK into Eurodac – an EU-wide system for tracking migrants, and entering the Dublin Conventions (signed 1990, came into effect 1997.) A new computer system for handling asylum would be introduced, moving away from paper technologies.

• Shifting of the responsibility for looking after asylum seekers from local councils to the Home Office.

• Crackdown on immigration advisors who made money from legal aid.

• Removal of appeal to upper courts.

• The Immigration Nationality Directorate was restructured, and moved to a system of integrated caseworking.

• The IND hired 500 new caseworkers, and targets focused on speed.

This centralised approach to asylum was coupled with a streamlining of the rules. The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act created the ‘One Stop Appeal’. Many claimants would make multiple separate claims in order to delay their removal for as long as possible. The One Stop Appeal meant that you must state all grounds to remain in the country in application, and any further grounds would not be considered. These changes could not have come soon enough. In 1999 the number of total applicants hit a record high of 91,200. They would stay at 98,000 in the year 2000. Then 91,600 in 2001. And then, in 2002, the asylum system would reach its peak of 103,081 applicants. This is a figure unmatched, even today. And yet, the Labour government dealt with it.

The IND moved quickly, going from 27000 initial decisions in ‘98/99 to 52000 initial decisions in ‘99/00 and then to 132840 decisions in ‘00/01. They rejected to overwhelming majority of applicants. To dissuade illegal migration, they established Oakington Detention Centre in the year 2000. The detention centre was used for a process known as ‘Detained Fast-Track’, where if an application was judged to be able to be resolved quickly - the subject would be detained in Oakington with roughly half having their case decided in two months. Most of these would be refusals. A review in 2012 found roughly 93% of all claims in Oakington were refused, and in Q1 of 2003, Oakington received 1210 cases and made decisions on 1085 of them - all refusals.

These measures: fast decisions, high rejection rate, detention for obvious fraudulent claims, limiting the avenues of appeal to just one and only entertaining one claim solved asylum. They created a system which saw a backlog of 125,100 in 1999 (slightly less than our current peak of 136,233) cut down to 5500 in just 6 years. If this is not the measure of solving asylum, then what is?

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Conclusions

So will Labour do this now? I think they will. One measure I didn’t mention here was that New Labour also had crack teams going out and actively preventing traffickers from leading groups of people onto flights. This stopped tens of thousands of people ever reaching the UK. Starmer looks to be proposing a similar solution for those leading dinghies out off the coast of France. This is a much smaller area to have to control (one coastline vs. every airport.) If the traffickers change tactics to planes, he may well just implement the previous solution. Considering Blair is almost certainly advising Starmer behind the scenes, it’s inevitable he’ll pick up some of the lessons from the Blair period. Moreover, Starmer is a human rights lawyer. He knows the rights of asylum seekers, and he knows what he can and cannot get away with.

Starmer’s main issue is ignoring the many NGOs, Quangos, and activist groups who will try and prevent any kind of migration control. The incoming Labour government has already shown an appetite for ignoring entrenched interests in the pursuit of its goals by changing the rules for onshore wind. With asylum being so prominent an issue, it’s natural that Starmer will take from Blair and solve asylum once again.