Peter Black

The Independent reports that an official has warned that British travellers heading to the European Union could face significant delays for up to two years, as the bloc's new Entry Exit System (EES) continues to cause disruption at borders.

The paper says that Uku Sarekanno, deputy executive director of EU border agency Frontex, stated that some member states are "struggling" to implement the new digital checks, which require fingerprints and photographs from non-EU citizens entering the Schengen Area:

British travellers heading to the European Union could face significant delays for up to two years, an official has warned, as the bloc's new Entry Exit System (EES) continues to cause disruption at borders.

Uku Sarekanno, deputy executive director of EU border agency Frontex, stated that some member states are "struggling" to implement the new digital checks, which require fingerprints and photographs from non-EU citizens entering the Schengen Area.

The EES mandates that individuals from third-party countries, including the UK, have their biometric data registered upon entry to the 29-country Schengen zone. This digital record is then retained for three years, with the initial enrolment process typically occurring at foreign airports for most UK holidaymakers.

Concerns over the system's impact have been mounting, with airline body the International Air Transport Association recently cautioning that border queues could stretch to six hours this summer.

Airports in popular destinations such as Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy are reportedly among the worst affected. In April, more than 100 easyJet passengers missed a flight from Milan Linate to Manchester due to extensive delays at passport desks attributed to the EES rollout.

Speaking at a travel industry summit in Westminster, Mr Sarekanno acknowledged the challenges. "We expect that the situation will stabilise in one or two years," he said, adding: "The most challenging part is the first enrolment, that is the moment where fingerprints and facial images will be taken."

He noted that repeat visitors within the three-year period would benefit from a "more fast track of entry."

With approximately 1,700 border crossing points requiring EES use, Mr Sarekanno highlighted the ongoing adjustments by member states. "There are ones which are managing it rather well, who have dedicated resources," he explained. "There are the others who are still struggling. This adjustment… is taking some time and effort."

The EES was initially introduced in October last year, with its full rollout significantly ramped up on 10 April. While EU regulations permit temporary halts to checks during peak periods to alleviate queues, this measure is not consistently applied.

A recent survey commissioned by Booking.com underscored public apprehension, revealing that nearly three out of five (59%) UK holidaymakers travelling to Europe this year anticipate delays linked to EES, with almost half fearing they could miss their flights because of the new border checks.

Yet another benefit from Brexit, thanks to all the Brexiteers now running Reform.

The Independent reports that a UK Minister has suggested that Labour will revisit its Brexit “red lines” as the government seeks to create closer ties with the European Union.

The paper says that the minister tasked with leading the UK’s so-called reset negotiations with the EU has suggested that the government may have to reconsider its manifesto red lines, which rule out rejoining the customs union and single market or allowing free movement of labour:

European affairs minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said Labour currently did not have a “mandate” to begin talks on its red lines, but added: “It is something we obviously will have to look at.”

The prime minister has put his pledge to reset Britain’s relationship with Brussels at the heart of his government, promising to rebuild ties with the EU that had been damaged by the previous Conservative government.

Sir Keir clinched an initial landmark deal last year, which included agreements such as allowing British tourists to use fast-track eGates at European airports, a 12-year extension of an agreement for EU trawlers to access UK waters and an open-ended agreement to slash red tape on food and drink exports and imports.

But further negotiations could be hampered by the government continuing to rule out allowing EU citizens to work in the UK visa free.

“What happens after the next election will depend on how successful I am across this parliament in terms of what I have delivered,” Mr Thomas-Symonds said. “I think what we’re doing is popular. But it needs to show results to remain popular.

“It will depend on exactly where we are in European and world politics in 2028 or 2029.”

Downing Street insisted the government’s red lines would remain in place for now on Monday, but suggested there may be a shift in Labour’s position at the next general election.

“You've got our position on this before, that red lines stand,” the prime minister’s official spokesman said, adding that when it comes to the next election, the party “set out its position on that in future”.

“But we've been very clear about the red lines for this parliament,” he said.

An indication of a change of direction is very welcome, but to suggest that we need to wait until after the next election is not good enough. Failure to address the economic consequences of Brexit sooner will only makes things worse.

The government has already broken its red lines once when it put up employers' national insurance rates. They should consider doing so again in this instance in the best interests of the country.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, Jonathan Freedland writes in the Guardian about the country we have become as a result. He says that the choices Keir Starmer and his would-be successors face, indeed the entire political and cultural landscape we now inhabit, are informed or were shaped by that event. We are living in Brexit Britain.

Freedland writes about Etonians working out their schoolboy rivalries, with nothing less than the destiny of the UK at stake, a recklessness with the future of seventy million people that remains unforgivable, the guilt belonging to Cameron and Osborne almost as much as to Gove and Johnson:

More important than the origin story, however, is the legacy. We see that around us every day. Start with the economy. The remain campaign was mocked at the time as “project fear”, spreading gloom by warning that Britain outside the EU would be poorer, to the tune of 6% of GDP. Yet here we are a decade later and, if anything, remain was not pessimistic enough. The drop in GDP is now estimated to be between 6% and 8%, with investment down by as much as 18%. Trade is on course to be 15% less than it would have been had we stayed in the EU, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, while a staggering 85% of those who import or export goods report problems that they didn’t have before. Remainers said that Brexit would be a slow puncture, as the air was let out of the British economy. So it has proved, except it’s not been that slow.

Brexit’s other legacy, besides upending the old Labour-Tory duopoly, is not measurable in pounds or percentages but is just as real. It is visible in the coarsening and darkening of the national conversation, in the aggression and even hatred that, previously pushed to the margins, now loiter in the centre of the public square. This week the leader of the party that brought us Brexit warned of civil war.

It would be wrong to cast the referendum as the sole cause of this shift – Brexit was, in part, a symptom of the change – and we can all see the role social media and the likes of Elon Musk have played in degrading the discourse. But Brexit both accelerated and intensified that process.

An insouciance towards the facts – recall that “post-truth” was Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016 – was an enduring gift of the leave campaign. Percy’s documentary lays bare the knowing dishonesty of the claim that the UK was sending £350m to the EU every week, a gross figure – in every sense – that did not include the more than £80m that came back as a rebate or the money the EU spent in the UK. Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings would later brag that “The point of using that really was to try and drive the remain campaign and people running it crazy” – deliberately tangling up his opponents in dry factchecking over stats, while he could press the voters’ hotter buttons. “Love that bus,” an unrepentant Johnson says now, describing it as “the bus of truth”. In 2026, we wade through a swamp of lies and disinformation all the time, especially online – but it was the referendum that drove us into that swamp and at top speed.

The currency of Cummings, Farage and the rest was fear and loathing. We see again Farage’s “breaking point” poster, with its brown-skinned men apparently massing on our borders, and the wholly bogus Vote Leave ad suggesting that 76 million Turks would soon be able to come into Britain via the EU, leaving a trail of dirty footprints behind them. These were racist and xenophobic messages, barely veiled – and they worked.

So it’s hardly a surprise that, a decade later, we have the man who could well be in Downing Street after the next election – and who, tellingly, speaks of Brexit only rarely these days – complaining of “anti-white prejudice” and calling for “pure cold rage” after the murder of a young white man, even as that man’s parents pleaded for his death not to be used to turn Britons against each other. Restore Britain, a party that is endorsed by unabashed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, is on the ballot in Makerfield and might win 10% of the vote. There has always been a far right in Britain, but it used to be confined to the fringes. Brexit invited it in.

By dividing us down the middle, leave or remain, Brexit polarised our politics in a new, starker way. Looking back, it’s clear that remain could never win a contest like that because it was never really about British membership of the EU. In effect, the question became: “Do you want things to remain as they are, or would you like to leave the current reality of your life for something better?” In that contest, there was only ever going to be one winner.

Farage and his fellow travellers are building their support by exploiting the mess that they created. That hypocrisy and opportunism needs to be exposed over and over again.

The Guardian reports that Labour Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell has accused Reform UK of destabilising British democracy by spreading divisive material that is being amplified by bots and troll farms.

In an echo of an essay by Oliver Bullough on Byline Times, which I blogged on earlier this month, the paper says that Lucy Powell has called for tighter laws on social media giants to tackle misinformation, arguing the online space was “open to wealthy individuals, and bad state actors”:

She also highlighted the multimillion-pound donations that have bolstered Reform’s election war chest and “fund their powerful online campaigns”.

Arguing Nigel Farage and his party posed a threat to democracy, she said the law should be strengthened to “tackle the scourge of dis- and misinformation which is ripping communities apart and undermining us all”.

She said Reform’s “exploitation of online algorithms on social media sites is well documented”, as was the way the party had benefited from “bots and troll farms to amplify support”.

The need to deal with this problem is getting more and more urgent.

If you were to go into Swansea City Centre today, you would find that a large part of it is fenced off while building work carries on there. This is Castle Square, an open space in front of the city's historic castle that is undergoing its second transformation after a major revamp in the 1990s saw it mostly concreted over.

The square itself has evolved from a medieval Norman settlement to a bustling Victorian commercial hub, and finally into a central civic space. After being flattened during the 1941 Blitz, the site was transformed into public gardens as illustrated above, and then redesigned into a hard-scaped urban amphitheater in the 1990s as pictured below.
The area's history is closely tied to the adjacent medieval fortifications and the changing face of the city centre set out in this AI summary:

1. Medieval Origins and Commerce

• Norman Stronghold: In the early 12th century, Norman lord Henry de Beaumont built a timber castle on a strategic bluff overlooking the River Tawe. The area that is now Castle Square sat just outside the main castle, hosting a settlement of Anglo-Norman craftsmen.

• Stone Fortifications: The timber castle was attacked multiple times by Welsh forces and eventually rebuilt in stone. By the 13th and 14th centuries, the castle was enlarged, bringing the Castle Square site within the extended outer defensive walls.

• Early Trade: Long before it became a square, the plot featured burgage plots where medieval merchants traded.

2. The Victorian Era

• Thriving Retail: By the 1800s, Castle Square and the surrounding streets were the commercial heart of Swansea. It was home to grand Victorian and Edwardian buildings, including the famous Ben Evans department store.

3. The Blitz and Post-War Gardens (1941–1990s)

• The Swansea Blitz: During the tragic "Three Nights Blitz" of February 1941, German bombers devastated much of central Swansea. The buildings in Castle Square, including the Ben Evans store, were completely destroyed.

• Castle Gardens: In the post-war reconstruction, the Swansea Council decided against rebuilding on the site and instead designated it as a memorial to the victims of the bombings. In 1953, Castle Gardens opened with ornamental flowerbeds, pathways, and a fountain, serving as a picturesque public green space right in the city center.

4. Modern Transformations (1993–Present)

• Urban Amphitheater: Over the decades, Castle Gardens became a bit scruffy and fell into disrepair. In October 1993, the council decided to replace the greenery with a harder, treeless urban space. This redesigned "Castle Square" was completed in 1995 and featured a focal glass-and-steel leaf sculpture.

Prior to the latest reconstruction work, the square contained six historical plaques based on drawings by local schoolchildren. They commemorate key moments in the city's past, including Welsh attacks on the castle, Dylan Thomas at the nearby Three Lamps, and the devastating "Three Nights Blitz. 

Labels: lochist

The Times reports that government borrowing was £60 billion higher than the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted in recent forecasts, as the spending watchdog also admitted to underestimating the hit to growth from Rachel Reeves’s payroll tax raid.

The paper says that in its latest evaluation report on the accuracy of its economic forecasts, the OBR admitted to understating the scale of annual government borrowing by more than £60 billion in its March 2023 and March 2024 budget projections.

The OBR said that persistently higher than expected inflation and interest rates, both of which pushed up debt interest and welfare spending beyond what was anticipated, were partly to blame for the inaccuracies:

Lingering inflationary effects from the surge in global energy prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were more pronounced than the OBR thought.

The economic forecaster said yesterday that it had “adjusted our analytical and modelling toolkit” to ensure this did not happen again in the wake of the US-Israeli war with Iran, indicating that Reeves, the chancellor, could be handed a sobering set of forecasts at the autumn budget if the conflict drags on.

The OBR said that the substantial rise in government spending Reeves announced in her first budget in October 2024 also pushed borrowing far beyond its previous projections.

In that budget, Reeves set out a huge increase in daily government spending and public investment expenditure of around £70 billion. The package was funded through a mixture of extra borrowing and tax increases, including a £25 billion rise in employer national insurance contributions (NICs).

In March 2023 the OBR predicted that borrowing would total £85 billion in 2024/25, £66 billion lower than the actual figure, and in March 2024 it predicted borrowing would reach £87 billion in the same year, £65 billion below the actual result.

Reeves’s decision to increase employer NICs is likely to have constrained the economy by much more than the OBR calculated when the policy was announced nearly two years ago. The UK economy expanded by 1.4 per cent in 2025, well below the OBR’s prediction of 2 per cent, which it admitted had been “too optimistic”.

“In broad terms, this could be because our pre-measures forecast was too optimistic, our assessment of policy effects was too optimistic, or some combination of the two,” the forecaster said.

Economists have blamed the NICs rise for pushing up unemployment in the UK by making it costlier to hire people, especially the young: the jobless rate among this group has hit an 11-year high of 16.2 per cent.

It is not as if the government were not warned. Back in early 2025, the Centre for Policy Studies predicted that the year ahead would be the most expensive on record for businesses who employ workers on the minimum wage, with the combined amount of tax paid by employees and employers for those on minimum wage being the equivalent of a shocking 21.3% of salary in 2025:

Since the minimum wage was introduced in 1999, the tax wedge has fluctuated. In 2010, it stood at 18% but the Coalition government reduced this to 11% in 2015, primarily by increasing the income tax personal allowance. Although this increased over time, owing to wages rising faster than the personal allowance thresholds, by 2024 the amount of tax paid per minimum wage worker stood at 17.5% of the salary – still lower than in 2010.

However, the rise in employer’s National Insurance in the Budget and the dramatic reduction in the threshold at which it is paid mean that 21.3% of the cost of employing a full-time worker on the minimum wage will go in tax. Coupled with increases to the minimum wage, it will cost businesses £2,367 more to employ a full-time worker on the minimum wage than it did in 2024, which will have an obvious impact on hiring decisions for the lowest paid.

For higher wage positions, the increased cost of hiring workers translates into lower wages over time. For those on the minimum wage, where salaries cannot fall, businesses will instead hire fewer workers, which limits the opportunities for those in low-paid work and the unemployed who are looking to get back into the workforce.

The choice made by the Chancellor to use employer's national insurance payments to fund public sector payment has had a direct impact on government debt and unemployment, hitting the lowest paid and young people hardest.

The Guardian reports that graduates saddled with ballooning student loan debts have told MPs that they feel they are being unfairly used as “cash cows” to finance measures benefiting older people such as the state pension triple lock.

The paper says that student representatives have told an official inquiry about the “harrowing” plight of many young people, while the man who led the 2019 government review into post-18 education criticised the “almost sneaky” changes to loan terms, and appeared to compare the situation facing graduates with the car finance and payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandals:

Pressure has been building on the government in recent months to reform the student loans system, with campaigners and politicians queueing up to describe the rules as unfair.

The debate has focused on the millions of students from England and Wales who have taken out a “plan 2” loan. Many have money taken from their wages each month to repay their debt, but what they pay off is often dwarfed by the interest that is being added every month, so the sums they owe get bigger.

The catalyst for the latest row was Rachel Reeves’s decision to freeze the salary threshold for plan 2 loan repayments for three years. This threshold, above which graduates have to repay 9% of anything they earn, will now stay frozen at £29,385 until 2030. The above-inflation interest rates that apply to many loans have also come under fire.

As part of its own inquiry into student loans and the taxation of graduates, the Commons Treasury select committee took evidence from seven experts on Tuesday, including Ollie Gardner, the founder of Rethink Repayment, a graduate-led campaign for a “fairer” system, who described the current situation as “an intergenerational crisis”.

He gave the example of a 33-year-old NHS doctor who was about to be a consultant who had already had £38,000 of interest added to their student loan and was expecting to have to repay between two and two-and-a-half times the amount they originally borrowed.

He added: “To see Rachel Reeves or previous governments freezing the thresholds makes it feel a lot like we’re being used as cash cows.”

Gardner said figures showed that by 2030, the triple lock – which guarantees that the UK state pension will rise by whichever of three figures is the highest – was going to cost the government £15bn a year. He added: “To see graduates being the mechanism to generate more tax revenue … I think lots of people feel very, very angry about that.”

This is a system that desperately needs reform, let's hope that the inquiry has some workable recommendations.

This article was published on Liberal Democrat Voice on Sunday

Listening to David Miliband at the Hay Literary Festival a few days ago, two things that he said struck me as interesting.

The first was that the Labour government had been elected to effect change, but they have not changed enough. The second related to the high number of young people who have left school with no education, employment or training opportunity. Where is the triple lock for that cohort, he asked.

Of course, both of these statements are easy soundbites, needing much more policy detail and commitment before any government can make a difference, but if, as is the case, people are disillusioned with Starmer’s administration, and are casting around for an alternative, then why have the Liberal Democrats not stepped into the breach?

Just over a week ago from the time of writing this, Harrogate MP, Tom Gordon, posed the question on Liberal Democrat Voice of what his, and my party, should stand for.

He pulled out three examples from the King’s Speech, where the Lib Dems could adopt a distinctive position. These were a full ban on conversion therapy, with no exceptions, Leasehold Reform and opposition to digital ID.

My purpose is writing this is not to disagree with Tom’s analysis but to seek to extend it to a fuller list of how the Liberal Democrats can promote a radical and bold programme for change that will make people sit up and listen, a broader canvass if you like.

My list is not comprehensive and there will be items that others will want to add or take away from it, but if we are to use the opportunities that present themselves to grow our party then we need a narrative that will capture people’s imagination.

Above all, we need an engaged leadership who are prepared to embrace an agenda for change in a serious and compelling way, without the stunts and gimmicks that have lost us support in the past.

None of these suggestions are new, it’s just that the party has appeared too timid to fight for them in the past.

Europe is a Liberal Democrat issue and yet we seem too embarrassed to campaign openly for party policy. Opinion polls show that there is a majority who believe that Brexit has been a disaster and that we need to get closer to the EU.

I accept that full membership of the EU is not an option at present, but why aren’t we saying loudly and often that we need to rejoin the EU customs union to reduce red tape, get rid of tariffs on trade with our biggest export market and to provide the protection for key industries such as steel? The boost to GDP will also help to fund everything else we need to do to get this country back on its feet.

Donald Trump’s attitude to Russia, his war in the Middle East and his willingness to cast aside traditional alliances, make it imperative that we move closer to Europe, to protect our borders and to collaborate on defence, new technology and a whole range of other issues. We cannot do that without jettisoning Brexit.

Social Care and health – Is it me or have we gone quiet on the need for a massive investment in social care to relieve the pressure on the health service? This should be at the centre of our campaigning, along with calls for capital investment in the buildings and equipment that house these services.

Climate Change is the other big issue facing us and in particular energy policy. Rising temperatures, predicted to be 40C by 2052, mean that we need to have strategies to preserve food and water supplies. The party should be pushing for all homes to be heavily insulated and linked to solar panels to reduce energy costs and consumption and provide some refuge from hot weather. A huge investment in alternative energy is imperative for security, the environment and affordability and, if we are serious about moving away from the combustion engine, then we need electric car chargers in every street.

Young People – Alan Milburn’s review tells us that there are over one million 16-24-year-olds not in education, employment or training in the UK. This is not an issue that should be left to the Labour Party. We should be calling for better educational opportunities, supporting companies to provide more apprenticeships and better access to vocational training – a triple lock that could create the skilled workers we need to rebuild our infrastructure, to construct the public sector social homes we need to reduce homelessness, and provide the staff needed for the health service.

Higher Education – this leads on to the state of our higher education institutions, many of which are in debt, laying off staff and cutting courses. Why aren’t we calling for changes to the visa regime that has precipitated this crisis and looking at how we can make this sector more sustainable?

Social Media and Child Protection – whatever your views on Jess Phillips, her resignation letter raised some serious issues about protecting children on-line. This strikes me as a cause we should be promoting. Outlawing serialised images of children on-line and restricting access for the under-18s should be a no-brainer.

Housing – a commitment to a massive increase in social housing to reduce homelessness in my view should be the very minimum we can do on this issue. In addition, there is no doubt that leasehold tenure, like rent charges, has had its day, can be exploitative and expensive. We should be campaigning to abolish it. And don’t get me started on shared ownership leases, a supposed form of affordable home, in which the tenant pays rent, a service charge and a mortgage. Government should prevent public sector bodies using this format straight away.

Immigration – in many ways the elephant in the room. However, as Liberal Democrats we have always recognised the many benefits migrants bring to our society and our economy. Net migration has dropped significantly in recent years but there is still work to do in reducing backlogs on asylum claims, looking at whether we can allow asylum seekers to work and re-opening legitimate pathways for asylum to reduce channel crossings. We should be much more vocal on this issue.

Defence – contrary to current government thinking, renewing our commitment to the UN target of spending 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid actually helps in making our country more secure. But, yes, we need to increase the amount we spend on conventional defence in the light of increasing international threats, build alliances across Europe, including joint operations and command, and invest in building up our capacity to resist cyber and drone attacks.

Liberty – the party needs to be more vocal in defending the European Convention on Human Rights and continue our resistance to digital ID as both a waste of money and a threat to our freedoms.

Finance – finally, how do we pay for all this? These measures cannot all be carried out at once, but better alignment with Europe can increase GDP, while making the tax system fairer, with a wealth tax, reform of council tax and other measures can bring in new income.

These are just some of my thoughts on how the Liberal Democrats can lay out a distinctive agenda in a five- or six-party system in which our support appears to be stagnating and where we are failing to cut through in many parts of the country.

Others will have different priorities, but what seems clear to me is that a change of approach is needed. We have to be louder and bolder in standing up for liberal principles and values. Maintaining our present course is not an option.

There is an interesting article on Byline Times in which Oliver Bullough, who has written a number of books about the way oligarchs and corrupt state players exploit the UK's financial system to launder and hide money, argues that we must act now to prevent a complete oligarch takeover of British politics.

Bullough says that when you step back and look at Nigel Farage’s £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, even when you compare it to illegal donations, you can see that there has never been anything like it in British politics, and people are right therefore to be more than usually concerned about where it came from, why it was given, and how it was spent.

He says that all the parties’ spending in the last British general election added together comes to barely one-hundred-thousandth of the total for America’s presidential and congressional races that year.

Bullough suggests that some US billionaires might be looking across the Atlantic right now and wondering why they should bother chucking so much money at SuperPACs when they could, for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas, buy a whole G7 country, money that wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems:

I know there are lots of crises clamouring for your attention right now, but the threat posed by electoral funding should trump them all because without negating it, there is no way to solve the others. Without a fair political system, we cannot elect politicians who will represent everyone, rather than just their donors; without adequate enforcement of the laws, there is nothing to stop politicians from cheating their way to victory and, once they’ve won, retrospectively approving their own triumph.

If we don’t get big money out of democracy therefore, there will eventually be no democracy. Once a political system has started to accept the kind of money that flows into American elections, there is precious little you can do about it. If a democracy has become a plutocracy, it is well on its way to oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t give up their power without a fight.

The government has made some moves in this direction, but its efforts are inadequate and lack the urgency required. They must be strengthened, and then the rules must be robustly enforced by ambitious, independent and powerful investigative agencies.

The first threat is from money. Billionaires are accustomed to getting their way, and are highly skilled at obscuring their wealth behind shell companies, foundations, associations, and other structures, and spreading it among multiple jurisdictions, in order to do so. But these time-honoured ways of escaping detection are a clunky old video store compared to the streaming service smorgasbord that is provided by digital currencies that can be programmed to evade detection.

It is good that the government has announced a moratorium on any donations made in cryptocurrencies, and tightened restrictions on how money can flow via companies, but that’s not enough. Only people can vote in elections, so only people should be able to fund them; and those people need to be taxpayers in the UK, on the electoral register.

This radical but simple reform would sweep away every available loophole, and every trick, and force political donors to be open and transparent about who they are, what they’re doing, and where their money comes from.

Political donations should be made, in sterling, from a British bank account (with the sole exception, for obvious reasons, of Northern Ireland), to make sure their origins are checked as thoroughly as can be. And there should be restrictions on how much any one person can give: £100,000 seems like a good limit to me, but I don’t mind as long as it’s comfortably in the low six figures. In recent elections, British parties have become increasingly dependent on large donors to fund their operations, which is a trend we need to reverse, if we want a healthy democracy. These rules should apply not just to the period before an election, but all the time.

The second threat is from cheats. Too often in the UK, parliament has passed strict rules to protect us – against sewage in our rivers; against money laundering on our high streets; or against bias on our airwaves – but those rules have not been enforced. Regulatory bodies are underfunded, demoralised, and lack the political support they need to do the jobs they’ve been given. This legalisation by under-enforcement needs to stop.

In 2022, Boris Johnson’s Government stripped the Electoral Commission of its powers to prosecute wrong-doers and undermined its independence by forcing it to follow a government-imposed strategy, with many Conservatives at the time angry that the commission had fined Vote Leave for breaking funding limits during the Brexit referendum.

But the lesson to draw from that episode was that the commission had too few powers, not too many: what’s the point of fining a political party or campaign after it’s already won? The obvious lesson that politicians drew from such a futile punishment was to cheat. The body defending our democracy needs to be able to act quickly, decisively and robustly to keep corruption out of politics, and to make sure our politicians serve only the interests of their constituents.

Once more the government is guilty of not doing enough to protect our precious democracy. It is time to put that right.

The Independent reports on warnings by a leading think tank that the UK is facing a "democratic emergency”, after new polling revealed around 16.5 million UK adults saw political deepfakes in the month before the local elections.

The paper says the poll found that almost one in three (30 per cent) voters said they had seen a deepfake or AI-generated video, audio clip or image about an election candidate or politician online in the lead-up to this month's elections:

The polling of 2,005 adults was conducted by Opinium for the cross-party think tank Demos between 30 April and 6 May this year – immediately before local and devolved elections across the UK.

The warning comes just two weeks before voters go to the polls in Makerfield for a contest that could decide Britain’s next prime minister if Andy Burnham wins the seat and decides to challenge Sir Keir Starmer, which he is widely expected to do.

Deepfakes are digitally created and altered content, often in the form of fake images, videos and audio recordings.

Around one in six people (16 per cent) said they had encountered political deepfakes more than five times during that period, suggesting that a significant minority of users are being exposed to this content at very high levels.

The polling showed that, when it comes to UK politicians, Labour and Reform leaders were most often reported to have been “deepfaked” - which is significant for the upcoming Makerfield by-election as the race is expected to be a close fight between those two parties.

The findings come as the Electoral Commission launches a new deepfake detection pilot intended to improve identification and map the scale of the problem. However, findings from the pilot are not expected for at least six months.

Demos has called for the government to "move faster to establish clear rules and accountability” for deepfakes, urging ministers to "use the Representation of the People Bill – which is already underway – to introduce meaningful protections for the public before the next general election”.

The think tank previously proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Bill to address AI-generated election misinformation, including clearer legal responsibilities for platforms and developers – proposals which were not taken up by the government.

Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, agreed that "stronger safeguards are needed to protect voters from online misinformation”.

She told The Independent: "Reports of growing numbers of political deepfakes ahead of elections is deeply alarming, and it's clear that stronger safeguards are needed to protect voters from online misinformation.

"My committee has repeatedly raised the risks posed by AI-generated deepfakes with the big tech companies, and we weren't satisfied with their response. It's clear that protections are not working as intended.

"Deepfakes can do untold damage to individual lives and to the integrity of our democratic systems, eroding confidence In the electoral process itself. At a time where hostile actors like the Kremlin are actively working to undermine our democracy, complacency isn't an option.”

Demos's research also found that 39 per cent of respondents were unsure whether they had seen a deepfake at all, which the think tank argued showed a "concerning lack of public confidence in discerning the truth in visual content they see online related to elections”.

More of the public said they were not confident they could identify a deepfake (43 per cent) than said they were confident (38 per cent), the survey also showed.

The most commonly identified subjects of political deepfakes were Donald Trump - with 45 per cent of people saying they had seen a deepfake of him - Sir Keir (36 per cent) and Nigel Farage (27 per cent). Meanwhile, a smaller minority reported seeing deepfakes of Zack Polanski (10 per cent) and Kemi Badenoch (8 per cent).

Polling suggested much of the content was overtly damaging to the profiles of those represented. Among respondents who had seen political deepfakes, six in 10 (56 per cent) said the content portrayed the subject negatively, including 28 per cent who described the content as “very negative”. The polling also found significant public concern about the impact of AI misinformation on democracy, as 42 per cent said they were worried about fake videos or deepfakes of candidates and MPs having an impact on the 7 May local and devolved elections, while just 23 per cent said they were not worried.

Azzurra Moores, associate director of information ecosystems at Demos, told The Independent: “Political deepfakes are no longer a future threat, they are already flooding people’s social media feeds.

“Our polling shows millions of people say they are now encountering AI-generated political content online, often repeatedly and usually in a negative context. At the same time, many voters are unsure how to discern the truth from the content they are seeing.

“That combination of widespread exposure and low public confidence in spotting deepfakes creates serious risks for trust in democratic debate, setting the stage for a democratic emergency in the UK.

This is something that may require further legislation, if so the government needs to move fast.