Towering Columns
For The Times, Joanna Williams argues that we must restore political neutrality to teaching in our schools.
When teachers are told their job is to encourage children to adopt particular attitudes and values, it becomes harder to spot the promotion of a political outlook. This is especially true when schools are campaigning institutions. About 5,000 schools champion Fairtrade and have access to free classroom resources “designed to help young people understand fair trade, global justice, sustainability and how they can take action”. A similar number are Unicef Rights Respecting Schools, where children are encouraged to see themselves as “global citizens who advocate for social justice, fairness, and children’s rights at home and abroad”.
In 2024 a London secondary school asked pupils to join a “fast” in solidarity with people in Gaza. A post on the school’s website said: “We stand united in supporting the children of Gaza, firmly advocating for their right to safety, health, and education.” Jewish children may have noted the absence of a fast in support of Israeli hostages.
At present, teachers are pulled in two directions. Under the Education Act 1996 and subsequent government guidance, schools are meant to be politically impartial. Yet when they promote favoured causes, tilt the curriculum and are told to instill certain values in children, this is not easy. The alarming rise of antisemitism in schools shows what can go wrong when politics is allowed to enter the classroom.
In The Critic, Katie Lam says that the Charity Commission must investigate charities that are being used to support extremism and political campaigns.
Registered charities benefit from generous tax relief, including sweeping exemptions on income tax and Stamp Duty. Through Gift Aid, they can reclaim much of the tax that they do pay. This set-up is designed to encourage people to donate to charity, and to allow charities themselves to make a positive impact without getting hit with massive tax bills. But in far too many cases, these arrangements are being extended to dangerous organisations, which peddle extremist views and which threaten the foundations of our democracy.
At the absolute bare minimum, the Charity Commission — the body responsible for regulating registered charities — has to take this issue much more seriously. Far too often, charitable status is providing cover for extremists, who get away with little more than a slap on the wrist. The Government is currently consulting on whether or not to give the Commission more powers to deal with extremism, but given their record on this issue, there’s precious little reason to believe that any new powers will go far enough.
Under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the Conservative Party has worked hard to shine a light on these disgraceful abuses of charitable status. We have been clear that extremist and ideological groups should not benefit from favourable tax treatment. When people give money to charity, they should be able to trust that it’ll be spent on the cause that they intended to support in the first place.
For The Times, Juliet Samuel highlights how charitable foundations have been diverted away from their founding purposes towards fashionable causes.
This, according to the campaign group Looking For Growth, which has taken a good look at the City Bridge Foundation, is what it should be doing. Unfortunately, in 1995, the City of London Corporation, which is the charity’s sole trustee, decided to seek consent to alter its charter. It did so not in order to spend excess cash on the maintenance of Thames bridges outside the City, which would have stayed true to its original mission. Instead, it gained permission to fund “other charitable purposes”, which has meant, in practice, to pour its vast wealth down the drain of leftist causes.
Since then, the foundation boasts, it has spent £840m on “social justice”. Among its grant awards: £1.4m over ten years to the LGBT Consortium; £1.5m over ten years to Race on the Agenda; £1m over seven years to Spectra CIC, to “build capacity in the trans and sex worker sectors”. It has handed more than £2m to Comic Relief’s Global Majority Fund and £2m to fund grants for “black-led charities”. It has funded activists campaigning to give migrants more benefits; it’s supported a poet-in-residence to write about bridges; it’s put £15m into a “climate action strategy” fund and even funded a charity that has campaigned against river crossings.
The foundation’s focus on “systems change” and “structural inequality… positions us firmly as a social justice funder”, explained its chairman, Paul Martinelli, a classicist and City councillor who runs a family butchers business. In 2024-25, the foundation spent £12.5m on bridges and £81.5m on grants. “Bridges maintenance projects were deferred into future years,” it said.
In The Critic, Arthur Reynolds showcases how large amounts of NHS funding are being diverted towards staff pet projects.
The problem is as stark at the trust level. A further FOI reveals that in October 2024 Great Ormond Street Hospital paid £6,600 to Radius, a specialist provider of staff network training, for a package including ten places on its Employee Network Leadership Programme. Nearly two years later, only one person had completed a course and six places remained unused. According to their brochures, Radius — who provide services to other trusts — offer network leaders lessons in finding their voice on social media, “holding stakeholders accountable”, “engaging external communities” and “Founding spin-off networks”. Taxpayers’ money is being used to expand these groups’ membership, reach and influence.
Just one trust — Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh — spent £162,942 on EDI training, events and consultancy in 2024/25 alone, while a number of trusts publicly advertise allowing network officers to carry out their duties during the working week. This patchwork of training, subscriptions to outside bodies and paid time for network officers disappears into individual trust budgets, ensuring no national total exists and each individual sum appears too small to challenge. This is how identity politics becomes institutionally permanent.
Health chiefs cannot credibly threaten cuts to patient care while treating diversity spending as untouchable. Ministers must have the gumption to challenge their sophistry and the Prime Minister must hold firm against the lobbying that will ratchet up as winter approaches. He might begin his new era of fiscal rectitude by explaining to a constituent stuck on a waiting list how “The Big Fat Gay Quiz 2!” passes the Makerfield test.
For The Telegraph, Lewis Page makes a compelling case for why Trafalgar Day should be made a National Holiday.
Trafalgar, then, is evocative of an age when Britannia ruled the waves and to be British was to be part of the greatest nation in the world – even more fortunate than the citizens of other great nations such as France. We (and the French) have had our ups and downs since then, but surely Trafalgar is a great occasion for a national holiday, far better than the May Day one.
Some traditionalists will speak of maypoles and Morris men, but the truth is the early May Bank Holiday was brought in by the miserable Leftist Michael Foot in the dark days of the 1970s to celebrate the international union movement, not anything British or cheerful like Morris dancers. Also, we have too many Bank Holidays early in the year and not enough later on.
It’s time for a Trafalgar Bank Holiday.
Wonky Thinking
The Prosperity Institute has issued a new report on freezing the National Living Wage in order to reduce the cost of hiring staff for British businesses, particularly young people. This follows evidence of record numbers of young people being found out of employment, education and training.
The cost of employing a full-time worker in Britain, as of April 2026, was £28,308.52 per annum. This number includes the full-time salary of an employee earning the National Living Wage (NLW), the new higher rate of employer National Insurance contributions, and the auto-enrolment pension contributions an employer makes to an employee’s pension. The minimum wage ‘bite ratio’—that is, the ratio of the minimum wage to the median wage in a country, also called the Kaitz Index—has risen from 46 per cent in 1999 to approximately 66 per cent today. This sits comfortably above the 60 per cent threshold which was the NLW’s original target and is often treated as the suggested point where disemployment effects begin to emerge.
In Britain today, we are already seeing these effects. This has been borne out especially when looking at employment opportunities for young people. The NLW has risen by 48 per cent since 2019 in cash terms (15.8 per cent in real terms), whilst output per hour has only risen by 2.4 per cent over the same period. The Low Pay Commission estimates that wage spillovers from multiple increases to the minimum wage have now reached the 35th percentile of earners.
This has resulted in the slow erosion of the differential between junior and mid-level roles. As a result, the financial incentive to seek promotion or assume more responsibility in the workplace has been weakened, with damaging effects on workplace productivity. Most unfortunate is the continuous increase in 16–24-year-olds who are not in employment, education, or training (NEETs). The number of NEETs has increased from 715,000 in 2021 to 946,000 in 2025. This is a major cause for concern, signalling that the door to entry-level jobs has been steadily closed to young people seeking employment.
The report recommends:
Freeze the National Living Wage at £12.71 for five years: Any forthcoming uprated recommendations by the Low Pay Commission should be rejected. This will allow median earnings growth to restore a bite ratio of 56 per cent—the value in 2015. This would require no primary legislation to accomplish.
Abolish the Low Pay Commission or recast its remit: The setting of the minimum wage should be a decision for government. During the freeze, uprating recommendations by the Commission should be declined as a second-stage reform which will require primary legislation and the body should ultimately be abolished.
Revert Employer National Insurance contribution rates to their pre-April 2025 level: This would involve reducing the Employer NIC back to 13.8 per cent above the £9,100 secondary threshold while keeping the current Employment Allowance at £10,500 so that SMEs are not left worse off. This would reduce the cost of hiring a worker on minimum wage by £800 per annum.
Reinstate the two-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal protection: This would reduce the risk borne by firms seeking to hire new staff—especially SMEs that rely on recruiting lower-productivity workers. From January 2027, the Employment Rights Act 2025 will reduce this period to six months. To restore this would require primary legislation.
Podcast of the Week
For Reality Check, The Spectator’s economics podcast, former Chief Economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane criticises both the Bank of England’s handling of inflation and says that “devolution is not a growth strategy” in response to the new Prime Minister’s agenda to give more power to Mayors. You can watch the podcast here.
Quick Links
Trump claims that Starlink access for Ukraine has been restored.
The number of job vacancies has fallen to its lowest level since the pandemic.
Consumer confidence has fallen at the fastest rate since Brexit.
The Environment and Net Zero Committee has call for all green levies to be taken off bills.
Microsoft pulls out of large data centre investment in the UK.
Cambridge University has officially recognised a new free speech society.