Will Boris Johnson keep his bulldozer promise on a third runway at Heathrow?
Re the UK's love of instant coffee (Pass notes, 27 January), the Germans have the best word for weak, nasty coffee or coffee substitute: Muckefuck. I eagerly await the day when high-street coffee shops add this to their ever‑expanding drinks menus.John RobbinsKnowle, West Midlands
Unlike Zoe Williams (28 January), I am always delighted to be offered a seat on public transport, not because I need it necessarily, but because it heartens me to see people showing kindness, consideration and care for others. Please don't stop.Jenny CobleyLewes, East Sussex
It appears that the real threat to the US was not deep state after all, but DeepSeek ('Sputnik moment': $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot, 28 January).Philip ClarkeEast Bridgford, Nottinghamshire
Is the government's decision to change the name of the Royal Navy's latest submarine from HMS Agincourt to HMS Achilles a heel-jerk reaction (No 10 defends decision to change name of HMS Agincourt submarine, 27 January)?Chris ArrowsmithCam, Gloucestershire
At least they didn't rename her 'Astings.John DavenportKenley, London
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
16-year-olds will soon have the vote. How will they use it?
Sir Keir Starmer may have been named after the founder of the Labour Party but among his predecessors it is Harold Wilson he admires most. Like Starmer, Wilson was both a pragmatist and a progressive, famously declaring that 'he who rejects change is the architect of decay'. It is this shared ethos that explains best why Starmer intends to hand the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds; he is the first prime minister to extend the franchise since Wilson lowered the threshold from 21 to 18 in 1969. Starmer believes it is essential to restoring the 'social contract' with younger generations, whose needs and desires have been ignored by successive governments, and whose faith in democracy is lower than other age groups. He also sees it, fundamentally, as an issue of fairness. 'He's long believed that if you can serve [in the military], pay tax and reach adulthood in that parliament you should have a say,' a No 10 source said. 'Every time the franchise has been widened it has been bitterly opposed. Opponents are on the wrong side of history again this time around.' Similar arguments shaped the thinking of Wilson's administration decades ago, as the Swinging Sixties and the Mod subculture personified by rock bands like the Who gave rise to new ideas about the meaning of adulthood. Starmer's opponents see it differently, noting the trend in recent years has shifted towards raising legal age thresholds, be it getting a tattoo, remaining in full-time education or buying tobacco. Starmer, following in the footsteps of Rishi Sunak, is pushing through a generational ban on cigarettes for anyone born after 2009. Those nicotine-free teenagers are the same people he wants to empower at the next election. The UK is to join a handful of countries that have moved to voting at 16 for national elections, including Austria, Argentina and Brazil. As the veteran Labour commentator John Rentoul recently observed, the challenge for Starmer is 'to explain why voting is different from most other things, not why it is the same'. The fiercest attacks on Starmer come from the right: Nigel Farage has accused Labour of attempting to 'rig the system' and secure re-election on the back of a 'youthquake'. But to focus on this alone is to ignore a movement that first emerged 40 years ago, and which stretches far beyond the confines of Labour politics. In 1985, at a time of surging youth unemployment, drug use and crime, a fresh-faced Liberal Democrat MP sought to seize on the growing clamour for change. Aged 30, Jim Wallace, the member for Orkney & Shetland, put forward a youth charter bill to improve educational and work opportunities and to lower the voting age from 18. He argued young people could bring forward 'fresh ideas' and had put environmental issues on the agenda 'long before they gained political respectability'. Unlike the environmental movement, his bill failed to catch on. Wallace, who went on to lead the Scottish Lib Dems and served as both deputy and acting first minister of Scotland, now says that 'the lot fell on me' because he was the youngest Lib Dem in parliament. Nevertheless, the principle stuck with him and he remains, aged 70, a staunch supporter. While another three private member's bills failed in 1991, 1992 and 1999, the cause continued to rise up the political agenda and became a core policy for the Liberal Democrats. It has been in their manifesto since 1992. The SNP followed suit in 1997. The idea gained popular momentum in the early 2000s as dozens of youth and democracy organisations formed the Votes at 16 Coalition. It was around this time that a young Angela Rayner, a teenage mother who left school at 16, also began advocating to lower the voting age in her role as a Stockport branch secretary at Unison, the trade union. While the Electoral Commission advised against the move, by 2007 Gordon Brown was calling for it as prime minister. The Youth Citizenship Commission was established to try to reconnect Britain's disengaged youth with the political system. Among the new commissioners was Wes Streeting, who was president of the National Union of Students and is now health secretary. As the 2010 election neared, Labour's internal National Policy Forum had given its backing and Streeting, determined the policy should make the manifesto, directly appealed to the man Brown had tasked with writing it. 'The inclusion of votes at 16 in the next manifesto is a litmus test as to how seriously the leadership take the youth movement of the party,' he wrote in a blog post for the LabourList website. 'Ed Miliband: we're watching you.' Miliband delivered: Labour's manifesto promised MPs a free vote on the issue. Brown, however, did not, and the election of David Cameron's Conservatives doused the hopes of a generation of young activists. However, the election did prove Brown right in at least one respect: less than half of the 18 to 24-year-olds registered to vote actually did so. While the Tories had killed off the prospect of UK-wide change, in Scotland the genie was already out of the bottle. At the instigation of Alex Salmond as first minister, 16-year-olds were allowed to vote on Scottish independence at the 2014 referendum. More than 100,000 of them voted and at least half chose independence. Sixteen and 17-year-olds gained the right to vote in Scottish parliamentary and local government elections in 2016, and Wales followed suit in 2020. While low turnout among young voters is frequently raised as a reason not to extend the franchise, Wallace believes Scotland has shown the opposite to be true. 'The turnout of 16 to 17-year-olds was better than the next tranche of 18 to 24-year-olds in 2014,' he noted, citing an analysis by the Electoral Commission, which put the figures at 75 per cent versus 54 per cent. The habit stuck. In 2023 research at the University of Edinburgh found these young Scots had 'continued to turn out [at subsequent elections] in higher numbers, even into their twenties, than young people who attained the right to vote later, at age 18'. Wallace believes this is partly explained by the flurry of educational activity around the Scottish referendum, with 'almost every second school holding a hustings'. He added: 'It confirms something that I have felt for a long time, which is that the reason why people don't vote is they don't know what it's about. I think just the act of going into a polling station is alien to some people. You have to strip away some of the mystique around it.' Similar trends have been found in Austria, where turnout among 16 and 17-year-olds roughly matches other age groups. By the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016, the principle of votes at 16 had become widely accepted in Labour. Miliband and later Jeremy Corbyn were firmly committed to it during their leaderships. After the vote to leave the EU, the argument deployed by Remainers, that 1.5 million ineligible teenagers had been robbed of their future, merely entrenched the belief among senior Europhiles that it was time for change. Many, like Rayner and Streeting, would go on to take seats around Starmer's cabinet table. With the policy now set, the question is whether this new cohort of voters will alter the course of the next election. They number 1.5 million, increasing the size of the franchise by 3 per cent, but large enough to prove decisive in a tight contest. According to an analysis by The Sunday Times, there are 114 constituencies where the size of the incumbent MP's majority is smaller than the number of 16 and 17-year-olds living there: Increasingly, age, rather than class or gender, is proving the key social divide in Britain — and it is certainly true that under Corbyn, these younger voters flocked to Labour in 2017. But those assumptions can no longer be made. Labour's majority is increasingly under threat from progressive parties such as the Greens, Lib Dems and Corbyn's new, as yet unnamed alternative. It is no longer a given that the youth votes left, if recent European elections are anything to go by. When Germany gave 16-year-olds the vote before last year's European parliament elections, the populist left and right increased their vote. Sixteen per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds voted for the hard-right AfD. There was a similar pattern in France, where 31 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds backed the left-wing France Unbowed at last year's European election and 26 per cent backed Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally. President Macron's Renaissance party got 8 per cent. Here in Britain, Reform has made a concerted effort to win over millennials and Gen Z. Farage's presence on TikTok, where these voters increasingly get their news, far surpasses his Labour and Tory rivals. In Warwickshire, where Reform won the largest number of seats in May's local elections, George Finch, a 19-year-old politics student at Leicester University, is now the leader of the county council. Reform holds a commanding lead in all-age opinion polls, but surveys by the think tank More in Common consistently show younger voters are still more drawn to Labour and the Greens. This is true even among young men, although they are voting for the populist right in unprecedented numbers. There are also signs that, despite Scotland's success, apathy among the young remains high. In a recent poll by Merlin Strategy, 49 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds said they did not want the vote before 18. Only 18 per cent were sure they would vote if there were an election tomorrow. • Daniel Finkelstein: Opposing votes at 16 would cost Tories dear With so many variables, the change seems likely to have a negligible impact. According to Wendy Chamberlain, a Lib Dem MP who previously co-chaired the Votes at 16 all-party parliamentary group, the only certainty in politics now is 'the volatility of the electorate, regardless of their age or other social demographics'. The bigger problem for Starmer is the perception of other voters. More in Common's polling found 70 per cent shared Farage's view that Labour was seeking electoral advantage, and votes at 16 were opposed by 48 per cent to 27 per cent. Luke Tryl, the think tank's director, says the issue ranks well below the public's top priorities. For Wallace, these are challenges not to resile from but to confront head-on. 'It's a reason to get your argument across to young people, to try and win their vote,' he said. 'Whether it's higher education, better training and apprenticeships, the environment, young people are right to be demanding more.' Additional reporting by Dominic Hauschild
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list' of federal regulations
The 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) is using artificial intelligence to create a 'delete list' of federal regulations, according to a report, proposing to use the tool to cut 50% of regulations by the first anniversary of Donald Trump's second inauguration. The 'Doge AI Deregulation Decision Tool' will analyze 200,000 government regulations, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Post, and select those which it deems to be no longer required by law. Doge, which was run by Elon Musk until May, claims that 100,000 of those regulations can then be eliminated, following some staff feedback. A PowerPoint presentation made public by the Post claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) used the AI tool to make 'decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections', while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau used it to write '100% of deregulations'. The Post spoke to three HUD employees who told the newspaper AI had been 'recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations'. During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump claimed that government regulations were 'driving up the cost of goods' and promised the 'most aggressive regulatory reduction' in history. He repeatedly criticized rules which aimed to tackle the climate crisis, and as president he ordered the heads of all government agencies to undertake a review of all regulations in coordination with Doge. Asked about the use of AI in deregulation by the Post, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said 'all options are being explored' to achieve the president's deregulation promises. Fields said that 'no single plan has been approved or green-lit', and the work is 'in its early stages and is being conducted in a creative way in consultation with the White House'. Fields added: 'The Doge experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business and are embarking on a never-before-attempted transformation of government systems and operations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.' Musk appointed a slew of inexperienced staffers to Doge, including Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who was previously known by the online handle 'Big Balls'. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy.
Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Telegraph
Reeves abandons inheritance tax raid on grieving military families
Rachel Reeves has abandoned plans to impose new inheritance tax changes on the grieving families of military personnel. The Chancellor has dropped a proposal to tax death in service payments, which are tax-free lump sums given to the families of deceased Armed Forces members. Changes unveiled in the October Budget would have made off-duty death in service payments subject to inheritance tax for the first time, if not going to a spouse or civil partner. It would have meant that children or partners of unmarried servicemen and women would have had to pay death duties on the benefit from April 2027. The Treasury has been forced to abandon the proposals after pressure from Armed Forces organisations, which said the move would have a 'corrosive' effect on trust among servicemen. The Government said that following its consultation, it had decided not to go ahead with the reform. 'Another U-turn' by Labour Mark Francois, the shadow Armed Forces minister, told The Telegraph that he welcomed the decision, 'even though it represents another U-turn by this Labour Government'. He added: 'It was always unfair that married partners of service personnel would be exempted from these changes to inheritance tax liabilities, while unmarried partners, in long-term relationships, would not. 'We highlighted this to ministers, on behalf of service families on multiple occasions and I am pleased for their sake, that common sense has now finally prevailed.' It comes after Ms Reeves's department had to water down proposals to scrap the universal winter fuel payment and reforms to the welfare system. The Government said: 'From 6 April 2027 all death in service benefits payable from registered pension schemes will be out of scope of Inheritance Tax, regardless of whether the scheme is discretionary or non-discretionary.' The HMRC document said that the new plans were 'in line with the broader policy objective of removing inconsistencies in the Inheritance Tax treatment of different types of pension benefits'. Labour 'standing up' for service personnel? Death in service payments are usually a lump sum paid to named beneficiaries of a worker who dies while on the company payroll. It is typically the equivalent of four-times the late individual's salary. For members of the Armed Forces, these are paid whether or not the individual was 'on duty' at the time of their death. Those who die 'on duty' were to continue to benefit from a separate tax-free arrangement on their death in service payments from 2027. But a military worker who dies while technically 'off duty', such as by sudden illness or accident, would have been stung by the proposed inheritance tax rules. Maj Gen Neil Marshall, the chief executive of the Forces Pension Society, told The Telegraph in January that military servicemen and women are unable to put the payment into trust, because they are part of the Armed Forces pension scheme. Labour sought to shore up support from the Armed Forces community at last year's general election, declaring the party would be 'standing up' for service personnel and veterans. The party was successful in winning over voters from military backgrounds, most notably winning in Aldershot, the site of a major garrison, for the first time in more than a century.
