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Keir Starmer is at odds with his powerful chief of staff over whether to scrap a two-child cap on benefits, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, a costly policy move that the British prime minister is under pressure to make after bruising local election results.

Starmer favors lifting the limit as a way to demonstrate the ruling Labour Party’s commitment to alleviating child poverty, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal government matters. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, however, has been one of the main opponents of the move, contesting the estimated £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) expense ahead of the government’s most recent fiscal statement in March.
[…]
Starmer has faced repeated calls from Labour lawmakers to reverse the cap, which currently limits child benefit payments to two children per household. Rather than heed pressure to change the policy immediately upon entering government in July, the government delayed a decision by announcing a consultation on a broader child poverty strategy. McSweeney urged Starmer at that time to rule out scrapping the two-child cap, according to people familiar with the matter. He argued that polling shows that Labour voters view the cap as fair, the people said. Starmer pushed back and removing the cap has remained an option under consideration by the government.

Starmer, Chancellor of Exchequer Rachel Reeves and Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall proposed scrapping the cap in the March statement, according to the people, before concluding there wasn’t enough money to fund it. McSweeney was again opposed to the idea, the people said.

The Downing Street official said any suggestion that McSweeney had blocked a worked-up plan supported by three ministers would not be true.
[…]
Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown added to the pressure on Starmer on Wednesday, saying that scrapping the cap was “the cost-effective way of getting more children out of poverty” in an interview with ITV. He separately told Sky News that Reeves could raise £3 billion by either increasing taxes on the gambling industry or reducing the interest paid to commercial banks for their deposits held by the Bank of England.

One government figure in favor of the scrapping the cap countered McSweeney’s polling argument by pointing out that most Labour voters also don’t want child poverty to go up. Lifting the cap is the most financially efficient way of doing that, the person said.

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

Police have been issued guidance on how to search women’s homes for abortion drugs and check their phones for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss.

New guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) on “child death investigation” advises officers to search for “drugs that can terminate pregnancy” in cases involving stillbirths. The NPCC, which sets strategic direction for policing across the country UK, also suggests a woman’s digital devices could be seized to help investigators “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy”. That could include checking a woman’s internet searches, messages to friends and family, and health apps, “such as menstrual cycle and fertility trackers”, it states.

Details are also provided for how police could bypass legal requirements for a court order to obtain medical records about a woman’s abortion from NHS providers.

Toot

Dozens have thrown their support behind a letter urging the government to "delay" the proposals, which they blasted as "the biggest attack on the welfare state" since Tory austerity.

The MPs - who are restless after Labour's poor showing at last week's local elections - warned the prime minister that his plans to slash the welfare bill by £5bn a year were "impossible to support" without a "change in direction".

In the letter, seen by Sky News, the MPs said the reforms - which will tighten eligibility criteria for incapacity benefits - had caused a "huge amount of anxiety among disabled people and their families".

"The planned cuts of more than £7bn represent the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne ushered in the years of austerity and over three million of our poorest and most disadvantaged will be affected," they wrote.
[…]
A government impact assessment in March found an additional 250,000 people - including 50,000 children - could be pushed into relative poverty in the financial year ending 2030.

The MPs went on to say that while the benefits system needed reform, this needed to be done "with a genuine dialogue with disabled people's organisations".

"We also need to invest in creating job opportunities and ensure the law is robust enough to provide employment protections against discrimination," they added.

"Without a change in direction, the green paper will be impossible to support."

Keir Starmer has defended his plans to curb net migration after an angry backlash from MPs, businesses and industry to a speech in which he said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tough new policies.

The rhetoric was likened by some critics to the language of Enoch Powell, and the prime minister was accused of pandering to the populist right by insisting he intended to “take back control of our borders” and end a “squalid chapter” of rising inward migration.

Some politicians claimed that his words had echoed Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.

When asked to respond to accusations he had adopted Powell’s rhetoric, Starmer told the Guardian: “Migrants make a massive contribution to the UK, and I would never denigrate that.”

But in words that could further enrage his critics, Starmer insisted that new migrants must “learn the language and integrate” once in the UK. He said: “Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.”
[…]
Starmer was speaking before the publication of a 69-page immigration white paper that sets out details of how the government intends to introduce restrictions across all forms of visas to the UK.

A new Home Office assessment showing the impact of changes to study and work visas and the introduction of English language tests said there would be about 100,000 fewer people entering the UK. It suggests net migration could fall to 300,000 by 2029, but the government declined to confirm a target.

Net migration, the difference between the number of people moving to the UK and the number leaving, was 728,000 in the 12 months to June 2024. Under the previous Conservative government, the figure rose to more than 900,000.

Starmer said that the current immigration system “encourages some businesses to bring in lower-paid workers rather than invest in our young people”.

Rain Newton-Smith, the Confederation of British Industry’s chief executive, said: “The reality for businesses is that it is more expensive and difficult to fill a vacancy with immigration than if they could hire locally or train workers … When considered alongside the large fees and accompanying charges, foreign workers are simply not the ‘easy’ or ‘cheap’ alternative.”

Bluesky

Good day all, the Lemmy devs (the people that make the software this website runs) are currently underfunded. If you're willing and able, then it'd be greatly appreciated if you could donate to help out little corner of the internet get better.

If, for whatever reason, you don't want to support the hosting of lemmy.ml but do want to support the developers, then make donations through something other than OpenCollective.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

Zack Polanski, who has been deputy leader since 2022 and serves as a London assembly member, will challenge [Carla] Denyer and [Adrian] Ramsay this summer despite them taking the party to its best-ever general election result last year, winning four seats.

Polanski told the Guardian he believed the pair had done a good job, but that the Greens needed to meet the challenge of Reform UK, which has a membership about four times bigger than his party and surged to a mass of victories in Thursday’s local elections.

“People are done with the two old parties and we’re in this dangerous moment where Nigel Farage is absolutely ready to fill that vacuum,” Polanski said. “We should never turn into Nigel Farage. But there are things we can learn in terms of being really clear in speaking to people.

“There’s an empty space in politics, where we’re not being as bold as we can be. Being sensible and professional are good qualities. But I don’t think they should be the central qualities.”

The Greens in England and Wales have about 60,000 members, while Reform have more than 220,000, a discrepancy Polanski said indicated the need for a change of direction.

“I don’t believe there are more people in this country who align with the politics of Reform than they do with the Green party,” he said. “In fact we know that, because when Green party policies are polled, they are frequently the most-liked policies, and we are the most-liked party. So why are people not joining?

“We’re not visible enough. I don’t want to see our membership grow incrementally. I want to see us be a mass movement. There’s something here around eco-populism: still being absolutely based in evidence, science and data – and never losing that – but telling a really powerful story.”
[…]
Polanski argues the party needs to take advantage of “massive” disillusionment with the Labour government, something he said was for now mainly helping fuel support for Reform.

“If you were trying to create the circumstances for the far right to rise, you would be doing exactly what Keir Starmer is doing now, which is protecting the wealth and power of the super rich,” he said.