John Souter

A 7-year-old boy gets on a train in Tokyo. Alone. No mother. No phone. No adult watching him at all. He bows to the driver, finds his seat, and folds his hands in his lap. He is going to school. By himself. Across a city of 14 million strangers. And not one person on that train thinks anything is wrong. A businessman glances up, then goes back to his paper. An old woman smiles at the boy and looks away. Nobody films him. Nobody calls anyone. Nobody is afraid. Because in Japan, a small child alone is not a victim waiting to happen. He is just a kid going to school. Like every kid before him. I grew up being told the opposite. Lock the door. Watch your back. Trust no one. Never let them out of your sight, not for one second, or the world will take them. And somewhere along the way, I started to believe that was simply the truth. Then I watched a 7-year-old ride home alone through a city of millions. And step off at his stop. And walk the rest of the way. Safe. We had this once, too. A street that watched your kids. A town that brought them home. Japan didn't find some secret. They just never stopped being decent to each other. Quietly. Every single day. While the rest of us forgot we ever could. That little boy will get home tonight. He always does.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer says those involved in putting up Union Jacks or St George flags will feel the full force of the law and will be dealt with within a week. He hates British people.

FLASHBACK: Minister Andy Burnham "rejects ID card fears" As a Home Office minister in 2005, Burnham was responsible for helping push Tony Blair’s original ID Cards scheme through Parliament Burnham said biometric technology, with fingerprints, iris scans and facial images stored on a database linked to the card, was a "major step forward"

Angela Rayner was sent a letter on the 12th of April warning her of fake electoral candidates in her constituency. Elected councillor Khaleel Khan in Tameside sent the letter but did not receive a reply from either Rayner or her office. The mystery deepens following the arrest of 5 people who have been accused of setting up independent candidates so as to split the vote…

In 1980, we had one regulator for every 11,000 people working in financial services. Today, it's closer to one regulator for every *75* people. Bureaucrats always create more rules and always work to expand their powers. The idea that we can "regulate for growth" is ludicrous.

Andy Burnham says land in the UK is ‘undertaxed’. Yet more financial punishment awaits British farmers - who are already at breaking point.

A bid for the revitalisation of Britain is synonymous, one-to-one, with a war on fraud and corruption, which now infests almost every layer of our social and institutional life. For instance, our immensely unimpressive Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has just come within touching distance of doing something right by referring the Public Sector Fraud Authority to investigate organised, large-scale fraud against the British student loans system. At the centre of the racket sits an outfit called Oxford Business College - a private "franchised provider" partnered with several British universities, which you just know is producing reams of little blaggers pecking their way around the u-bend of the job market telling some poor would-be sucker that they "went to Oxford" - and the broader franchise model that the higher education sector has been quietly running for the past fifteen years. The mechanism by which this fraud functions is worth describing in detail. A Russell Group or post-92 university enters into a commercial franchise agreement with a private provider, allowing that provider to deliver degree programmes under the university's name. Then the provider rents a building in an unfashionable part of a British city and enrols "students", many of them foreign nationals, often of limited English. I have one of these right down the road from me. The Student Loans Company then pays out the tuition fee directly to the university, which retains a percentage and forwards the balance to the private franchise operator. The maintenance loan, meanwhile, is paid directly into the student's bank account. The student, on enrolling, has in theory begun a three-year course; in practice, on a large enough scale to have triggered a formal fraud investigation, the student has begun something else entirely. Multiple £millions have already disappeared down the model's pipes. The Public Sector Fraud Authority's investigation, once it has finished, is likely to identify a number considerably larger than this. You, the British taxpayer has, in other words, been quietly underwriting an arrangement in which a private operator and an established university split the proceeds of recruiting people the system did not need recruiting, on a maintenance loan the British state will be repaid for from a borrower who is, in many cases, no longer in the country, away and laughing with the cash. Your cash. This is the precise educational analogue of the immigration figures published in the last couple of days. The stated purpose was respectable: opening up degree-level education to people who could benefit from it. Ok, that's a nominally noble objective, in straight-ahead terms and if you can shoulder the costs. But the actual outcome, in too many cases, has been what it always seems to be nowadays: taking the mickey out of the British public's trust and largesse. The harvesting of public money via the maintenance loan and the tuition fee, with foreign enrolments as the vehicle and the franchise contract as the legal cover for splitting the proceeds between a private operator and a partner university content not to ask hard questions. The institutions involved are not, in the main, marginal ones. The franchise model is in use across the British higher education estate. Many of the partner universities are well-known names that the British public still considers respectable. Each one of them has been signing partnership contracts with private providers and forwarding student loan payments without - to put it gently - adequate institutional curiosity about what is happening at the other end of the arrangement. It's time to close the franchise loophole. As per Progress' vision of things, public-money-backed student loans will be paid only for courses that meet the same standards as the host university's own courses, at premises subject to the same inspection regime, with student attendance verified by a single, transparent national mechanism. Where partner universities have profited from fraudulent enrolments through their franchisees, the profits will be reclaimed, and the institutions involved will lose their access to public funding until the rot has been demonstrably and comprehensively cleared. And then it's relentless follow-up. No peace for a long time for those who have transgressed, until the guarantors of the public interest can be sure that they've learned their lesson. What the country is paying for, with this scheme as with so many others in so many other contexts, is the continued operation of an institutional racket dressed up as opportunity.