Peter Franklin 🌳

Britain is a Christian country. The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words. This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on. Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever. @Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations.  What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come? Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.

Being against the unaffordable expansion of the welfare state is now "far left"? For God's sake, grow up, man.

Like George Osborne before him, Nigel Farage has prioritised the old over the young. That might win Reform the next election; future elections not so much. From me for @UnHerd: unherd.com/newsroom/farag…

ludicrously stupid on Starmer's part

No, *modernism* ravaged our civilisation. The same thing happened in towns and cities across the West that weren't bombed. Including/especially the United States.

This comparison is an indictment of both the liberal Left and the liberal Right

The case for replacing Keir Starmer is overwhelming. But are Labour MPs about to chicken-out again? 🥀 🐓 From me for @UnHerd: unherd.com/newsroom/labou…

I still can’t believe Parliament has legalised abortion up to the moment of birth. We live in a country where it is illegal to hunt a fox - or indeed to sell a drinking straw made of plastic - but lawful to kill a human baby. We have lost our way.

Nimbies have a point. Until they stop having a point we won’t build the houses we need.

I think everyone excited about New Towns should visit Northstowe, a new New Town outside Cambridge (about 40 mins away), and the largest New Town in England since Milton Keynes. It's been a disaster so far. It's been built very poorly/cheaply made and planned. The housing stock is ugly and cheap. It doesn't have a shop, a GP, or a gym, and it's been kind of a ghost town the times I've been. A lot of the residents are furious and feel totally misled into buying there. And yet *it's probably the most prime place in England to build a New Town*! So what's the problem? Partially it's lots of costs being put on to the new housing, including a 40% affordable requirement, which means developers build cheaply and cut corners to be able to have something to sell at a price people can afford (in the same way high land costs mean new builds are worse quality). Partially it's because Homes England, the Quango delivering it (and likely any future New Towns), is useless. Labour's supposed wave of New Towns (I actually doubt any will happen of any significant size) will suffer from all of these problems. And most won't even have the benefit of being a short commute away from Cambridge!

It’s make or break time for Reform’s political strategy. From me for @ConHome: conservativehome.com/2026/03/24/pet…

Public utility infrastructure has no need to be ugly. We do it to ourselves.

JOB: Assistant Editor, ConservativeHome An exciting opportunity to join our editorial team. You don’t have to be a journalist to apply. We’re seeking someone who can write original, insightful content, with knowledge of centre-right politics. Details: conservativehome.com/careers

Is there anything that can stop the rise of the Green Party? From me for @UnHerd: unherd.com/newsroom/could…

Nick Timothy and Nigel Farage are right, and Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer are wrong. Small groups of people, of whatever religion, praying in public places is fine. And as a Christian country we should allow a special privilege for churches to lead services in our national spaces, like the Palm Sunday celebration that happens in Trafalgar Square. What we don't want is mass ritual observances intended to claim the civic realm for another religion, or assert the domination of another culture over our own Christian traditions. What happens in our national spaces is not neutral. People use Trafalgar Square, for celebrations and demonstrations, to make a point about the kind of country they want us to be. The Palm Sunday pageant reminds us of who we are - not as individuals (many or most of us don't identify as Christians at all) but as a national community, with the roots of our institutions in the ground of the Bible and our most solemn communal moments, from coronations to funerals, mediated through the liturgies of the Church. A mass Adhan held there, or in any town square, is making a different point: that Britain is not a Christian country, and that - inshallah - one day it shall be Muslim. This is unacceptable to the British public and indeed incompatible with our constitution. As ever with these debates, the issue is partly one of kind and partly one of degree. There is an issue with Islam itself as a religion which in most interpretations does not admit of pluralism or freedom of conscience, and therefore is inherently aggrandising, including over territory. But with a bit of confidence and a bit of toleration we could handle that - if it were not for the issue of degree. It is the scale of Islam in Britain, and the ambition of its leaders for greater scale, that makes the problem. The numbers of people who assembled for the adhan in Trafalgar Square, clearly and openly claiming the territory for a faith with no connection (indeed, with strong doctrinal disagreement) with the model of Western liberal democracy that Britain has developed and exported to the world - that is the problem. The numbers, whether everyone there understood it this way or not (and I suspect many did), convey an explicit threat to the foundations of our country. Being relaxed about other people's religion is a good thing, a very British thing. I don't mind modern druids dancing around Stonehenge in my constituency (arguably, though the historicity is tenuous, they have a claim to the place). I don't mind small groups of Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims demonstrating the reality of Britain's religious toleration by worshiping in Trafalgar Square. But let's not kid ourselves about this adhan, or pretend that we're just seeing another harmless expression of Britain's religious diversity. We are seeing an abuse of liberalism, led by people who are not themselves liberal; or - let us imagine they are acting in good faith - who are themselves deceived about what they are doing. It should not happen again. And it would be good to hear the Church of England say so.

Both Reform and the Tories have weak foreign policy teams – and it shows. From me for @UnHerd: unherd.com/newsroom/has-t…

Fingers crossed that this becomes a trend & we start removing hideous single use ugly shopping centres & replacing them with real middles, mingling uses & attractive as the public, not the advisors, understand it. Something very similar, on which we advised, has also recently won permission in Newbury . The moral is … createstreets.com/projects/resti…

@HCH_Hill @TheSimonEvans Good point!

@peterfranklin_ @TheSimonEvans Big Bad Wolf is a proper noun.

They will always but always find ways of taking more from us than they give in return. We’re better off out.