Politics

In one of London’s most dangerous areas, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can be deadly

Published

2 years ago

November 7, 2023

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“Jaden” was stabbed a couple of weeks ago while walking the streets of Croydon, south London.

Luckily for him, it wasn’t serious. But a week later, he was arrested for carrying a knife of his own.

When we meet him, he tells us he is appearing before magistrates in the morning.

The thing is, Jaden – which is not his real name – is only 13 years old.

He seems a quiet boy, dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and wearing a dark coat with the hood pulled up over his head.

A bag is slung over one shoulder and he is constantly looking down at his phone.

We ask about the stabbing. What happened?

He pauses for a moment, then says: “Wrong place, wrong time.”

Welcome to Croydon, one of the most dangerous boroughs in the capital for a child to grow up in. Where “wrong place, wrong time” can be a lethal combination.

It is where local services have been decimated. The local council has declared that it is effectively bankrupt.

And it is where children carry knives.

There is another huge issue affecting Jaden’s life. He has not been to school at all this year, and that is putting him in huge danger, says James Watkins, a community worker.

“I think a lot of the older gang members target young people who have stopped going to school because they see them as vulnerable,” he explains.

“Sometimes young people just need to feel like they belong and because they’ve been kicked out of school they feel almost cast out of society and they can become easy targets.”

More Black Caribbean pupils are excluded from school than any other ethnic group. In 2021/22, 44% of all exclusions were Black Caribbean despite only making up just over 10% of the school population. And it is a similar figure nationally.

Official figures show that excluded children rarely return to mainstream school. They are cast out to the fringes of an already overstretched education system.

Like most excluded kids, Jaden ended up in a pupil referral unit (PRU) – a segregated school for youngsters for whom no mainstream school can be found. He has been excluded from two PRUs.

This group of children run the risk of disappearing from the system altogether, and are often called “ghost children”.

But demand for PRU is high and places are often hard to come by, according to Nicola Peters, from the Project for Youth Empowerment.

“The situation is just getting worse by the day and I don’t see it getting any better,” she says. “Demand is skyrocketing and the numbers of children being excluded keeps going up and up.

“There are pupil referral units popping up all over the place and we cannot accommodate all of the children who are being excluded.

“The education system for these kids is collapsing. For a lot of them, school is old and out of date and no longer supports their needs.”

The number of children regularly absent from school is double what it was before the pandemic.

Reports of an increase in anxiety among youngsters is also putting pressure on schools.

But there is also some evidence to suggest that there has been a “seismic” shift in parental attitudes towards school attendance.

A report, compiled by the public policy research agency Public First, draws on focus group conversations with parents from different backgrounds across the country, which shed some light on why children are not always in lessons.

A mother of two primary school children from Manchester told the report’s authors: “Pre-COVID, I was very much about getting the kids into school, you know, attendance was a big thing. Education was a major thing.

“After COVID, I’m not gonna lie to you, my take on attendance and absence now is like I don’t really care anymore. Life’s too short.”

But the bigger picture shows a lack of progress by government to tackle the problem.

A recent report by the Education Select Committee, made up of cross-party MPs, was critical of the government’s response to this crisis – saying there had been “no significant improvement in the speed” of reducing the absence numbers to pre-pandemic levels.

Andy Cook, chief executive of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a centre-right think tank, says the crisis could have far-reaching consequences for society.

“You go into any prison and you talk to the people there, 90% of them say they missed a lot of school on a regular basis. So we need to take this seriously.”

The CSJ says up to 9,000 more young offenders, including 2,000 violent criminals, could be on Britain’s streets by 2027 because of a rise in school absence, according to calculations based on official studies.

“We are storing up ourselves a load of problems,” Mr Cook warned.

“This issue is the whole ball game. It’s the ticking time bomb that’s already gone off. It is the most urgent thing facing us.”

Politics

The Belgrave Circle effect is hitting UK politics

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2025

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The Belgrave Circle effect is hitting UK politics

This is a story about a roundabout in Leicester.

It’s not a particularly special roundabout.

But it does tell us something about British politics.

Belgrave Circle, in the north of the city, was opened in March 2015 on the site of an old railway station known locally as “The Gateway to Skegness”.

Later that year, Leicester – along with the rest of the country – went to the polls in the 2015 general election.

The vote saw David Cameron win a majority and Ed Miliband resign as Labour leader.

But around the Belgrave Circle, something different was going on.

Because this is the spot where Leicester‘s three parliamentary constituencies meet, and in 2015 they were all held by Labour MPs who saw their majorities increase.

It’s a different story now.

Stand in the middle of the roundabout and face towards Abbey Park and you’ll see the city’s only remaining Labour seat – that of cabinet minister Liz Kendall.

Turn around and face the B&M Home Store, and you’ll find the only place the Conservatives picked up at the last election.

This freak occurrence happened after the Labour vote was split by two independent candidates – both of whom also happened to be former MPs for the city.

Labour saw its vote share cut in half here, and then some.

The Tory vote dropped as well, but not by enough to stop the party coming through the middle and taking the seat by four thousand votes.

But walk to the south of this roundabout and you’ll get to where an independent candidate went one step further.

Local optician Shockat Adam won this seat last year, defeating frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth in a campaign focused mainly on Gaza and events in the Middle East.

What happened on this roundabout last July is no one-off. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest these phenomena could be on the rise around the country.

Since the election, Labour’s vote share has plunged, and its base has fractured as support for insurgent parties on the right and left surges.

A lot of the focus from this has been on Reform UK and how Labour can stop Nigel Farage in traditional ‘red wall’ seats in the midlands and the north.

And yes, Labour is leaking support to Reform on the right. But what’s often not talked about is the greater number of votes its losing on the left.

A rejuvenated Green Party under Zack Polanski is chasing Labour close in some polls, while Your Party is attempting to form a separate fighting force straddling ex-Corbynites, independent pro-Gaza candidates and those from the more hard-left tradition.

Come the next election, this could all have far-reaching consequences.

Sky News has ranked all 404 Labour seats according to how at risk they are to these new forces on the left. We created this ‘vulnerability index’ using factors like voting history, population and demographic data.

It shows several cabinet ministers in the top 25 most vulnerable, including Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in fourth place, Sir Keir Starmer in thirteenth place and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy in twenty-third place.

All three of these Labour big beasts have seen their majorities cut in the last election by a Green candidate, an independent candidate or a mix of the two.

In Birmingham Ladywood, the total number of votes won by independent and green candidates exceed the number won by the Home Secretary.

That could trigger trouble, given the Greens and Your Party have indicated they may be open to the idea of local “progressive pacts”.

But in the neighbouring constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North, the result last year shows how an altogether different result could materialise.

Here, Labour’s vote was again split by a left-wing insurgent candidate – this time from George Galloway’s Workers Party.

But the conservative vote was also cut in half by Reform.

If Nigel Farage can unite the right in places like this, he could come through the middle – in much the same way the Tories did in Leicester.

So how can the government fight back?

Part of the answer, according to senior figures, is attempting to tell a more appealing story about the more overly left-wing chunks of their policy platform – such as the workers rights reforms and rental overhaul.

The hope is these stories may be given more of a hearing in 2026 when (or perhaps more accurately, if) a corner starts to be turned on big domestic priorities like the economy, the NHS and migration.

If that doesn’t happen, the real saving grace for Labour could be tactical voting.

The Greens and Your Party have made it clear that they will plough on with their campaigns against the government, even if it ultimately benefits Reform.

What’s less clear is whether left-wingers across the country will.

If they are faced with the prospect of Nigel Farage in Downing Street, could they hold their nose and stick with Labour?

It all begs the question – who is their great enemy: the government or Reform?

Ministers are already trying to emphasise a binary choice when they talk about Labour being the one single “bulwark” to Nigel Farage.

Expect more attempts to mobilise this anti-Reform vote in the years ahead.

But that’s made more difficult by what happened around Leicester’s Belgrave Circle. The same political fracturing that’s dogged the right in years past now being replicated on the left.

Labour’s ability to pick up the electoral pieces may prove decisive in whether what took place on a shabby East Midlands roundabout in July 2024 is recreated across the country in a few years’ time.

Politics

US lawmakers push to fix staking ‘double taxation’ before 2026

Published

5 hours ago

December 22, 2025

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US lawmakers push to fix staking ‘double taxation’ before 2026

A group of 18 bipartisan US House lawmakers is pushing the country’s tax agency to review its rules on crypto staking taxes before the start of 2026.

In a letter sent to Internal Revenue Service acting commissioner Scott Bessent on Friday, the lawmakers, led by Republican Mike Carey, asked for a review and update guidance on “burdensome” crypto staking tax laws.

“This letter is simply requesting fair tax treatment for digital assets and ending the double taxation of staking rewards is a big step in the right direction,” Carey said.

The letter calls for taxes from staking rewards to be applied at the time of sale, so that “stakers are taxed based on a correct statement of their actual economic gain.”

*Mike Carey is leading lawmakers to change crypto staking tax rules. Source:* *Mike Carey*

The lawmakers argued that the current laws, which see stakers taxed upon receiving rewards and again when selling them, are hindering participation in the staking market, when the laws should be designed to support a fundamental part of certain blockchains.

“Millions of Americans own tokens on these networks. Network security — and American leadership — requires those taxpayers to stake those tokens, but today the administrative burden and prospect of over taxation discourages that participation,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter concludes by asking if there are any administrative barriers to updating the guidance before the end of the year, and asserts that they should be changed to support the current administration’s goal of “strengthening US leadership in digital asset innovation.”

Not the only push for changes to crypto tax rules

On Saturday, House representatives Max Miller and Steven Horsford also introduced a discussion draft aiming to ease the tax obligations on crypto users by exempting small stablecoin transactions from capital gains taxes and offering a deferral option for staking and mining rewards.