‘We need to get back to British’: concern over immigration in Doncaster before local elections
“You can’t fix the system with the same hands that broke it,” Richie Vallance shouted through a megaphone from his mobility scooter,“Let’s make Doncaster Doncaster again,” he yelled at passersby in the city centre, who mostly politely ignored him,Vallance is standing as an independent candidate for mayor in the local elections on 1 May, when all 55 seats on the city’s council will also be up for grabs,The small South Yorkshire city is a key battleground that will be a test of Labour’s resilience in the face of rising public support for Reform UK,Nigel Farage’s party is surging ahead in the polls and in Doncaster there is a good chance it will wrestle control from Labour, which has been in power for nearly 50 years.
Last month, a poll conducted by Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph found Reform was expected to win 32 of the council’s 55 seats,“It’s a beautiful town, with so much potential,” said Vallance, who has some sympathies with Reform and previously explored standing for the party,“I was all about Brexit,” he said, “and we need to deal with the immigration problem in Doncaster,”Immigration was on the minds of lots of people in the city centre on Wednesday, with some saying they felt it had had a negative impact on the city, particularly when it came to asylum seekers, of whom there are 688 housed in Doncaster, according to Home Office figures,“I know they’ve got to be put somewhere but Doncaster has changed and it’s not for the better,” one man said.
This sentiment is exactly what Reform is hoping to harness, and why Farage paid a visit to the city at the start of April in support of Alexander Jones, the party’s mayoral candidate.While there was also disgust among some Doncaster residents at the idea of voting for Reform, Labour was not popular either.Most people, in one way or another, pointed to what they felt was decline in the city, blaming the cash-strapped council.It is something the current mayor, Labour’s Ros Jones, who has been in the directly elected post since 2013, is all too aware of, having battled under the weight of enormous budget cuts from central government.She said: “I have made incredibly difficult decisions in terms of council services over the years of austerity, protecting frontline services and keeping council tax low, with Doncaster having the lowest council tax in Yorkshire.
”Though Jones had some supporters on the streets of Doncaster – one couple said they were “not unhappy” with the council and called Farage a liar and a “mini-Trump” – she is also contending with the council’s reputation.Near the start of her tenure, she pulled the local authority out of special measures after the tabloids called Doncaster the “worst council in Britain”, and the label seems to have stuck.Labour could face a bigger brand-recognition problem in Doncaster as some of those out and about only vaguely recognised Keir Starmer’s name.This might be cheering news for Reform except Farage’s name did not necessarily ring bells either.“Never heard of him,” said Shelly, who was out in the Frenchgate shopping centre with her friends Siobhan and Jade.
“Was he in the Celebrity jungle?” Jade asked.“He seemed all right but I wouldn’t know about his politics.”Though they did not know Reform, the trio did broadly agree with the party’s policies on immigration.“We need to get back to British, not everybody else,” Siobhan said.“We shouldn’t be fetching migrants when we can’t even look after our own.
”Shelly said: “I daren’t say owt because it sounds racist,”They felt people coming to the UK were getting better treatment than those born here, particularly because they were put up in hotels and given homes without having to work,The UK has a legal duty to house asylum seekers, and paid work is forbidden under asylum rules,The women said they were not against this, they just wanted to see British people better looked after,“It’s a bleak future for the next generation,” Siobhan said.
The issue for all parties is likely to be getting voters to the polls,Most people the Guardian spoke to in Doncaster on Wednesday lunchtime said they did not vote and had not known there was a local election happening at all,“I don’t do politics,” one man said,“Whoever’s the prime minister, good luck to them,”Naomi Nache, from Romania, and Michael Yip, from Scunthorpe, moved to Doncaster when they started working in an Amazon warehouse.
They have plans to leave for a bigger city, citing a lack of things to do in Doncaster, particularly on the “artistic side”,Safety was a big issue for Nache, who said she felt afraid to go out in the city on her own,“It can be a bit scary,It doesn’t feel safe,I wouldn’t come to the town centre by myself,” she said.
Vallance has campaigned on public safety and tackling antisocial behaviour, knowing something about the subject himself having received a criminal conviction in 2016 for dressing up as the “Donny Klown” in an effort to attract attention to societal problems.“I scared a lot of people and I’m really sorry about what I did.I went about it the wrong way,” Vallance said.“I took the mask off many years ago.Now I want to show who the real clowns are.
”
Scottish Water staff to strike for two days as pay standoff continues
Scottish Water staff will strike for two days from the early hours of Tuesday as a standoff over pay continues at the state-owned company.The striking workers’ union warned that emergency repairs and quality checks to water supplied to 5 million people across Scotland would not be carried out during the action on Tuesday and Wednesday.More than 1,000 workers in the Unison union will go on strike for the second time in a month in the pay dispute, after rejecting a deal that the union said was 2.6% and followed years of real-terms cuts to wages.The Unison Scottish Water branch secretary, Tricia McArthur, said: “Scottish Water workers are simply asking to be paid fairly for the essential services upon which everyone in Scotland relies
The Guardian view on City deregulation: a recipe for recklessness
In its desire to ensure the City of London remains attractive after Brexit, the Treasury seems to have forgotten one of the major lessons of the 2008 financial crisis: when regulation is lax, risks accumulate. This month, it launched a consultation about whether it was time to lighten the rules governing alternative asset managers, including private equity and hedge funds, in the belief that doing so will boost growth. There is little evidence to support this idea, and every reason to think it could exacerbate systemic risks.The proposal is consistent with Rachel Reeves’s belief that expanding the financial sector will deliver economic prosperity. The chancellor has suggested that post-crisis regulations went “too far”
Australians pay $84 a month for their internet. Why so expensive, and what can be done to lower the cost?
Australians are paying an average of $84 per month for internet access on the NBN – and in a cost-of-living crisis, questions are being raised about why cheaper internet is not available for people on lower incomes.What could be done to lower NBN pricing plans, and can we learn from overseas?According to the latest report, about 8.6m of the 12.5m premises able to connect to the NBN are now using the service in Australia.Consumer advocacy group Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (Accan’s) latest survey conducted by Essential, of 1,065 people, found Australians are paying $84 per month on average for their home internet connection, with 31% paying between $81 and $100, 30% paying between $61 and $80, 20% paying over $100, and just 13% paying $60 or under (with the rest unsure)
Views of TikTok posts with electronic music outgrow those using indie
It is another example of the parallel worlds in the music industry. The Gallagher brothers may be taking over the world’s stadiums this summer, but over on TikTok users are moving to a different beat.Views of posts using electronic music as a soundtrack, including techno and house, outgrew those tagged for indie and alternative for the first time in 2024, according to the social media app.There were more than 13bn views of videos tagged #ElectronicMusic worldwide last year, an increase of 45% on 2023, representing faster growth than the “indie and alternative” and “rap and hip-hop” genres. Videos created with the electronic music tag grew by more than 100% over the same period
Grounds for concern with credibility urgently needed on racing data
What is the state of the going at Thirsk before the track’s meeting tomorrow evening? In a well-run racing industry, this should not be a trick question, but it does rather feel that way after James Sanderson, the track’s clerk of the course, admitted in an interview last week that when it comes to GoingStick readings – the numbers that professionals and punters alike rely upon as an objective guide to the state of the ground – he feels at liberty to massage the data as he sees fit.Sanderson told an interviewer from the Barstewards Enquiry podcast, which is a sponsor at his track, that he had knocked a point off the actual reading from his GoingStick before publication ahead of Thirsk’s meeting on 12 April. He subsequently told the Racing Post that he had done so because “if we published the readings as they came out of the ground they would be misleading”, and added for good measure that he does not believe he is the only clerk of course that routinely tweaks the numbers.“If the Racing Post did an anonymous survey of clerks of the course,” Sanderson said, “and asked do they ever change the reading, or manipulate the process to get a reading they’re happy with, I’d be amazed if you didn’t get 50% or more saying yes. I know others do, I talk to them
Let it out or bottle it up? Does venting emotion harm performance in elite sport? | Sean Ingle
Two scenes from an extraordinary week. The first: Justin Rose, a gentleman in a bearpit as Augusta hollered loud and long for Rory McIlroy. The second: the British tennis player Harriet Dart, causing a stink by asking for her French opponent to apply deodorant as “she’s smelling really bad” before succumbing to a 6-0, 6-3 thrashing.Pressure does strange things, of course. But the wildly different reactions of Rose, Dart and indeed McIlroy, whose final round became part white-knuckle ride, part pass‑the‑parcel, raises an intriguing question: when the heat is on, should sport stars let their emotions out or bottle them up to improve their performance?Of course it is encoded in sport’s DNA that letting off steam can sometimes be a good thing
Nigel Farage defends allowing US chlorinated chicken into UK as part of trade deal
Two-party politics is dying in Britain. Voters want more than just Labour and Tories | Robert Ford
Tories and Reform use the steel crisis to knock clean energy. They’re wrong: it will secure all our futures| Ed Miliband
Cutting business ties with China would be ‘foolish’, Reeves says amid reports of US pressure
Labour MPs urge Starmer to ‘get out there’ with Trump-style media strategy
‘We need to get back to British’: concern over immigration in Doncaster before local elections