From public service broadcasting to an independent judiciary, these are the things that we must fight to keep

How can we defend our democracies against those who would destroy them? We talk a lot about strategies for keeping anti-liberal, nationalist populists out of power, but Donald Trump’s daily wielding of a wrecking ball shows that it’s equally important to reinforce your democracy so it can withstand a period of populists in power.

Germany has a concept called wehrhafte Demokratie, often weirdly translated as “militant democracy” but actually meaning a democracy capable of defending itself. Under this motto, some in Germany are proposing to ban Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now one of the most popular parties in the country. That’s the wrong way to go. It would only reinforce the far-right party’s supporters in their conviction that the democratic state itself is a kind of liberal elitist conspiracy, and impart to the AfD the nimbus of martyrdom. The French experiment of a “republican arc”, in which virtually all the other parties agree only on keeping out Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is also visibly backfiring. Such a wide range of parties unsurprisingly fails to agree on urgently needed reforms and the National Rally can go on criticising from the sidelines. So it’s worth contemplating the example of the Netherlands, where the party of the inflammatory populist Geert Wilders was allowed into power in a coalition government, failed to deliver, brought that government down by withdrawing from the coalition, and lost the subsequent election (albeit only narrowly) to a liberal party led by the young, dynamic Rob Jetten.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Coding purists once considered BASIC harmful. AI can't even manage that

Opinion  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a singular project possessed of prospects is in want of a team. That team has to be built from good developers with experience, judgement, analytic and logic skills, and strong interpersonal communication. Where AI coding fits in remains strongly contentious. Opinion on vibe coding in corporate IT is more clearly stated: you're either selling the stuff or steering well clear.…

The US is one big grift these days: the Trump Administration, traditional and social media, corporations, crypto, financial markets are all selling some kind of spurious promise. It’s hard to pick the most egregious example. But for me, it’s hard to go past Tesla. Having lost its dominant position in the electric car market, the company ought to be on the edge of delisting. Instead, its current market capitalisation is $US1.33 trillion ($A 2 trillion). Shareholders have just agreed on an incentive deal with Elon Musk, premised on the claim that he can take that number to $8.5 trillion.

Having failed with the Cybertruck and robotaxis, Tesla’s value depends almost entirely on the projected success of the Optimus humanoid robot. There’s a strong case that Optimus will be outperformed by rivals like Unitree But the bigger question is: why build a humanoid robot at all?

The choice of a humanoid form factor reveals more about the sloppy thinking of our tech elite than about engineering logic. The design represents a triumph of anthropomorphic fantasy over functional optimization, producing machines that excel primarily at generating media buzz rather than performing useful work.

In promoting Optimus, Tesla offers a long list of functions such as robot might perform: lifting and stacking goods in warehouses, operating in dangerous situations with ground too uneven for wheels and tracks, and performing various kinds of domestic labour.

In each of these cases, there is a better alternative available. Modern warehouses are designed around automated systems that exploit the advantages of robotics —conveyor networks, sorting systems, and wheeled or tracked robots specifically designed for lifting and moving tasks.

Industrial robots—fixed-position systems with multiple articulated arms—have dominated automotive and electronics assembly for decades precisely because they abandon human form constraints in favour of functional optimisation.

Mobile warehouse robots can navigate autonomously while carrying loads that would topple any humanoid robot. Meanwhile, human workers remain more cost-effective for complex picking tasks, combining visual recognition, fine motor control, and problem-solving capabilities that no current robot approaches.

In less controlled environments, with uneven ground surfaces, quadruped robots (commonly presented as dog-like) are more stable than bipeds. They can be equipped with a wide range of grasping appendages including, but not limited to, the mechanical hands of a humanoid robot. Examples are already in use for tasks like bomb disposal and disaster response.

In domestic applications, Musk’s presentations envision Optimus folding laundry, preparing meals, and performing general housework—tasks that supposedly justify the human form factor because homes are designed for human occupancy.

This argument doesn’t stand up to even minimal scrutiny. Specialized appliances consistently outperform generalist approaches in domestic environments—robotic vacuum cleaners navigate more efficiently than any humanoid could, dishwashers clean more thoroughly than human hands, and washing machines handle laundry with greater consistency than any robot attempting to mimic human movements. Where genuine flexibility is required, the combination of purpose-built tools and human intelligence remains unmatched. The complexity of truly autonomous domestic robots would require artificial intelligence capabilities that remain decades away, if achievable at all.

A final idea is that of robots as companions for lonely humans. This seems likely to fall into the “uncanny valley” – too human-like to be viewed as a machine, but too mechanical to be seen as human. But, if there is any market for Optimus, this will probably be it.

The humanoid form factor serves primarily to create an illusory impression of human-like intelligence. By mimicking human appearance and movement, these robots suggest cognitive capabilities they fundamentally lack. The fact that humans are more intelligent than dogs encourages the fallacious (implicit) inference that robot resambling must be more intelligent than one resembling a dog.

The humanoid form factor consistently proves inferior to specialized alternatives across every proposed application domain. I persists because it generates the kind of media attention and investor enthusiasm that Tesla requires for its business model. Effective robotics emerges from careful analysis of specific problems and optimisation for particular environments, not from attempts to recreate human form and movement. Until the technology sector abandons its anthropomorphic fantasies in favour of functional engineering, robotic development will remain trapped between impressive demonstrations and practical irrelevance.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s share price keeps going up, along with (until very recently), crypto, AI stocks, and the fortunes of the Trump family. By this time, the remaining sceptics have given up short-selling and retired to the sidelines to wait for the crash. That’s about the best advice I could give (bearing in mind that I Am Not a Financial Advisor).

But I’d be interested to read any contrary views on why humanoid robots are The Next Big Thing, or why bubbles like this can last forever.

The government spent this week outlining a series of morally depraved proposals on asylum seekers. Each day another vicious, spiteful announcement. Each day, another step towards the ravine’s edge.

Stripping asylum seekers of their jewellery when they arrive. Deporting children. Keeping proven refugees in a state of perpetual administrative limbo for decades, so they can never put down roots or have any sense of security. The sort of thing someone proposes when they have lost any lingering sense of decency or moral vigour.

This series of interventions was treated as a rare moment of success for the government. “Shabana Mahmood’s asylum crackdown landed exactly as officials hoped in the media bloodstream,” the Politico newsletter reported. The government had managed to control the news agenda, which apparently is what matters now. It won supportive front pages in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

The core thing to understand about these policies is that they will not work. Indeed, they are not even meant to work. On a basic logical level, it is obvious that they will not. Mahmood claims they will deter people arriving in small boats. But the policies are not as severe as the previous Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, or its refusal to process asylum claims at all. That did not deter arrivals. Why should the new policies do so? They won’t. In all probability, Mahmood knows they won’t. She doesn’t care.

You can see the practical ambivalence about all this in the lack of detail. The government has no real idea of how it would go about seizing people’s jewellery. It cannot describe how it would assess assets or forcibly secure them. There is no value threshold. But then, the jewellery proposal is not designed to work. It is probably not even really designed to be implemented. It is designed to be heard.

The policy is eerily reminiscent of the Nazis, who stripped Jews of their belongings at the camps. It also has a faint echo-memory of abuses during border disputes, such as Partition. It has a kind of fascist shimmer, a sense of cold-hearted bastards doing cold-hearted things, of people who have built walls around the parts of themselves which were once home to universal human feeling. That is not considered a defect. It is considered an advantage.

Apart from being immoral, Mahmood’s policy agenda is empty. It resolves nothing. It fixes nothing. And it therefore means that this interminable debate will continue, becoming ever more poisonous by the year.

What happens when we look at other areas of policy, at the things the government is expected to be getting on with? What happens when we look at social care, or prisons, or hospitals, or all the other things which we have forgotten to talk about due to our inflexible obsession with the immigration issue?

Here we find a similar fundamental quality. Unlike immigration, there is no sense of poison. Ministers do not feel the need to self-define as watercolour Nazis when it comes to hospital appointments. Nor is there such a focus on communication. But there is the same sense of foundational ineffectiveness: of policies which do not exist, or have not been properly thought through, or have no plan for implementation, or which simply will not work.

Subscribe now

This week, the Institute for Government (IfG) published its Performance Tracker 2025. It is an invaluable appraisal of government performance across the policy landscape. It offers one of the clearest tests of Labour performance and the state of the public sector.

It found solid progress in just one policy area, which is children’s social care. This is one of the instances where the government actually set out a clear plan for reform - creating new regional care cooperatives, controlling profiteering, emphasising early intervention, supporting families, reducing residential care reliance and improving data sharing, all of it backed by a fairly generous funding settlement in the spending review. “The plans,” the IfG concluded, “represent a serious attempt to move the system in a better direction”. Nice, reassuring words. If only there was more reason to use them.

There is some limited progress in other areas. The government took urgent action to address the prison crisis when it came to power, using an emergency measure to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentence. It then commissioned two substantial reviews, by David Gauke and Brian Leveson, on addressing the prison population problem and case backlogs, and accepted most of the recommendations. The ensuing sentencing bill is now making its way through parliament.

And yet even here, the IfG is unconvinced. They found that the current proposals “will certainly not be enough to get prisons out of their permanent state of crisis and support meaningful performance improvements”. Further reforms are expected in a police white paper, which was initially promised for last spring. It’s nowhere to be seen.

On the face of it, health seems like an area of government clarity. There’s a ten year health plan, which aims to provide community-based, preventative and digital care. Performance is trending upwards in hospitals, more GPs have come online and fewer hospital staff are leaving their jobs. The dashboard contains numerous indicators flashing green. But when you look a little deeper, this policy area starts to become disturbing.

Health secretary Wes Streeting announced that he would abolish NHS England, merge its functions into the Department for Health and Social Care, and reorganise Integrated Care Boards. That alone is an immense act of structural change. The NHS England decision was announced suddenly last March, with little clarity about how it would be delivered - symptomatic of a lack of thought in opposition about what the government wanted to do.

There is little evidence that the government has considered how those plans will interact with its other reform initiatives, such as the decision to introduce major structural changes to local government by phasing out district councils. Doing this at the same time as merging NHS England and changing the Integrated Care Boards will be immensely disruptive. It will consume the next four years. “Large swathes of staff in the NHS and local government will spend most of this parliament thinking about how to make this transition and whether their job is safe, rather than how their service can work more effectively,” the report found.

In other areas, public services are being actively worsened by the Labour government’s behaviour. Take adult social care. We have a good understanding of the problems in this sector. But instead of doing anything about them the government has commissioned yet another review, due to report in 2028. That means any difficult conversations about funding would take place just before the election, when it is least possible to have them. They have essentially decided to perpetuate a culture of nothingness. They have ensured that nothing can happen this parliament and that nothing is likely to happen in the next parliament either. Another lost decade.

That would be bad enough, but the government’s obsession with immigration means it is also committed to ending the care visa route, which provided the largest source of staff in recent years. What are the consequences of that? Staff shortages. What are the measures to address these shortages? There aren’t any. There are plans for fair pay agreements, but none for how to implement them or the funding consequences of doing so. If they were to work, they would entail higher wages, which would have to come from users or local or central government. But there is a refusal to even concede this point by ministers.

Subscribe now

It’s now been 16 months since the election. It’s 40 months until the next one. The government is running out of time. It is pissing it away.

It is unforgivable that so many areas of policy enjoyed no planning at all in opposition, with the party basically coming in and trying to work out what it wanted to do once in government.

It is unconscionable that the government still does not have a clear philosophical or political position to provide consistency to its behaviour. It is currently pushing for devolution in some departments - like the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government - and centralisation in others - like the Ministry of Health and the Home Office.

But most of all, it is unpardonable that Labour is spending time promoting hateful policies which it knows will not work, instead of doing the actual work of government which the country requires.

This is the classic Westminster madness, the prototypical bullshit pantomime: full of noise and activity and bluster and nothing underneath it.

We have spent the last few weeks discussing whether Rachel Reeves will break her election commitment on tax. And yet there is an equally important mandate which is never mentioned: the overall purpose of the government. Starmer went to the country on a seriousness ticket. He pledged grown-up government - competent, unflustered, diligent, with a sense of social responsibility. This was the encapsulation of his appeal, which voters then supported in droves.

He specifically did not pledge to pursue a rabidly anti-immigrant policy agenda. He has no mandate for that. He did not pledge to provide vacuums in place of policy initiatives, or back-of-a-fag-packet ideas which he knows are ineffective, or half-conceived system-level reform without a clear plan for implementation. He has no mandate for that either. In fact, quite the opposite.

There have been worse governments than this - of course there have. But there might never have been one which was quite so deceptive. Tony Blair promised to govern as a dead centre prime minister, with a conservative view on economics and a wish to increase equality of opportunity. That’s what he did. David Cameron promised to pointlessly and illiterately slash spending. That’s what he did. Boris Johnson promised to govern as an amiable and cynical clown. That’s what he did, to the cost of tens of thousands of lives. I might not like it. I might wish to Christ it had never happened. But you can’t accuse him of mislabelling the prospectus. He positioned himself as a clown, the country elected a clown and then we were governed by a clown, as demanded.

Starmer presented himself as a serious man for serious times. What did we get? More clown.

But still. They won the grid. The proposals “landed exactly as officials hoped in the media bloodstream”. So well done them. Round of applause. Maybe that’ll save them when the country next goes to the polls. But I very much doubt it.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

This newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, or you can subscribe on Spotify.

My i newspaper column this week was on the update to the immigration stats and when we might start asking ourselves about why people leave Britain, rather than merely why they arrive.

This week saw the third and final episode of Origin Story’s history of the Labour party, covering Michael Foot to Keir Starmer. It’s an absolute beast of a thing, which encompasses two of the big Sliding Doors moments of the post-war era - the 1992 election defeat and the death of John Smith. Subscribe on your preferred podcast app, or watch it below.

Culture pick this week is Game, a tight, nasty and very fucking weird British thriller which just came out in cinemas.

It won’t be for everyone. Its opening half hour is an incredibly claustrophobic experiment in entrapment which makes you feel every second of it. But it then shifts into a deranged sequence of events which really have no direct cinematic comparison. At certain points, the screen is filled with psychedelia, humour and threat, as if the filmmakers are intent on making the maddest potion they can conceive of and setting it loose in the world. You will never know what it is about to do. It is functionally impossible to predict. And in the middle of it is the Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson, as this bundle of paranoia, madness and good-old-boy humour - a film-stealing bit of weirdness and menace. This was a reminder of what people can do when they are utterly committed to their sense of creativity and authenticity. A short, vicious, lunatic delight.

Right, that’s your lot - fuck off.

Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind.

If you've ever visited a foreign country's national history museum, I guarantee you've read this little snippet:

King Whatshisface was a wise and noble ruler who bought peace and prosperity to all the land.

Upon his death, his heirs waged bloody war over rightful succession which plunged the country into a hundred years of hardship.

The great selling point of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful transition of power. Most modern democracies have rendered civil war almost unthinkable. Sure, you might not like the guy currently in charge, but there are well established mechanisms to limit their power and kick them out if they misbehave. If they die in office, there's an obvious and understood hierarchy for who follows them.

Most Open Source projects start small - just someone in their spare room tinkering for fun. Unexpectedly, they grow into a behemoth which now powers half the world. These mini-empires are fragile. The most popular method of governance is the Benevolent Dictator For Life model. The founder of the project controls everything. But, as I've said before, BDFL only works if the D is genuinely B. Otherwise the FL becomes FML.

The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings. They become tyrannical despots, lashing out at their own volunteers. They execute takeovers of community projects. They demand fealty and tithes. Like dragons, they become quick to anger when their brittle egos are tested. Spineless courtiers carry out deluded orders while pilfering the coffers.

Which is why I am delighted that the Mastodon project has shown a better way to behave.

In "The Future is Ours to Build - Together" they describe perfectly how to gracefully and peacefully transfer power. There are no VCs bringing in their MBA-brained lackeys to extract maximum value while leaving a rotting husk. No one is seizing community assets and jealously hoarding them. Opaque financial structures and convoluted agreements are prominent in their absence.

Eugen Rochko, the outgoing CEO, has a remarkably honest blog post about the transition. I wouldn't wish success on my worst enemy. He talks plainly about the reality of dealing with the pressure and how he might have been a limiting factor on Mastodon's growth. That's a far step removed from the ego-centric members of The Cult of The Founder with their passionate belief in the Divine Right of Kings.

Does your tiny OSS script need a succession plan? Probably not. Do you have several thousand NPM installs per day? It might be worth working out who you can share responsibility with if you are unexpectedly raptured. Do you think that your project is going to last for a thousand years? Build an organisation which won't crumble the moment its founder is arrested for their predatory behaviour on tropical islands.

I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the social contract and the consent of the governed. Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers.

It is a sad inevitability that, eventually, we will all be nothing but memories. The bugs that we create live after us, the patches are oft interrèd with our code. Let it be so with all Open Source projects.

The tactics that gave Labour its huge majority in 2024 were no preparation for government – and the prime minister has proved he has nothing more to offer

The mood among Labour MPs these days follows Edgar’s law. This states that the scale of any misfortune can only be measured against unknown future disasters. As Shakespeare has the banished son of the blinded Earl of Gloucester say in King Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’.”

According to Edgar’s law, there is no opinion poll so gloomy for Labour that it can’t be followed by one even bleaker; no fiscal forecast so bad that the Treasury can’t aggravate it with contradictory signals on tax; no misgivings about Keir Starmer that can’t be amplified by malevolent briefing about a leadership challenge; no social policy so nauseating to the party faithful that it can’t be made grosser still with a relish of cruelty.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist