Whatever you think of his politics, Zack Polanski embodies the outsider narrative he preaches. His background is varied: actor, activist, youth worker — and, most infamously, hypnotherapist, where he apparently tried to enlarge a woman’s breasts. Polanski’s political development is just as striking. Elected as deputy leader of the Greens in 2022, he became the first openly gay Jewish deputy leader in British history. Born David Paulden, he reclaimed his former family name, and his religious heritage, at 18.

Polanski has made much of his unconventional personal journey, projecting authenticity and charming much of the media in the process. Branding himself as a youthful and emotionally charged disrupter, he has been careful to contrast himself with Green Party stereotypes — less Home County geriatric and more insurgent with a green beret. Even Polanski’s insistence that the Greens select a single head, dumping the party’s traditional system of co-leadership, points towards an incipient form of personality cult. The ex-actor’s showmanship is easy to criticize, as are his rather undignified scraps with Right-wing rivals online. Yet the results speak for themselves. Polanski’s campaign launch video received over two million views, while Green Party membership has surged roughly 8%, and is now approaching its 2015 peak.

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This change of tone is echoed by policy, with Polanski’s Greens enthusiastically embracing so-called “eco-populism”. Aiming to strip environmentalism of its stodgy middle-class baggage, it instead aims to inspire apolitical voters. Polanski ties these reforms to redistributionist themes, painting every green policy as a step toward greater social justice. One example is linking climate action to wealth inequality, even as he argues that obsessing over immigration misses the bigger picture: a super-rich elite not paying its share. Unsurprisingly, Polanski also champions a comprehensive wealth tax of 1% on assets exceeding £10 million, and 2% on assets over £1 billion. This, he claims, means the green transition can be achieved without burdening ordinary people.

A longstanding tenet of the Green Party has been the so-called Green Economic Transformation, which the party’s leader will be expected to deliver. At its core, this is a commitment to spend £40 billion a year in new public investment. This will fund sweeping eco-friendly retrofits, from home insulation and low-carbon heating. Beyond that new wealth tax, this would be paid for via a steep carbon levy on all fossil fuels. Alongside canceling all new oil and gas licenses, and ending the relevant subsidies, the Greens would effectively legislate oil and gas out of existence.

Such radicalism is reflected elsewhere. For starters, Polanski hopes to renationalize key utilities, bringing trains, water and energy back into public ownership. Then there’s foreign policy. Polanski has called for the UK to leave Nato, in large part due to Donald Trump, whom he deems an unreliable ally. As for Gaza, Polanski has attended pro-Palestine marches, using his Jewish upbringing to assail Labour’s support for Israel. These stances underline his anti-establishment appeal, which has also started to reshape the party’s base. Much of its growth comes from former Labour activists and Corbyn-era allies. Eager to take on both the Right and mainstream Treasury orthodoxy, Polanski has even indicated a willingness to collaborate with other Left-wing insurgents, notably Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s new outfit.

This approach seems to be working: internal Green Party figures suggest 30% of young people may now vote for them, an excitement apparently echoed by one-in-ten voters nationally. Yet if this is a 43% jump from the already-record vote share the party secured last year, the Green prospectus is very far from perfect. Consider, for instance, the question of carbon levies. In 2024, the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted that any success the tax had in cutting emissions would directly result in revenues collapsing. Many of Polanski’s spending pledges, in areas from health and social care, would effectively be financed by a revenue stream tailor-made to shrink.

The party’s proposed wealth tax is also flawed. An annual levy on complex assets, which make up the bulk of this wealth, would be administratively costly and prone to evasion. This is mirrored in the experience of other developed economies, notably the Netherlands, where the supreme court went so far as to rule that the tax was a violation of European law. Elsewhere, countries from Germany to Sweden were forced to repeal their wealth taxes due to capital flight, and because they deterred foreign investment and cut tax revenues. And if these fundraising measures look faulty, so too do the outlays.

One of the party’s main promises is to make electricity generation 100% renewable by 2035, completely eradicating carbon-based energy. Right off the bat, this goal is made more challenging by the party’s long-standing disdain for nuclear energy, which it deems unsafe and expensive. That’s debatable: but either way, around half of British power currently comes from gas-fired plants, with nuclear providing a further 9%. No less important, the grid isn’t ready for Polanski’s renewable revolution. Building the necessary battery storage infrastructure would cost hundreds of billions alone, far exceeding the party’s calculations. As for renewable projects, many remain stuck in connection queues, unable to hook into the grid, with waiting lists stretching to over a decade. For the Green Party to hit its renewable targets, it would need to connect more turbines than the entire current queue — and all within a decade.

In a way, though, and as Polanski’s own style implies, the point here is less about policy outcomes and more about radicalism per se — with those extravagant green offers simply one pillar of a broader anti-establishment platform. This, of course, raises the perennial question of whether the Greens are mainly an environmental movement, or else a progressive party that uses climate change as a Trojan Horse. Certainly, think tanks on the far Left have been advancing nearly identical policies for years, just without the green branding.

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Whether this socialist turn will expand the party’s appeal is the biggest gamble of Polanski’s leadership. For if the polling numbers seem strong, the electoral fragmentation implicit in his strategy could yet be his undoing. Even a vote share of just 5% could see the Greens gain a number of seats, especially in our dawning age of five-party politics. More to the point, Polanski is probably right in thinking that a chunk of disillusioned Labour supporters are ripe for the taking, particularly after four more years of idea-free Starmerism. At the fringes, though, Polanski’s revolution extends even beyond that. Among other things, he claims that many Reform voters are simply frustrated by low pay and poor public services, and that Green “eco-populism” is clearly the solution.

Indeed, this idea has likely shaped Polanski’s decision to echo Reform’s campaign strategies, with the man himself stating that his party must “learn from Farage”. In practice, though, there are reasons to think that Polanski is overstretching. For one thing, campaigning for Labour voters undercuts any notion of shared purpose. If too many disaffected voters scatter, Reform’s vast poll lead will only grow. By emphasizing that they are not fundamentally at odds with Labour ideology, meanwhile, the Greens risk foundering were Starmer to tack Left. This places the party in a far more tenuous position than Polanski may realize — and that’s before you add his idealistic paean to the material interests of Reform voters, oblivious to the ways immigration and identity are transforming British politics. Hypnotherapy, political or otherwise, just won’t cut it.

With the next election still years away, after all, parties have a remarkable opportunity to forge the political identity of today’s 12- and 13-year-olds: and tomorrow’s new voters. As genuine digital natives, it’s impossible to overstate the power of social media here, especially when ads can be hyper-personalized, and when there’s so much in modern Britain to feel angry about. That promises a tsunami of digital campaigning, as children are flooded with seemingly innocuous content that can nonetheless reinforce partisan political messages. A trending meme or viral video that children encounter now has the potential to mold their political outlook, influencing how they vote when they finally turn 16.

For Britain’s political parties, this really matters. In large part, that’s because young voters are also enthusiastic voters, especially for a novel event like in 2029. This has already been shown in Scotland, which lowered the voting age for the 2014 independence referendum, and which saw turnout among 16- and 17-year-olds reach a remarkable 75%. No less striking, research suggests that by instilling a high level of participation in voters at 16, individuals are more likely to vote into their 20s and beyond. This means effective campaigning in the short term can influence politics for years or even decades to come.

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More to the point, tomorrow’s future voters are essentially up for grabs. The traditional view — that a younger electorate is a de facto electoral boon to centre-left parties — is a dangerous oversimplification, one that fails to appreciate the underlying political polarization within the group itself. This generation is not a monolith, but in fact highly fractured, with notable drift towards both the far-Left and far-Right. A recent poll from the Onward think tank echoes this divide, revealing that among young Britons, close to a third hold a positive view of communism, even as 38% would back a “military strongman” taking charge. That, in turn, is driven by a profound rejection of the mainstream political establishment, from housing to climate change, presenting vast opportunities for radicals to attract youngsters to their cause.

For its part, social media is the perfect vehicle to engage with these concerns. For one thing, there’s its sheer proliferation, with perhaps ​​2.7 million Britons under the age of 13 using TikTok in 2020. Then there’s the broader rise of digital activism and social media campaigning, which has allowed young people to be part of political protest movements from the comfort of their iPhones. Taken together, this dynamic allows politicians to target young people with highly specialized messages.

What might this look like in practice? The Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election offer something of a blueprint, with both employing psychological profiling to target voters online. The Trump campaign used Facebook to deploy tens of thousands of daily ad variants, before determining which resonated best. There are even more relevant examples here too. Back in 2010, for instance, the parent company of the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica was hired by Trinidad and Tobago’s opposition United National Congress party. The techies determined that, to win the election, the UNC needed to discourage young voters from casting their ballots. To that end, they crafted a campaign centred around youth apathy, reframing abstention as an act of empowerment. This strategy led to a significant drop in youth voter turnout come election day, duly gifting the UNC their victory.

Over the last 15 years, of course, digital technology has improved dramatically. Combined with increasingly malleable social media platforms — feeds are driven exclusively by user preferences, making it easier to steer them down a particular path — this guarantees the electoral techniques used in the run-up to 2029 will be far more sophisticated. This is apparent, too, in the widespread adoption of generative AI tools, making it possible to produce thousands of highly differentiated pieces of campaign material, each personalized to specific subsets of young voters. If, for instance, an individual was deemed to be afraid for the future, they might be shown anti-government messaging dovetailed with inflammatory images of uncontrolled mass migration.

No less pertinent, this material can be refined and tweaked in real time. To return to our hypothetical example, our user’s anti-government messaging could instead be combined with patriotic images of historic Britain, firing a sense of national pride. Taken together, anyway, this surely marks the death knell for traditional polling. Rather than releasing their ads and hoping for the best, campaigns can now use synthetic voter models to run simulations, before deploying ever-evolving material that instantly responds to shifts in voter behavior. Most importantly, this will also ensure that campaigns can keep up with social media trends, mimicking its bewildering variety of apolitical memes.

And if generative AI will surely play a role here, the vast amount of data now available on social media users will also allow parties to target voters far more subtly. Increasingly, material will be integrated into the algorithmically curated feeds of future voters, undetectable from other content but designed to convey a certain political message. Individuals, who on the surface may appear identical in age, sex or race, may nonetheless see vastly different messages appearing on their feeds. As a result, political material will be crafted to resonate with their “true” online selves, something that can only be determined after hundreds if not thousands of hours of scrolling. Insecurities and weaknesses, revealed through what content someone consumes, can hence be exploited. This is certainly clear in the co-opting of “pro-masculinity” content by nationalists, with the latter promoting the defense of one’s homeland as a key tenet of being a man.

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For political strategists, this is a dream come true, allowing them to seamlessly disguise political messages as naturally viral content, shifting the ground on core issues from immigration to healthcare without anyone (least of all voters themselves) consciously noticing.

What could all this mean for Britain? Parties have already tried to burrow into Gen Z feeds, with Reform dominating youth social media: in large part thanks to Nigel Farage’s endless stream of “memeable” content, directed at his 1.3 million TikTok followers. In the run-up to the 2029 election, anyway, what we might call “TikTok politics” will intensify competition in key constituencies — as parties, especially those on the political fringes, target marginals where most new voters live. Think, here, of university towns like Canterbury, or else high-birthrate areas like Bradford. That’s reflected more generally too. Before the 2019 election, psychologists determined that the number of newly eligible 18-year-old voters was greater than the incumbent MP’s majority across 56 seats. Highly targeted regional campaigns, favorably altering voting behavior in young people, could therefore have an outsized impact, especially when our FPTP electoral system acts as a vote multiplier.

While a single-party majority remains unlikely, then, capturing swathes of a highly polarized youth vote could be decisive. Not that any of this will happen via anything as shallow as policy or debate. Rather, it seems likely that algorithms will shape the actions of many first-time voters, whose choices in the polling booth were engineered months or even years before.

Last week, the Government was forced into a humiliating climb-down on its attempts to address the welfare bill. This week’s fight will be over the provision of support for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (or SEND) another political hot potato — pitting underfunded councils against desperate families trapped in a broken system. Everyone involved is a victim of Britain’s paradox of good intentions, as reforms meant to safeguard the rights of vulnerable children, instead have created an open-ended legal obligation to deliver bespoke support — whether money is available or not. The result is reactive, chaotic and wildly expensive, as desperate children are left in the lurch and thoughtful reform nowhere to be seen.

Once a niche element of educational provisions, SEND has grown into a budget-devouring juggernaut. In the past financial year, total funding for young people with complex needs reached £10.5 billion. This is an increase of nearly 60% in just five years. It’s an unsustainable trend, with councils from Hampshire to London soon set to go bust.

As with many policy missteps, the roots of today’s SEND crisis can be traced back to a well-intentioned piece of legislation. The Children and Families Act 2014 was sold as a landmark shift towards a more compassionate and family-centric approach to supporting those with special educational needs. It featured Education, Health and Care Plans — known as EHCPs — which would provide support from birth up to age 25. Eligibility criteria was also broadened, so that more children could qualify for assistance. Yet, most crucially, it also reinforced the legal rights of families to receive tailored support packages. In England, one-in-20 pupils now have a formal special needs plan, and almost a fifth receive a form of SEND support. As a result, all of these children are now legally entitled to a range of specialist support services.

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Yet this increase in numbers — which continues to rise — hasn’t been accompanied by the required funding: demand has outstripped budgets to such an extent that funding per EHCP has actually fallen by 35% in real terms. Inevitably, in an effort to ration scarce funds, councils have started to unlawfully or unreasonably deny support to families. There’s an irony here: the more rights families were theoretically given, the more adversarial the system actually became. At the same time, record numbers of families have started challenging councils over support packages they felt their child needed, and by 2023, local authorities lost 95% of SEND tribunal appeals in 2023. This clumsy attempt at cost-saving had the knock-on effect of forcing councils to spend an estimated half a billion pounds defending themselves in tribunal cases.

This created a farcical — and deeply harmful — cycle of rejection and defence for families forced to fight for their children’s basic rights. They’re routinely portrayed as adversaries of the system. But the routine of legal conflict has become a sad necessity for those trying to secure support, with a mechanism intended to assist the most vulnerable transformed into yet another barrier to overcome. According to a report by the LGA, in fact, these legal hurdles produce “long-term misery, stress and hardship” for both the children and their parents. Even worse, the lengthy legal proceedings have been known to cost close to £20,000 in some cases, a figure prohibitively expensive to many frantic parents.

Councils increasingly realize that a lack of money isn’t a suitable defense when challenged, and not just because they’ve spent half a billion pounds in doomed court cases over recent years. Through the 2014 Act, Parliament had created an absolute legal obligation to provide support — without any exceptions. As a result, and unlike other types of public spending, these services can’t be pruned or means-tested when funds are low. This is the crux of the SEND crisis, and it’s the same fundamental tension wreaking havoc through local public services more generally.

In the case of SEND, the 2014 Act had the effect of giving every qualifying child a blank check for support which couldn’t be refused. This provided fertile ground for opportunists keen to exploit the legal bind. For instance, the council’s statutory duty to provide free transportation to SEND children has spawned a £1.4 billion school taxi industry. Over the past five years alone, spending on home-to-school transport for disabled pupils has doubled, with many local authorities now allocating more funds to SEND transport than to road maintenance.

These eye-watering figures aren’t hard to understand. With councils having no alternative method of fulfilling its legal obligation, the price of a single taxi journey has soared. In areas where providers are scarce, firms are able to indulge in blatant price-gouging, charging significant premiums for their services. In Bristol, a single taxi journey for one student can cost the council $150. Mini-bus trips for multiple students have been known to exceed $1,700 per trip. This open-ended commitment has forced local authorities into the role of beggar, borrower, or defendant, a situation that inevitably hamstrings relations between citizens and the state.

Promises are continuously made at the government level. Yet when the time comes for delivery, they never materialize. This creates a natural distrust and resentment towards the powers-that-be. At best, this manifests itself in a disdain for local councils, with parents believing that they are solely to blame for ineffective services. At worst, this dynamic can even transform into a deep-seated belief that the social contract is irreversibly broken. Certainly, Whitehall will soon be unable to scapegoat regional government for its structural failures and fiscal irresponsibility. At that point, of course, cheery pre-election promises will be summarily dumped.

Yet if SEND is stomping social trust into the ground, it’s far from alone. Consider, for instance, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, another case of a legal obligation whose ramifications have been financially ruinous. The Act forced the Home Office to provide accommodation and basic support to any asylum applicants who would otherwise be homeless. That may have been manageable in previous years — but quickly became impossible after a surge of arrivals, particularly via Channel crossings. With local housing capacities exhausted, the Government has resorted to mass-booking hotels as a temporary stopgap. This has seen the Home Office’s asylum support budget ballooning from around $700 million in 2019 to $5.4 billion last year. Like with SEND, meanwhile, private contractors are able to reap vast profits from the state’s absolute legal duty to house asylum seekers.

Both these failures highlight another serious structural flaw in the way Britain works. There is a total imbalance between the central government — which is incentivized to announce sweeping legislation to impress the electorate — and the local councils forced to pick up the pieces. Unsurprisingly, this creates an environment ripe for buck-passing. Regional councils can complain about their increasing responsibilities and dwindling funds, even as Whitehall can accuse councils of mismanagement or inefficiency in delivery.

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Both sides have a point, but disasters like SEND are simply the inevitable consequence of years of policy layering without sufficient consolidation. That’s ultimately a legal problem. Within the British legal system, after all, a “rights revolution” has taken place. Inspired by instruments like the Human Rights Act, it increasingly means the public is legally entitled to public services. In the case of SEND reforms, these transformed the broad human right of education into a highly specific, iron-clad, and judicially enforceable obligation to each child with special needs.

In isolation, this shifting legal philosophy may have been manageable. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by a wave of austerity and marketization. Especially after 2010, the Government pursued fiscal belt-tightening and embraced private solutions to public problems, driven by the misguided belief that competition and decentralization would enhance implementation efficiency. The reality was an often-unmanageable fragmentation, making oversight difficult and reinforcing severe gaps in accountability. Britain soon became a nation that expanded rights while contracting its capacity to deliver them.

When it comes to SEND, certainly, there are signs that a little investment can go a long way — clear enough in the example of Sure Start, which drastically helped cut costs later. Yet any new funding must be focused on addressing issues at their root, rather than on the usual short-termism. Legal expenses are a prime example here. Rather than fighting families through the courts, councils might instead consider what services the vulnerable actually need. In practice, this is likely through the use of in-house providers, delivered at source, and without the pointless legal hoops.

Alas, the Government’s response to these challenges seems as reactive and piecemeal as ever, even as Labour MPs are using their newfound authority to strangle reform at birth. According to Helen Hayes, chair of the Commons education committee, reassuring parents that EHCPs remain intact is “the right thing to do”. In a sense, that’s unsurprising: no politician wants to remove the rights of vulnerable children, even if it’s a financial necessity. Yet that leaves MPs stuck in a trap of their own making, unwilling to fully fund the system but also unwilling to reform the laws that make the same system unmanageable. All the while, the cost of implementation will continue to rise, more local governments will collapse — and essential support for the most vulnerable children will only get worse. But as must surely be obvious by now, you can’t legislate with compassion if you implement with cruelty.

Nor is Royal Star & Garter unique. In care homes up and down the land, the staff represent a multicultural kaleidoscope. In theory, this conveyor belt of low-paid overseas workers provides a vital lifeline for Britain’s aging society. But these workers often do not come alone, bringing with them a set of dependents who add to the state’s future care burden. That, in turn, creates a self-perpetuating dependence on immigration, one where sector-wide profit taking and governmental inefficiencies have built up a veritable human Ponzi scheme. And if the cycle now can’t be stopped without fear of collapse, it follows that Britain requires fundamental socioeconomic reform — if we want to leave a welfare state to our grandchildren.

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Over the past two years, care providers in England recruited 185,000 international workers, easing vacancy rates in adult social care to around 7% by early 2025. This marks a significant improvement from the double-digit rates seen in previous years, especially as the sector has lost over 70,000 British care staff since Brexit. All told, foreign-born workers now make up roughly a third of the care home workforce, up from a quarter before the pandemic.

On the surface, then, this global recruitment drive has provided a vital lifeline. But this quick fix comes at a cost. Britain’s population isn’t just growing: it’s aging. Net migration now accounts for roughly 73% of the country’s population growth. The number of people over 85 is on track to nearly double over the next 25 years, naturally ensuring continuing demand for future care. Against this backdrop, the sector’s staffing progress is minuscule. Even with recent hiring spurts, Britain faces a shortfall of carers and will need almost half a million additional workers over the next decade just to keep pace. The country is facing the lethal combination of a population that is both growing and greying, piling pressure on services.

To meet this demand, the UK has increasingly leaned on non-EU migrants, mostly from poorer countries. India alone accounted for close to a third of new care workers via the health and care worker visa. Zimbabwe, another country facing a drain in its healthcare sector, accounted for 15% of all visas granted. In theory, that offers care operators trained staff willing to work at minimum wage, while also saving on training local workers. No wonder the retail and service sectors have poached domestic care workers, promising better working conditions for similar pay. That’s helped turn international recruitment from a mere stop-gap to the bedrock of Britain’s social care system, with ministers desperately needing to fill a hole that just keeps getting wider.

In truth, though, the crux of the problem lies in what happens after these migrant carers arrive — or rather with whom. Until recently, Britain’s immigration rules allowed care workers to bring their immediate families. Between 2022 and 2023, around 100,000 migrant carers brought with them some 120,000 dependents, adding not just themselves but often a spouse or children to Britain’s population. Those family members will likely live in the UK permanently, and why wouldn’t they, given how much higher our wages and living standards often are? Naturally, these people use public services, and will inevitably need social care themselves.

This self-reinforcing loop has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. Instead of cash, the care sector’s Ponzi is built on people. To keep the system stable, Britain must continuously import new carers, growing the base of dependents, and eventually adding to the ranks of old people who need care. When that future arrives, even more (presumably international) carers will be needed, perpetuating the cycle. The risk is that the system grows ever larger and more costly until it eventually collapses under its own weight.

This looming disaster is the result of an approach that merely treats the symptom of empty jobs rather than the disease of why they’re so hard to fill domestically. To do the latter requires us to acknowledge a number of uncomfortable truths. Migrant labor is often painted as a virtuous act of mutually beneficial exchange. An international worker is able to enjoy a higher standard of living than in their home country, and Britain benefits from filling the gaps in our domestic workforce. There is, of course, something to this sketch. Yet, within the care sector particularly, the fact is that Britain’s workforce boom has largely been built on poverty-wage labor and dubious recruiting practices.

Overseas caregivers are often drawn from countries with their own critical health-worker shortage — allowing Britain to relieve its own shortfall by depriving poorer nations of much-needed caregivers. The Government has policies to discourage active recruitment from such countries, places like Nigeria and Ghana. Yet, enforcement is patchy at best, with regulators and care home owners both preferring blissful ignorance.

You might say the same of Whitehall civil servants. In 2022, the health and care worker visa was expanded, allowing entry-level caregivers access to the dedicated immigration route for overseas medical professionals. But despite warnings from the charity sector, including Citizens Advice, the new migration path was quickly exploited by criminals and unscrupulous brokers. Capitalizing on the vast demand for these roles, they started charging steep service fees for UK jobs, flouting British labor laws in the process. A major survey by Unison found that nearly a quarter of migrant care staff had paid money to a care provider or broker to secure a job in Britain. In extreme cases, criminals have demanded £20,000 from their foreign charges, with workers selling property or taking out loans in their home countries.

In one shocking incident, a single mother sold all of her belongings and paid £5,000 to a broker after being promised a care role. Yet upon reaching the UK, the job proved to be nonexistent, and the broker vanished. Even for those who do secure real jobs, life in Britain can be grim. There have been widespread reports of wage theft and abuse by rogue care homes, effectively trapping workers in bondage. Between unpaid hours, arbitrary deductions and recruiter fee repayments, over one in four migrant workers claim to be being paid below the legal minimum.

Nor are things necessarily better once migrant workers clock off. Many are housed in accommodation provided by their employers: another form of wage extraction, even as many caregivers often pay through the nose for squalid conditions. A recent investigation by UNISON found nine migrant workers crammed into a three-bedroom house, forcing them to sleep on the floor or share makeshift beds. Food was also restricted, with some caregivers obliged to eat the leftovers of their care residents. At the same time, the scale of the Ponzi scheme makes change tough. Though the authorities have stripped over 470 care firms of their sponsorship licenses, there are 12,000 such outfits nationwide.

Taken together, it’s little wonder the UK’s Anti-Slavery Commissioner has described the situation as “horrific”. But despite these miseries, workers feel they can’t complain. Visa status is bound to a single sponsoring employer, and any dispute can jeopardize their ability to remain in the UK. Rogue operators have been known to wield this power as a method of subjugation, with some going so far as seizing workers’ passports. That’s shadowed by “exit fees” — whereby a worker owes thousands of pounds if they try to leave before an arbitrary period. The rising demand for caregivers has allowed this form of forced labor to continue unabated, with the sector becoming increasingly reliant on worker exploitation.

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The public’s renewed focus on record immigration figures — and the corresponding strain on national services — has seen Labour abruptly try to break the imported worker cycle. This effectively involves turning off the tap of overseas recruitment in social care just three years after it was opened by the previous government.

Once again, however, there hasn’t been any attempt to address the root causes of domestic worker shortages: exactly the thing that sparked our reliance on overseas alternatives to start with. The Home Secretary has said that care employers should draw on the roughly 40,000 migrant caregivers who are already in the UK and whose sponsor firms have collapsed. In theory, that could reduce immigration without impacting the care sector. Yet this is an extremely short-term solution to a foundational issue. A combination of grueling conditions and long unsociable hours has been continually met with low wages at best — and thoroughgoing exploitation at worst.

A recent Government survey showed that a better-paying opportunity outside of social care was the primary driver behind people leaving the industry. That’s hardly surprising: Ipsos reports that almost two thirds of Britons think caregivers are underpaid. With the hourly wage in social care the same as the legal minimum, these entry-level roles compete directly with retail and hospitality jobs. In the first place, then, social care must pay. The Trades Union Congress previously advocated for a minimum £15 per hour wage for the care sector, believing that this would address the domestic recruitment shortfall. But raising the minimum wage through legislation isn’t the only option here. Rather, the unlimited pool of international labor currently available to care homes must urgently be drained.

That also requires a fundamental rethink of how social care recruitment is done. These roles are often considered low-wage, low-skill jobs, where workers are expected to work long hours and are treated as interchangeable drones. Making the profession more desirable therefore requires improved working conditions, better oversight to prevent worker exploitation, and renewed opportunities for role development. Training and the ability to access career-long qualifications would also go some way to challenging poor public perceptions.

Of course, completely ending reliance on foreign caregivers is neither realistic nor desirable in a globalized world. Migrants will remain an important part of Britain’s care workforce as the population continues to age and the demand for new workers accelerates. If the sector continues to rely on international labor, then an increase in the state’s future care burden is inevitable. The only real solution, then, is to increase the domestic workforce supply. And if that obliges the Government to improve conditions — among other things, it must assail care home operators who try and ignore the minimum wage — it’s also clear that who the Home Office lets in must be far more selective in future. Fail and we risk even greater problems than understaffed care homes.

Our higher education system is facing an unprecedented level of fraud, after decades of policy blunders and lax oversight. Organized crime networks are exploiting funding loopholes, using sham students to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. Thousands of these “students”, many with no intention of ever studying or repaying, have enrolled in degree courses purely to cash in on easily accessible loans, turning a scheme meant to expand educational opportunities into a sordid free-for-all. The emerging picture is one of brazen criminality, with the Student Loans Company (SLC) uncovering at least six questionable college partnerships that facilitate these loans. Over the last academic year alone, the SLC flagged over 3,500 suspicious applications that exhibit clear signs of fraud. That’s equivalent to around $60 million — yet after decades of limited oversight is clearly the tip of the iceberg.

The mechanics of the fraud are shockingly simple. Applicants enroll online in university courses, often never setting foot in a classroom, but still triggering tuition and maintenance loan payments. Because finance applications and course registrations are largely taken on trust, with virtually no in-person verification, fraudsters can game the system remotely. Much of the scam centers around so-called franchised colleges: private institutions that offer degrees on behalf of accredited universities. These smaller colleges have become a weak link in the chain. Showing a willingness to admit candidates with minimal vetting and lower entry requirements, they make it easy for opportunists to pose as students.

During enrollment, proper registration can be bypassed via forged credentials and identities. Organized crime groups submit bulk applications using fake documents or duplicated addresses to meet eligibility checks. Many franchised colleges are also willing to admit individuals who speak little to no English, accepting dubious evidence of English proficiency, including screenshots of Duolingo tests. At one Manchester college, students barely had enough English to understand the onboarding process. Once registered, a large number of the fraudulent students then immediately quit their courses after receiving the first installment of the maintenance loan, around $4,000, before re-enrolling in a new course the following year.

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In fact, these schemes have proven so lucrative that they have led to certain international communities embracing the opportunities en masse, repatriating ill-gotten gains back to their home countries. Roughly 15% of all Romanian nationals in Britain received a student loan in 2023. The number of applicants from the country surged by over 1,500% over the eight years prior. Romanian students now make up over half of all applicants at several franchised college providers. This has been driven, in large part, by a wave of Romanian-language TikTok and Facebook videos that propagandize student loans as free money to be sent back home. These posts could easily be mistaken for those of traditional influencers, with videos showcasing tropical destinations, designer clothes, and a youthful recruiter keen to help you get rich quick.

Even worse, many of these influencers are acting as recruitment agents for franchised colleges, profiting directly from each student they refer. These agents actively coach applicants on how to game the system, often using social media to advertise, recruiting students with poor English skills and explaining that they can get paid just to enroll. These agents also engage in commission sharing, with some offering existing students cash lump sums for each friend they introduce to the course: all with no limit on referrals. This web of kickbacks and profit-sharing creates an incentive pyramid, where all parties make money by pushing more students through the door, leaving the British taxpayer footing the bill for all those unpaid loans.

At the heart of this scandal is a structural weakness caused by the rise of franchise partnerships in higher education, with universities increasingly farming out courses to affiliated colleges. This system was designed to widen access and save costs by using off-site providers. Instead, it’s led to widespread abuse with near-zero oversight. Roughly two thirds of franchised providers aren’t registered with the official regulator of the higher education sector, resulting in hundreds of colleges teaching degree courses with no scrutiny from the Department of Education. As a result, quality controls have been scant. Forget the language issue: there is little accountability around whether students even attend classes, leading to some franchised campuses having course completion rates of just 60%.

All the while, there is a vested interest in keeping this system in place, as the number of students enrolled at franchised providers has almost tripled over the last four years. By 2022, these educational arrangements accounted for just 5% of all student loan borrowers, yet franchised courses made up over half of all detected student loan fraud by value. One franchised college received $234 million in revenue in 2024, with profits increasing 1,200% in just three years. This is despite universities and partner colleges splitting the tuition fees of newly enrolled students, with the lead former typically taking 30% for essentially brokering the deal. For cash-strapped bursars, this provides an uncapped source of secondary income without the need for further infrastructure, teaching staff, or course provisions. For those universities willing to turn a blind eye, and delegate all responsibilities to a college partner, this arrangement can be highly lucrative.

It all speaks to a system utterly unable to keep pace with changing realities. The UK’s student finance model has long relied on an assumption of trust, while funding shifted costs from the state to students and fees continued to rise. Education providers suddenly stood to receive much more per student — yet if loan books swelled, controls have stayed lax. As far back as 2018, a report warned that some private colleges had found a loophole within the funding system. It was hoped that the newly formed Office for Students (OFS) would address the problem. In the years since, however, the regulator has been more focused on political battles in academia than on financial policing, meaning little was done to systematically fortify the loan system against this new type of fraud.

At the same time, government policies inadvertently widened the problem. After Brexit, EU nationals already living in Britain by 2020 retained the right to UK student finance as home students. Despite this being intended as a fair provision for those settled in the country, it also meant that tens of thousands of people from across Europe suddenly qualified for British loans with minimal restrictions. After the Government announced that tuition fees would be frozen at $9,250, meanwhile, universities’ per-student income stagnated, even as operating costs continued to soar. To combat this, institutions sought creative ways to boost enrollment and revenues, driving mass adoption of the very franchise system that’s now proving so vulnerable to abuse.

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To be fair, the situation isn’t totally hopeless, with policymakers are now scrambling to bolster the system. In practice, that means new legislation and tougher enforcement measures on organized fraud. In addition to a dedicated counter-fraud team from the Public Sector Fraud Authority, the Government has announced that any college teaching 300 or more students on franchised courses must register with the regulator or lose access to student finance. There are also proposals to give regulators the power to impose instant sanctions on dubious providers; improve verification of student eligibility; and recover funds from universities that ignore fraud. The Department for Education may also link loan disbursements more closely to attendance and academic progress, while strengthening data sharing between agencies to identify fraudulent students.

Yet beyond these short-term fixes, the scandal has done near-irreparable damage to public trust in British higher education. That’s especially problematic given education is one of Britain’s biggest invisible exports. Almost $22 billion comes from fees and spending by legitimate international students a year. These are students who are willing to pay premium fees far in excess of domestic students: essentially due to an academic reputation built over hundreds of years.

It is, therefore, sadly ironic that widespread criminality risks diminishing the appeal of our great academic institutions. This could justifiably fuel a perception that British credentials aren’t what they used to be, as the perceived value of a university education diminishes with every sham course and low-quality provider. If British degrees can be abused on this scale, meanwhile, it raises uncomfortable questions about how much the education sector has been operating on an honor system too easily dishonored. With over half of franchised providers still unregistered, and therefore free from regulatory oversight, this could easily fuel narratives around a system in chaos.

Either way, the whole scandal once again strikes at the heart of short-sighted policymaking that aims to produce flattering headlines and optimistic metrics — without a willingness to address difficult structural challenges. Widening access to higher education is important, and cutting costs can be helpful. But without the necessary, and far less glamorous, development of a robust regulatory environment for these initiatives to sit in, malignant forces will soon exploit political generosity. This crisis demands a change in mindset from policymakers, and restoring credibility will require more than just one-off raids and attention-grabbing investigations.

Nor, of course, are the lessons here just for vice-chancellors. Time and again we’ve seen well-meaning schemes — from Motability to Covid relief — wrecked by organized fraud. Especially as our high-trust society fades away, it’ll become more important than ever for the Government to build out the actual institutions that prevent graft from occurring. Fail, and the state will continue to crumble far beyond the university gates.