Reform UK is in a tight spot, says Ross Clark in The Spectator. Small boats arrivals – the party’s raison d’être – are slightly down, its more right-leaning supporters are flocking to Restore Britain, and it has a persistent issue with unpopular donations. Compound this with the arrival of a so-far “energetic and popular” prime minister, and it’s possible to imagine a Labour victory at the next election. But if anything is going to “throw a hand grenade” into UK politics and revive Nigel Farage’s fortunes, it’s the slavery reparations movement. Labour MPs including David Lammy and Diane Abbott openly support the cause, while the chairwoman of the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations has called on Britain’s black population to “join her fight”.

The case for reparations is “obviously nonsense”. You can’t compensate people who died 200 years ago, and many people have ancestors on both sides: slaves and slave-owners. Paying reparations on a nation-to-nation basis would have the “perverse” outcome of black UK taxpayers shelling out for public services enjoyed by rich white expats living in the Caribbean. The government says it won’t fork out, but Labour has a reputation as a “pushover”: Keir Starmer was poised to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which never owned them in the first place; when the UN held a vote on opening reparations talks in March, Britain merely abstained. Hard-pressed UK taxpayers, most of whose ancestors had nothing to do with slavery, don’t want to pay even higher taxes to compensate supposed “victims” several thousand miles away. If Andy Burnham doesn’t stamp it out, the reparations debate could be just the thing to “reboot” Reform.

📚🇧🇧 There’s a cohort of Caribbean leaders who aren’t just calling for reparations, says Tony Sewell in The Telegraph, but also the “cleansing of the curriculum” to make it less Western. This is absurd. Barbados, which follows a traditional British syllabus, has one of the best education systems in the world. CLR James says his classical 19th-century British education in Trinidad – “Latin, English Literature, cricket’s ethical code” – instilled in him a lifelong love of literature and culture. Derek Walcott’s absorption of the Western literary canon, from Greek epic to modernism, in St Lucia didn’t “erase” the Nobel prize-winning poet, but “gave him the raw material to forge something new”.

The residents of Silicon Valley have greater combined wealth than most small countries, says Arielle Pardes in The New York Times. At least 50 of its residents are billionaires, and each day wildly rich tech employees are shuttled in from their swanky houses in north San Francisco to the Google, Apple, Meta and Nvidia campuses. Each of these functions like a “city in miniature”, complete with cafes, dining halls, barber shops, dry cleaners, healthcare clinics and childcare centres. Apple Park – a glittering circle wrapped in the world’s largest panels of custom-made glass – hosts a 100,000 sq ft wellness centre with a two-storey yoga studio. Meta’s 30 structures spread over 250 richly landscaped acres, including a nine-acre rooftop park and a high street with an arcade and sweet shop.

Yet outside these gilded enclaves, Silicon Valley is a “soul-crushing, car-choked suburban sprawl”, filled with office parks, car dealerships and failing chain stores. Public infrastructure is creaking and the roads are full of potholes. Rarely in history has such a concentration of wealth and power allowed its own backyard to flounder so badly. It doesn’t have to be like this: in Arkansas, the Walmart founder’s family have spent considerable sums improving infrastructure, building museums, creating mountain biking trails and opening restaurants. In Michigan, the Dow family (of Dow Chemical) financed extensive botanical gardens, miles of public parks and the Midland Center for the Arts. The industrial tycoons of the Gilded Age bankrolled cultural institutions like the Met, Carnegie Hall and the New York Public Library. French monarchs built the Arc de Triomphe and the Medicis filled Florence with art. Thanks to the tech titans, Silicon Valley has “about as much cultural capital as an airport”.

Sharon Horgan’s new sex comedy Youth is “precise, witty and defiantly silly”, says Rebecca Nicholson in the FT. Protagonist Alex (played by Horgan) is a successful publishing agent in her fifties, who is long divorced and keen to start having sex again, but is trapped in the so-called “sandwich generation”, looking after both her teenage son and her ageing parents. Worried she only has “10 years left as a sexy person”, she gets drunk, sends regrettable texts and is repeatedly drawn to her ex. But along with this lighter side, Youth pulls off “emotional heft” in its handling of modern parenting, particularly of a young man. The relationship between Alex and her son Ruarí is one of the show’s “most tender and nuanced achievements”. Over the course of eight “zippy” 30-minute episodes, Youth packs in the gags while digging for – and finding – deeper meaning.

Watch on NOW TV here.