Children crying out for stability are paying the highest price for Britain’s chaotic and exploitative residential care

I’m a patron of a small local charity that helps struggling children to rebuild trust and connection. It’s called Sirona Therapeutic Horsemanship, and it works by bringing them together with rescued horses. The horses, like many of the children, arrive traumatised, anxious and frightened. They help each other to heal. Children who have lost their trust in humans can find it in horses, which neither threaten nor judge them, then build on that relationship gradually to reconnect with people.

It’s an astonishing, inspiring thing to witness, as the children begin to calm, uncurl and find purpose and hope. It can have life-changing results. But, though I can in no way speak on Sirona’s behalf, I’m painfully aware that such charities can help only a tiny fraction of the children in desperate need of stable relationships, trust and love.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Cultura RM/Alamy

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© Photograph: Cultura RM/Alamy

This is a seismic moment as Westminster prepares for power to pass from one party to another. It will affect everything in some way

The Conservative party’s lurch into collective hyperventilation after 2016 gave Britain five prime ministers in eight years. Yet changes of government from one party to another are actually remarkably rare. There have been only three of them in the past half century: to the Tories in 1979, to Labour in 1997 and then back to the Tories in 2010. Lucy Powell, the shadow leader of the House of Commons, pointed out in a speech this week that, at the age of 49, she has only witnessed two changes of UK party government in her adult life; someone aged 30 will not have witnessed a single one in their voting life.

More on Powell’s speech later. But her observation about the rarity of change underlines something distinctive as well as something important. Britain’s rare changes of regime make it something of an outlier. In the US, Canada and Spain over the same half century, there have been seven such changes to Britain’s three. In France and Germany, there have been five. Change is just that bit rarer in the UK, and for that reason it may in some ways be a bigger deal.

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© Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck/The Guardian

Ahead of the byelection in Blackpool South, the Guardian takes the temperature in the once prosperous northern coastal town, with many voters expressing complete apathy and disdain for the state of politics.

The area is going to the polls because the former Tory MP Scott Benton resigned after being found guilty of breaching standards rules in a lobbying scandal. Labour is hopeful of taking back the seat, which Benton won with a majority of 3,690 in 2019

• Polls open in England’s local elections with Tories braced for heavy losse

• Analysis: Will Tories dump Rishi Sunak if election results worse than expected?

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© Photograph: The Guardian

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© Photograph: The Guardian

The deep pockets of the tech investor Garry Tan are valued by his allies, but his pugnacious online habits are creating plenty of enemies in the city he says he wants to save.

© Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times