Where is this government heading, and who is now in charge? Keir Starmer looks even weaker than he did a week ago, uncoupled from the aides who wrote his scripts and picked his fights, and only still in his job because the cabinet and parliamentary Labour party stared into a chaotic immediate future and decided not to pounce – for now. The high-stakes Gorton and Denton byelection arrives in less than two weeks’ time. Policy-wise, meanwhile, we are about to finally be presented with a set of plans that have been fitfully gestating for over a year, and causing a quiet chorus of jangling Labour nerves.

That sound is now getting louder. Any day now, the government will publish the education white paper containing its plans for sweeping reform of England’s provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or Send. Amid rising fears about current and future costs, that document will shine light not just on the government’s thinking about the system it wants to change, but even bigger questions about Labour’s views on disability and human difference, and the relationship between families and the state. And if the proposals misfire, this most fragile of administrations will find itself back in the nightmarish place it ended up in when Labour MPs refused to pass its cuts to disability benefits – only this time, the resulting chaos could consume it.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson and her colleagues want to maximise the numbers of Send kids taught at mainstream schools, driven by a staunch belief in the ideal of “inclusion”, and the slightly less idealistic imperative to cut spending on comparatively expensive special school places, and hack down the transport bills resulting from getting thousands of kids to scarce placements miles away from where they live. Over 10 years, £3.7bn will be spent on buildings and facilities in mainstream secondary schools that will seemingly contain........

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