Last Tuesday Boris Johnson told the Tory conference that the reason he had such a bad time with Covid was because he “had a very common underlying condition. My friends, I was too fat.” He implored us “to search for the hero inside yourself in the hope that that individual is considerably slimmer.” Five days […]
Keir Starmer is moving on. In his first conference speech as leader he sought to draw a line under the Corbyn era with the tagline “A New Leadership”. If that wasn’t subtle enough, Starmer asked the country to “take another look at Labour…We are under new leadership”. Just as the Tories after 1997 had to […]
It’s that time of the year again when – as Jim Gallagher puts it – the Scottish Government’s statisticians are let off their leashes and ‘tell it like it is’. According to the annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) Holyrood spent £15.1 billion more than it raised in taxes in 2019-20, an increase of […]
In 1995 Robert Putnam published an essay titled ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’. For Leave-supporting academics today’s equivalent might be ‘dining alone’ – at least, according to a new report from the thinktank Policy Exchange. Academic Freedom in the UK reveals that only 54% of academics would feel comfortable sitting next to a known […]
Earlier this week the pro-Welsh independence group Yes Cymru released the results of a YouGov poll showing that 27% of English adults would support English independence in a hypothetical referendum (51% were against, whilst 18% responded ‘don’t know’, and 4% refused to respond). This figure in itself was relatively shocking, especially when one considers that […]
The University of Liverpool have announced they will be renaming Gladstone student halls – named after nineteenth-century Prime Minister William Gladstone – following an open letter from a group calling themselves ‘Students in solidarity with Black Lives Matter’ (SSBLM). It appears that this decision was taken rapidly and secretively, without consultation with the wider university […]
