You probably saw the typhoon of outrage this week when Carmen Smith, a one-time Plaid Cymru European Parliament candidate, was introduced to the House of Lords as Baroness Smith of Llanfaes. Lady Smith celebrated her 28th birthday last week – she is the youngest person ever ennobled under the Life Peerages Act 1958 – and […]
Since the savagery of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 last year, and the ensuing bloody conflict in Gaza, there has been sharp controversy over the role and nature of the UNRWA. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was established in 1949 to provide relief for […]
Brigadier David Neal ended his Army career as Provost Marshal and head of the Royal Military Police. In 2021, Priti Patel chose him to be Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, to monitor the Home Office’s immigration, asylum, nationality and customs functions. Last month, the current Home Secretary, James Cleverly, dismissed Neal just before […]
The conflict in Ukraine has been a wake-up call. Not only did it show again that Russia is an immediate military threat to its neighbours, but it revealed that defence spending can be eaten up very quickly when ice-cold relations become a hot war. Europe and the United States have acted to provide Ukraine with […]
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the crisis of Houthi militants threatening shipping in the Red Sea is still seen by many as principally a political one. Some observers have accepted the Houthis’ disingenuous justification that their terrorism is motivated purely Israel’s actions in Gaza. Tell that to the crew of the Strinda, a Norwegian-flagged […]
For people outside Northern Ireland, it takes a crisis to pay attention to what is happening in that corner of the United Kingdom. For too long, those crises tended to be violent, but after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was concluded in 1998, and a measure of uneasy peace was created. The stories now, thankfully, usually […]
This is the night mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door. Not every public utility inspires classic cinematography, let alone a script written by someone three times considered for a Nobel prize. But the […]
For a Conservative, these are fairly bleak times. However you regard the incumbent government, all the empirical data point towards a Labour victory at this year’s general election. Our likely new overlords believe in the heavy hand of the state and the performative virtue of high taxation, and regard the Brexit referendum, more than seven […]
Sir Keir Starmer wrote an article for The Telegraph last weekend. That is startling enough, for a one-time contributor to Socialist Alternatives, but what he said was more extraordinary and – for many – more inflammatory. The Labour leader, explicitly ‘extend[ing] the hand of friendship to those who voted for the Tories’, attempted to portray […]
‘All of us who have worked with him know he is a man of honesty and integrity’. That was the verdict of the first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, on his health secretary, Michael Matheson, on 16 November. The problem for Matheson, for Yousaf and for the Scottish Government is that it isn’t necessarily true. […]
Let me start by saying that I adore pubs. I haven’t been a drinker for years now but I still love licenced premises, and I’m not nearly as demanding as Orwell: his idealised Moon Under Water sounds divine, but I regard myself as adaptable. When I was a student, there were (I reckoned) 43 pubs […]
If you have ever worked in public relations, you will have pondered abstractly about impossible jobs or clients from hell. Shamima Begum, the 24-year-old East Londoner whose underage holiday romance led her into Islamic State, is not someone you would welcome representing. Her name is linked reflexively with some of the most abhorrent ideology and […]
Batteries are big business in the Far East. China satisfies about 60% of the global market for rechargeable, mainly lithium-ion, batteries, and its only sizeable rivals are Japan and South Korea. But the market has the potential to grow bigger still, as we prepare to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine: after 2035, you […]
When the Metropolitan Police was established in 1829, its progenitor, the then Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, ensured that its ability to maintain law and order and to prosecute criminality rested immutably on the approval and respect of the people. He would repeat ever after the aphorism, ‘The police are the public and the public […]
It is an open secret, in Brussels and elsewhere, that for political reasons the UK must still be ‘punished’ for Brexit. The EU cannot afford to see a country prosper after leaving; the lesson must be driven home that exiting the European Union is the door only to economic contraction and dwindling competitiveness. For evidence, […]
It wasn’t headline news, but a few days ago the Office for National Statistics revealed that public borrowing for July stood at £4.3bn, significantly less than the £6bn the Office for Budget Responsibility had predicted in the spring. Clash of the quangos! As surely as thunder follows lightning, this announcement was followed by Sir John […]
The Edinburgh International Book Festival celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Unfortunately, all has not run entirely smoothly this year. At the beginning of the month, Greta Thunberg announced she was pulling out of her appearance at an event entitled ‘It’s Not Too Late To Change The World’. Why? Because the festival is being sponsored by […]
There are two types of politician: those who look comfortable in relaxed, informal settings, and those who don’t. This week the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, demonstrated how firmly he belongs in the first group when he cast aside his coat and tie and visited the Two Chairmen, a pub in Westminster popular with civil servants and […]
My first exposure to arguments about how the National Health Service is run was when I was around 10 years old. It was the late 1980s, and the BBC had unveiled a new drama series, based in an A&E department, called Casualty. One of the main characters in those early days was Dr Ewart Plimmer, […]
For most of my politically aware life, I’ve been a committed Atlanticist: I believe in a close (if not necessarily ‘special’) relationship with the United States, I think the UK and the US acting in concert can be a force for good in the world, and I believe NATO is the foundation of our security […]
