When I was a student, and enthusiastically political in the way students often are, I sported on my wall a Conservative Party poster that I was quite fond of. One of a rather handsome set produced by CCHQ ahead of the 2010 election, it featured a balloon and a ball-and-chain and the words: “There is […]
Boris Johnson has already started rowing back from his extraordinary criticism of devolution of yesterday. But it probably doesn’t matter. By speaking aloud the heresy that it has been “a disaster north of the border” and “Tony Blair’s biggest mistake”, the Prime Minister has broken a spell more than two decades in the weaving. Devoscepticism […]
A few short months ago, in the summer, I tried to offer a bit of comfort to self-styled liberal Conservatives who were feeling forlorn at the prospect of a long and populist Boris Johnson ascendency: “Bonapartism – patriotic, populist, plebiscitary – can be an unstable thing once out of its pomp. Gauke, or his heirs, […]
The US election isn’t technically over – and it sometimes feels as if it might never be over – but it has at least produced a winner. Barring some extraordinary upset, Joe Biden will be the next President and the surreal reign of Donald Trump is drawing to a close. Judging by Twitter, there are […]
For a country which so often claims a sense of fair play as one of its defining characteristics, the United Kingdom has a remarkably patchy record when it comes to doing right by those who have given it service. The escalating crisis in Hong Kong cast a harsh light on how hard successive British governments […]
When it comes to fighting Covid, the British response seems to have managed to combine the worst effects both of over-centralisation and excessive devolution. Between the Home Nations, the Government’s inability to pursue national policies has been laid bare. In the early stages of the crisis, people in Scotland and Wales were repeatedly left waiting […]
Douglas Ross’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference has provided the first significant political moment of this strange, virtual conference. Instead of just attacking the Scottish Nationalists and talking up his party’s prospects at next year’s Holyrood elections, he spent ten minutes taking chunks out of English colleagues whom he feels are either indulgently defeatist […]
A charge that can be fairly levelled at the political right is that whilst it can be very effective at winning political power, it is usually woeful at achieving ‘hegemony’. This is what you get when the political, institutional, and cultural power centres of a nation are pushing in the same direction. Thus, under New […]
Have successive governments ‘stolen’ tens of thousands of pounds from women affected by change to the state pension age? If you’re at all familiar with the law and how the state pension works, the answer is ‘obviously no’. But that raises another question: how familiar are ordinary people with those nuances? And how detailed is […]
With the polls suggesting that the Scottish Nationalists would be well-positioned to win a second referendum on independence, it is perhaps not surprising that the Government appears to be gravitating towards a strategy of simply refusing to grant them one. The reasoning is perfectly simple. The 2014 vote was supposed to be a ‘once-in-a-generation’ event. […]
Before everything was swept aside by the imperatives of combating the Covid-19 pandemic, this Government had placed at the core of its mission the ambition to build a ‘global Britain’. That phrase covers a host of subjects, not least our trading relationships with the EU and the rest of the world. But few things have […]
As he walked the streets of Beirut in the aftermath of last week’s horrifying warehouse explosion, Emmanuel Macron cut an extraordinary figure. Here was the President of France, Lebanon’s former European mandate power (the title of ‘former imperial power’ perhaps better fits Turkey), being treated as a hero by a population simultaneously taking to the […]
There is something slightly soul-crushing about the news that the Government is mulling a new digital sales tax to ‘save the high street’. It isn’t just the prospect of ministers raising the cost of living for online shoppers at a moment when they’re meant to be trying to kick-start the economy. Nor the fact that […]
Boris Johnson is in Scotland to save the Union. This is not a sentence that will fill many Scottish unionists with joy. His ratings amongst Scottish voters are poor. His track record on the Union is patchy. His relations many Scots Tories are, to put it mildly, not great. Nonetheless, this visit is a welcome […]
In 1954, René Rémond published the first edition of his famous Les Droites en France, an analysis of the evolution of the right wing of French politics from 1815 until the then-present. Updated in the Sixties, this book was the origin of his classic division of the French right into three distinct traditions: Legitimism, Orléanism, […]
Is a university education a public good, or a private one? This is a question which British policymakers have been trying to escape for too long, and it’s time the Conservatives answered it. The current structure of the English fees regime is a strange hybrid. On the one hand, the Government effectively subsidises mass university […]
When I last wrote about the battle over re-opening schools, I highlighted the significance of the fact that it was the major academy chains who were the strongest supporters of the Government’s proposals. This detail was a reminder of the difference structural reforms to the education sector can make – and how unfortunate it is […]
Few things better capture the haphazard manner in which the United Kingdom disentangled herself from Empire than the fact that there are no fewer than six types of British nationality. One of these – that of British National (Overseas) – has been thrust into the spotlight in recent days. As the Chinese Government has tightened […]
As the Dominic Cummings row closes in on its first full week on the front pages, even the die-hards must now admit that this is not, in fact, a bubble story. We’re also surely past the point where the Government had anything resembling a winning option. The moment for a swift and contrite admission of […]
The looming clash between the Government and the trades unions over re-opening primary schools is a grim reminder of the unfinished state of the Tory schools revolution. In 2010, the Conservatives entered office with education reform at the heart of their offer. Michael Gove’s ambitious plans to reshape the state education sector survived the Coalition […]
