If the title Baron Walker of Broxton leaves you blank, let me help: Richard Walker is executive chairman of the frozen food retailer Iceland, succeeding his father Sir Malcolm Walker, the company’s founder, in 2023. He was on the Conservative Party’s approved list of parliamentary candidates, then resigned in October 2023 because the party had […]
‘The Bomber Will Always Get Through.’ With this blunt warning in 1932, eight years before the Blitz, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin revealed a harsh truth: nothing was safe in the era of aerial warfare. Almost a century later, we are faced with an equally formidable threat in the form of cheap and scalable drones. This […]
Over the centuries, the concept of ‘money’ has continued to evolve – from bartering, to bank notes to bitcoin. During this time, London has emerged as a powerhouse in the foreign exchange market, accounting for almost 40% of all global trading. Today, the UK is well placed to become a global leader in the future […]
A spring conference rarely grabs the national headlines. It is typically a chance for party faithful to shore themselves up before a local election, and party officials to take a weekend away. It’s why much of Ed Davey’s spring conference speech last week floated under the national radar, bar the odd headline about the Liberal […]
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, so the saying goes. If that is true, Britain’s political class must be losing its mind. Faced with persistent economic stagnation, the highest youth unemployment in Europe and embarrassingly high levels of debt, they continue to reach for the same interventionist […]
Iran’s strike on Ras Laffan this week was not just an attack on Qatar, but on one of the most important energy hubs on the planet. In this extract from his book ‘Material World’, Ed Conway explains why this vast LNG complex matters so much – and why damage there could reverberate through gas markets, […]
In 2020, the European Union launched its Green Deal. Six years later, investments in hydrogen-based projects have collapsed, and electricity prices are twice as high as in the US and China. Europe is losing its competitive edge. In our research for the Institute of Economic Affairs, we identify eight reasons why the EU Green Deal […]
The Government’s approach to the UK’s steel industry has always looked like a cross between inveterate, unshakeable optimism and the panicked thrashings of a drowning man clutching for a flotation aid. An extremely charitable observer would argue that the Government had always had a very clear aim: to preserve Britain’s steel industry in order to […]
Today’s labour market statistics are the usual jumble of sometimes conflicting indicators, based on different periods and using different methodologies. However, it is clear that the unemployment rate is continuing its slow upward creep, with the overall rate now at 5.2%, the highest since the Covid pandemic (when an understandable blip reversed a long trend […]
On Wednesday mornings in my little rural village in Hampshire, I have two options for a morning coffee. The first is the charming community café, freshly ensconced in the village hall, which is a cross-generational space where my teenage daughter serves coffee to our octogenarian neighbours, and which I happen to love. The second is […]
After the non-event that was the Spring Statement, yesterday’s Mais lecture by Rachel Reeves was supposed to give us the granular detail of the Chancellor’s plan to rescue Britain’s economy. I hope no one held their breath. The speech was at times incoherent, and felt like an exercise in buck-passing more than the decisive plan […]
The latest surge in oil prices, following the US-Israeli confrontation with Iran, has revived a familiar warning about stagflation and recession, and if Britain may be about to relive the 1970s. That comparison is not absurd. But it is often badly misunderstood. The central lesson of the 1970s was not that oil prices rose. It […]
Nearly three years ago I launched Next Gen Tories (NGT), a pressure group to focus the Conservative Party on winning back voters under the age of 45. For too long, the Conservatives had ignored the growing problem that younger generations weren’t achieving the key milestones that might make someone feel like they have a greater […]
The BBC likes to present itself as a national institution that belongs to all of us. If that is true, it should be willing to live by the same rules as everyone else. Right now, it does not. Under the current system, complaints about BBC programmes are handled first by the BBC itself. Only after […]
A report from Healthwatch England has found a dramatic increase in the number of people in Britain using private healthcare. It says: In 2023, 9% of those we polled had accessed private healthcare in the last year. By 2025, this figure nearly doubled to 16%. The use of private dental care increased from 22% to […]
The war in Iran continues, and Donald Trump is trying to avoid an enduring oil shock by assembling an international alliance to protect the Strait of Hormuz. But as the realities on the ground play out, so too does the war of narratives. Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who frequently appears on […]
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