It’s only on the basis of truth that power should be won – or indeed can be worth winning. Margaret Thatcher, 1996 It is a hundred years since Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham. Fifty years since she took over the Conservative Party. Almost 35 years since she was forced from office. Today’s voters are […]
Andy Burnham has one prescription, and he means to fill it, whatever the patient walks in with. The man with the broken arm, the woman with chest pains, the child with a fever: each leaves the surgery with the same pad of repeat scripts, which call for higher taxes on the rich, more generous benefits […]
Ten years ago, the EU referendum created two new political tribes: Leavers and Remainers. As Sara Hobolt and I show in our new book ‘Tribal Politics: How Brexit divided Britain’, both tribes are very much still with us. Even today, about 60% of people in Britain identify as a Remainer or a Leaver, and people’s […]
Whether through pig ignorance or wilful blindness, politicians of all stripes have presided over the slow decay of Britain’s economy for at least the past two decades. Under the Conservatives, taxation and public spending increased while growth and productivity slumped. It was largely this legacy that saw them ejected from office in 2024 when, after […]
This was not the King’s Speech Keir Starmer imagined it would be. The crisis engulfing the Prime Minister has become so terminal that Buckingham Palace even questioned whether it would be appropriate for the King to speak at all. But Starmer hasn’t maneuvered himself to the top job for nothing, and he patently won’t go […]
I was in a field in Kent as the local election results came in. As an unapologetic adherent of the metropolitan elite, it’s not my natural environment. But over the weekend it became increasingly clear that I’m not the only Londoner who’s out of touch with the rest of the country. The capital is now […]
After a poor set of local election results, the Government has returned to a familiar British political reflex: the ‘reset’. It is a word that sounds decisive, almost therapeutic, signalling that a Prime Minister has learned from their own mistakes and is now freshly aligned with reality. Yet in Westminster, the ‘reset’ is less a […]
We are living through a Tocquevillian moment: ‘The evils which are endured with patience so long as they seem inevitable become intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from them.’ The two-party system appears to be collapsing. The rightward turn seen in the United States may well be repeated in the […]
Britain is in a funk. Economic sclerosis, populist agitation, social fragmentation – now with extra domestic terrorism – and a political class bewildered by it all. What to do? Enter historian A.G. Hopkins. In his book, ‘The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot’, Hopkins’ sweeping analysis explores the last two centuries of […]
In leisure centres and town halls across the country, the cheers of the victors can be heard alongside the half-hearted claps of the vanquished. Democracy at its most local – and for the people involved, most personal – is being played out in over 130 English councils, including every borough in London. Few beyond the […]
Governments rarely earn applause for changing their minds, but sometimes it is well-deserved. In the past few weeks, ministers have killed two policies that would have made Britain poorer, a one-year freeze on private rents and a statutory power to direct where pension funds invest. The rent freeze, briefed on a Sunday and definitively buried […]
The House of Lords is trying to help the Government recognise the dangers of the mandation powers it wishes to include in the wide-ranging Pension Schemes Bill. It has asked the Commons to reconsider three times. How did we reach this impasse? Ministers believe investing in private assets will enhance workers’ long-term returns. Most large auto-enrolment […]
The following is an edited transcript of Lord Wolfson’s keynote speech at the 2026 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Prosperity, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argues that replacing Britain’s failed planning system would be the first step towards a freer, faster-growing economy. My father actually worked for Mrs Thatcher as her […]
It takes a special kind of political crisis to make a right-winger agree with Diane Abbott. As Keir Starmer faced MPs on Monday over his appointment of renowned sinophile and friend of Jeffrey Epstein Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, Abbott struck at the heart of the Prime Minister’s weakness. Portraying himself as feeling […]
This is the transcript of a speech delivered by the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions during the Commons debate on the Pension Schemes Bill on April 15, 2026. Who knew that the Pension Schemes Bill would become so controversial? It is a Bill on which there was so much consensus; a Bill […]
This week the IMF cut its forecast for UK growth by a hefty 0.5 percentage points to 0.8% for 2026, the sharpest downgrade of any G7 economy. The OECD last week went lower still, to 0.7%, leaving the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of 1.1% looking increasingly optimistic. Britain cannot afford to persist with an […]
As London heads toward local elections on May 7, voters will hear plenty about housing, crime and the cost of living. But on the streets, literally underfoot, a smaller, more visible issue is shaping perceptions of how well the city is run: the explosion of dockless e-bikes. What should have been a triumph of consumer […]
This week, Nimby Watch is… everywhere. Or at least, it’s in ‘nature, parks and green spaces’ across the country. Right then, where are we going this time? Well, for once, it’s not so much about where we’re going as where the Nimbys are headed. That sounds ominous. It is! A coalition called Vote For Nature […]
Over the past year, my pastime has been defending Americans from Ofcom, the UK’s internet censorship agency, while parrying demands from regulators in Australia, the EU and Brazil. Most readers will know about this work because of a cartoon hamster. That hamster, sent in a letter to Ofcom on behalf of my client 4chan, illustrated […]
We are facing one of those delightful clashes between equity and efficiency. Sadly, it looks like equity might win, which would mean a ‘fairer’ society – by the estimation of some people – but also a decidedly poorer one. I refer to this from Zack Polanski – the unthinking man’s Left populist du jour: ‘And […]
The Government’s plan to tunnel under Stonehenge has been struck down, having its planning consent formally revoked. The cost of this current stint of planning and consultations amounted to an eye-watering £179 million. At the same time, HS2 continues its slow progress northwards: continuously scaled back, delayed and vastly more expensive than when first promised. […]
Only last week, the Chancellor set out, once again, the Government’s ambition to get the economy moving. The language is familiar: growth, investment, opportunity and, of course, AI. This Government likes talking about growth, while choosing policies that make it harder to achieve. The route to economic growth is not a mystery And it is […]
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