Just as there is a battle on the Right in Britain, so too is there a battle inside the Conservative Party for what the party should focus on. There are those who are concerned about the threat of political Islam, the damage to the social fabric of the Boriswave and other elements of mass immigration, […]
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every […]
In 1920 a Scottish Unionist MP Noel Skelton coined the term ‘property-owning democracy’, arguing that widening the base of property ownership among the working class would stabilise democracy and counter socialism. The term came to the forefront of political discourse when Prime Minister Anthony Eden used it at the Conservative Party conference in 1946. However, […]
I moved from New York to Britain and I keep getting asked when I’m going back. Not by my family, or my friends back home, but by British people. They tell me about flat wages, looming youth unemployment and an air of decline throughout the country. But no one talks about lunch, because everyone here […]
More than 20 million people across England and Wales are currently under hosepipe bans. This should be no surprise following the driest July on record, with the Met Office provisionally recording just 5.6mm of rain across England, less than half the previous record, set in 1911. But how much of the blame can be laid […]
‘A Waiter in Paris’ is the story of a young Englishman who graduated from a good university in London with a humanities degree, trained and educated for a world that no longer exists. ‘All while I applied for other, more “prestigious” jobs. Jobs that didn’t appear to exist anymore.’ That’s how Edward Chisholm puts it […]
One doesn’t like to be a disappointment to one’s parents. But in (at least) one crucial regard, I’ve let my dad down. He is a steam train enthusiast, and I’ve never shown a blind bit of interest. So it was more with filial duty than pleasure that I took the old man to the Didcot […]
Zia Yusuf has announced his proposal for a ‘Deliveroo law’ which would make it a criminal offence for CEOs and company directors to use or employ illegal immigrants, i.e., they’d face jail for non-compliance. And if that were not enough to discourage them, 10% of their global turnover could be seized for repeated breaches. Irrespective […]
When I was born in 1998, Britain had reached an optimistic point. It was the era of ‘Cool Britannia’: Tony Blair had won a landslide majority the year before to the tune ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, business was confident in our economy, employment was rising and we had low inflation. Yet by the time […]
Outgoing governments often try to craft a legacy for themselves by introducing policy traps that incoming governments find hard to undo, such as Rishi Sunak’s National Insurance cuts in 2024 or Gordon Brown’s introduction of the 50p top rate of income tax in 2010. Keir Starmer just did something similar by initiating a huge expansion […]
Trains run on rails. And access to these rails determines what services can be offered. Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries the railways were privately owned. Most companies, however small, initially owned their own permanent way. It soon became apparent that, rather than forcing passengers on long journeys to disembark and join another […]
‘I’m personally convinced that our civilisation is approaching its end,’ wrote the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge in 1980. ‘I think of St Augustine when, in AD 410, the news was brought to him in Carthage that Rome had been sacked by the Barbarians.’ Jim Callaghan was equally gloomy. In 1974, he remarked: ‘When I am […]
Below is a speech incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham could give – one that would unite the country around a shared vision of prosperity. Prosperity for All My fellow citizens, Today, as I stand before you as your Prime Minister, I want to cut through the political noise and give you the unvarnished truth about […]
In Gordium, the capital of Phrygia, stood an oxcart, its yoke connected to the pole by a knot of cornel bark so intricate that no one could find where it began or ended. An oracle promised that whoever undid it would rule all Asia. For generations, clever men picked at it, theorised, and organised what […]
For a nation of Nimbys, Britain – or at least London – is remarkably fond of its skyscrapers. We love them so much we give them cutesy diminutives like ‘The Gherkin’, ‘The Cheesegrater’ and the ‘Walkie Talkie’. We boast about vistas from which you can see them, marketing properties for their ‘stunning view of The […]
Nigel Farage, the Member of Parliament for Clacton and leader of Reform UK, has resigned, triggering a by-election in the constituency. This follows weeks of speculation regarding an undeclared £5 million gift Farage received before he became an MP, as well as other gifts he allegedly should have declared. Farage intends to stand in the […]
As the Sex Pistols sounded the last honk of their guitar amps in a San Francisco rock venue in 1978, Johnny Rotten leered over the crowd one final time. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” A strange question to ask a group of punks perhaps, if one made more explicable by Rotten’s swift departure […]
Since Andy Burnham became the Mayor of Manchester in 2017, the term Manchesterism has taken on a new meaning. To him, it stands for the expansion of the public sector and a managerial state. Now, with Keir Starmer on the brink of resignation and Burnham’s Makerfield by-election win clearing his path to Westminster, Britain may […]
Some are saying they don’t know what Andy Burnham’s big ideas are. They don’t know what he will try to achieve when he becomes prime minister. On GB News earlier this week, Boris Johnson described Burnham as a ‘mascaraed Mancunian mystery’. It is a peculiar concern. Burnham’s ideology seems to me no harder to identify […]
The UK has the lowest business investment of any G7 country. The last time its business investment stood above the G7 median as a proportion of GDP, John Major was Prime Minister. The Labour government’s instinct, both in its manifesto and in practice, reflects the old Keynesian mindset that “The duty of ordering the current […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched the largest ever public offering of stock today, selling $75 billion worth of shares. SpaceX emphasised its remarkable achievements in its IPO filing: ‘We are the primary launch provider for the US government. In 2025, we launched 11 of 12 National Security Space Launch (‘NSSL’) medium and heavy lift missions […]
June 4 marked the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It has been a long time since the China of reform and opening-up gave way to one of the strangest regimes of our age: a country with the political freedoms of the Soviet Union but economic power approaching that of the United States, capable […]
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