The IFS has produced one of its characteristically insightful analyses of the UK’s fiscal situation in the run-up to the General Election. Much of it is familiar territory, covering the large rise in taxes of recent years, taking us to levels seen previously in the late 1980s. It also notes the work still to do in […]
Later this summer, Christopher Nolan’s latest film, featuring Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, and Mark Rylance amid a host of others, will be released to cinemas nationwide. Speaking about this project, Nolan said: “The empathy for the characters has nothing to do with their story …The problem is not who they are, who they pretend to […]
Apparently, Jeremy Corbyn intends to argue during this election that he has been “on the right side of history”. It is reasonable, for someone so shortly and deservedly to be consigned to history, that he should want to put a warm gloss on his relationship to posterity. But has Jeremy’s record over the longue durée […]
David Goodhart has often suffered for being ahead of his time. The founding editor of Prospect, the New Labour house journal, he became persona non grata for daring to suggest, in 2004, that unrestricted immigration might not be an unmitigated blessing. Goodhart’s new book, however, is precisely of its time. The Road to Somewhere is […]
Years before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, Nick Cohen had diagnosed the pathologies that led to his rise. Cohen – a columnist on The Observer and blogger for The Spectator – became first disillusioned and then enraged by how his colleagues on the Left would leap to the defence of any tyrant, […]
If the Labour Party were a bank, it would be RBS, the once-great Scottish institution that made the huge mistake of buying the Dutch ABN Amro. It failed to do proper due diligence on ABN’s balance sheets and got saddled with debts that tipped what had become the world’s biggest bank over the edge. When […]
Will he or won’t he? In any other situation it would be unthinkable for someone about to lead their political party off an electoral cliff to even consider clinging to office afterwards. Yet the question is nervously being asked of Jeremy Corbyn. Such is the fanaticism of the hard-Left movement he has unwittingly found himself […]
In 18 months as the Scottish National Party’s leader in Westminster, Angus Robertson has always had a back-up question ready at Prime Minister’s Questions – just in case Jeremy Corbyn actually does his job and addresses the obvious issue. This week, we learned that Robertson has never had to use it. By an astonishing coincidence, […]
Earlier this week, the Royal Mail delivered a remarkable piece of election literature to thousands of households across Scotland. It made no mention of any candidate. Nor did it refer to any policies or make any promises of any kind. Most remarkably of all, it did not even mention whether it was concerned with next […]
Here’s a simple question for Labour MPs: do you want your party to be smashed? There are, of course, some who would answer that with a yes. Some Corbynites clearly think that the only way to purge the party of their internal opponents is to have them vanquished in an election, leaving a rump PLP […]
Forecasts of a landslide victory for Theresa May abounded at the weekend, with one poll, by ComRes, even putting the Conservatives on 50 per cent, the highest since 1992. But at this point, such expectations need reining in and we should be sceptical of a May landslide. By landslide I mean a Thatcher or Blair […]
Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election does not just give her the opportunity to gain a working majority. It frees her from the manifesto commitments made by David Cameron in 2015, and gives her the opportunity to set out an agenda of her own. But what should that agenda be? We asked some of […]
If there is a golden rule of British politics, it is to suck up to the elderly. The lesson of the Brexit referendum – indeed, of pretty much every election, local and national – is that older people are overwhelmingly the most important constituency, because they are overwhelmingly the most likely to vote. That is […]
If there’s one aspect of British public life that’s impossible to overstate, it’s Jeremy Corbyn’s uselessness and unfitness for public office. This poses a dilemma for voters on the moderate Left. Here’s the best advice I can give, and it’s not very good. Early in Corbyn’s parliamentary career a Guardian leader noted that he was […]
Every time British politics takes its latest turn for the dramatic, or ridiculous, the same people drag out the same tweet by David Cameron from the last election. Glad we avoided that chaos with Ed Miliband, they chortle. Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with […]
There is only one acceptable response to Theresa May’s announcement that she wants a general election: good. For its own democratic hygiene, Britain desperately needs one. Since the Brexit referendum the country has been sloping miserably around the place like a football hooligan with an unshiftable hangover and morning-after breath. This is the bracing restorative […]
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