A rare glimmer of sanity as Reuters reports that the British clothing retailer Next ‘has won an appeal allowing it to keep paying warehouse workers more than sales consultants’. The report adds that: The ruling on basic pay overturns a key part of a 2024 Employment Tribunal decision in favour of over 3,500 current and […]
This morning, John Healey delivered his first major speech as Chancellor. He set out his vision for the economy and, while it was encouraging to hear his determination to drive growth and solve the NEET crisis, all while claiming to be committed to fiscal discipline, it was quite light on detail. However, one specific point […]
Dear Andy Burnham, Firstly, I must congratulate you on your new role. I am sorry that I have not written to you sooner and I know that you’ve technically been in post for a while now. In my defence though, you did go away almost immediately after taking office. The reason that I am writing […]
The last time I wrote about Reform UK’s annual conference I was doing it as the Deputy Editor of this fine publication. A year on, how much has changed? Greeting you as you enter the conference hall is the familiar fare for the familiar fee. Chicken and chips stands sit next to anti-Labour propaganda, accompanied […]
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 […]
Channel 5 has announced that it is preparing to dramatise the Peter Murrell embezzlement scandal. The 90-minute film will be made by Wonderhood Studios, whose most recent work was the well-received ‘Downfall’ about Huw Edwards. Not much is known about the production as yet, but those hoping for a deep dive into the complexities of […]
The ‘moron premium’ is back with a vengeance this week, with 10-year gilt yields approaching 5.30%, their highest since 2007, while the 30-year is again threatening 6%. Pantheon Macroeconomics estimates that higher borrowing costs have cut the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom from £23.6 billion to around £13 billion. Meaning almost £11bn has disappeared before the Budget […]
When Andy Burnham arrived at No 10 in July he came with a bold message of change. 40 years of neoliberalism have left Britain hollowed out: wealth has drained from those with the least to those with the most; capital ran riot while the state stood back and watched. It’s a powerful story, and evidently […]
If you spend enough time in politics you learn to spot a familiar mistake dressed up as a novel dilemma. In the 1980s, Xerox forbade the American programmer Richard Stallman from so much as fixing a glitch in his own printer, on the grounds that the code inside it was proprietary. It was this small, […]
Alan Greenspan was always attacked by the Left because of his belief in market forces. John Kenneth Galbraith, at a White House conference, made fun of him, saying that the cure for inflation is always the same for ‘Bolsheviks and the devoted supporters of Ayn Rand’. But each and every government learns the hard way […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in Axminster, because where else would you go to talk about the technologies of the future? Alright then, where are we off to this time? In this edition of Nimby Watch, we’re focusing in on Axminster, where – Oh, I love that we’re finally doing something different! I’m a huge […]
Between all the usual August silly-season news stories about how the Prime Minister makes tea (milk first, apparently) or his go-to Greggs pie (it’s the sausage, bean and cheese melt, since you asked) was something altogether more serious: where the Government plans to build 70,000 of its promised 300,000 new affordable and social homes. It […]
This week, consultation closed on the Government’s proposals to place further restrictions on the use of zero-hour contracts. Labour’s intention was signalled in last year’s Employment Rights Act, which obliges employers to offer a guaranteed-hours contract based on the average hours worked in a ‘reference period’, to give workers ‘reasonable notice’ of shifts, and to […]
This morning the Guardian reported ‘Number of young people in UK not in work or education falls below 1 million’. Technically yes. The ONS released new statistics today which show that the number of people aged 16 to 24 not in employment, education or training (NEET) is down 30,000. Unfortunately, it is not cause for […]
Britain says it wants to be a global hub for digital assets. Yet many people who want to use a lawful, FCA-registered crypto service cannot reliably move their own money to one. This is a test of whether the UK believes in individuals’ freedom to control their own money. A growing number of banks now […]
In 1943, a Post Office engineer called Tommy Flowers built a codebreaking machine out of 1,500 thermionic valves, partly out of his own pocket. Within a year Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, was cracking Nazi High Command ciphers at Bletchley Park. Britain had invented the data centre, in a large shed, and chock-full […]
