The Greek poets understood that the cruellest fate is not the one a man brings upon himself, but the one that was waiting for him before he arrived. Oedipus did not choose his fate, indeed he walked into it with the very best of intentions. So too, in his quieter and more lawyerly fashion, did […]
The refusal of the Treasury to increase defence spending shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is exactly what HM Treasury is supposed to do: stop spending that it sees as unaffordable, unless the necessary trade-offs are made to unblock it. The point of cabinet government is for Secretaries of State to make their case for […]
The ‘Burnham effect’ that propelled Labour to victory in Makerfield is only the latest example of regional and devolved democratic leaders who are miles more popular than their opposite numbers in Westminster. Political talents as diverse as Boris Johnson and Alex Salmond prospered after being sprinkled with devolved political fairy dust. So do these roles […]
The numbers are not in dispute, whatever the spin. Andy Burnham took Makerfield with 54.8% of the vote and a majority of 9,231, on a turnout of 58.7%, the highest at any parliamentary by-election in almost seven years. Labour’s lead over Reform, 13 points at the general election, widened to 20. A seat Reform UK […]
Viewers of ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ – now back for another season – will be familiar with Jeremy Clarkson’s long-running battle with the bureaucrats of West Oxfordshire District Council. When his Diddly Squat farm shop boomed, the council dragged their feet over planning permission for a car park extension, bizarrely decreed he could only sell goods from […]
Looking For Growth has launched the Emergency Energy Bill – a ready-made piece of legislation that the Government should pass tomorrow. But it won’t. Labour won’t take the radical action necessary to get bills down unless we force them to. This Government, just like many of its predecessors over the last thirty years, has prioritised […]
When John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary last week, there was widespread praise for his principled stand. The financial settlement contained in the final draft of the Defence Investment Plan, believed to offer the Ministry of Defence an additional £10 billion or so over the next four years, was not even close to the resources […]
Can you imagine anything worse than a foreign company whose software saved lives, cut NHS waiting lists, put more police on the beat and reduced crime? It’s appalling, isn’t it? No British government or public sector body should have any dealings with such a company. Obviously. Much better to let patients die, cut police jobs […]
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 […]
