Over the past few months, the TaxPayers’ Alliance sent hundreds of freedom of information requests while researching Prevent, the Government’s counter-terrorism programme designed to stop people becoming terrorists. FOI requests to local councils, questions to the Home Office, requests for the most basic financial breakdowns – where the money went, who received it and what […]
In that bonkers novel, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, Hunter S. Thompson has a great line (well, in some ways, he has several) about crime in America: ‘In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.’ But not even […]
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 […]
The British are coming! The British are coming! As the United States celebrates 250 years of independence from the British, millions of Californians wish to put themselves under British rule. The primary is taking place tomorrow, and Steve Hilton, a British-born former adviser to David Cameron, is not only expected to make it through to […]
Admired for his reformist approach to the NHS, Wes Streeting is generally seen as the most market-friendly figure on the British Left. Yet his call for social media companies to be treated like tobacco businesses reminds us that even the best of a bad bunch can still be pretty awful. After resigning as Health Secretary, […]
When the Labour Government gained power in 2024, Matthew Syed proposed in his Times column the creation of a ‘Department for Long-Term Thinking’: a department that would take government out of the fog of the 24/7 news cycle and encourage policymakers to focus on the bigger picture. Although translating that idea into practice would probably […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in south-east London, just for a change… Alright then, where have you brought me this week? We’re in rapidly-gentrifying Peckham, in south-east London. Specifically, we’re by the Aylesham Centre, a shopping centre that has clearly seen better days, and they definitely weren’t recent. Hang on a second, haven’t we been […]
The 6-7 craze is about to turn from a meaningless, but ultimately fun, meme into something decidedly more serious: the number of UK Prime Ministers in the last 10 years. British firms and families are battling spiralling energy bills while our towns and cities are disfigured by rashes of vape shops, epidemics of shoplifting and […]
I walked the dog recently along the Thames Path, around the source (or one of the sources, so as not to cause a fight) of the River Thames. This time of year, much of it is all dried up, and you can walk along the bed of what in the winter is full-flowing river. Wondering […]
When I went to Manchester last year, there was one place I particularly wanted to visit: the Free Trade Hall. The building was constructed in the middle of the 19th century to commemorate the repeal of the Corn Laws. Manchester was then the heart of manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution and, most importantly, the struggle against […]
A confession: I have never read Karl Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. I don’t have a noble excuse for not having done so, just bone idleness. Nonetheless, I have Wikipedia, a penchant for clichés and a horror at the evolving Labour leadership race. If the fall of Boris Johnson was a tragedy for […]
A collective howl of despair could be heard throughout the unionist community of Scotland last Friday at the prospect of five more years of SNP rule following the Holyrood elections. I can’t have been alone in feeling a bit like a prisoner, incarcerated for a crime I don’t remember committing, having looked forward with faint […]
The bond market has finally lost patience with Labour. The 10-year gilt yield this week is back above 5% – around 5.09% as I write – its highest since the 2008 financial crisis. The 30-year gilt has touched 5.81%, its highest since 1998. Labour’s credibility is being repriced in real time. And the omens are […]
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 […]
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 […]
