Sir Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as Prime Minister – either from mid-July or from mid-September, depending on how the Labour leadership process goes (coronation vs contest). He will thus have been prime minister for somewhere between about 730 and 800 days, following his victory by a huge majority in the 2024 General Election. […]
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 […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in Danson Park, Bexley, in South East London. But why? I see we’re in a park! You never bring me anywhere nice. It’s a particularly nice park, too! Danson Park, which celebrated its 100th birthday last year, has a lake – which hosts boating and water sports activities – football […]
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 […]
In my new book, Inside the Sausage Factory, I examine four campaigns for ‘public health’ policies in the 2010s and examined all the evidence that was marshalled for and against them. It turns out that the evidence for them wasn’t very good and there wasn’t much evidence marshalled against them, but that isn’t really the […]
Britain has built a tribunal system so sprawling and risk-free that it now consumes the very people who should be running organisations, improving products and services and designing more productive companies. What was meant to be a quick, low-cost alternative to the courts has become a parallel bureaucracy that traps skilled workers in disclosure exercises […]
According to the Government, England is about to spend £39 billion on social housing. That may be just the start. Andy Burnham, the frontrunner to replace Keir Starmer if he wins this Friday’s Makerfield by-election, has made a large-scale expansion of social housing central to his pitch. Yet the discourse around this number focuses almost […]
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping policing, and the recent row over the Metropolitan Police’s blocked deal with Palantir shows how far politics is lagging behind operational reality. If we are serious about protecting frontline officers and visible neighbourhood policing, we should embrace carefully regulated AI as a force multiplier that releases cops from analogue bureaucracy […]
In what could have been a comment on Scotland’s low-scoring, but nevertheless clean sheet-keeping win against Haiti in the World Cup, Adam Smith once remarked: ‘Defence is of much more importance than opulence’. But for too long now, Britain has had too little of either. The lack of capable military force has prompted (at the […]
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 […]
Every year, I eagerly await a report that confirms what I see before my eyes. KPMG’s ‘Illicit Trade in Tobacco Report’ is a beast of research, conducting in-person ‘pack-surveys’ (where packets of tobacco, whether to be rolled or already neatly packed into paper, are surveyed to find whether they are legally bought or smuggled, counterfeit […]
