It’s been reported that officials in the Trump administration have given their UK counterparts a dressing-down over the Online Safety Act and the social-media ban for under-16s. As someone who previously worked on digital trade for the UK government, this does not surprise me. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have seen British laws such […]
It’s not often that a Labour announcement reminds you of music. Reading Andy Burnham’s confirmation of his commitment to Net Zero in the Guardian last week, I couldn’t help but think of The Who’s 1971 epic rocker ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Within it are the lyrics: ‘And the world looks just the same, And history […]
It reads like a horror story. A tiny baby projectile vomiting for four feet. Sinister rashes moving across newborn skin. A shifty nurse hovering over the cot of an infant with blood around his mouth. The looming threat in these sentences: ‘Mother D could see her daughter looked better and so went back to bed. […]
When you drive through the potholes and your suspension gives out, or when you sit fuming at temporary traffic lights because of roadworks, it’s for a reason. It’s because the cost to you in delays and disruption doesn’t figure much in the council’s budgeting or the contractors’ work schedules. The familiar ‘I don’t give a […]
Britain’s political class loves to talk about ‘reforming welfare’, but everyone knows the limits of that ambition. Voter Welfare – the £333.7 billion the state is forecast to transfer from taxpayers to households in 2025–26 – is politically untouchable. A population brought up on free cake is unlikely to vote for the plate being removed, […]
So, this week financial markets started pricing four or even five Bank of England rate rises over the next year. On the evidence in front of me today, that is lunacy. In fact, I called it rubbish on GB News yesterday lunchtime. Against that backdrop, the Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate by 25 […]
You could almost hear the revolutionary vitriol dripping onto the Labour benches during Monday night’s Lords debate on political donations, following the announcement of Reform’s £72 million bonanza from two crypto billionaires with UK voting rights but recent residence abroad. ‘An undermining of democracy and rampant Americanisation’, one peeress spat out. A case of ‘the […]
If there was one event that ended Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, it was 9/11. The growth and predominance of globalisation were followed by anti-Western intellectual movements. Many, especially on the Left, are still obsessed with rationalising the insanity of the attackers – most notoriously streamer Hasan Piker, who claimed in 2019 that ‘America deserved 9/11’. […]
Did you ever hear the one about the leaders of Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party holding a press conference? It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but yesterday, the UK’s foremost regional separatists came together in Cardiff to pressure Andy Burnham into facilitating the dissolution of the nation. Michelle […]
If rumours are to be believed, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party are thinking about scrapping inheritance tax. Inheritance tax is a pernicious tax that punishes people for doing things that we are supposed to do: building things, saving and investing. Crucially, it is also a tax on loving your family and wanting to leave […]
If you think this summer has been sticky, count yourself lucky you were not in the Cabinet in August and September 1931, in the midst of possibly the worst economic crisis the country has ever faced. It is worth looking at what happened then, because high energy and Government borrowing costs mean a crisis of […]
This week, Nimby Watch is on its way to Edgware – but it’s taking the long route… Ummm…where are we? Because I’m going to be honest, this doesn’t look too familiar… Well, for now, we’re in the West Bank, the larger of the two territories that make up Palestine – the other, of course, being […]
This week saw a south-Atlantic gale of outrage after Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding President Javier Milei repeated his country’s entirely bogus claim to the Falkland Islands, with President Donald Trump twisting the knife by saying the USA’s view of the issue was ‘under review’. It came just weeks after Argentina’s footballers brandished a ‘Malvinas’ banner at the […]
There is a standard response from any Chancellor or Prime Minister asked questions about government finances: ‘I am not going to write the Budget in front of you’. And neither should they. The Budget is a potentially market-moving financial event. The figures it contains have to add up, make sense. The measures have to be […]
The Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons was clearly a worrier. When, in 1863, the Tyneside arms-maker Sir William Armstrong calculated that Britain’s coal would run out in 212 years, Jevons checked the sums. Armstrong had assumed the country’s appetite for coal grew by the same tonnage every year. But it actually grew by the same […]
Last week, I met my friend Becky for coffee in Buenos Aires. Becky lives on Las Malvinas and, unsurprisingly, calls them ‘the Falklands’. I never do, of course. After nearly ten years in Argentina, I have learned to discuss this particular subject in something closer to a stage whisper. Hearing the ‘F’ word spoken at […]
