Politics

Last week, the new head of the Army, General Sir Roly Walker, warned that war may be much closer than we think. Is our military ready? Two years ago, a syndicate of young officers published an article on the extreme shortage of division and brigade-level training in the British Army. Since then, the amount of larger-scale training has improved somewhat, despite a general resource shortage, but a form-filling safety regime has developed in our armed forces in the past decade which makes our army less combat ready. It’s worth first understanding how safety works in the British Army. In recent years, several fatal accidents have been reported in its operations. Statistics are no

As if the French hadn’t enough on their plates, with turbulent elections and an underwhelming Euros performance, they’ve now had to contend with the prospect of terrorism blighting the Olympic Games. At least one major terror plot has been foiled by the French authorities, and pro-Islamic State channels are issuing threats to stadiums and fans. The main concern comes from the Afghanistan-based ‘Islamic State of the Khorasan Region’ (IS-K), and for good reason too. Back in March 2023, US Army General Michael Kurilla warned Congress that IS-K could launch an attack against European targets with ‘little to no warning’. A year later, the group took responsibility for the attack on the Crocus City Hall

Although Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been in office less than a month, similarities between this year’s election and Tony Blair’s 1997 victory end with the size of Starmer’s House of Commons majority – just 13 seats shy of Blair’s in 1997. Just four days into Blair’s government, Gordon Brown stunned the country with his announcement that he was going to make the Bank of England independent. Two of Brown’s four Conservative predecessors as Chancellor, Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, had used their resignation speeches to advocate Bank independence. The other two, John Major and Kenneth Clarke, had been strongly opposed. Brown came into the Treasury with a fully

The Tories are about to choose a leader once more, and this time cannot allow themselves any self-indulgence. In 2022, they sidelined Kemi Badenoch – far and away the most popular candidate with the party-membership – in favour of a choice between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Tory MPs resembled a football manager ‘fielding the reserves’. The resulting electoral meltdown this summer seemed inevitable. Badenoch clearly doesn’t shrink from a fight Much has been made of Badenoch’s rather inspiring backstory: the birth in Wimbledon to middle-class parents (father a GP, mother a university professor), the childhood under a grim left-wing dictatorship in Nigeria, and her teenage move to the UK

Anjem Choudary thrived on the oxygen of publicity and in the end could not stand being starved of it. He could have retired quietly after serving a five-year sentence for encouraging support for Isis, but as soon as his licence conditions expired, he was courting controversy again. He put out press releases on WhatsApp and Telegram (largely ignored by the media), collected bans from online platforms, and began preaching over the internet to a group of five members of the Islamic Thinkers’ Society in New York. He did not know that two of them were undercover officers from the US. Much of what he said would not have been illegal in the