Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Jeremy Hunt’s Budget was short on surprises. The Chancellor cut National Insurance for workers by another 2p in a bid to address the Tories’ poll slide ahead of the upcoming general election. Hunt also announced a shake-up to child benefit charges, said that ‘non-dom’ tax status would be scrapped and said that alcohol and fuel duty would be frozen. Here are the Budget announcements in full: Follow all the analysis as it unfolded on our live blog:
The News Agents podcast has had a mixed reception in the UK but its presenters are having an even rougher ride in the US. Host Emily Maitlis ambushed Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on ‘Super Tuesday’ to get her reaction to Trump’s victory. Asking first about the Republican party’s message for Trump’s competitor Nikki Haley, Maitlis swiftly moved on to a fiery line of questioning. She asked why ‘so many people who support Trump love conspiracy theories’, using as an example Greene’s own comments that the 2018 Camp Fire was started by ‘Jewish space lasers’. Suffice to say this didn’t exactly go down well. A
The Princess of Wales has been photographed for the first time since she was hospitalised earlier this year. But while the picture, which shows Catherine in a car driven by her mother Carole Middleton, is splashed across the American celebrity website TMZ, it won’t be appearing in British newspapers. So why is the British press so scrupulous, so abstemious and so responsible – things they could never have been accused of in the Wild West days of the old Fleet Street – when their American cousins still shoot from the hip when it comes to publishing paparazzi pictures of the Royals? The Earl’s words hit home It all goes back to
Will a UAE-backed entity buy the Telegraph and The Spectator? Not if parliament gets its way. More than 100 MPs have signed a letter saying that this should not happen, demanding a veto on foreign states taking over British titles. Former Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick, who organised the letter, told this morning’s Today programme: We believe that freedom of the press is a fundamental bulwark of democracy, and it is therefore very important that we protect our major national newspapers and media outlets from inappropriate control by foreign powers. Jenrick says that he and his colleagues are proposing that, alongside the existing powers that the government has, there should be a vote in parliament on whether these
It will put more money in people’s pockets. It will improve the incentives to work. And it will put down a marker that the party does still believe taxes can occasionally be cut. The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is not the world’s finest speech-maker, but he will probably attempt a few rhetorical flourishes when he cuts 2 per cent off the rate of National Insurance in his Budget later today. The trouble is, it is going to prove a damp squib, and not least because it has been widely trailed in advance. In reality, a modest reduction in National Insurance is not going to save the Conservative party from defeat at
Long gone are the days when you had a job for life. But, for young folks especially, it seems we don’t just do one job in a week. The strivers are scrambling for second jobs. Though it is hard to ascertain exact numbers through official statistics, some surveys suggest more than two-thirds of British Gen Zs are now supplementing their income with side hustles. A side gig could well be the most sensible way to improve your prospects Some of this is out of necessity, thanks to stagnant wages and rising living costs. But it is also being driven by attitude changes, and a desire to choose more purpose and freedom in
Anyone expecting Jeremy Hunt to unleash the animal spirits of wealth creators in his Budget today cannot have been paying much attention to the Treasury’s pre-briefing. Two per cent off National Insurance is likely to be as good as it gets, we are told. Perhaps a white rabbit will be pulled from a hat during the speech itself but more likely the animal in question will be a sloth. Such a creature – steady and dependable but resolutely undynamic – would be emblematic of the condition of what pundits used to term ‘UK plc’. For Britain under Hunt does not have an economy so much as a ‘meh-conomy’. While talk
It’s Budget day today. With the tax burden predicted to amount to 37 per cent of national income by the next election, the 2019 to 2024 parliament is set to go down as the biggest tax-raising parliament in modern times. A rather impressive feat for a Tory party that likes to paint itself as one of low taxes and financial stability. In fact, under the last 14 years of Conservative government, Mr S has discovered there have been over 1,000 tax rises. While we eagerly await today’s Budget announcements, here is a list of some of the most significant tax hikes introduced under various Tory Chancellors since 2010… Income tax
This Budget is probably Jeremy Hunt’s last fiscal event before the election, and the Chancellor will want to at least set a fair wind for the Conservatives to head into polling day. That means giving voters a sense that sticking with the Tories is the safer option, offering them giveaways on tax and the sense that more tax cuts might be to come – as well as avoiding the sort of post-Budget rows that can define a government in all the wrong ways. Hunt is expected to cut National Insurance by a further two percentage points, on top of the 2 point cut he made in the autumn. This is
Super Tuesday is over and so is the primary season. Although some states have not voted yet and a few others have not finished counting, the parties’ nominees are now locked in. They were really locked in several weeks ago. Biden had no serious competition and Trump vanquished his two main rivals in the early voting. Trump’s chief competitors were Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s UN ambassador. The former president effectively clinched the nomination when he beat both decisively on their most favourable terrain: DeSantis in Iowa and Haley in New Hampshire and her home state. Haley stayed in the race
Watching the current scandal around Christian Horner play out, I didn’t feel any of the glee I usually do when tabloids dissect the private lives of well-known people. (To be fair, I had zero sympathy for myself when the Daily Mail did it to me, twice – if you dish it out, you’d better be able to take it.) Rather, I felt an emotion that I rarely feel: protectiveness for my adored Ginger Spice – a.k.a Geri Hallwell Horner, wife of the Red Bull boss. It’s a weird one. We’re used to feeling various emotions towards pop stars – lust, love, loathing – but it’s not often that we feel protective of
More than 100 MPs have tonight backed an amendment in the House of Lords which would give parliament a veto on foreign states owning UK media outlets. Robert Jenrick, the former Housing Secretary, has organised an open letter among colleagues, following the attempt by the UAE-owned RedBird IMI to take over the Telegraph and Spectator titles. Signatories include a string of former Cabinet ministers including Sir John Redwood, Therese Coffey, Sir Simon Clarke, Robert Buckland, Stephen Crabb, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa Villiers and Sir Geoffrey Cox. Jenrick’s letter to Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, says that: ‘If major newspaper and media organisations can be purchased by foreign governments, the freedom of the press has
Another day, another government figure in a spot of bother. Michelle Donelan, Science and Technology Secretary, has today had to retract false accusations she made about an academic and agreed to pay the damages and costs. It’s a rather embarrassing case of the science minister unable to get her facts right: sub-optimal to say the least. Last October, Donelan accused Professor Kate Sang, an academic working at Heriot Watt University, of expressing sympathy for Hamas in the aftermath of the 7 October attack. She also accused another academic, Dr Kamna Patel, of sharing extremist material. Both woman, Donelan claimed, had breached the Seven Principles of Public Life and should be
We’ll know tomorrow afternoon what exactly Jeremy Hunt has included in his Budget, but reports this evening suggest we’re looking at another 2p cut to employee National Insurance: a move that is estimated to put £450 back in the pocket of the average worker, which Hunt will try to sell as a £900 tax cut, if you combine it with the additional 2p taken off NI in his Autumn Statement last year. The decision to opt for NI will be driven by fiscal restraints rather than political desire. Tory MPs, and workers, have been expecting something bigger than what was already delivered last autumn, and an income tax would have
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Kate Andrews speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman as the speculation grows over what taxes Jeremy Hunt will cut in tomorrow’s budget. National Insurance is looking most likely – it’s a giveaway but does it go far enough?
The SNP seems determined not to stick to the day job of actually running the country. Scotland’s government this week launched a publication called ‘Building a New Scotland: an independent Scotland’s Place in the World’. It set out policies for something that doesn’t exist – an independent Scotland – in areas in which the devolved administration has no responsibility. Angus Robertson, the party’s constitution and external affairs secretary who launched the report, hardly seemed fazed by those facts: he spoke fluently and familiarly about ‘defence, peace and security’ and Scotland’s role as ‘a good global citizen’, even if his party’s plan is unlikely to ever see the light of day.
Britain’s prisons brim with vulnerable people but perhaps the most vulnerable are children. At 30 September 2023, there were 301 children in prison in England and Wales alone. Wetherby Young Offender Institution in Yorkshire is home to 165 of them and a new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons makes for troubling reading about the conditions inside. There are the usual observations, familiar to regular readers of these write-ups, about broken heating systems and smashed windows, faulty electrics and insufficient time out of cells. But then there is this: ‘We had considerable concerns about the use of all-male teams to cut the clothes of vulnerable girls under restraint and
Mr and Mrs Sunak of Downing Street have given a joint interview to Grazia magazine in which they give answers to the most pressing questions facing the country. They don’t bother sweating the small stuff like the state of the economy, the upcoming Budget, or the election prospects of the beleaguered Tories, but instead share their carefully considered thoughts on dividing up the household chores. Akshata Murty gushes that Rishi’s ‘special skill’ is tidying the bedroom. Rishi is not to be outdone when it comes to spilling the secrets of their home life. He confesses to breaking away from his day job (just the small matter of running the country,
What a week for TV broadcasters: it’s been non-stop breaking news about, um, themselves. After BBC Verify’s debacle yesterday, it’s TalkTV that is making headlines today. The television channel, launched to much fanfare in 2022, is moving entirely online from this summer. Staff were informed by email on Tuesday, just a month after the channel’s most famous presenter Piers Morgan announced that his shows would be broadcast solely on YouTube. The station has struggled with fluctuating viewing figures for some time, and it racked up 2 million viewers in December 2023 – significantly less than BBC News’s 11.4 million and falling just behind its main competitor, GB News, which reached
Following an ill-timed interview with the BBC, Londoners have been reminded of the existence of the capital’s underwhelming ‘night czar.’ Amy Lamé has a claim to being Sadiq Khan’s worst mistake in office, having presided over a disastrous decline in London’s nightlife since taking up the post in 2016. Since then, her pay has been hiked by a whopping 40 per cent, with Mr S revealing last year that her annual salary is now almost £117,000. Talk about money well spent. Lamé’s re-emergence this week has sparked a campaign on social media, with Londoners sharing their #LameLondon snaps to highlight her failures in the job. And if things weren’t bad enough,