Politics

It’s confirmed. The co-leaders of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, have become junior ministers in Nicola Sturgeon’s government. Harvie is Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Active Travel and Tenants’ Rights, while Slater is Minister for Green skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity. Of the two, Slater’s is the more interesting role as it includes green industrial strategy, an area where Scotland has continued to fail under the SNP. If Slater is serious about turning this around then she should make her first ministerial outing a trip to the north-east of England to see how green industrial strategy should be done. From the Tyne to the Humber, developments in

Nearly two years on from the general election and 11 years since the Tories took office, they remain comfortably and consistently ahead in the polls. This is remarkable. In September 2008, when Labour was in power, it was almost 20 points behind the Conservative party. Eighteen years before that, when the Tories were in power, they regularly trailed by double digits. You might think this Tory lead, and the poor numbers for the leader of the opposition — Keir Starmer’s latest approval rating is minus 39 — would have led to Tory triumphalism. However, when Tory MPs return to parliament next week, they will do so in a strikingly subdued

With the conclusion of the disastrously-executed Afghanistan withdrawal, the attention of Joe Biden and his loyal media apparatchiks has turned to dealing with the ordeal’s political damage. The last few weeks have seen Biden lose significant support, most notably among independent voters, and Republicans are already incorporating the Afghan debacle into their pre-2022 midterm messaging. Biden’s response to all this is to provide more evidence that he – contrary to the claims of many American liberals – is just as willing to dissemble and misrepresent as Trump. But there’s one crucial difference: Biden has Silicon Valley on his side. Twitter famously never missed an opportunity to slap a ‘misleading information’ label on Trump’s tweets

With the war in Afghanistan having officially ended on Monday, the world’s thoughts have turned to how the Taliban will govern Afghanistan – and what equipment left behind by coalition forces they now have at their disposal. Some $88 billion was spent by the US government alone since 2002 on security reconstruction – primarily equipping the Afghan army and police forces with training and kit. Now, with the messy withdrawal complete, much of that equipment has been left behind in Afghanistan. Caution should be taken with that headline figure however. Much of that $88 billion would have gone to the Afghan army in salaries, for instance, while consumables such as fuel and the

One of the most remarkable stories to come out of Germany in the last year has been the rise of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Having struggled for relevance in 2020, the party has transformed itself into a political force that could decide the makeup of the next government – and maybe even anoint Angela Merkel’s successor as Chancellor. The FDP’s success follows an almost eight-year long self-reinvention in which the party has sometimes resembled a cult of personality centred around its charismatic chairman, Christian Lindner. It was Lindner who began the party’s revival after a shattering 2013 defeat led to the loss of all its seats in the Bundestag,

Much recent discussion has focussed on the collapse of Afghanistan and the decline of the West. The humiliating American-led Western retreat from Kabul is most poignant for the signal it sends to other ‘protected’ states, present-day and future. The Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, Global Times, mockingly jibed in its editorial at the history of America abandoning its allies and warning how this might be an omen for Taiwan. But the Afghan smokescreen has obscured another aspect of Western decline: a European Court of Justice ruling of 15 July enforcing the same restrictions on ‘work time’ for member states’ military personnel as for any other worker, except on clearly specified military operations. If