SpecData

Mr Steerpike was interested to read over the Christmas break that young people are currently flocking to join China’s civil service, attracted by the job stability it offers compared to the volatile private sector, and seeking to escape the country’s relatively high youth unemployment.  According to the Reuters piece, the civil service is still seen by young people as an ‘iron rice bowl’, or job for life. Readers may be reminded of our own ‘Rolls-Royce’ civil service, where even the most incompetent bureaucrats are shuffled between departments rather than ever fired – the ‘iron hot desk’, perhaps. But Mr S was struck by one part of the Reuters piece in

Dear oh dear. There’s more bad news for the Labour lot as new polling by More in Common for LBC has revealed that a quarter of those who backed Sir Keir Starmer’s party in last year’s election now regret their decision. After the events of the last six months – from freebie fiascos to cronyism rows to unpopular policy decisions – Mr S can’t say he’s all that surprised… The latest poll shows that 24 per cent of all Labour voters surveyed regret supporting Starmer’s army, with a staggering third of this aged between 60-74 years old suffering from a serious case of buyer’s remorse. Similar frustration can be seen

Labour’s crackdown on people smugglers comes as New Year’s Day Home Office figures show the number of small boats crossing the English Channel increased by a quarter on 2023. A staggering 36,816 people were recorded as having made the journey on small boats in 2024, with the last group of just under 300 people arriving on 29 December. Good heavens… The figures reveal a 25 per cent increase on the previous year, in which 29,437 people took on the Channel to get to the UK – although 2022 remains the busiest year on record, with a whopping 45,774 arrivals onto British shores. In fact, the latest figures take the total

It’s been an eventful year in British politics, with a snap general election and multiple leadership contests keeping political journalists across the country busy. And how have political party leaders fared? With the help of the Spectator’s data hub, Mr S has examined which party leaders, both north and south of the border, have had the best (and worst) 2024. At the start of the year, hapless Humza Yousaf was forced to step down as First Minister after he rather abruptly ended his government’s coalition agreement with Patrick Harvie’s barmy army. The SNP establishment became rather concerned about the prospect of yet another leadership race – given just how unedifying

Another day, another bit of bad news for Sir Keir Starmer. A new Ipsos poll carried out between 27 November and 4 December has revealed that dissatisfaction with the Labour leader has reached a staggering 61 per cent – his worst rating as leader of the lefty lot. Good heavens… It’s not just Sir Keir struggling with unpopularity – overall unhappiness with the Labour government remains rather high too, with a whopping 70 per cent of Brits registering their dissatisfaction with the party in charge. And voters are feeling rather bleak about the future too, with two thirds of poll participants admitting they expect the economy to get worse over the

When Keir Starmer announced his ‘measurable milestones’ yesterday, he called them ‘the most ambitious and credible programme for government in a generation’. But are they really so ambitious? Many of them sound remarkably similar to the missions in the Conservatives’ Levelling Up white paper, published just under three years ago – only less detailed and lacking a focus on improving the worst-performing areas of the country. Starmer has six milestones compared with the white paper’s 12 missions and 51 metrics. On living standards, Starmer promised that they will be ‘higher in every region of the country’. Which sounds very much like the white paper promise that ‘pay, employment and productivity will

While all eyes were on the Prime Minister’s big ‘plan for change’ announcement today, the government also chose this morning to release some new data to the public. One of the reports published today includes the latest Prevent stats – and they paint a rather interesting picture. Between March 2023 and 2024, there were a staggering 6,922 referrals to the programme which when broken down reveal an uptick in cases being referred due to ‘Islamist concerns’, a rise of over 130 from the previous year. How very interesting… The gap between referrals for extreme right wing behaviour and Islamist concerns has narrowed notably in the year ending March 2024, with

When it rains for Scotland’s Nats, it pours. It now transpires – according to the Scottish government’s very own survey – that between 2022 and 2023, the proportion of people who trust the SNP government has plummeted by a staggering 10 points. And that’s not all. Trust in all six public sector institutions has declined markedly in the last 12 months, with the results presenting a rather concerning picture for the SNP ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections. Not that Mr S can say he’s particularly shocked… The Scottish government saw public trust fall from 55 per cent in 2022 to a mere 45 per cent the following year, while

One of the perennial scapegoats of the NHS is the patient who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment. The headlines write themselves: millions of pounds wasted and other patients can’t get seen. But while missed GP visits have become a symbol of inefficiency, a far bigger – and often overlooked – problem lies within our hospitals. Every day, there are more than 300,000 outpatient appointments at hospitals, from MRI and breast scans to plaster casts and blood tests. And every day, 20,000 patients don’t turn up. On the surface the data looks like a success story for the NHS, with the percentage of appointments that patients miss gently falling over the last

Does wisdom come with age? MPs have just voted by a margin of 55 to back a bill to legalise assisted suicide. In what was the first Commons vote on assisted death for a decade, MPs voted 330 to 275 in favour of the bill.  The new intake of parliamentarians – those first elected in 2024 or returning after an enforced absence – were nearly twice as likely to back assisted suicide than any other intake. You might think this is just because most of the new MPs sit on Labour’s benches. Well, perhaps. But this was a free vote on an issue of conscience so we wouldn’t necessarily expect