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Since Steerpike first reported on the petition for another general election, another two million signatures have been added. (Not that Mr S is taking the credit.) While the petition is most popular in Tory and Reform-held seats – especially in Essex, where almost one in ten of the electorate have signed in some constituencies – MPs in Labour marginals should be taking note too. In Tamworth, Ribble Valley, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Derbyshire Dales and North West Leicestershire, Labour MPs with majorities of fewer than 1,500 votes have at least 5,500 constituents who have signed the petition. Derbyshire Dales’s new boy John Whitby perhaps has the most to fear as his

The BBC reported that AstraZeneca and Pfizer are credited with together saving more than 12 million lives in the first year of Covid vaccination. To substantiate this claim, the BBC refers to Airfinity, a ‘disease forecasting company’. Models do not fit anywhere in the pathway for establishing effectiveness Airfinity used an Imperial College London study, which calculated that Covid vaccines saved 20 million lives between December 2020 and December 2021. Using a mathematical model, the Imperial team assumed that vaccination conferred protection against Covid infection (mRNA vaccines were estimated to have given 88 per cent protection against infection after the second dose) and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission. The team also assumed

For more than a decade, viral petitions demanding an immediate election were the preserve of Remainiacs and much of the Twitter left. So with Labour now in government, it is to no surprise then that it is now much of the right which is demanding another vote. A parliamentary petition to ‘call a general election’ has gone viral overnight, thanks to supportive posts by Elon Musk (who else?) among others. Numbers currently stand at more than 650,000 signatories: six times higher than the threshold of 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate. Wonder what the government response will be eh? Such petitions rarely, if ever, succeed in their goal and those

Is ‘workshy Britain’ a mirage caused by dodgy statistics? That is what the left-leaning think tank the Resolution Foundation is claiming in a report published this morning. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), it says, has missed 930,000 people who are actually in work. The missing numbers, it asserts, are enough to raise Britain’s employment rate from 75 percent to 76 percent, with a corresponding fall in the combined total of people classified as unemployed or economically inactive. Until the 1990s, the concept on unemployment in Britain was pretty straightforward: it was the total number of people who were claiming unemployment benefit. Since then, however, the unemployment total has instead

It is a fate which has been creeping up on Britain for years, but that doesn’t make it any the harder to bear when it becomes official. According to the OECD, we now have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe. At 80.9, the average Brit now keels over more than three years earlier than the average Swiss (84.2), Spaniard (84.0) or Italian (83.8) – which are the top three countries in Europe. We have lower life expectancy than many significantly poorer countries such as Greece and Slovenia. We also live shorter lives than countries where assisted suicide is commonplace, like Belgium and the Netherlands. We also come out pretty

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said Britain ‘would be one of the countries most affected’ by Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, with growth cut by 0.7 percentage points in year one, 0.5 percentage points in year two, and inflation 3-4 points higher. But research from Oxford Economics today suggests the impact would be ‘limited’, even in the worst-case scenario.  During the election campaign, Trump suggested putting tariffs of 10 or 20 per cent on all imported goods – except those from China and Mexico, which would be stung with 60 or even 100 per cent rates. At the moment, average UK tariffs on goods from the US

When it rains, it pours for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot. The polls have gone downhill since Starmer’s army got into power, and the latest More In Common survey is no exception. In the newest survey of Westminster voting intention, it now transpires that the Tories have a two-point lead over Starmer’s lefty bunch – whose time in office seems to be going from bad to worse. In good news for new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, approximately a third of Brits say they would back her party in a general election – the highest rating the Tories have seen since February – while just over a quarter would throw their

Are independent schools gaming the system to give a disproportionate advantage to their pupils in exams? That’s one possible inference from a new data release from Ofqual (the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) on access arrangements for school exams. The release sheds light on adjustments designed so that students with disabilities aren’t disadvantaged in assessments. This might include, for example, papers in braille for a blind student or allowing a student with dyslexia to use a word processor. Giving a pupil 25 per cent extra time to complete an exam is the most common adjustment schools can provide. The reasons commonly provided for the adjustment included English being a second language, physical disabilities that

Was it Labour wot lost it? It was less than a month ago, as Kamala Harris appeared to be riding high, that dozens of bright-eyed British Starmtroopers began descending on America. In a now-infamous LinkedIn post, Sofia Patel, Labour’s head of operations, urged others to join them in North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia. ‘I have nearly 100 Labour party staff (current and former) going to the US in the next few weeks,’ she boasted. ‘Let’s show the Democrats how to win elections!’ Fast forward three weeks and we know what happened next. The Trump campaign reacted in its usually understated way, threatening lawsuits, firing off bombastic threats and channelling