Politics

If you ever need a reminder of what northern Britain has achieved, I’d recommend a trip to York. The National Railway Museum brilliantly evokes the local creative energy that produced Stephenson’s Rocket which ran on the world’s first inter-city passenger railway and ushered in the railway age. Just over the River Ouse is the chocolate museum, which celebrates York’s chocolate-makers and their entrepreneurial legacy. It’s easy to be scornful about Boris Johnson’s talk of ‘levelling up’. Real levelling up would mean that for the foreseeable future, the North will grow faster than London, which seems almost unimaginable to Whitehall and in the City. But whatever the cocktail of culture and

It’s taken just 44 days for a royal pipe dream to well and truly bite the dust. Last month, Harry and Meghan tried to bounce the ancient institution into giving them a ‘progressive new role’ as part-time royals, part-time money makers. Harry’s 93-year-old grandmother doesn’t take kindly to being bounced or indeed being blindsided. With government regulations and royal rules on her side, the Queen has imposed her final restriction on the couple embarking on a self-imposed exile. Sussex Royal can be no more. A freshly branded website will have to be re-branded. Their supporters will argue it’s no great loss. Like Boris and Oprah, Harry and Meghan have global

Living in Scotland, it’s depressing to hear the way UK Government ministers talk about immigration. I have one proposal in front of me right now that advocates ‘a points-based approach’ as part of ‘a controlled immigration system to meet our own economic, social and demographic priorities and needs’. Anyone who wishes to ‘work, study or live’ here ‘will have to meet a set of reasonable and fair requirements to gain entry or approval to remain’. Predictably, for all the usual talk about attracting ‘skilled individuals from overseas’, there is the familiar obsession with numbers, especially of non-Europeans: ‘If there are higher than required numbers of non-European Economic Area/Swiss migrants… then

Once you accept that Brexit is happening – because, like it or not, the British people demanded it – it is not so very hard to accept that Brexit must come with consequences. In the absence of free movement from the European Union to the United Kingdom, new immigration arrangements must be put in place. As a political matter – which should not be confused with the policy design or practical application of new immigration controls – these must be seen to be tougher than the regime which preceded it. That is the meaning of ‘Take Back Control’. So it is no great surprise that the measures announced today represent,

It is often said a job is what you make of it. If so, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that London’s mayor Sadiq Khan regards his mainly as a means of burnishing his personal brand. Rather than getting to grips with the core responsibilities of his position – making transport work better, getting more homes built and fighting crime – his mayoralty has been punctuated by an apparently endless series of photo opportunities and overseas tours, often related to issues over which he has no direct responsibility. Today he took an entourage to Brussels to discuss his post-Brexit agenda with big players at the European parliament and European