Politics

To the Beeb, which these days is better at making news headlines than creating them. On Radio 4’s Thought of the Day this morning was Dr Krish Kandiah, who centred his sermon around fear. While he started gently, talking about feeling afraid of leaving his newborn children alone or taking them to school for the first time, his speech took a rather odd turn… Pivoting to more current affairs, he turned to a growing fear many in the UK are beginning to feel more intensely: that of immigration. But, worry not, those who can identify: by Kandiah’s reading, this is irrational. Taking aim at shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, he

If you eat a banana, you get a tiny dose of radiation. Perfectly safe. Yet Britain’s nuclear regulator once forced a proposed Anglesey nuclear power plant to redesign its filtration system to cut potential exposure by exactly that amount. The result? Months of paperwork and meetings to eliminate an amount of radiation smaller than what you’d get from 20 minutes on a plane. What didn’t follow was a new nuclear plant on Anglesey. That is the absurdity strangling Britain’s nuclear ambitions. We have world-class engineers and a spotless safety record, but also a regulatory culture that prizes minimising non-existent risks over common sense. Every government talks big on nuclear. Every

The news that over 50,000 migrants have arrived on small boats since Labour took office last year is of no surprise. If things don’t change soon another 50,000 are sure to follow and then another. The causes of the Channel migrant crisis are quite clear. Yet public frustration is at fever pitch partly because none of our political elites – red, blue or turquoise – have any idea how to solve the problem. Labour’s frontbench is comprised of post-national progressive politicians whose concern is global welfare rather than the particular interests of British citizens Both establishment parties reacted to the migrant crisis in the same way – not with substantial

In Birmingham, schoolchildren as young as five have been reportedly asked to write Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers. One group of children were said to have created heart-shaped messages with slogans like ‘You are welcome here!. Let us count the ways that school children sending Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers might be misinterpreted or otherwise lead to unintended consequences. Let alone whether it might cause alarm to parents, and generally reinforce the idea that the people in charge in this country are either profoundly naive or politically malevolent. Firstly – how might a Valentine’s Day card be interpreted by the intended recipients?  In most of the world, the

Nicola Sturgeon isn’t someone for whom oversharing comes naturally. Throughout her career, she has regularly been labelled ‘dour’ or ‘frosty’ by both her opponents and those on her own side. As her profile grew through the 2010s, so did her popularity among the SNP’s expanding membership – and in her first week of being party leader she mustered a 12,000-strong crowd with which to celebrate in Glasgow’s Hydro. But she remained an introvert with a tight-knit circle of few friends. ‘I can come alive on a stage in front of thousands of people, but put me at a dinner table with four people and I will struggle much, much more,’