Politics

It’s often been said that the late Queen Elizabeth II rarely if ever put a foot wrong during her 70-year reign. Trained from a young age to betray no sign of partiality, or even of individuality, she lived long enough to become the matriarchal figure at the centre of everyone’s favorite soap opera. In a world of change, she never wavered. Her death last year may have drawn a final line under the era we knew as ‘postwar’, where qualities like stoicism and self-effacement still just about prevailed in British life, and where nobody blamed, whined or emoted. But as the curious events of exactly 60 years ago prove, the

Ping! An email lands in Steerpike’s inbox. It’s a press release about Labour’s new homes pledge, touted with much fanfare in Liverpool last week. ‘Labour will jump start planning’ it declares, ‘to build 1.5 million homes and save the dream of homeownership.’ The ‘transformational package of reforms’ includes the ‘next generation of “new towns”, new communities with beautiful homes, green spaces, reliable transport links and bustling high streets.’ All very motherhood and apple pie. But according to an accompanying document, the new towns are not just about homeownership. Labour claim that their ‘next generation of new towns’ will be ‘attractive investment products, generating stable and diverse income streams; sales of

A year ago Liz Truss’ brief government collapsed when markets lost confidence in Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. A large part of the problem, it was explained at the time, was that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) – founded by George Osborne specifically to provide some independent backing for Budget measures – had not been invited to give its views.    Isn’t the real problem that the OBR fails to make any allowance for political events? But how much use would a judgement by the OBR have been in any case? Let no one say that the organisation has no insight into its own failures. Today it has published a mea culpa on the