Politics

When I learned that the Prime Minister was thinking of launching a new Help to Buy scheme, my first response was ‘Oh no’. My second response was the same, with the caveat that we are in the last days of campaigning for local council elections, with a general election a year or so down the line, so anything that looks like a political promise now may not actually happen. If it does though, my objections will be the same as when David Cameron and George Osborne launched the first version – except there is now more evidence of Help to Buy’s deleterious effects. ‘Help to Buy Mark I’ mostly assisted

It’s hard to imagine the housing crisis getting much worse. But according to the front page of today’s Times, the prospect of buying one’s first home may get pushed even further out of reach. According to the newspaper, officials in No.10 and the Treasury are working on plans to revive ‘Help to Buy’. This was the supposedly ‘affordable’ housing scheme which enabled first-time buyers to purchase a property with a 5 per cent deposit and access an equity loan from the government worth up to 40 per cent of the property, paid back interest-free for five years. Help to Buy came to an end in March, but it’s been briefed

This week both parties have been attempting to manage expectations ahead of the imminent local elections. The Secretary of State for Transport Mark Harper has been reiterating the worst-case prediction that the Conservatives could lose up to 1000 seats. But Keir Starmer told Sophy Ridge he thought the Conservatives should be making ‘significant gains’, given their result in the last local elections in 2019 was their second worst ever: ‘Are you embarrassed when you look at that map?’ Mark Harper was questioned by Laura Kuenssberg over his record with the HS2 rail project, which has been plagued by soaring costs and delays. She asked whether the railway would end up

The Guardian thinks of itself as Britain’s fearless liberal conscience, trigger-sensitive to racist ‘dog whistles’ in the language and editorial judgements of everyone except itself. It takes a special interest in cartoons published by right-of-centre newspapers which are accused of bigotry.  When the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun ran a cartoon depicting Serena Williams throwing a tantrum, the Guardian reported that News Corp had ‘come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon’, supplementing multiple news stories with several condemnatory op-eds. Other newspapers who have found their cartoons scrutinised for racial undertones by the Guardian include the Times, the New York Post, the Australian, the Boston Herald, and Charlie Hebdo.  So how exactly did Martin Rowson’s latest cartoon manage to slip past editors? Ostensibly a comment