Politics

Talk about getting your priorities right. As ministers battle to get inflation down from the double digit highs of earlier this year, it seems not all at the Bank of England are preoccupied with this struggle. For it has today been revealed that staff at Britain’s central bank – whose main job is to keep inflation at just two per cent – have been spending their time drawing up new, right-on pregnancy guidelines. The main takeaway? People of any gender identity can become pregnant, apparently. In its submission last year to Stonewall (who else?), the Bank of England boasted about how its new ‘family leave’ policy, introduced in June 2021,

Will the government meet its NHS target? Health Secretary Steve Barclay was asked about this when he did the broadcast round this morning, arguing that even though there were record waiting numbers, the government had successfully reduced the longest waits. But as Fraser wrote this week in his Telegraph column, Rishi Sunak is having to face up to the chance that he might miss this (and most of his other) five ‘priorities’ which he said the British people should judge him against at the next election. But voters might be paying a little less attention to another area of care where things are visibly going backwards: mental health. When I

Nearly three quarters of French people think it’s time for President Macron to send in the army to restore order to the towns and cities that have been sacked in recent days. According to a poll published yesterday, 70 per cent of people said they wanted the military to be deployed to areas that have been looted, vandalised and firebombed since police shot dead a 17-year-old in western Paris on Tuesday morning. The teenager, Nahel, was laid to rest on Saturday afternoon but it remains to be seen whether the furious reaction to his death – for which a policeman has been charged with voluntary manslaughter – will abate in

What is it with environmentalists and the Holocaust? Barely a month goes by without some prominent green or another outrageously invoking the greatest crime in human history when promoting their plans for eco-austerity. Step up Dale Vince, green entrepreneur and donor to both the Labour party and pongy activist troupe Just Stop Oil. In an interview with the Mail, he has compared climate sceptics to Holocaust deniers. ‘Anyone who says the climate crisis is not happening or it’s not man-made, honestly, I think they’re a dangerous fool, because it’s like denying the Holocaust happened’, he said. The use of this Holocaust rhetoric is grotesque, censorious and dangerous Were that not grotesque enough – comparing those