Politics

What policies should the government adopt in response to the energy crisis? When thinking about any policy, the correct place to start is to consider what kinds of solutions the market would produce absent any government intervention. Markets will always produce some kind of answer, and the market answer will often be very good in many respects. Policymakers should not assume they are intervening in a void, where almost any well-intentioned action might be better than nothing. Instead, they should always be more humble, seeking to understand what the market might do, accept that the market response is likely to be pretty good, and think about how, if at all,

I think that I may be able to claim credit for being the first writer to question the once universal assumption that Rishi Sunak would be the next Prime Minister. Back in March, after the then-Chancellor’s disastrous Spring budget statement, in a piece for this site headlined ‘How Sunak Sunk Himself’ I pointed out the dents in the smooth billionaire’s shiny armour that have now become gaping rusty holes, and turned ‘Dishy Rishi’ into ‘Fishy Rishi’. Too rich during a cost of living firestorm, too out of touch with ordinary people struggling to make ends meet, and too prone to making basic political errors, Sunak’s flaws have been brutally exposed

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart.  Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the

Imran Khan, the cricketing hero, legendary lothario and deposed prime minister of Pakistan, is in trouble again. His political opponents in the police and the judiciary, in a manner not dissimilar to the judicial attack on former US president Donald Trump, have moved against Khan in recent days by accusing him of terrorist activities. In theory, these charges could carry the death penalty. Khan’s crime was to threaten retaliatory action against the police and the judiciary in revenge for the arrest of his chief of staff, Shahbaz Gill. Gill had been roughly arrested by police and his assistant allegedly beaten up. In addition, police had tried to apprehend former Khan acolyte

We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite implacability. But just recently a new claim is surfacing, very much not coming from her ‘people’, which is the hardest to swallow of all – that she is a fascist. Of course, the boggle-eyed have said this about pretty much every Conservative leader – pretty much every Conservative – in living memory, but I’ve noticed

So farewell, Anthony Fauci, the unfortunate face of America’s pandemic response. Well, not so unfortunate – the doctor is stepping down as head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases this December, riding off into the sunset with a reported $350,000 per year golden parachute, the largest pension in US federal history. Fauci has developed something of a reputation for baffling the public – whether it be for contradictory advice on the efficacy of masks or herd immunity or vaccines. Even his resignation announcement was confusing:  I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career… While I am