All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
This week, Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced their plan to abolish NHS England, which Starmer has said will ‘cut bureaucracy’ and bring management of the NHS ‘back into democratic control’. Today on Sky News, Streeting told Trevor Phillips that the size of NHS England had doubled since 2010, when the NHS had
There are, as Rachel Reeves keeps telling us, some tough choices to be made. Whether she is personally tough enough to make them is another matter. It seems as if the government is already retreating on proposed plans to freeze Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in the Spring statement in ten days’ time. A putative backbench
The pound has not collapsed. You can still trade shares, bonds and currencies in the City of London. And inflation, while still high, at least doesn’t come with ‘hyper’ as a prefix, at least not yet. If the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey wants to celebrate today’s fifth anniversary of taking charge
What springs to mind when you think of the Falklands? You might imagine the wild, windswept landscape, sparsely populated by the sheep-farming communities that have made the Islands their home for nearly 200 years. Those of my vintage will recall grainy television images of the war in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent visit, and grateful islanders
Dale Vince has donated millions of pounds to Labour, but the green energy tycoon is only just getting started in politics. Having helped remove the Tories from power last summer, Vince is turning his attention from party donations to offering ministers a ready-made policy platform instead. The 63-year-old wants to champion an eco-agenda for Keir Starmer’s government via his Green Britain Foundation. The six-man outfit
Written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa at the end of his life in the late 1950s, it is a novel about the collapse – one century beforehand as a result of the reunification of Italy – of the Sicilian aristocracy of which his family was a part, and its replacement with what was called democracy.
For me, one of the great pleasures of public transport is getting into a conversation with a stranger. But in our age of smart-phones and headphones, where everyone is plugged into their own private space, it’s a pleasure that’s becoming increasingly rare. So when I heard of a new scheme by Transport for London (TfL)
Sometimes epics end with a whimper not a bang. This is the case for Skype, whose demise Microsoft has announced – for those paying only the closest attention – in a preview of the latest Skype for Windows update. ‘Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams,’
Imagine the Guardian newspaper fully committing to increasing Britain’s stockpile of nuclear warheads. It may sound fanciful, but that’s the closest comparison to what happened last week, when the Swedish liberal–left leaning Dagens Nyheter wrote in a leading article: ‘We are going to need a [national] discussion about nuclear weapons. Should the French [nuclear forces] protect the
At the end of February, 1945 about 1,000 surviving Japanese soldiers based on Ramree Island off the coast of Arakan, a province in western Burma, fled the onslaught of the British Army commanded by Lt General William Slim. A squadron led by the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth had bombarded Japanese positions on Ramree. The 26th
To Canada, where Mark Carney is settling into his first week in the top job. The former Bank of England governor won a landslide victory in Sunday’s election and has been quick to turn his attention to the growing animosity between his nation and its neighbour over Donald Trump’s tariffs. But what prompted the new
Following Thursday’s big speech on public sector reform, Sir Keir Starmer has since turned his attention back to foreign affairs. This morning the Prime Minister hosted a conference call with European and Commonwealth counterparts to discuss support for Ukraine. The ‘coalition of the willing’ met to discuss their response to Vladimir Putin’s contemptuous dismissal of
It’s shaping up to be a difficult year for Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who is struggling to get many within her own party – and Cabinet – onside with proposed spending cuts. But fear not, Reeves has managed to find some downtime amid the drama. It transpires that she nabbed free tickets to US singer Sabrina
No two politicians could be less alike than Sir Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage. But it looks as though the Prime Minister is transitioning into the Reform party’s rumbustuous leader – or at least stealing his velvet collared clothes. Consider the evidence. Over the past few days and weeks, Labour has adopted a raft of
Ramadan, which this year runs until the end of March, is viewed by Muslims as a time of compassion and generosity. But for others – especially those who flout fasting rules in Muslim-majority countries – it can be a period of suffering and persecution. Liberal Muslims and those from religious minorities can be punished severely for
Bernard-Henri Lévy is running on fumes. Plus ça change. “I slept as always last night, a few hours, with chemistry compelling me to sleep,” the Parisian public intellectual tells me when we speak on the phone. “I miss the process of sleep, the process of getting awake, all parts of the ceremony I miss. But
Friedrich Merz promised to do things differently. Ahead of the country’s federal election last month, the likely next chancellor of Germany said he had a ‘clear plan for Germany’s economic future’. From day one in office, he wanted to be seen to enact the change so many Germans had voted for. But, held to ransom
Setting ourselves stringent net zero targets will help us get ahead of other countries in the race to develop green technologies of the future. We know this must be true because Ed Miliband, and many others, keep telling us so. It is just that things don’t seem to be working out quite this way in
After a spectacular week of feuding, opinion polls appear to show support for Reform UK remains unscathed. Reform somehow still sits at level-pegging with Labour – perhaps even a point ahead – with the Tories several points further adrift. Yet anyone who thinks that the fall-out between Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage can be dismissed
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Slashing the winter fuel allowance, maintaining the two child benefit cap, cutting international aid, cutting the civil service, axing NHS bureaucracy, possibly slashing welfare expenditure… you’d be forgiven for thinking the Conservatives were in power. But no, these are all policies pursued by the current Labour government. So on today’s Saturday Shots Cindy Yu asks
Howard Hodgson ends lunch in a rage against unearned fame. ‘Marilyn Monroe: drunken actress,’ he says, ‘fat drunken actress. Gets killed. Ohhh! Marilyn!’ He does a mocking voice for that last bit, like someone wailing about her death. ‘John F. Kennedy: one of the worst presidents the United States ever had. Bay of Pigs. Fucked everything up. Robert Kennedy was vastly
The BBC’s reputation is in shreds – again. Its Hamas propaganda film, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, had to be withdrawn after it was revealed that its protagonist and narrator was the son of a Hamas minister. The BBC has announced it will investigate itself following the broadcast of the documentary last month, but what is to be done
The word ‘surreal’ barely does justice to what’s been happening in recent weeks. Quite apart from the possible collapse of Nato and the US treating Canada as more of an enemy than Russia, there was the previously unthinkable sight last month of the US voting alongside North Korea, Belarus and, yes, Russia at the United
On Monday, concrete will be poured into Britain’s last two shale gas wells in Lancashire. Cuadrilla Resources, which owns the license at the Preston New Road site, is being forced to destroy the wells by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which has ordered that the wells be ‘plugged with cement and decommissioned’ by 30 June.
Spain’s defence spending, at a mere 1.28 per cent of its GDP, lags behind all other Nato members. While most European Union countries have already reached the target of 2 per cent that was agreed back in 2014, at the present rate of progress Spain won’t get there until 2029. Such a leisurely approach is
Vladimir Putin has set his conditions for Donald Trump’s ‘unconditional’ ceasefire: Kyiv must not mobilise or train troops, nor receive military aid, then Ukraine must ultimately accept a final peace deal that eliminates the ‘root causes’ of the conflict – i.e., which erases Ukraine’s sovereignty. The Kremlin’s terms remain the same as they were three
An American influencer called Sam Jones has been roundly denounced after she posted a video of her snatching a wild baby wombat from its distressed mother in Australia. The video, since deleted, showed Jones picking up a joey by the road and running with it to a car, while its poor mother ran after them.
It has not been Rachel Reeves’s year. From accusations of CV embellishment to noisy backlash over the farmer’s tax, the Chancellor has been fighting on all fronts as she battles her way towards the Spring spending review. And now, in yet another blow for Reeves, it transpires that her plans to increase the amount of
The Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report, published today, addresses the prison cell crisis in the UK, highlighting huge government and organisational failures in managing prison capacity. We may be wary of the term, but it is yet another description of a system in crisis, with many prisoners stuffed into ‘inhumane conditions’, looked after by
Keir Starmer’s imminent attempt to curb Britain’s spending on welfare is a more serious and important bid to curb the growth of government than Elon Musk’s theatrical Doge performance. That is because the UK’s Labour government is at least engaging with the fundamental driver of higher public spending – the demographic shift towards an older
Is Keir Starmer a Tory? That’s the question much of Westminster is asking after his recent talk of welfare cuts, planning reform and raiding the aid budget to pay for defence. But while the Labour leader seems happy to talk the talk, some of his ministers are less keen to walk the walk. For while
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New figures from the Office for National Statistics show the UK economy unexpectedly shrunk by 0.1% in January. This comes only a few weeks after the Chancellor’s pro-growth speech, and a fortnight ahead of her Spring Statement. Just how much pressure is Rachel Reeves under? And how likely is it that Labour will change their
Parents of young children should be happy: since September 2024, those with an income of less than £100,000 a year have been eligible for 15 hours of free childcare a week once their child is nine months old. From September this year, that will increase to 30 hours a week. However, once again, it seems