All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It is difficult to fathom how an incident as horrifying as the kidnapping of Israeli musician Itay Kashti by three men in Wales barely registered as a blip on the national news agenda. In any just world, this crime – motivated by anti-Semitic hatred, religious fanaticism, and a chilling sense of political grievance – should
Keir Starmer is gearing up for a showdown with his party as the Prime Minister prepares to unveil his welfare reforms. On Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall will announce the details of the government’s plan to shake up the benefits system in a bid to reduce the ballooning welfare bill and get more
Sir Keir Starmer has been tireless in his diplomatic efforts to construct a ‘coalition of the willing’ and send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine. At the weekend, he hosted a conference call with 29 other world leaders, and on Thursday the defence secretary, John Healey, will convene a meeting of military chiefs at the MoD’s
German politics has delivered yet another masterclass in how to betray your voters while maintaining a straight face. This time it is Friedrich Merz, the supposedly steel-spined conservative who spent years critiquing Angela Merkel’s drift leftward, who has now managed to outdo even his predecessor’s talent for abandonment of what he promised. Merz’s capitulation on
We stand at a critical juncture. Over the past decade, England has ascended the global education rankings with remarkable momentum. In mathematics, we have surged from 21st to 7th in the Pisa rankings. Our performance in reading on the Pirls scale now positions us as a leader in the Western world. Just last week, a
For those people with a therapeutic bent of mind, the phrase ‘good enough’ has an almost magical power. It says: don’t beat yourself up because your child isn’t a straight-A student, your marriage isn’t the best thing since Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, and your sobriety is patchy. Sure, you hit your kid – but
In some countries, the study and pursuit of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proceeds apace, while in this country the practice of Artificial Unintelligence (AU) becomes ever more widespread. AU is the means by which people of perfectly adequate natural intelligence are transformed by policies, procedures and protocols into animate but inflexible cogs. They speak and behave,
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
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,’
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)
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
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
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
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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
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
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
