All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I am far abroad at the moment but have just learnt the sad news from home of the death of George (Lord) Weidenfeld, at the age of 96. As a publisher, philanthropist, convener, guru and friend he was one of the most extraordinary people in 20th and 21st-century Britain. Born in Vienna in 1919, he
David Cameron didn’t have a particularly good PMQs today. He struggled to make sense at some points, ending up telling the House that ‘two out of three people who want to become a nurse can’t become a nurse because of the bursary system’ and rambling about ‘two out of three Vickys’ being turned away from
The unemployment rate fell to 5.1 per cent in the three months to November, putting it at the lowest level since 2006 – and back to its average over the six years before the crisis. Back to what the Bank of England regards as the “equilibrium” rate. [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/DUFV6/index.html”] The other side of the coin is
Given how apocalyptic the predictions were, Anglicanism’s make-or-break meeting about issues of human sexuality last week proved something of a damp squib. The Anglican Communion was supposed to be rent asunder. Upheaval was imminent. Schism was certain. Conservative African Archbishops were going to be tripping over their cassocks in the rush for the door. In
Today the Electoral Commission have released the campaign expenditure returns of the six political parties that spent £250,000 or more on campaigning in the General Election. While the Conservative’s £15,587,956 campaign bill could be argued to be money well spent given their majority win, Labour have a bit more explaining to do it when it comes to
The shamelessly censorious MPs and petition-signers who want Donald Trump banned from Britain are basically saying: ‘Oh my God, he wants to ban people from entering America! This is so outrageous we must ban him from entering Britain.’ Can these people hear themselves? The thing they claim to find repulsive in Trump — that he
MPs are debating the report stage and third reading of the psychoactive substances bill today, with a series of amendments from MPs on exempting poppers from the ban on legal highs (more on why the Tories might want to do that here), and one intriguing one from a group of Tory MPs on supplying drugs
David Cameron is today expected to urge leaders to ease trade rules between Jordan and the EU to help with the Syrian refugee crisis. During his trip to Davos, Cameron will call for changes to spur economic growth and employment in neighbouring countries to Syria. Where might he have got this idea from? In August, Paul Collier –
With Jeremy Corbyn’s approval rating currently at minus 39 according to yesterday’s YouGov poll, one could argue that there is little reason for cheer within Team Corbyn. However, the Labour leader can at least take heart that he has managed to prove more popular than one Labour heavyweight when it comes to football. While Corbyn is a regular at
Few Labour MPs had expected Margaret Beckett’s report into the 2015 election loss to be the thing that saved the party. But they had hoped that it might give the current leadership pause for thought with a reasonable distance before the next election. Instead, much like an IMF report, the document contained something for everyone,
The world’s tennis elite is up in arms. Roger Federer wants to see proof, demanding that the people behind “allegations that match-fixing is rife” should name names. Andy Murray has criticised the practice of betting companies sponsoring tournaments. And Murray’s former coach Mark Petchey thinks that betting on lower-grade tournaments should be outlawed – although it isn’t clear how
Labour’s report on its election defeat is finally out, and it says there are four reasons for its defeat: Failure to shake off the myth that we were responsible for the financial crash and therefore failure to build trust in the economy. Inability to deal with the issues of ‘connection’ and, in particular, failing to
Although David Cameron is said to be planning to scare the nation into staying in the EU, others in the in-camp think they can win voters over with the good. Britain Stronger in Europe have today sent out an optimistic press release revealing a key reason Britons ought to choose to remain in the EU: they can now
It’s just as well that Mark Carney is Bank of England governor: he’d have made a lousy forecaster. In August 2013 he said he’d raise interest rates when unemployment fell below 7 per cent, expecting that to take three years. It took five months. Then last summer, Carney informed us that the decision on when to make the first rate
This evening, if you have time and are around central London, there is an interesting lecture at the British Academy by the admirable sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, whose book with Andrew Brown on the CofE, The Church We Left Behind, is as depressing as it is largely to the point. The title is ‘Why
The EU referendum is looming, but the biggest fight at present is not between the two sides of the argument but the different ‘out’ factions. Only one campaign can get the official Electoral Commission designation, which is leading to some rats-in-a-sack behaviour from Leave.EU and Vote Leave, made worse by the launch of Peter Bone’s
I’ve pointed out before that to be a woman who sucks up to Islamic extremists is to be a somewhat upmarket but equally self-deluded political equivalent of those strange women who write love-letters to incarcerated rapists and serial killers of women. I’ve recently spotted another septic sister-under-the-skin, though I imagine this one will be better-dressed and
Retail empires, like the political and military kind, are tragedies. They grow from modest beginnings, pushing all others aside until they reach their apogee when all competitors seem to have been vanquished. Then they collapse from within. The only difference is that instead of leaving us magnificent cathedrals and palaces they leave us enormous tin sheds.
The Times has a fascinating splash today on the discrepancy in prices between products for women and men. It reports that high street stores are charging women up to twice as much as men for practically identical products, with the addition of pink to something seemingly boosting its price hugely. The most striking finding is
Two post-mortems into the general election come out today: the pollsters’ examination of how their surveys got the election so wrong, and Labour’s latest internal inquiry into how it lost that election. The first report, which is the preliminary findings of an independent inquiry set up by the British Polling Council and the Market Research
The Guardian set tongues wagging across Westminster in December when its editor Katharine Viner appointed two women to share the role of political editor. Although the paper’s chief political correspondent Nicholas Watt had been seen as the favourite to succeed Patrick Wintour, Sky News‘s Anushka Asthana and Observer economics editor Heather Stewart were offered the role
David Cameron wants recent migrants to learn English, or face deportation. He argued today that too many women are denied the opportunity to speak English. And who doesn’t want women to have the freedom to learn English and play a full part in society? As an MP who represents one of the most diverse constituencies
Emily Thornberry might not know why Jeremy Corbyn made her Shadow Defence Secretary, but she will have known that this afternoon’s departmental questions for the Ministry of Defence was going to be a difficult session. She came armed with two questions that she knew few would listen to, and delivered them well. But for the
In the past 12 months a curious thing has happened: student politics, for decades the most irrelevant, cut-off sphere of public life, has become headline news. The explosion of campus censorship – the primary means through which twentysomething politicos vent their political passions today – is followed, reported on and critiqued by greying commentators on a
Oh, look, it’s time for another episode of Jocksplaining. That is, time to remind some people south of the wall that what’s obvious to them is not at all obvious to the folk north of the wall. There has been, in recent days, a flurry of articles claiming that, look, there’s no need to worry about a
Should Donald Trump be banned from visiting the UK? The candidate for the Republican presidential nomination hasn’t actually booked a trip here, but MPs are debating two petitions – one calling for him to be banned, and the other calling for him not to be banned – for three hours in Westminster Hall this afternoon. Paul Flynn,
The government came to office in 2010 with the promise of revolutionising the welfare state as we have known it. It set out to curtail the cost to taxpayers of working-age welfare, move more people into work and reduce dependence on benefits, while also protecting the living standards of the poor. How much success has
Since Sadiq Khan was elected as Labour’s mayoral candidate, he has made an effort to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn. Although Khan was one of the Labour MPs to help Corbyn get onto the ballot, after Khan won the nomination he turned on the Labour leader — suggesting that Corbyn’s refusal to sing the National Anthem
Jeremy Corbyn’s remarks about Trident have, unsurprisingly, been picked up everywhere this morning. The Labour leader told Andrew Marr yesterday that he could consider a ‘deterrent’ in which submarines continued to patrol the seas, but just without any nuclear warheads. He said the submarines ‘don’t have to have nuclear warheads on them’, adding: ‘There are
Jeremy Corbyn’s interview on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday saw the Labour leader wax lyrical on the virtues of Trident submarines without warheads, discuss the prospect of peace talks with ISIS, and ponder a deal with Argentina over the Falklands. While he also discussed housing and the junior doctor strike, his more divisive comments have
Your average milkman has more wealth than the world’s poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January.
Almost a month on from an unprecedentedly divisive general election, Spain seems further away from forming a new government than ever. In Madrid’s grandiose Palacio de las Cortes on Wednesday, the Spanish parliament convened for the first time since the December 20 vote, and it proved an eventful session – but not because some combination
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as
If Britain were to vote to leave the EU, we’d promptly set about agreeing our own trade deals as a sovereign nation. But what about our new trade deal with the EU itself? What conditions would this wounded beast set, and might we end up accepting the diktats and red tape that drove us mad in the first place?