All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
12 min listen
Parliament is back from recess and the row which will be dominating MPs inboxes is the school concrete crisis, which has disrupted the start of term for over 100 schools. Why didn’t the government act sooner? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
It never rains but it pours for Rishi Sunak. Just when a new term loomed, with the encouraging news that UK GDP had been revised upwards, along comes a deluge of bad news to dampen his freshly-raised spirits. First, there was the ongoing row about school roofs potentially collapsing on kids – a ‘sub-optimal’ spectacle,
There is something curious about even the very modest degree of success the Prime Minister has been able to herald on his key priority of stopping the boats. Every time the wind drops and the sun comes out the numbers crossing surge just as they did during the long hot summer of 2022. This happened,
Labour leader Keir Starmer’s reshuffle has now finished. Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has been moved from her current berth, shadowing the Cabinet Office to Levelling Up – marking something of a promotion for Rayner. Lisa Nandy, however, has been given a large demotion from shadow Levelling Up minister to shadow cabinet minister for international
It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could call it pluto-utopianism. The latest manifestation of this is California Forever. A number of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs have been quietly buying up 55,000 acres of farmland in Solano county, California, and at the end of
Oh dear. With parliament returning from recess today, No. 10 was hoping that this week would be a chance to put the summer blues behind them. But a former mandarin with a grievance has returned to put a spanner in the works. Amid a row over who is to blame in the ongoing schools farrago,
How did they not see this coming? Normally that question is one of the laziest you can ask in Westminster: easy for pundits or opposition politicians to say with a confident flourish in hindsight when they hadn’t seen it coming beforehand, either. But in the case of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), everyone saw this
Good old Humza Yousaf: the one-man walking cure for imposter syndrome. Scotland’s First Minister was out making the case for independence this weekend, telling a Scexit rally that ‘the people of this country are not suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, they’re suffering from a cost of the Union crisis.’ When asked by reporters to justify
There are many good reasons, we’re constantly told, for millennials and Generation Z to resent their elders. What they can barely imagine, we took for granted: affordable housing, state-paid education, free dentistry and slow, misspent youths on unemployment benefit. But there is another justification for their envy, one that is hardly ever mentioned: we wrote
More bad news for the Beeb. It seems that the Corporation’s flagship Sunday politics show has sprung a leak and is losing its audience at an alarming rate. Figures from Barb, obtained by the Sunday Times, show that the number of live viewers for Laura Kuenssberg’s show has declined by more than a third since
The latest Bond villain is Nigel Farage. Not literally, of course. But he was clearly a major inspiration for the chief antagonist in the most recent James Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. This master of international skulduggery is known as Athelstan; a former City trader with a Kentish accent, he espouses a boisterous,
The Chinese Communist Party’s ‘standard map’ is updated each year to include Beijing’s ever-extending territorial claims. Neighbours see it as a sinister measure of Beijing’s imperialist threat, but to the party it is a sacred document, a badge of legitimacy, encapsulating its historic grievances and its growing ambition. It must be faithfully reproduced in school
26 min listen
Theresa May’s new book, Abuse of Power, will not be a gossip-fuelled account of her time in No. 10. Instead, it’ll be an account of how powerful people make mistakes, and how institutions corrupt. What’s the point of the book, and has the former Prime Minister landed on a real, punishing problem in British politics? Kate
Rental e-scooters have been banned from Paris since Friday after residents of the French capital were asked to decide their fate in a referendum. The vote, held in April, attracted a low turnout, with only 103,000 of the city’s 1.38 million men and women bothering to cast their ballot. Of those that did, however, 90 per
Every three months, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) updates the full UK welfare picture. It’s a big task and there’s a six-month lag — but the resulting picture is the biggest scandal in politics. It shows that now, with a worker shortage crisis so acute that immigration has been running at a million
Two weeks ago, VJ day (Victory over Japan day) celebrated the end of the Pacific War. On 15 August 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with his high-pitched voice and arcane royal language, which was heard by his people for the first time, announced Japan’s surrender. Huddled around their radios the Japanese heard Hirohito say: ‘We have ordered
Popes may make claims to infallibility but they certainly make mistakes, and Pope Francis is likely to get a dressing down in heaven from his predecessor-but-one, John Paul II, for what he has now said about Russian imperial greatness. What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who
Policing any part of the United Kingdom is a difficult enough task these days. Policing the part of it where the national security threat is highest and the personal details of all officers and staff are now likely in the hands of terrorists after an embarrassing data breach is a whole other story. We are
When a party’s own natural supporters decide they have good reason to turn against it then the writing is normally on the wall. Things, though, are rather worse than that for Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives: Tory-leaning voters would now seem to have not one but two good arguments for hoping the party loses next year’s general
22 min listen
This week Freddy speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest, about Vivek Ramaswamy. What does he stand for? Could he be the ideal candidate for Trump’s vice president?
Today, almost five million Ukrainian pupils have gone to school – in person or remotely. Most didn’t have festive assemblies with flowers, songs and first graders reciting poems by heart, as they would have done before the war. The first of September doesn’t feel like a day to celebrate anymore. Today, every third child in
Thursday’s cabinet reshuffle may have been minor but the No. 10 shake-up is proving more substantive. Amber de Botton has stepped down as Director of Communications saying ‘it is the right time to move on’. In her statement, the former broadcast journalist describes No. 10 as ‘a demanding and high pressure place to work –
It’s not just the ministers getting reshuffled. This afternoon, Amber de Botton departed her role as Downing Street’s director of communications, having served just 10 months in the role. Does this mean a new comms strategy could be the offing? In a statement, the former head of ITV’s politics coverage said: It has been an
Pupils are due to head back to school over the coming days, but now it seems that some of them might not. Yesterday, the government told schools to prepare evacuation plans for buildings made with RAAC concrete. This morning, schools were instructed to close these buildings altogether. This has caused immense disruption to at least
It’s not often that we see a GDP revision as startling as the one published today. In its Blue Book for 2023 – which includes updated methods for a range of calculations – the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has upgraded the size of the economy in the final quarter of 2021 by 1.7 per
He may have lost the Labour whip, but Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow still looms over the party’s finances. Following the leak of the Forde report into antisemitism in the party, the Labour party launched legal action against five ex-staffers thought to be the source of the leak, including Corbyn’s former chief of staff, Karie Murphy and
What is the purpose of a local newspaper? Time was, it was to stand up for local people against the tyranny of corrupt councils, daft bureaucracies and badly-behaved businesses. It appears though that the Manchester Evening News has expanded its remit lately: to include tattling on service workers for not toeing the line on identity politics.
When I tell people in England I’ve just returned from several years abroad and they find out the country was Russia, it is a real conversation stopper. Their minds short-circuit, they seem to gulp in front of you. What question do they ask next? Do they mention the war? Talk about Tolstoy? ‘Ah… Interesting,’ one
House prices dropped more than was expected this month, falling 5.3 per cent compared to August last year. The value of the average home in Britain has, on average, fallen by £14,600. This marks the biggest annual decline on record since the financial (and housing) crash of 2008/9. So, is a housing crash imminent? Could we
One is an oppressive regime that guns down its own people, promotes a radical Islamist theology and hangs gay people from cranes. The other is a liberal democracy that protects the rights of minorities, upholds the freedoms of speech and assembly, and grants equality to women and gay people. Yet when weightlifters from the two
It’s back to school for many pupils this week – but it seems Schools Minister Nick Gibb is still in holiday mode. Gibb has been touring the airwaves to try and reassure parents in the wake of the announcement that dozens of schools may need to shut some buildings because of safety fears. But Gibb’s
Every month, the Bank of England publishes new data on the flows of money and credit around the UK economy. Most commentators focus on the ‘credit’ part – particularly the amount of mortgage and credit card borrowing. In contrast, the ‘money’ part rarely gets a mention. This is understandable. After all, good luck explaining what
Danielle McGahey is set to become the first transgender cricketer to play an official Twenty20 international. The 29-year old Australian-born opening batsman has been named in the Canadian women’s squad that will take on Brazil, Argentina and the USA next week in Los Angeles. The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup Americas Region Qualifier is hardly