All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It’s the day after Jeremy Hunt’s first Budget and so far the Chancellor has managed to avoid disaster. Reaction has been muted, with the Daily Mail asking the question on the mind of many Tories: ‘Is it enough to turn the tide?’ The Guardian and Mirror have, predictably, focused on criticism of Hunt’s proposal to
Drawing penises and making vulvas out of Play-Doh might not be the reply most parents expect when they pose the question, ‘What did you get up to at school today?’ But with even the youngest children now encountering explicit content and bizarre teaching methods in mandatory sex education classes, it is an answer more might
It’s Thursday so you know what that means: another chance to watch Penny Mordaunt demolishing the SNP from the despatch box. Today’s Business Questions to the Leader of the House saw Mordaunt face off across sometime soap star and full-time grievance-monger Deidre Brock. The Scottish nationalist gave a rather tedious speech lambasting Jeremy Hunt’s Budget,
You thought this SNP leadership election couldn’t get any more bizarre. It just did. Two of the candidates have effectively accused the leadership of their party of suspected ballot-rigging. Kate Forbes and Ash Regan have called for an independent auditor to be brought in to ensure the conduct of the ballot is ‘transparent, fair and
How big a deal are the social reforms announced in yesterday’s Budget? They are designed to remove the reasons people have for leaving the workplace and not returning. The two biggest policies are the extension of childcare subsidies and the disability benefit reforms. Both are potent, though not necessarily in the way ministers suggest. Work
The House of Commons will next week debate a motion on the Stormont brake, a month after it was unveiled by Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen. The measure was the centrepiece of Sunak’s ‘Windsor Framework’ and is intended to resolve long-running issues in Northern Ireland by alleviating the worst aspects of the Protocol
The Chancellor’s decision to slap a ten per cent duty hike on Scotch whisky is bad economics. Exports broke the £6 billion mark last year and the industry employs 11,000 people in Scotland while supporting 42,000 jobs across the UK. But whisky is a luxury item in a competitive global market where increases in retail price impact
Mick Lynch strikes again! The tough-talking general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) was out on the airwaves again this morning to defend yet another day of train strikes. True to form, Lynch couldn’t quite get through the broadcast round without getting into a spat with the journalist interviewing
It may seem like a bizarre question but it’s the one that is obsessing much of the left: is Rishi Sunak simply Enoch Powell in a better suit? Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, made the comparison in parliament last week when he asked the Prime Minister ‘from whom are his Government taking inspiration, Nigel
Labour has greeted the Budget with its now-familiar trick of accepting 90 per cent of its changes and then railing against one high-profile measure to attack those beastly Tories. This time, it’s Jeremy Hunt’s abolition of the £1.07 million lifetime tax allowance on pensions from April to prevent doctors going into early retirement. The party’s attack
Jeremy Hunt has announced plans to extend the 30 hours a week of ‘free’ childcare for three and four year olds to include babies as young as nine-months old. This expansion of childcare provision has been hailed by the Chancellor as a measure to allow mothers to return to employment if they want to; it
Taiwan has lost another friend. Or at least it soon will, according to the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro. She says her country will formally withdraw its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, in favour of recognising China. If this happens, it will leave only 13 countries (and the Holy See) who recognise Taiwan as independent and
Justin Trudeau’s government has been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party and Canada’s democracy is in jeopardy. This is a startling claim, all the more so for the fact that Canadian intelligence officials are the ones making it. Over the past month, a series of leaks from within CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has stirred
They’re all the same, politicians. How often have we heard this before? We need a real choice, people often say. Well, we have it now; or at least members of the Scottish National party do. If you’ve been watching the televised debates, of which there have now been four, you’d be forgiven for thinking that
Can the Conservatives do it again? The Tories have won four elections in a row but face a struggle to emulate that success next year. The Budget yesterday offered a taste of the Tories’ election pitch. But the government cannot escape some difficult numbers: Labour has led the Conservatives in the polls for more than
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Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor has unveiled his spring Budget, which was accompanied by forecasts predicting that the UK will avoid recession this year and that inflation will drop to below 3 per cent by the end of the year. But do the measures go far enough? Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and Fraser Nelson.
Jeremy Hunt was designed to exclude unnecessary body movements. Tall and gaunt, his demeanour faintly bird-like, he worked through his Budget statement at a steady pace, sipping regularly from a tumbler of water. Or was it vodka? No, it was water, of course. Hunt has the air of someone who always waits for the green
Jeremy Hunt has just delivered his second Budget as Chancellor. The top message the Chancellor wants to push is that Britain will avoid recession. But the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report suggests immigration may be the real story. Among the policy announcements were an extension to the energy price guarantee, currently at £2,500, to July (effectively
In his Budget speech, Jeremy Hunt made a great play on how Conservatives value work. Tories love talking about this but in fact they have just presided over a catastrophic increase in benefits. Before the pandemic there were 4.2 million on benefits: at the last count, 5.2 million. Given the mass worker shortage, this is
Keir Starmer really padded out his Budget response speech with pre-prepared lines today, to the extent that it was not quite clear what the Labour attack actually is. It’s always the case that replying to the chancellor the moment he finishes speaking is difficult. Occasionally opposition leaders are able to tease out a clear response
The fourth and final debate of the SNP leadership contest aired from Edinburgh last night with a live studio audience ready to pounce on the contenders. So how did the candidates fare in the final debate of the contest, and who came out on top? While Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan are now
It says a lot for the SNP’s commitment to transparency that even its leading lights don’t trust its electoral processes. Ash Regan and Kate Forbes have today written to the party’s chief executive Peter Murrell asking for information about the party’s membership and the leadership ballot. Regan, in a letter which was sent with the
In the Budget we heard plenty about welfare reform and how Conservatives believe in hard work. But in the small print, the OBR reveals it expects just 10,000 to go back to employment because of tighter conditionality on benefits: a tiny sliver of the 5.2 million on out-of-work benefits. A greater number – 75,000 –
The biggest surprise from today’s Budget was not an announcement, but the forecasts that gave Jeremy Hunt room for manoeuvre. The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised its forecasts for economic growth and inflation towards the upside. The OBR no longer expects the UK to enter into a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of negative
About halfway through his Budget speech, Jeremy Hunt was making a joke about returning from retirement on the backbenches in his fifties to a new career in finance. ‘How’s it going?’ heckled one opposition MP. The Commons erupted into laughter. ‘It’s going well, thank you!’ Hunt replied merrily. The speech itself did go smoothly: Tory
When your largest single shareholder decides that enough is enough, that it is no longer prepared to throw good money after bad to prop up your finances, you really do have a problem. And that is exactly what has happened to Credit Suisse this morning. The Saudi National Bank, which owns a 10 per cent share
Prime Minister’s Questions was unusually feisty for a pre-Budget session. It covered the two big political rows of the week on the Illegal Migration Bill and Gary Lineker, both of which elicited a tribal response from both Conservative and Labour benches. The session started with a particularly angry question from Labour’s Jess Phillips about a tweet
If you’ve spent any time on Twitter over the past few years you will almost certainly have met the ‘woke toddler’. This is where progressive parents share the super cute and achingly right-on insights of their tiny charges. Over time, potentially genuine anecdotes have given way to up-front political commentary. A classic of the kind
Jeremy Hunt is today unveiling his first Budget. He has told the Commons that his Budget will help deliver on Rishi Sunak’s five priorities that the Prime Minister set out in January: namely halving inflation, reducing the national debt and increasing growth. Hunt has reprised much of his Bloomberg speech from January with championing the
As Gary Lineker resumes his duties as the BBC’s highest-paid employee, it is worth appreciating that one of the Corporation’s greatest strengths is that its own journalists are willing and able to criticise the organisation in their coverage without professional repercussions. The broadcaster’s many critics should recognise this self-flagellation for what it is: a vital
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Freddy Gray is joined by Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast at Bloomberg. On the podcast, Joe talks about the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the moral hazard of state intervention. How gloomy should people be?
The United States and Russia are blaming each other for an incident which led to an American drone crashing into the Black Sea. Yesterday morning, a Russian Su-27 fighter jet collided with a US MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drone. The US claimed that Russian aircraft struck the drone’s propellors, so US forces had to bring the
Jeremy Hunt’s most important Budget announcement today won’t be something that’ll take effect in the next few hours or weeks. What Tory MPs are looking for above everything else is a commitment to reducing the tax burden and to the Conservative party going into the next election as a low-tax party. They have largely accepted
The more junior doctors have tried to justify their three-day withdrawal of labour over the past week, the more damage, or so it seems to me, they have done to their cause – whatever that cause may be. On the final day of their strike – in pursuit of a 35 per cent pay rise