All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Mr S had not intended to provide a rolling blog of COP26. But with the UN’s green games less than a week ago, things in host city Glasgow go from bad to worse as the world’s leaders prepare to jet in to tell the rest of us how to save the planet. Unite and GMB today confirmed
During the now virtually forgotten cod wars between Iceland and the United Kingdom from 1958 to 1976, the diminutive foreign office official Sir Donald Maitland invited to King Charles Street for a dressing down the Icelandic Ambassador, a 6’7” Nordic giant. When the ambassador arrived, Sir Donald climbed on to his massive desk, drew himself up
The best thing that can be said about the government’s latest anti-obesity scheme is that it’s cheap. For now. The new HeadsUp app, which will track people’s diet and exercise regimes and reward them with cinema tickets, clothes vouchers and the like, has a price tag of £3 million. This is peanuts in public health terms.
For many so-called liberals, Jacinda Ardern seemed to be the perfect premier. Warm, empathetic, progressive, above all – moderate – the New Zealand Prime Minister was lionised by the London intelligentsia as the ideal model of a liberal, centrist leader who saved her country by locking down during the pandemic. But now the shine is coming off
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It’s Budget Week and Rishi Sunak has already telegraphed a lot of what we can expect from it, branding it as a good news affair including NHS spending and minimum wage reform…but who stands to feel the pinch? Katy Balls sits down with James Forsyth and Kate Andrews to discuss the Budget as well as
Baroness Hale has evidently been enjoying life since retiring as President of the Supreme Court in January last year. Hale, once dubbed the ‘Beyoncé of the legal profession,’ became the toast of Remainers everywhere after her withering slap-down to Boris Johnson’s prorogation bid in 2019. Now ensconced on the lecture circuit, the former academic has
The received opinion is that Islam and immigration are Éric Zemmour’s prime targets as his putative presidential campaign gathers pace. But he has a third mortal enemy, and that’s the Anglophone world. Éric doesn’t much like us. But then Éric doesn’t much like anyone who’s not, as his sort are wont to say, Français de souche. Zemmour’s rabble-rousing is
Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind. But perhaps it chimes with your experience. First time round — back in the days when we were all huddled indoors, leaving the house only to stand on the doorstep of a Thursday night to
For the European Union to work, its law must be supreme. All member states have courts, but those courts submit to the EU’s own court, the European Court of Justice (the ECJ). The UK knew and accepted this. By the time the Lisbon Treaty was signed, everybody knew this. That is why Poland and Germany
Rishi Sunak – Plan B will not involve furlough This Wednesday will see the Chancellor’s second budget of the year. As always, the contents are hotly anticipated, but Rishi Sunak was reluctant to give too much away this morning. It has been reported that the new Health Security Agency is sounding out local authorities about
Opposing Viktor Orbán is a formidable task. Support for his coalition hovers at around the 40 per cent mark while the parliamentary system makes it harder for opposition parties to break through. By 2018, all of the opposition parties, most of which are firmly on the left, realised they were individually incapable of breaking through.
When Sajid Javid was interviewed at Tory party conference recently, he was asked if he’s going to start firing unvaccinated NHS staff, given that care workers are about to lose their jobs under ‘no jab, no job’ rules. He said he was considering it, which would be quite a move. The unjabbed may make up a small percentage
Is Rishi Sunak losing his battle within the Cabinet to promote fiscal responsibility? We’ll find out this week, when he unveils his Budget and three-year Spending Review on Wednesday, but there were hints this morning that more spending is coming down the track. Speaking to Andrew Marr on BBC One, Sunak laid out the principles
New cars could soon start disappearing from Britain’s forecourts, with the latest supply chain crunch threatening to cripple the global motor industry. It’s a crisis that once again delivers a stark warning about the dangers of over-dependence on China and the costs of succumbing to Beijing’s predatory trade practices. The automotive industry is currently facing
Earlier this week, the health secretary Sajid Javid said in a Downing Street press conference that the government was not yet ready or willing to activate its Covid ‘Plan B’. His announcement came after the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) argued last week that Plan B measures – such as mandatory masks, working from
Let me start with some statements of fact. The planet is heating up dangerously fast with devastating consequences for everyone that lives on it and if we don’t stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere we have no future as a species. In the UK, a major source of our carbon emissions comes from homes and
In a 368-page document published this week, the government announced its strategy to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 and confirmed its target for all electricity to come from low carbon sources by 2035. It’s difficult to imagine worse timing for the release. An energy crisis is exposing the failures of decades of massive
Boris Johnson might insist that the UK will not ‘pitchfork’ Chinese investment but it seems not everyone in government agrees. Liz Truss, the new Foreign Secretary, has made headlines today for saying what many on her back benches believe — that Britain cannot be dependent on China and allow it a role in our nuclear plants
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Katy Balls talks to Kate Andrews and James Forsyth about the prediction from the Bank of England’s chief economist that the UK’s inflation rate could hit 5%.
If I wanted to persuade my fellow Americans to eat more cheese, I would begin by launching a campaign to ban cheese. This might start with the argument cheese clogs arteries or lowers IQ. I’d find some doctors willing to testify that cheese inhibits testosterone, and some other doctors to insist it fouls up estrogen.
A young royal, seen as a potential future star, falls in love with a commoner and chooses to leave the gilded cage and a life of dutiful service to marry and live a ‘normal’ life in America. The match is controversial for various reasons, not least the royal’s mental health and the non-royal’s family problems;
The question was direct and to the point, ‘Are you one of them blokes?’ With those six short words, I was the victim of blatant transphobia. We have been advised to report such attacks. ‘We need the stats,’ explained one transgender campaigner in 2018. That was in response to ‘hateful’ stickers which read ‘Female is
Whisper it, but Rishi Sunak looks to be heading into the Budget next week with the public finances in a far better state than once predicted. The Office for National Statistics update on public sector net borrowing showed September’s total — £21.8 billion — coming in several billion pounds below the Office for Budget Responsibility’s
Hard luck, Madonna, your lovingly assembled rainbow family is no longer the most cutting-edge crew on the showbiz block. If you want to excel as an A-list parent these days, you need a trans child to show off on social media. Jamie Lee Curtis has revealed that her child, born Thomas, now answers to the
In a move that as important as any in the recent Cabinet reshuffle, Emily Lawson is returning to run the Covid vaccination programme. Lawson headed up NHS England’s vaccination team during the rollout, and after its success, she was moved to take charge of the new Number 10 delivery unit. The hope was that she would
Irony was officially pronounced dead this week after disgraced MP Claudia Webbe launched an attack on ‘wrong, bad and exploitative’ bosses. Webbe is facing a possible jail sentence after being convicted of harassment last week but is still merrily carrying on as if nothing has happened, regularly launching Twitter attacks on the government and blithely
As a member of Sage, I support public scrutiny of our scientific advice. However, once our models enter the public domain they are interpreted in many different ways and some of the crucial context can be lost. Modelling is an important tool for epidemic management, one that has been tested against numerous infectious disease outbreaks
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The Chancellor is making final preparations to his Budget, announced next Wednesday. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about the major themes coming up, and whether this is the moment when Rishi Sunak sees a turn in his popularity.
The EU is notoriously bad at learning from its own mistakes, mostly because it is unable to recognise these mistakes in the first place. A notable exception is austerity. There is now a consensus that it was a disaster, which blighted Europe’s economic resilience for a generation. A mistake the EU has not recognised yet
The push for legalised assisted dying for the terminally ill is back with a debate on Baroness Meacher’s private members’ Bill on the subject today in the House of Lords. It’s an emotionally charged issue which goes to the heart of medical ethics. It is also true that euphemistic language is often deployed by advocates
If absurdity were a source of renewable energy, the COP26 climate change summit might achieve its aim of saving the planet. Yesterday Mr S brought news that local lawyers are set to join rail engineers, transport operators, catering staff and refuse collectors in timing industrial action to coincide with next week’s eco-jamboree. Now Steerpike learns
Molly Meacher, whose Bill to allow assisted dying gets its further reading in the Lords today, gave an interesting interview on BBC radio today – there was no other speaker to counter her arguments; an exchange of views came later in the programme. She explained that her engagement with the cause had been prompted by
When another country does something to upset the Chinese Communist party, it gets accused of ‘a Cold War mentality’. This is psychological projection, in Freudian terms, a defence mechanism which projects onto others the negative aspects of one’s own self. But the CCP is right in a way: we should have more of a ‘Cold