All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Colin Pitchfork, 61, was jailed for life for raping and murdering 15-year-olds Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth in Leicestershire in the 1980s. Now the Parole Board has said Pitchfork should be released. The backlash from politicians has been swift. Local MP Alberto Costa said he was ‘appalled’ by the decision. ‘It would be immoral, wrong
What do John Bercow, Nigel Farage, Iain Dale and Count Binface all have in common? The quartet are among the few British political commentators listed on popular celebrity video app Cameo, where celebrities charge fans to record messages. Now though the quartet has been joined by the first sitting MP to use the app: onetime Corbyn loyalist Dawn Butler.
In England, the NHS is run by an organisation with an identity crisis. It calls itself NHS England, but that’s just self-promotional branding. In law, it is the NHS Commissioning Board, created by Andrew Lansley’s controversial 2012 reforms which gave the NHS a high level of autonomy from direct government control. The NHS Commissioning Board
Tories up and down the country should be celebrating tonight after it was revealed that walking CCHQ advert Zarah Sultana has kept her seat intact in the report by the Boundary Commission. The hard left MP has served as a Conservative recruiting agent since 2019 when the 27-year-old squeaked home in Coventry South by just
The Speaker’s decision to rule out an amendment which would have forced a vote on international aid cuts tells us a number of important things about the current situation in Westminster. The first is of course that Lindsay Hoyle is not John Bercow, who was prepared to ride roughshod over the advice of the clerks
It is results day in the House of Commons as nervy MPs wait to find out their future. At long last the Boundary Commission for England has today revealed its conclusions on the future of Westminster constituencies. It is the latest development in a decade-long saga which has previously failed to change the parliamentary map. This
Vetoes should no longer be allowed. Smaller countries should not be able to block the will of the ‘majority’. And the biggest countries, with the largest financial contributions, should be the ones that get to dictate policy. Ever since German re-unification made the country by far the largest in the bloc, there has been a
And so the foreign aid rebellion died before it even began. This afternoon Speaker Lindsay Hoyle decided that an audacious move to amend the ARIA bill to keep spending 0.7 per cent of GDP year on international development was not within the scope of the legislation. Despite this Mr S thought it worthwhile to go through the names of
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After the government cut the UK’s foreign aid budget a group of rebellious tory MPs bound together to try and reverse the decision, will it come to a head this week?‘This cut has caused some resentment amongst other nations’ – Isabel Hardman And has the culture war spread to cricket after the suspension of Ollie
It has not been a good year for gay rights charity Stonewall. Last month founding member Matthew Parris accused the organisation of trying to delegitimise anyone who did not agree with its views after a free speech row at Essex University. Stonewall was alleged to have misrepresented the law in its advice to the institution with barrister Akua Reindorf warning
Should the NHS be mixing vaccines for better effect, or at least offering people who have had one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine the choice of having the Pfizer vaccine for their second shot? The question arises because that is exactly the regime which has been followed in Germany since the risk of clotting from
Update: Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle has announced that a vote on the aid spending amendment has not been selected. Hoyle says the amendment is out of the scope of the current bill, meaning Boris Johnson will avoid a potentially difficult vote on the issue – for now. Hoyle suggested the government should give MPs an opportunity for
Life is about to get even more miserable for smokers living in Oxford. Oxfordshire county council has announced plans to make the region ‘smoke-free’ by 2025. Smokers will be prevented from having a puff outside cafes, pubs, and restaurants, while employers will be asked to impose smoke-free spaces in workplaces. Hospitals, schools, and public areas will be
As culture secretary, Matt Hancock developed a taste for technology, even launching his own eponymous social network in February 2018. But now as health secretary it appears his appetite for big data has grown ever greater. Not content with launching the NHS Covid app as part of a £22 billion test and trace scheme, his latest wheeze is
Matt Hancock said this morning that the Indian variant was 40 per cent more transmissible than the Kentish one. Now, it should be noted that these numbers do tend to move around. But if come 14 June and the decision about the unlocking on 21 June this is still the figure, it would point to a less
The Health Secretary was back in front of the cameras this morning, and there was plenty to discuss, from the planned lifting of all restrictions on 21 June to the fallout from Dominic Cummings’ testimony before MPs last week. Dominic Cummings’ most wounding accusation last week was that Hancock had deliberately lied to the Prime Minister’s
While war raged between Israel and Gaza, the New York Times published a powerful montage of 64 minors said to have been killed in the conflict so far. Under its famous motto ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and with the headline ‘They Were Just Children’, America’s paper of record informed us that ‘they
Cracks are appearing in the EU’s climate strategy. An international dispute over the court-ordered closure of a coal mine on the Poland-Czech Republic border has thrown divisions over how to phase out fossil fuels into sharp relief, leading to the first ever environment-related lawsuit between two EU member states. The Czech Republic has taken Poland to
When the National Health Service was formed in 1948, it had three goals: it would meet the needs of everyone, it would be free at the point of service, and its services would be based on clinical need, not ability to pay – a revolutionary, and ambitious, challenge. Fast forward 73 years though and it
A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant sentiment, most German commentators believed that the Alternative für Deutschland was now a spent force. The party had been able to attract centre-right voters following the 2015 migrant crisis, many of whom may not have
In a sign that nature is truly healing, this afternoon brought reassuring news of a great parliamentary tradition reasserting itself: the House of Lords hereditary by-election. These contests are held every time one of the 92 hereditary peers still in the Upper House die and see the great and the not-so-good vote among themselves to elect
Calls to reform corporation tax are nothing new and don’t just come from the left. The inefficient and bureaucratic nature of the tax has been highlighted by free-market advocates for years, as it becomes increasingly obvious that, in the age of multinationals and digital tech giants, the structure is no longer fit for purpose. Action
Poverty will be abolished. Governments will be able to spend again. Inequality will be eradicated, our welfare systems secured and the power of the tech giants will finally be curbed. We will hear a lot of hype about today’s global tax deal. Given that the liberal-left have spent the last decade complaining that the main
It’s been a tough year in the diary world. Covid has wrecked the usual party circuit of canapés and cocktails, with hard pressed hacks forced to pump their sources for a rapidly diminishing supply of gossip for the past 15 months. Now it appears that not even the legendary Sebastian Shakespeare is safe. Shakespeare, an Oxford
Ed Miliband gave an interview this week in which he decided it would be a good idea to bring up the topic of Brexit. The interviewer spotted an opportunity and asked Miliband if he had ‘embraced’ our departure from the EU. ‘You’ve got to embrace it because that argument is over,’ was the former Labour
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As China changes its two child policy to a three child policy over fears of population decline, the west is also having to regularly change its approach towards the world’s next superpower. John Connolly talks to James Forsyth and Cindy Yu about our precarious relationship with China.
It seems that the BBC has finally acknowledged the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism. Demonstrating his inherent anti-Englishness, the old Fabian snob declared: ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’ And the barb hurts because to an extent we must accept that
The feigned outrage in Berlin – but mostly in Paris – at the USA’s proxy use of Denmark’s intelligence services to intercept submarine cable traffic to spy on European leaders raises more than a wry smile. Allies have always spied on allies for legitimate reasons. Few have done so, and continue to do so, as
Opponents of the new racial extremism typically object that it vilifies white people in much the same way that classical racism does black people or other minorities. While this ideology does retail racist theories about white people (collective racial privilege, heritable racial guilt), when progressives want to get really racist, they invariably turn to another
If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until
The Tory party has turned sharply against the idea of ever larger numbers going to university. The reasons for this are both economic and political, I say in the Times today. On the economic front, the taxpayer is bearing more of the cost of the expansion of higher education than expected — the government estimates that
Today brings yet more proof that Liz Truss is dead right to want to withdraw government departments from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme. The Telegraph reports that one way institutions and companies can rise up Stonewall’s ‘Workplace Equality Index’ is by ditching words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and using more ‘gender-neutral’ terms instead. Apparently, words like