All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Almost two weeks on from the storming of the US Capitol it’s becoming plainer that the most substantive changes to our political and public spheres are brewing not in Congress but on the internet. First, let’s be clear: Twitter had to act against Trump. By deleting his account, it shut down a large part of
This weekend former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn launched his ‘Project for Peace and Justice’. Ostensibly, the organisation has been set up to campaign for a ‘fairer society’ via worldwide progressive networks. It does sometimes seem though as if the group’s real purpose is to act as a branding exercise for Jeremy Corbyn himself, with the message ‘Founded
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The Commons will today see a debate over extending the universal credit uplift. While Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, wants the weekly increase to remain, Rishi Sunak wants to replace it with a one-off £500 payment. Isabel Hardman talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about the Tory split.
We need to talk about the ‘four lads’ meme. Specifically we need to talk about the undercurrent of prejudice, and on occasion outright class hatred, that propelled these four unsuspecting young men from Birmingham and Coventry into the internet spotlight. Anyone who has been online in the past year will know about the four lads.
Today is supposedly Blue Monday. Sixteen years ago, a travel agency published a press release claiming that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. The idea is superficially plausible. It’s mid-January. It’s cold. You’re skint after Christmas. You’re back at work after the weekend. There are worse candidates for
Today’s papers are splashed with good news on the pace of the vaccine rollout, with over-70s now being invited for a jab. However, the issue currently causing angst in the Tory party is universal credit. Last week, Labour attacked the government over free school meals, today they will put the government under pressure over the universal credit
Mark Drakeford has been a popular figure throughout the pandemic. The Welsh First Minister’s authoritative grasp of detail and his professorial briefings have helped foster a sense of national confidence that ministers in Cardiff have a better grip on the public health emergency than politicians in Westminster. Today’s Welsh Barometer poll for ITV Cymru reaffirms
The man with no name is now a prisoner with a number. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader poisoned by security officers back in August, flew back to Moscow yesterday and was promptly arrested. Whether this is symbolic catch-and-release or a sign that the Kremlin plans to bury him – literally or metaphorically – in
With Russia back in the news yet again, it’s interesting to note how comparatively few English language movies are set in the country. Admittedly in TV there’s been an uptick lately, with two recent series on Catherine The Great in youth/middle age, the Andrew Davies version of War & Peace, McMafia and the multi award-winning
Vladimir Putin likes his opponents in exile: it makes them easier to portray as defectors who have turned their back on Russia. It suited him to have Alexei Navalny, the most prominent opposition leader in Russia, hiding in Germany fearing he’d be arrested (or worse) if he returned. But now, Navalny has flown back to
Armin Laschet is the new chairman of Germany’s Christian Democrats – the party that was led by Angela Merkel for almost two decades. Laschet was elected in a runoff vote during the digital party conference on Saturday, beating centre-right candidate Friedrich Merz, by 521 votes to 466, to resolve a three-way contest that had also
If there is one area that the government can point to as having had a successful pandemic, it would be the speed at which the UK has been able to rollout the vaccines for Covid-19. The Telegraph has even reported that their Whitehall sources believe that every adult will be able to receive their first
Liberalism hasn’t had its sorrows to seek of late but its misfortunes show no sign of abating. The confluence of national populism and coercive progressivism, and the refusal of the non-aligned but sympathetic soft-right and soft-left to break with the culture wars, gives liberalism little chance of reasserting itself. This comes, too, as domestic and
What does the world’s foremost Shia power and the most notorious Sunni terror group have in common? Given that the two great branches of Islam rarely see eye to eye, the layman would be forgiven for thinking that the answer is ‘not much’. It isn’t just the layman who has concluded that Iran and Al
Now that Britain has left the EU, we are no longer bound by the European Court of Justice. Some may view that as something to celebrate. Yet there may also be downsides. The ECJ is the final court of the EU. It hears lots of cases about EU member states who break EU law. It
Keir Starmer’s keynote speech at the Fabian conference today was focused almost completely on foreign policy. The thrust of the Labour pitch was that Starmer is ‘pro-American but anti-Trump’. Given Corbyn’s tendency to see the United States at the Great Satan, this marks a huge shift in Labour’s foreign policy outlook. However, the speech was
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The new chairman of the BBC has been announced. It’s not Charles Moore, or Paul Dacre, but a low-profile former banker called Richard Sharp. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about what Sharp’s appointment reflects about the government’s war on the BBC.
France is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council not to have developed a coronavirus vaccine, and it hurts. USA: two; UK: one; Russia: one; China: one, France nul points. To make matters worse, France also has an embarrassing international ranking in the number of its citizens it has vaccinated. ‘France is the laughing stock
Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees have been warmly received by the massed ranks of anti-Trumpists in Washington. But the warmth stateside is nothing compared with the rave notices the incoming administration is receiving in much of Europe. There is particular delight in the UK, where the special Boris-Donald relationship evaporated within seconds of Biden’s election victory.
The UK’s decision to lengthen the gap between first and second doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines has been criticised by some. But what if we had a vaccine which only needed one dose, and had been tested on that basis? A vaccination programme could progress far more quickly and without the complication of
Boris Johnson had a few positive things to offer this evening’s coronavirus briefing. Speaking alongside chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, the Prime Minister announced that 3.3 million people had received their vaccines, including nearly 45 per cent of the over-80s. Whitty, meanwhile, had the sort-of good news
The Netherlands has a reputation as one of the sensible, efficient countries of Europe. Asked to predict which government was most likely to collapse in the face of a national scandal, many EU watchers would not have bet on Mark Rutte’s government. But while the political fallout has been extraordinary — Rutte cycled to the palace
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Helen Andrews is Senior Editor at the American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. On this episode, Freddy Gray interviews her about the Boomer generation and why she argues they are to blame for the chaos of today’s world.
How soon might we see the vaccine effect? With the programme in full swing, and over 2.5 million people with their first jab, the hope is that the prioritisation of the most vulnerable groups means that we will soon see a meaningful reduction in the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths. But how soon? For
At 3.48pm on Thursday the Sun’s political editor tweeted out an explosive story that Steve Baker, the co-convenor of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, had warned that Boris Johnson’s party leadership would soon be under threat if restrictions were not lifted soon. Less than 100 minutes later, Baker put out his own tweet
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A leaked Scottish government document suggested that all over-50s could be vaccinated by the end of March, and that UK has capacity to deliver 3.8 million jabs next week. Has the government been underselling its efforts? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
The government has finally attempted to crack down on the problem of people bringing Covid back into the UK, a mere 11 months after the pandemic began. The transport minister Grant Shapps has announced that from Monday, for the first time, travellers will be required to present a negative Covid test at the border, to
This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics has boosted optimism about the prospect of the UK’s economic recovery. GDP fell 2.6 per cent in November last year, reversing the trend of six consecutive months of increases since April’s significant contraction. This takes GDP back down to 8.5 per cent below last February’s levels
Of all the arguments put out against Brexit during the bitter referendum debate, one of the least convincing was that it would give a UK government the opportunity to repeal employment law, thereby impoverishing Britain and its people. Jeremy Corbyn once asserted that a Conservative government would turn the country into a ‘low-wage tax haven’. That
One of the arguments made against leaving the EU was that Brexit Britain would have to subordinate everything in its foreign policy to economics and the need for trade deals. But the UK’s approach to China in recent months shows that this hasn’t turned out to be the case, as I say in the magazine
It’s now been over a year since the former Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd resigned from Boris Johnson’s Cabinet, over the possibility of a no-deal Brexit and the ‘purge’ of 21 Tory MPs who voted against the government. After standing down in 2019, Rudd has since left frontline politics. Could the former frontbencher still
The figure of the ex-president is one of the most endearingly republican features of American politics. He who was the most powerful man in the world for as many as eight years turns overnight into a political fossil. He’s no longer the leader of his party, much less his country. Whether in his fifties or