All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It’s wonderful to hear that Professor James Tooley, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, has been reinstated after a gruelling, four-month investigation. James is a member of the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run, and we’ve been helping him navigate this Kafkaesque ordeal. The KC hired by Buckingham to carry out the investigation
Another day, another City Hall scandal. Mr S can today reveal that Labour’s London mayor Sadiq Khan has splurged a whopping £2.1 million on a statues commission. So much for sensible public spending, eh? In a Freedom of Information response returned to Mr S, the Greater London Authority admitted that, so far, £2,138,888 had been
Kemi Badenoch may well have been right in the points that she made at Prime Minister’s Questions, but she managed to go about making them in the wrong way. The Tory leader focused on the many contradictions between the government’s focus on economic growth and its policies, but her phrasing of her questions and her
It’s a busy day for the Labour lot, what with Rachel Reeves’s big growth speech this morning and Sir Keir Starmer’s PMQs at noon. But as viewers tuned in to watch the back-and-forth play out between the Prime Minister and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, there was one rather notable absence on the Labour benches. Energy
As expected, Rachel Reeves used her big – and long – growth speech this morning to back the expansion of Heathrow and argue that Britain was taking too long to make decisions on building infrastructure, let alone getting it done. The Chancellor did devote large passages of her speech to criticising the ‘structural problems in
Has Rachel Reeves got her growth? Today’s speech from the Chancellor in Oxfordshire was not this government’s first attempt to pivot towards a more business-friendly, growth-generating narrative. But it was its best effort yet. Starting with the highlights. Reeves threw her unabashed support behind a third runway at Heathrow, insisting that the expansion was ‘badly
US President Donald Trump has reiterated his call for Egypt and Jordan to accept residents of Gaza into their territory, as part of arrangements to end the current war with Israel. Further explaining his idea on Monday, the President said that he would ‘like to get [Gazans] living in an area where they can live
To Scotland, where today the SNP government’s embattled Health Secretary Neil Gray is in the firing line. The Scottish Tories have tabled an amendment – which will be voted on today – calling for the ‘Limogate’ minister to step down after Gray admitted to inadvertently misleading parliament over using taxpayer-funded cars to transport him to
There’s a new sheriff in town. Trump’s election means a new Secretary of State; the world’s most powerful foreign minister is now a Republican. Out goes Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden’s longtime Francophone aide. In comes Marco Rubio, the three-time Florida Senator. Unlike some of Trump’s cabinet picks – like the unorthodox Pete Hegseth at Defence
Growth is the flavour of the month for Sir Keir Starmer’s government, with Rachel Reeves this morning delivering a big speech on Britain’s economic potential. As the Chancellor attempts to woo the public with a number of talking points in today’s address, all eyes remain on the rather controversial matter of Heathrow’s expansion – which,
‘Growth’ – the focus of the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ speech this morning – can be a confusing word. It’s intangible, obscure, hard to visualise. It happens slowly, often imperceptibly, over a political cycle – when it happens at all. The changes needed to achieve it can be tough and involve trade-offs. Often voters feel those
Oh Mandy. It’s now nine days since Donald Trump was elected – and our new man in Washington is still yet to get final sign-off. Peter Mandelson was named as the new UK Ambassador to the US last month in a move that did not go down well with all in Trumpworld. Mandelson has made
The BBC licence fee is dying as millions of Britons realise that they do not need a television; they can get all the entertainment and news they want on the internet. But don’t assume that it will go quietly. On the contrary, we could end up with something even worse. Bloomberg is reporting today that
Can the NHS reform itself? MPs on the powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC) say it doesn’t know how to. It has published a stinging report this morning, accusing both NHS England (NHSE) and the department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) of ‘complacency’ and blaming external factors for the poor financial position of the health
Emmanuel Macron has promised to return the Louvre to its former glory in an ambitious renovation project that is forecast to cost between €700 and €800 million (£586 and £670 million). The French president outlined details of what he called his ‘New Renaissance’ project on Tuesday as he stood in front of the Mona Lisa.
In events that were foreseeable to anyone outside America’s cultural elite, the actress and popstar Selena Gomez is facing an online backlash to her now-deleted Instagram post decrying Donald Trump’s immigration policy. The offending video featured a sobbing Selena, who has Mexican heritage, wailing into her phone camera that ‘all my people are being attacked’
The wait is over. After six months in government, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has decided that today is the day to step forward and pull the big lever marked ‘growth’. In a widely-trailed speech, she has outlined all the different ways her government is going to get the economy moving again. There is just one snag.
British politics is in a new place: the combined polling score of Labour and the Conservatives is below 50 per cent for the first time in living memory. The latest polls have Labour averaging 26 per cent and the Tories 23 per cent. This is a nine point reduction on the terrible combined score of
What is DeepSeek, the Chinese AI system that’s shaken the world, and what does it reveal about our future? While DeepSeek has been around since 2023, what shocked the world was the release on 20 January of their DeepSeek-R1 AI model, a Large Language Model (LLM) that is just as intelligent as American giant OpenAI’s
Imagine talking about the transatlantic slave trade and not saying the word African. Or discussing the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda without saying ‘the Tutsis;. It would be unthinkable, right? Impossible, in fact. How could you talk about such grave crimes without mentioning the victims, without making at least a passing reference to those whose liberty
As Donald Trump toys with the audacious idea of relocating Gaza’s population – whether to neighbouring Jordan and Egypt, or even as far afield as Albania and Canada – he touches on one of history’s most contentious and emotionally charged issues: the relocation of peoples. Resettling large populations is never easy. History is full of
They say that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. But MPs haven’t always be so keen on having their voting records online. Some take issue with how their votes are portrayed; others suggest disproportionate weight is given to divisions they do attend. Still, Mr S is always keen to see which Honourable Members are turning
There’s more than meets the eye to today’s story of a leaked Home Office report calling for police to be encouraged to file ever more reports of non-crime hate incidents (NCIHs). The word “report,” suggesting work by scrupulously impartial civil servants, seems a strange description of what looks like a pretty blatantly political document, which at one
Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain could be knocked out of the Champions League tomorrow night. So thank God for the tournament’s new format, or so say the pundits. Yes, there’s the glee that most football fans feel when two of Europe’s petro state-owned superclubs are struggling. But the pundits also see Man City’s scrambling as
How do you create a low-trust society? One way to do so is to have an administrative class which seems to treat the views of ordinary people with contempt. Today’s news of a leaked Home Office report on counter-extremism is a classic of the genre. The report, commissioned by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, in the wake of
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Richard Hermer was one of the surprise announcements from Keir Starmer’s first Cabinet, and one of the most controversial since. Starmer’s old pal came with some notable baggage: his former clients include Sri Lankan refugees to the Chagos Islands and ex-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, as well as British-Bangladeshi Isis bride Shamima Begum. In government,
At a recent closed-door session in Ukraine’s parliament, Kyrylo Budanov, the country’s spy chief, was asked how much longer Ukraine could hold on. His answer reportedly stunned the room: ‘If there are no serious negotiations by summer, very dangerous processes could begin, threatening Ukraine’s very existence.’ Ukraine’s military intelligence rushed to deny the statement, but
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are under pressure to reduce red tape in the financial sector. “We’ve told our regulators they need to regulate for growth, not just for risk,” the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said. But the idea that tweaking regulations will somehow unlock growth is a fallacy. The
It’s ‘growth week’ in government, as the Chancellor Rachel Reeves attempts to convince sceptical business leaders, bankers and voters that she has a plan to get the economy going. After a dismal start to the year in which bond market jitters saw the cost of government borrowing soar, Reeves is hoping to turn things around
One million people will migrate to the UK every year this decade. The result: the UK population will grow by nearly five million. Population projections, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning, show Britain’s population rising from an estimated 67.6 million now to 72.5 million in the middle of 2032 – driven
Sometimes a new technology comes along that immediately shakes the world. The release this week of the new Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) tool, DeepSeek-R1, is one such moment. Despite Washington’s efforts to restrict Beijing’s development of AI, including an export ban on advanced microchips, researchers in China have created an AI tool that not only
You can tell a government report has gone down badly when ministers are distancing themselves before it has been officially published. Today, it’s the Home Office’s ‘Rapid Analytical Sprint,’ commissioned in the aftermath of the Southport riots last August to determine future counter-extremism policy, that is causing trouble for ministers. The leaked document claims that
It is easy enough to trace the point at which local authorities embarked on the sad, downwards journey which has led to several going bankrupt. It was when they renamed their town clerks ‘chief executives’. In doing so they started posing as private businesses, with salaries and bonuses to match. But their pretensions were not
On the face of it, the Chancellor’s big growth speech tomorrow could be one of this government’s most significant interventions yet. If Rachel Reeves is serious about starting the building process for a third runway at Heathrow – she is expected to endorse the idea formally tomorrow – she will be single-handedly overturning more than