All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Everyone knows what the oldest profession in the world is supposed to be. But what came afterwards? Labour deputy leadership hopeful Dawn Butler has put forward her suggestion: accountants. In an interview with Pink News, had this to say: ‘Sex work is the oldest profession in the world…It’s older than accountants. Apparently, sex work came
A year ago, did anyone look like they would come out of Brexit better than Leo Varadkar? Here was a leader of a small country on the fringe of the EU suddenly catapulted to its centre. He was the one pushed forward by Juncker, Barnier, Merkel and Macron, as they sought to leverage advantage from
It’s only a few weeks until Budget day and the papers are filled with reports of the various revenue-raising measures being considered. After plans for a mansion tax were dampened down by government sources, ideas being mooted include cuts to pension tax relief and a fuel duty hike. Who the burden falls on will reveal
Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, has tendered his resignation. After gambling his political career on an election in which he hoped Brexit would be the defining factor, the Irish voters decided they cared about pretty much anything but. In fact, just one per cent of Irish voters cited Brexit as a decisive factor for them
Living in Scotland, it’s depressing to hear the way UK Government ministers talk about immigration. I have one proposal in front of me right now that advocates ‘a points-based approach’ as part of ‘a controlled immigration system to meet our own economic, social and demographic priorities and needs’. Anyone who wishes to ‘work, study or
Sparks are flying across Oxford quads: an alarming proposal is afoot to make the study of Homer and Virgil, the two most influential poets of the ancient world, optional for Classics students. So why has it become national news for one university course to stop treating two ancient authors as compulsory set texts? Most of
Since the election, Brexit has fallen down the news agenda. But getting this country ready for the end of the transition period is still—by far—the biggest challenge facing the Government and what drives many of its actions. As I say in the magazine this week, you can only understand the reshuffle through this prism. First,
Could motorists be hit with the first fuel duty rise in ten years in this month’s Budget? According to the Sun, the PM’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings wants to use petrol and diesel as a revenue-raiser to fund big infrastructure projects outside the capital. But ending the fuel duty freeze after a decade might not be a good idea,
Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg got a taste of front-runner status on Wednesday night, getting absolutely walloped by his primary opponents during the ninth Democratic debate in Nevada. Bloomberg, who was not on the ballot in the Iowa caucus or the New Hampshire primary, has been surging in the polls thanks to massive
Lisa Nandy is the best candidate for Labour leader. That’s what I said last week and since then, she’s been endorsed by the Jewish Labour Movement (good) and backed calls for the Israel-ending ‘right of return’ (less good). So was I wrong to back Nandy? I’m not so sure. My argument for Nandy wasn’t of
Once you accept that Brexit is happening – because, like it or not, the British people demanded it – it is not so very hard to accept that Brexit must come with consequences. In the absence of free movement from the European Union to the United Kingdom, new immigration arrangements must be put in place.
Where are the engineers? Whenever climate change comes up we hear from ecologists, activists and the odd scientist. But engineers? The very people we need to solve problems seem to be shut away in a box while school kids and dopey vegan campaigners are handed a megaphone with which to tell us the planet is
Plenty of people are pretending this morning that they actually knew who Dave was the day before yesterday. The Streatham rapper made headlines at the Brits last night for calling Boris Johnson ‘a real racist’ during a performance of his song ‘Black’. Suddenly, he’s the toast of Twitter, liberal-lefties and assorted other Boris-loathers, who eagerly shared
The argument for excluding the low-skilled from work visas under our new post-Brexit migration system is reasonable enough. As Home Secretary Priti Patel argued this morning, excluding low-skilled migrants should encourage businesses to invest in automation and in training higher-skilled staff who might be able to do the work of two of more unskilled staff.
I’ve always been a fan of the French police, in part because when I lived in the south of the country I played rugby in a team that contained a couple of coppers who told me stories of what they had to deal with on a daily basis. But I’m also a little partial to
Is Nish Kumar right to be telling children that the idea of ‘Britishness’ is a fallacy? On the latest episode of That’s Life, journalist and TalkRadio host Julia Hartley-Brewer talks about Nish Kumar’s infamous ‘Horrible Histories’ episode, Philip Schofield and why the Democrats just can’t get rid of Trump. Spectator Life’s That’s Life podcast is
It is often said a job is what you make of it. If so, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that London’s mayor Sadiq Khan regards his mainly as a means of burnishing his personal brand. Rather than getting to grips with the core responsibilities of his position – making transport work better, getting
The police have no jurisdiction over our thoughts, but that hasn’t stopped them trying recently. Just over a year ago, a plainclothes officer from Humberside Police turned up at my workplace to ‘check my thinking’ for getting involved in the transgender debate online. An individual had taken offence at something I’d retweeted and reported it
Sadiq Khan has ventured to Brussels today to meet with European Union negotiators. London’s mayor has a plan to convince EU officials to offer Brits ‘associate citizenship’ after the Brexit implementation period ends this year. The citizenship would grant Brits continued access to freedom of movement and residency within the EU, along with a possible
Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are
We will export less. There will be less competition. Prices will be higher and productivity lower. Textbook economics tells us that trade friction – that is anything that makes it harder for goods or services to flow across borders – is a very bad thing. So why is the British Government suddenly accepting trade frictions
How do you move on from a week of torrid headlines over a power struggle between senior No. 10 aides and a recently departed Chancellor? The old Tory playbook – mastered by Boris Johnson’s former election guru Lynton Crosby – would suggest throwing a dead cat. The dead cat strategy used when a party wishes
The SNP’s ability to defy political gravity — a poll conducted last month put them on 51 per cent in Holyrood voting intentions — is easier to understand when you consider the alternatives. Jackson Carlaw, unveiled on Friday as Ruth Davidson’s successor at the helm of the Scottish Tories, is a pleasant chap with a certain
Throughout the Labour leadership election, Lisa Nandy has sought to pitch herself as the more moderate candidate in the race – the candidate who can break away from Corbyn’s rule of the party, and win back traditional, working-class Labour voters in the North and Midlands who abandoned the party at the last election. So it
Ursula von der Leyen was an unloved choice to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as the next president of the European Commission. She emerged from a ferociously contentious process as a last-minute compromise and she promptly fell into a storm of criticism. Even members of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) shellacked her. In the thankless role of
Boris Johnson’s top Brexit negotiator David Frost gave a major speech at ULB Brussels University on Monday evening where he set out the British government’s plans for a UK-EU trade deal. This is an edited transcript of his speech: Thank you much everyone for that very kind introduction. It is a really huge pleasure to
Dominic Cummings said he wanted to hire ‘weirdos’ and ‘misfits’ to improve Whitehall, but new adviser Andrew Sabisky (more on whether he’s actually an adviser shortly) isn’t so much a misfit in Westminster as he is a sore thumb, standing out for his views on eugenics, race and unplanned pregnancies. Today a No. 10 spokesperson
Margaret Thatcher famously said of Mikhail Gorbachev “We can do business together”. Clearly she wasn’t endorsing the policies and outlook of the USSR, just reaching a practical conclusion that was to lead to beneficial outcomes for both sides in the years ahead. It’s time for Boris Johnson’s opponents to arrive at the same conclusion –
When I read that police were invoking emergency powers at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Cambridge I thought: about time, too. It meant, I presumed, that they were not going to make the same mistake as the Met Police last April, when they were too slow to stop this bunch of anarchists closing down public
If major research universities improved their neighbourhoods, the city of New Haven—the home of Yale University—would be one of the richest and happiest in the state of Connecticut. Instead, New Haven is a pit of poverty and crime in a state that is otherwise known for its wealth and lawfulness. Equally, Baltimore in Maryland, which