It’s not just the government that’s now beholden to forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility. Keir Starmer told the BBC that Labour doesn’t ‘quarrel with the number that the OBR put out as a target or trying to get the debt down’. So Starmer accepts that the government needs to find around £50 billion
You have to admire their bravery, don’t you? The stoicism with which they put up a fight in the name of principle and decency. The England football manager, Gareth Southgate, and his similarly equine captain, Harry Kane, had pledged that the latter would wear, throughout England’s World Cup campaign, a rainbow ‘One Love’ armband to
Unlike some fair-weather fans I maintain a fairly constant interest in the workings of Fifa. Not because I especially care for football, but because I consider myself something of a connoisseur of corruption. I do not spend all my time studying the matter, but I do take an interest in corrupt people and entities. They
I’ve been conducting a straw poll. Using incidental encounters with people who don’t follow politics closely, I’m learning what ordinary voters do or don’t know or think of Rishi Sunak. Responses range between neutral and mildly positive. Beyond that, what do I get from respondents? (1) They really don’t know much about him; but (2)
Once the energy price cap expires in April, the Chancellor is apparently considering the levy of ‘social tariffs’ on the energy bills of the better off – a pleasantly elastic category, since most of us are better off than somebody. Charging wealthier customers extra for their energy could facilitate reducing the bills of benefit claimants.
The Supreme Court decided rightly on Wednesday, rejecting the Scottish government’s claim that a second referendum on independence was not a ‘reserved matter’. But since it was obvious from the beginning that this was the case, why did Nicola Sturgeon insist on bringing an unwinnable action? Presumably to lay blame, as usual, on UK authorities.
A colourful selection of news items this week seem to have a central thread. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the Theranos fake blood-test venture once valued at $9 billion, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, the collapsed crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion, was holed up in
