After six months of delay, the US Senate has finally passed a $60 billion foreign-aid package which will send urgently needed ammunition and military equipment to Ukrainian soldiers. It may well be the last such cheque to be signed in Washington. Donald Trump is favourite to be the next president of the United States and
Why is Britain poised to ban cigarette smoking, when the habit is already dying out anyway? Smoking is seen by the young as disgusting and outdated. A generation ago, 50 per cent of school pupils said they had smoked at some point. By the time David Cameron came to power, this was down to 25
The publication this week of the Cass Review into gender-identity services for young people marks a welcome return to reason in an area of medicine which for the past few years has been driven by identity politics. No one is denying that there are those who deserve psychological – and in some cases physical –
It was bound to happen sooner or later: a guest on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow presented an artefact which derived from the slave trade – an ivory bangle. One of the programme’s experts, Ronnie Archer-Morgan, himself a descendant of slaves, said that it was a striking historical artefact but not one that he was willing
During Easter weekend four years ago, the country felt on the verge of catastrophe. The prime minister was in hospital having just come out of intensive care, the Covid-19 death toll was at more than 1,000 deaths a day, and hospitals were trying to cope with a flood of patients. It had been estimated that
As the world discovered when she was caught lifting other people’s work for her book on women in economics, Rachel Reeves is not the most original of thinkers. But she has political talents. She has cultivated her image as an uninspiring technocrat in order to present herself as someone who will not spring surprises or
Ethical issues such as abortion and euthanasia are rightly considered matters of personal conscience for MPs at Westminster, so Keir Starmer’s promise of a vote on assisted dying does not automatically mean that Britain will follow Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada in legalising euthanasia, no matter how large a majority Labour might win. When the
Last November Jeremy Hunt announced what he proclaimed was ‘the biggest tax cut on work since the 1980s’. He cut employee National Insurance from 12 per cent to 10 per cent, yet to his great disappointment, the polls didn’t budge. This week he decided to double down, lowering NI again, to 8 per cent. ‘The
Attempts by the Emirati government to buy The Spectator and the Telegraph through RedBird IMI, one of its state investment vehicles, pose a conundrum. There is no existing law against such a deal because until this point safeguards have not been needed. No autocracy has ever before attempted to buy a leading national newspaper in
Britain’s ‘net-zero economy’ is booming, creating more better-paid jobs than any other sector, but it is all being put at risk by the government’s reversal on policies on electric vehicles and heat pumps. That, at any rate, is what the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) wants us
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is a government-in-waiting desperately searching for ideas. It says much about the leader of the opposition that arguably the biggest proposal he’s put forward comes not from him but from his chief of staff, Sue Gray. She, it seems, is enthused about the idea of citizens’ assemblies, and wants more
The polls suggest that Labour is in line for a general election victory later this year which could match or even exceed Tony Blair’s landslide of 1997. Yet the party exudes none of the confidence and maintains none of the self-discipline which it did 27 years ago. On the contrary, were the Conservatives not in
The natural reaction to this week’s news that King Charles III is suffering from cancer has been one of concern and compassion. As the Prime Minister said, consolation can be drawn from the fact that the illness has been caught early and that Charles is continuing with his duties – albeit stepping aside from public-facing
In ten years’ time, there’s a good chance that the main concern in the western world will be the threat of population collapse. Fertility rates are falling everywhere and no government has found a way of reversing the trend. Plenty have tried. South Korea has so far spent $200 billion on tax breaks and lowering
The US and Britain have joined forces to strike Houthi rebels who have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. But where is the rest of Europe when it comes to defending its own interests? The Netherlands has provided some logistic support – along with Australia, Bahrain and Canada – but European countries have
For many people, Donald Trump’s victory in Iowa this week will seem incomprehensible. Not only did he win – he did so by a margin that no other Republican has achieved since the state became the first to choose its candidates. This is quite a feat from a man facing almost 100 criminal charges, who
Joey Barton, the footballer turned manager, may be a controversial figure, but is it really the business of the sports minister, Stuart Andrew, to threaten to silence him on Twitter and Facebook? Andrew this week described Barton’s derisive remarks about female football commentators as ‘dangerous comments that open the floodgates for abuse’. He called upon
Yet again we start the year with news that the NHS is facing the worst crisis since its inception. This has a real impact. People who think the health service is in crisis will be less inclined to use it. As we saw over lockdown, this leads to fewer treatable conditions being diagnosed, more ‘excess
The recent United Nations climate summit in Dubai ended up becoming a carnival of gloom. Speakers competed to paint the bleakest outlook for the world. But while it’s right to focus on the challenges that lie ahead, the doomsday narrative risks obscuring all the progress we have made. ‘Records are now being broken so often
Two years ago, a new strain of Covid emerged and with it came calls for a Christmas lockdown. The Omicron variant was said to spread far faster than previous iterations of the virus and Imperial’s Neil Ferguson warned that it was no less deadly. The call for lockdown began and Britain came very close to
