“The police are still struggling to get the basics right.” So stated Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary, in his annual assessment of the state of policing in England and Wales, published last week, highlighting particular failures relating …
Keir Starmer’s war on mothers
As their swift suspensions indicated, Keir Starmer can probably cope with a rebellion of “pissed-off” Labour MPs over his failure to commit to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. But when even Suella Braverman, the Right-winger that right-thinkers love to hate, …
Keir Starmer’s favourite radical socialist
Modern politics is a business that obliterates the self. It turns its winning practitioners into one-dimensional media-facing personalities schooled for the soundbite and the photo-op. Yet plenty of voters, and news outlets with gnat-sized attention spans, still hanker for glimpses …
What Roger Scruton can teach Starmer
Not long into David Cameron’s first term as Prime Minister, the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton refounded an old Tory dining club that had, for a short time in the Seventies, exerted an outsized influence on British politics. The Conservative Philosophy …
How snobbery killed suburbia
The new Labour government’s day one commitment to a vast national housebuilding effort has been almost uniformly welcomed, yet there are some glaring exceptions. Naturally, the rump Corbynite Left is grouching on social media that plans to work with private …
Why Starmer is stuck in Blair’s prison
In his inaugural speech as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised to govern in a sober way, befitting the challenges of the day. He anchored his opening address in Britain’s small-c conservative, order-loving majority, promising “secure borders”, and “safer streets”.
And …
Starmer faces a farmers’ revolt
We sheared our sheep today, beneath a sky full of gloomy grey clouds. There were hours of chasing sheep up the ramp to the men on the trailer. The radio blared out country songs and an occasional news bulletin informing …
Labour still doesn’t know what women want
Just before the election, Keir Starmer finally found the third way on trans issues and women’s rights. First, he was damned by J.K. Rowling, who wrote in The Times that she would “struggle to support” Labour and suggested she might …
Starmer is turning Britain into a vassal state
It seems fitting that Keir Starmer’s international debut should be the Nato summit that kicks off in Washington, DC today. Ostensibly scheduled as a celebration of the alliance’s 75th anniversary, it will no doubt be remembered as the moment that …
Welcome to Keir Starmer’s post-liberal order
So now Keir Starmer is Prime Minister, what will change? There are two apparently contradictory responses to this.
The first: nothing. The truly shattering revelation from the era since Brexit has been that you can experience a so-called “political earthquake”, …
How Starmer slaughtered the Tories
This was an election campaign like no other. Less a battle of personalities and visions than of competing strategies to attain power, commanded not by the uninspiring monarchs under whose banners the battle was fought but the generals quietly ordering …
Will Starmer discover his Romantic side?
Hungover with apathy, there was no champagne drunk in our household after last night’s theatre of the predictable. Starmer is in power, and the Tories are out. How did our politics become so dull?
Should there have been more dancing …
Labour won’t save the NHS
Any culture, society or nation is ultimately judged on how it protects its citizens, and how it treats and cares for its most vulnerable. And on this standard, the Conservatives have failed. Over the past 14 years, their contempt has …
Keir Starmer’s moral vacuum
Who is Sir Keir Starmer, really? It’s fairly clear that the British public have difficulty with this question. Although by now they’ve probably picked up that he’s the son of a toolmaker, much else remains obscure. On the face of …
How will the Ukraine war end?
How will the war in Ukraine end? In an election overshadowed by a grim climate of international instability, it is remarkable that the only candidate to seriously address this question so far has been Nigel Farage. Laying out Reform’s foreign …