There is a vast, petrifying hollowness to the British economy. As you race around dealing with everyday life, the reassuring facade of the state is still there: the police and roads, the schools and hospitals. And yet, if you ever …
Who will save us from boarding-house Britain?
Perhaps the Conservative Party Conference would better have been cancelled: after all, no one in the country, not least those on stage making pronouncements about the party’s future policies, has the slightest belief that any of those policies will ever …
Keir Starmer has no story to tell
In the autumn of 1996, Tony Blair and the New Labour bandwagon arrived in Blackpool for the final party conference before the election. A sense of euphoria was starting to take hold: as they hit 57% in the polls, it …
Starmer needs Corbyn’s secret weapon
The barriers are going up for the Labour party conference. Not just to protect, of course, but to exclude. The National Executive Committee is considering a rule that would threaten party members with expulsion if they campaign for rival candidates …
Keir Starmer will never rejoin the EU
With Keir Starmer all but measuring the drapes in No 10, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that his pledge to renegotiate Britain’s treaty with the EU has set Westminster aflutter. The reality, however, is less exciting: Starmer’s promise is little …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
What does Angela Rayner really want?
Listening to Angela Rayner this week has felt like real-time evidence for Karl Marx’s quip about the past weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Even before she had addressed the TUC conference, Rayner was fending off …
The dark arts of Starmer’s reshuffle
New uniforms, new haircuts and new shoes at the ready, many children went back to school this week (to the ones that aren’t about to crumble around their heads, that is). It was, too, the return of “Hogwarts” — many …
Why is Britain so depressed?
Anyone with experience of depression will recognise the approaching symptoms: a numbed blankness of feeling, or pangs of melancholy nostalgia for a lost contentment now impossible to imagine. A black cloud of affectless lethargy drains life of purpose, making any …
McDonald’s made me a Marxist
There is a saying at McDonald’s: “‘tits on tills’ — boys in the kitchen, girls on the counter.” The idea, as a 22-year-old former worker described in a recent BBC report, is “to put attractive people at the front”. Human …
Westminster has failed Selby
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon in North Yorkshire, and Rishi Sunak is trying to reassure the North Yorkshire Conservative Association gathered on his front lawn that all is not lost. Sheltered under a marquee, he’s like a cruise-ship crooner entertaining …
Starmer should beware a Left-wing insurgency
Have Labour’s strategists achieved the impossible? Not only is the party 20 points ahead and in with a shot of winning four by-elections, but, perhaps even more impressively, its leader finally appears to be shrugging off his custardy sheen of …
Wes Streeting is a man for all factions
Well, comrades, nearly a quarter of the way into the century, how’s it going for socialism? Oh dear. Our humourless, uncharismatic party leader has decided to launch a purge, apparently. Anyone defying the official line will be expelled. Voices of …
Who should Starmer sack?
Henry Kissinger memorably observed that the reason academic fights were so vicious was that the prizes were so small. So it has been in the Labour Party for most of the last 13 years, when the chances of overturning the …
Why I’ve given up on the Conservatives
Victory should feel more satisfying than it does. Just a few years ago, arguing that globalisation had been a great policy error by the West’s political class was still viewed as a heretical position, its adherents fighting in vain against …