I spent the week before last on a hillside with some young people planting 12,000 saplings — oaks, and other native broadleaf species. We were helping to recreate a vital lost habitat, wood pasture, that will someday be home to …
The folly of a British Silicon Valley
Will Britain’s future be decided in Milton Keynes? The New Town lies at the heart of what’s now being called the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor: an amiable stretch of the English countryside on which the Government hopes to build a new …
The flawed philosophy of Rachel Reeves
In 2018, in a pamphlet titled “The Everyday Economy”, a backbench Labour MP called Rachel Reeves attempted to untangle Britain’s convoluted financial system. To do so, she started by drawing upon the history of political philosophy — and the work …
Rachel Reeves is Gordon Brown in a dress
When we think of student politics, we tend to imagine long-haired radicals full of righteous indignation, wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and reading (or perhaps pretending to read) Karl Marx. Not so for the young Rachel Reeves, who in the heady …
Rachel Reeves, the pound shop George Osborne
The curse of finance ministers whose country’s business model is broken is that they are powerless to transform the economy, yet too powerful not to take the blame. But when the economy is merely stagnating, not yet in free-fall, preventing …
Labour’s blueprint for decline
If Britain’s cultural production leads the world in anything, it is in the imagining of grim dystopias which are only elaborated versions of contemporary British life: the line from 1984 to Children of Men is drawn through a particular, grudgingly …
Rachel Reeves has no vision
In the Seventies, a Middle Eastern war precipitated a global energy shock and stagflation, and a US president invoked populist pleas to the silent majority against the counterculture. As the gold standard and the post-war Bretton Woods system teetered on …
Keir Starmer: a technocrat without a plan
Two episodes crystallised my opinion of Starmer. First, his dithering over school closures during the early months of the pandemic. Sir Keir changed his mind on the matter no less than six times. Boris, with some justice, was able to …
Broken Britain needs a tax hike
The recent British election was, by most accounts, a “service-delivery” vote. Appalled at the state of their public services, Britons opted for new management. And while they need no reminding of how bad things have become, the facts are still …
The bankrupt Queen of the Third Way
Five summers ago, 11 Labour and Conservative MPs quit their parties to form a breakaway faction in parliament. To the then Independent Group, then Change UK and latterly the Independent Group for Change, the motivating issues were Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership …
Is Labour already out of ideas?
Last month, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves travelled to the United States to present Labour’s new economic policy strategy, dubbed “securonomics”. If you think it’s strange for a party to unveil its economic manifesto in front of a foreign audience rather …