SpecData

It’s been an eventful year in British politics, with a snap general election and multiple leadership contests keeping political journalists across the country busy. And how have political party leaders fared? With the help of the Spectator’s data hub, Mr S has examined which party leaders, both north and south of the border, have had the best (and worst) 2024. At the start of the year, hapless Humza Yousaf was forced to step down as First Minister after he rather abruptly ended his government’s coalition agreement with Patrick Harvie’s barmy army. The SNP establishment became rather concerned about the prospect of yet another leadership race – given just how unedifying

Another day, another bit of bad news for Sir Keir Starmer. A new Ipsos poll carried out between 27 November and 4 December has revealed that dissatisfaction with the Labour leader has reached a staggering 61 per cent – his worst rating as leader of the lefty lot. Good heavens… It’s not just Sir Keir struggling with unpopularity – overall unhappiness with the Labour government remains rather high too, with a whopping 70 per cent of Brits registering their dissatisfaction with the party in charge. And voters are feeling rather bleak about the future too, with two thirds of poll participants admitting they expect the economy to get worse over the

When Keir Starmer announced his ‘measurable milestones’ yesterday, he called them ‘the most ambitious and credible programme for government in a generation’. But are they really so ambitious? Many of them sound remarkably similar to the missions in the Conservatives’ Levelling Up white paper, published just under three years ago – only less detailed and lacking a focus on improving the worst-performing areas of the country. Starmer has six milestones compared with the white paper’s 12 missions and 51 metrics. On living standards, Starmer promised that they will be ‘higher in every region of the country’. Which sounds very much like the white paper promise that ‘pay, employment and productivity will

While all eyes were on the Prime Minister’s big ‘plan for change’ announcement today, the government also chose this morning to release some new data to the public. One of the reports published today includes the latest Prevent stats – and they paint a rather interesting picture. Between March 2023 and 2024, there were a staggering 6,922 referrals to the programme which when broken down reveal an uptick in cases being referred due to ‘Islamist concerns’, a rise of over 130 from the previous year. How very interesting… The gap between referrals for extreme right wing behaviour and Islamist concerns has narrowed notably in the year ending March 2024, with

When it rains for Scotland’s Nats, it pours. It now transpires – according to the Scottish government’s very own survey – that between 2022 and 2023, the proportion of people who trust the SNP government has plummeted by a staggering 10 points. And that’s not all. Trust in all six public sector institutions has declined markedly in the last 12 months, with the results presenting a rather concerning picture for the SNP ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections. Not that Mr S can say he’s particularly shocked… The Scottish government saw public trust fall from 55 per cent in 2022 to a mere 45 per cent the following year, while

One of the perennial scapegoats of the NHS is the patient who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment. The headlines write themselves: millions of pounds wasted and other patients can’t get seen. But while missed GP visits have become a symbol of inefficiency, a far bigger – and often overlooked – problem lies within our hospitals. Every day, there are more than 300,000 outpatient appointments at hospitals, from MRI and breast scans to plaster casts and blood tests. And every day, 20,000 patients don’t turn up. On the surface the data looks like a success story for the NHS, with the percentage of appointments that patients miss gently falling over the last

Does wisdom come with age? MPs have just voted by a margin of 55 to back a bill to legalise assisted suicide. In what was the first Commons vote on assisted death for a decade, MPs voted 330 to 275 in favour of the bill.  The new intake of parliamentarians – those first elected in 2024 or returning after an enforced absence – were nearly twice as likely to back assisted suicide than any other intake. You might think this is just because most of the new MPs sit on Labour’s benches. Well, perhaps. But this was a free vote on an issue of conscience so we wouldn’t necessarily expect

How can you miss over 300,000 migrants? This morning the Office for National Statistics revised up its previous record high net migration figure to 906,000 meaning that since 2021, 307,000 more migrants are in the country than the ONS previously knew about. So, has Britain turned the corner on migration? There has been a 20 per cent fall in net migration in the year to June compared to the 12 months before, according to figures published this morning by the ONS. Some 1.2 million people migrated to the UK compared with 1.3 million the year before. Meanwhile, 479,000 left the UK, up from 414,000 the previous year.  Net migration is

Since Steerpike first reported on the petition for another general election, another two million signatures have been added. (Not that Mr S is taking the credit.) While the petition is most popular in Tory and Reform-held seats – especially in Essex, where almost one in ten of the electorate have signed in some constituencies – MPs in Labour marginals should be taking note too. In Tamworth, Ribble Valley, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Derbyshire Dales and North West Leicestershire, Labour MPs with majorities of fewer than 1,500 votes have at least 5,500 constituents who have signed the petition. Derbyshire Dales’s new boy John Whitby perhaps has the most to fear as his

The BBC reported that AstraZeneca and Pfizer are credited with together saving more than 12 million lives in the first year of Covid vaccination. To substantiate this claim, the BBC refers to Airfinity, a ‘disease forecasting company’. Models do not fit anywhere in the pathway for establishing effectiveness Airfinity used an Imperial College London study, which calculated that Covid vaccines saved 20 million lives between December 2020 and December 2021. Using a mathematical model, the Imperial team assumed that vaccination conferred protection against Covid infection (mRNA vaccines were estimated to have given 88 per cent protection against infection after the second dose) and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission. The team also assumed