Politics

Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures that Rishi Sunak laid out in his spending review this week boggle the mind. He has been Chancellor barely ten months, yet has already borrowed more than Gordon Brown did in ten years. The upshot of his Commons statement this week is that Sunak will carry on spending money as fast as the Bank of England can print it. But as he knows, debt bubbles have a habit of bursting. The response to this crisis may sow the seeds of the next one. It’s a point which Sunak has a

I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an amenability towards doing a spot of teaching? They still seem terribly averse to the whole idea. During the first lockdown, 60 per cent of young children received no virtual lessons at all from teaching staff, and one in five pupils over 12 was given no work to do, according to the Children’s Commissioner. Virtual lessons shouldn’t have been terribly difficult to arrange, but most of the time there were none. My own daughter had no virtual lessons from March to July (which is why she’s no longer in the state

I was never afraid of Jeremy Corbyn, never afraid of Momentum. I’ve never really feared Britain’s hard left at all. They’re wrong, of course, and they can do some serious localised damage; but their ideology is so obviously daft and has so comprehensively failed wherever in the 20th century it was tried that they occupy in my mind a position similar to that of Satanists. Grisly, yes, but a threat to civilised society? Hardly. The hard left always gets found out in the end, and always will. Their doctrines have no natural appeal to the middle-of-the-road British (which is most of us) and in the unlikely event they were ever