All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The ONS has today revised upwards its growth for most of 2013, to show a recovery far stronger than it admitted at the time. This fits a trend: in economics, good luck tends to come in waves. And the tools economists have to work out what’s happening are so crude (and often useless) that it
When he spoke to the 1922 Committee on Wednesday, David Cameron told MPs that the Conservative attack on Labour must not involve fighting the party on its own territory. He named payday loans as one of the issues that Ed Miliband and co want to create an ‘evil Tories’ narrative on. But another one that
I felt a touch of sadness on Tuesday when Marks & Spencer caved in to demands that they de-gender their toys, which must make me the worst person on earth. After her triumphant campaign, MP Stella Creasy tweeted: if it annoys some so much girls might want 2 play with cars, imagine how they’d feel
Yes, Eric Joyce, the MP for Falkirk until the next election, has issues. Yes, his copy book is well blotted. He has a conviction for assault which scarcely reflects splendidly upon him (even if many members of the public themselves wouldn’t mind sticking-the-heid on any number of MPs) and in his dozen or so years in
The Prime Minister is in Brussels today, trying to drum up support for stricter immigration controls on new countries joining the European Union. How much traction this gains will tell us a great deal about how successful his overall renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the EU might be. David Cameron’s supporters argue that the tide
Ed Miliband’s pledge to crack down on the ‘crack cocaine of gambling’ is a significant moment in the extraordinary moral panic over fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). Earlier this year, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport found that there was very little data to back up the anecdotal evidence of the anti-FOBT brigade and so
This was supposed to be the year of strife, strikes, misery and more. Instead, to the surprise of Britain’s politicians, things have instead gone badly right. I look at them in my Telegraph column today, and here are the top points:- 1. Crime plunges With the austerity and the unemployment, internal government reports predicted that
The ‘guilty’ verdict has been delivered in the trial of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale for the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in May. An interview with the soldier’s parents has just been released in which they say that their son died in the cause of protecting the rights of our democracy, including the freedom
With the economy recovering and Labour floundering, it was a poor PMQs yesterday for Ed Miliband. And the source of his trouble was sitting right next to him – his own Shadow Chancellor. After a disastrous response to the Autumn Statement, Ed Miliband is rumoured to have given Ed Balls nine months to sort out
Sanctimonious Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes has accepted a government job, despite having said that he would not. Speculation about who might replace him reached fever pitch last night at the annual Nick Clegg bash, which is always a night to remember. Insiders deride the job as ‘talking to bearded activists about hemp soup’.
Vince Cable’s Today interview was remarkable for two reasons. The first was that the Business Secretary announced that he doesn’t want to ‘rush into legislation’ on zero hours contracts and instead wants to have another look at exclusivity agreements, where an employee is forced to work for one company only, even if they offer very
There was a food bank debate yesterday in the House of Commons. We all know that, but what few people can tell you is what was said. Instead, there is a furious debate raging about whether the Tories were laughing at poor people not having enough money for food, or whether Labour MPs were laughing
Ed Milliband appears to have woken up this week – too late – to a housing crisis. He echoes his predecessors, who promised too little, too late and failed to deliver. Their lack of ambition will continue to fail the generation who couldn’t buy before the boom. As the IFS reports that even those born
Education reform that actually works is one of the noblest, but most thankless, tasks in politics. Noble because it’s necessary, thankless because it doesn’t earn much in the way of an electoral dividend. Polling consistently suggests fewer than 15% of people consider education a top priority. This is understandable. If you do not have children you
I’d just like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, for, as he put it, spending ‘twenty years’ trying to ‘build bridges between Islam and Christianity and (to) dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.’ Sadly, he has concluded that this noble endeavour was in vain and
Everybody wants to support cancer charities, don’t they? Take Maggie’s Trust, which ‘empowers people to live with, through and beyond cancer’. The Maggie’s approach is defined by their cleverly designed modern care centres, which welcome not just people battling against cancer but their families and those who care for them. Maggie’s now plans to build
David Cameron received a rapturous banging of desks at the final meeting of the year for the 1922 Committee this evening. My sources have given me a run-down of what was said. Backbenchers were, I hear, very cheered by some of his words, particularly on his 2015 strategy. The Prime Minister told his MPs that
Christmas is excellent news for a Labour opposition. The season of goodwill throws rich and poor into sharp relief. Red-faced aldermen gather at loaded tables to gobble up roast goose and plum-duff. And afterwards they throw sixpences at starving chimney-sweeps who scrabble for crusts of bread in the snow. At least that’s how it should
A Prime Minister can leave PMQs happy if he’s sent his troops off for Christmas in a good mood. Today David Cameron managed that, weaving in festive jokes through a list of statistics that shot Labour down. He was helped by the fact that Ed Miliband didn’t have a coherent line of attack at all,
A mischievous question, I know, but one prompted by Janan Ganesh’s latest Financial Times column. It is eight years since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party and three and a half since he became Prime Minister. He may only have 18 months left in either post. We know – or think we know – a
You might be forgiven for thinking that the Conservative party has spent the past month or so taking all the green rubbish – or ‘crap’ as one source close to the Prime Minister was quoted as saying – out and forgetting it ever loved environmentalism. But visiting Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker’s office
The Prime Minister’s announcement today that he is fast-tracking his curbs on ‘benefit tourism’ was designed to reassure worried MPs that the government really is moving as fast as it can to do anything it can ahead of the lifting of transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. When these curbs, which mean all EU
The Silence of Our Friends, my Amazon Singles ebook about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, is published today. I know I’ve written several posts on this subject recently, so I promise to stop, so long as everyone buys the book. Otherwise I won’t. Ever. It’s a subject that has become ever more
Must say, I felt a bit defensive when I looked at the tables of origin for immigrants to Britain for the decades to 2011, helpfully set out in The Daily Mail. The real gist of the thing was the numbers – an increase from just under 2 million in the decade to 1951 to 7.5
More positive economic news this morning — the unemployment rate has fallen. In the last three months, unemployment has taken a surprising drop to 7.4 per cent, compared to 7.6 per cent for the three months before. As the chart below shows, the unemployment rate is now lower than at any time since the general
I know it’s not quite the year’s end. But I think the sweetest words I heard in 2013 are already set: ‘The left doesn’t really matter’. Those words were said to me by a pollster. The point he was making was that although the commentating classes obsess about the state of the left, it doesn’t really
One thing that has been abundantly clear about the Tory plan for Ukip is that it will involve a long, slow ‘squeeze message’ (more on that here) that has already been deployed: the vote Ukip, get Miliband line. Naturally, Ukip is keen to counter that and argue that in fact this early squeeze message to
If you were hoping for great drama over the Davies Commission’s interim report, you’ve got a while longer. As Patrick McLoughlin made clear in the Commons today, you’re unlikely to hear anything more than ministers repeatedly arguing that something must be done about Britain’s aviation capacity. Just not anything in particular this side of the
Home truths hurt the most when they come from your own side. Mr S was gabbing with a backbench Tory MP the other day, talking about how the Tories might connect with what the said MP described as ‘[those] parts of the public that we used to rely on in the Eighties and Nineties.’ The
Boris may be under fire for his London bike scheme – what with soaring costs, declining use and Barclays cutting their sponsorship. But not everyone is so critical. The iconic blue bikes have achieved international fame, not least in Gambia. Probably tricky to find a docking station in the desert though. Via Oxfam Campaigns and
There has been much amusement in the last couple of days after Sophie Gadd, a student at the University of York, snapped a picture of Johann Baptist Lampi’s 1794 oil on canvas portrait of Catherine II the Great while visiting the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Eagle-eyed Sophie pointed out the immediate and obvious similarities
All winning cricket teams are alike; each losing cricket team loses in its own way. It doesn’t matter, right now, that Shane Watson and Michael Clarke will never be chums just as it did not matter very much, back in the day, that Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist couldn’t stand one another. Victory spawns solidarity.
Does Christmas have to start with a payday loan? No, according to the Church of England. The Church has unveiled its annual advertising campaign this morning, posing this very question to the residents of Manchester. As usual, the CofE is worried Britons are becoming ignorant about the origins of Christmas. As one of the adverts
It’s about this time of year – the darkest days of winter – when we traditionally get those newspaper articles lamenting the amount we consume over Christmas and how it’s all grossly commercial, which is bad because some kids go hungry; followed by the Thought for the Day piece about how we should all embrace