All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The need for the civil service reforms which Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden is proposing is glaring. It can be summed up in the evidence that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey presented to the Commons Treasury Committee last week: that since the pandemic, productivity in the public sector has shrunk by 7 to 8
Once again there is horror on the Syrian coast. The fighting began on Thursday, in the new government’s telling, after a broad uprising was launched by remnants of the old regime and allied militias. In a coordinated series of moves along Syria’s coastal areas and inland, dozens of checkpoints and bases of the new authorities
Pat McFadden: ‘There’s a whole lot of change coming’ to the civil service The government is set to announce big reforms at Whitehall which it hopes will save money and improve performance in a new ‘era of insecurity’. Among those changes are performance-related pay, a faster exit process for under-performing civil servants, and increased digitalisation
Another day, another Trumpian bombshell, this one aimed at the country he says he loves: Japan. Trump told reporters this week that the US-Japan security alliance which has bound the two countries together militarily since 1952 and offered military guarantees to Japan since 1960 was ‘interesting’ but unequal as it obliged the US to defend
Sometimes politics throws up a happening of quite exquisite irony. Lee Anderson suspending the whip from Rupert Lowe, his party’s most outspoken MP, a year after the very same thing happened to him is such a moment. Poacher turned gamekeeper indeed. Anderson will of course know that Rishi Sunak’s casting of him into outer darkness
Would Donald Trump invite Irish politicians to the White House for the traditional St Patrick’s Day visit this year? It’s a question that has been asked many times in Ireland in the past few weeks. It’s a tradition which began in 1952 but in the decades since it has grown in stature to become the
Oh dear, it looks like the civil war engulfing Reform UK is showing no sign of simmering down. On Friday, the political party currently leading in the polls went into complete meltdown after it announced that it had reported one of its MPs, Rupert Lowe, to the police and was suspending the whip. Party chairman
The London School of Economics’ decision to host the launch this week of Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters – a book that attempts to sanitise and fails to properly condemn a terrorist organisation responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – has rightly sparked outrage. It is a shameless attempt to rehabilitate
Shakespeare, Dickens, JK Rowling: Britain’s literary heritage is undisputable. Creativity, emotional depth and universal values have ensured that Hamlet, Oliver Twist and Harry Potter are familiar to school children (and grown-ups) around the world. While other pillars of the proud national legacy – the BBC, the army, the NHS – have crumbled around us, we
Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, there has been a great deal of temptation to seize Russian sovereign assets frozen in the West. There is, after all, an urgent need and moral imperative to make the aggressor pay and use Russia’s money for Ukraine’s cause. But the reality is that
On 29 March 2023, a retired social worker from Walthamstow, Trudi Warner, was arrested for standing outside Inner London Crown Court and holding up a banner saying: ‘Jurors you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.’ Inside, four Insulate Britain activists were on trial for causing a public nuisance. The
Would it really be strange if Vladimir Putin started playing off America against China in geopolitics? If he had greater vision, he would have been doing this in all those years when he fulminated against the US as the global Satan. I wrote about this in 2019 in my book Kremlin Winter as evidence of his long-term
Sky Atlantic’s eight-part biopic, Mussolini: Son of the Century, is a great missed opportunity to tell the truth about fascism. Director Joe Wright could have told us something truly instructive about Benito Mussolini, the rebel from the foothills of the Apennines who invented fascism. Sadly, he has not. The series fails to explain to viewers the
While Donald Trump may be threatening Moscow with major new sanctions, as it continues to hammer Ukraine with drones and missiles, the Russians seem unfazed. They assume this is just rhetorical for now – and they are probably right. This week has seen the US progressively cutting off its support for Ukraine, first suspending arms
China does not like tariffs, but big money in America likes them even less. If one thing has become clear amid the fog of the past week, it is that what will contain Donald Trump are the financial markets. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, attacked Trump on Friday for his imposition of tariffs, adding that
Historically, the richest and poorest men on the planet tend to father a lot more children than the men in the middle. With the former, its because there’s so much for the spawn to inherit, hence all the aristocratic Fitzes; the latter, because so many offspring die in infancy. The men in the middle tend
Make no mistake: whatever higher moral authority they may have invoked in their defence, Soviet and Russian spies have never been good or honourable people. Kim Philby, the suave Martini-sipping traitor sent dozens of brave anti-Communist volunteers to their deaths. Konon Molody – alias Gordon Lonsdale, Canadian vending machine salesman and kingpin of the Portland
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It’s a special (and emotional) edition of Coffee House Shots this Saturday because it is the last with Kate Andrews on this side of the Atlantic. She joins our editor Michael Gove and political correspondent James Heale for a debate on ideology. Kate – a liberal, in the classical British sense – explains exactly why she is
There is a new Islamist terror threat in Europe that the French describe as ‘low-cost terrorism’. The expression was deployed in a television interview at the start of this week by Bruno Retailleau, the Minister of the Interior. Warning France that Islamic State is ‘reconstituting themselves in Africa and elsewhere’, Retailleau said that the other
Sadiq Khan is exceedingly fond of ‘diversity’, not least the word itself. Perhaps as a result, London’s Mayor is willing to overcome his aversion to Donald Trump, even when the US president is looking increasingly like a menace to global peace and stability. “I think it’s important to show those people who believe the contrary
While the UK government struggles to deliver reliable mobile coverage across some rural communities, Somalia – a country that hasn’t had a functioning central government for three decades – has built one of Africa’s most resilient telecommunications networks. As a British researcher who conducts fieldwork in Somalia, I’m often struck by an ironic reality: I
The welfare bill currently unsustainably stands at £314 billion. It is forecast to reach nearly £380 billion by the end of the decade. Rumoured Labour cuts, set to be announced as part of the Spring Statement on 26 March, have just been reported by ITV News and include plans for £6 billion of welfare cuts.
After months of leading in the polls, Reform UK is now in meltdown. This afternoon, the party chairman, Zia Yusuf, and the chief whip, Lee Anderson, released a joint statement which says that they have now referred Rupert Lowe to the police. The pair say that they have ‘received complaints from two female employees about
Andrew Roberts gave the following speech in the House of Lords, following the publication of the report ‘Ukraine: A Wake Up Call’ from the International Relations and Defence Committee. We must not underestimate the gravity of what has happened, which is that during a war against totalitarian dictatorship, the United States has effectively changed sides.
Another week, another peace plan for a seemingly intractable conflict. This time it’s Gaza’s turn, with the launch of a new peace and reconstruction plan for the rubble-strewn Strip. The proposal, created by Egypt and endorsed by the Arab League (a 22-strong group of Arab states) at a summit in Cairo, provides an alternative to
It is now only a matter of days before the 52 million-strong population in South Korea will know the fate of their suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol. Since his first impeachment hearing at the end of 2024, after which he was arrested and indicted on charges of insurrection, the President has continued to defend his
It’s a day ending in ‘y’, which means the Scottish Nats are arguing amongst themselves again. Ex-SNP MP Mhairi Black has taken a pop at the party’s former Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon in a new BBC documentary released this week about her time in politics. In the programme – in which Black blasts Westminster culture
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Trump has been stealing the headlines when it comes to Ukraine this week, but Europe – and whether it can stay united in the face of the US pulling its support – remains an important subplot. At a summit yesterday, 27 countries backed the plan to increase spending on defence, but when will the cracks
Will this finally be the government which gets on top of the voracious financial monster that is the NHS and tackles its chronic over-spending? No, I can’t quite see that, either. But it has to be said that the new interim Chief Executive of NHS England – Sir Jim Mackey, who has replaced Amanda Pritchard
Some good news for Kemi Badenoch today. The latest donation figures for the end of 2024 are out – and they make for happy reading for the beancounters in CCHQ. The Tories reported £3.8 million in donations between October and December, compared to £1.6 million for the Liberal Democrats, £1.4 million for Labour and £336,800
It was so predictable as to be almost inevitable: a massive row has erupted within the leadership of Reform UK. Rupert Lowe, one of Reform’s five MPs and the Member for Great Yarmouth – an outspoken keyboard warrior on social media and popular with many grassroots party members for his outspoken online comments – kicked off
Donald Trump is intent on shaking things up in the White House and no one knows that better than neighbouring Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The US President ramped up his tariff war this week – and tensions between the pair seem to have taken their toll on Trudeau, even reducing him to tears during
Is it about to become illegal for parents to smack their child? We might have known that the already top-heavy Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill would be hijacked by those with an agenda to push. Labour MP Jess Asato has tabled an amendment, backed by 26 MPs (including surprisingly one Tory), that would abolish the