To understand the political journey of Sir Keir Starmer, look to Liz Kendall. This week the Blairite and one-time leadership contender was put in charge of Labour’s welfare reform policy. Her promotion has upset the party’s left-wingers, who already think Starmer is too right-wing on welfare. ‘She’ll be more hard-line than Jonathan Ashworth,’ says one
We must all hurry down to the Temperate House at Kew Gardens next month to enjoy Queer Nature After Hours, an evening of drama, music, comedy, drag acts and ‘a sprinkling of queer joy’. If, like me, you have never previously been sprinkled with queer joy, here’s your chance to find out what it’s like.
If any readers are having those September, back-to-work blues perhaps I might offer them a sure-fire palliative? Just go online and watch videos of this year’s Burning Man. For anyone who doesn’t know, Burning Man is a week-long festival of music and ‘self-expression’ which takes place in the Nevada desert. It is especially popular among
An Institute for Fiscal Studies paper, published at the end of last month, makes grim reading. Through the prism of the media reports it generated (‘One in 11 workers in England could be NHS staff by 2036,’ said the Guardian; ‘NHS staff will make up 49 per cent of the public sector workforce in 2036,’
The Texas Supreme Court just upheld a state law banning so-called gender-affirming care for minors, to explosive consternation from predictable quarters. Progressive commentators portray this and similar laws passed by more than a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures as ‘anti-LGBTQIA+’. In truth, the laws are aimed not at that whole bramble of capital letters, but solely
My long-standing theory of British general election results is that they are all deserved. This is true not just of big victories e.g. Labour in 1945 and 1997, the Conservatives in 1979 and 2019, but also of no-score draws, such as the two elections of 1974. In our system (though first-past-the-past sometimes exaggerates) the voters
It would be churlish not to celebrate revisions from the Office for National Statistics that tell us the UK is not, after all, the post-Covid invalid of the G7. Contrary to previous figures suggesting we had struggled to regain pre-pandemic levels of economic output, it turns out that our gross domestic product passed that benchmark
