James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.
Governing means accepting and embracing trade-offs. Almost every public policy choice involves deciding how important one set of people are, or how to balance their interests with others. Covid mitigation measures were a case study in government-as-trade-off. Time and again, ministers had to weigh up public health, NHS capacity, economic and fiscal costs, human freedom
Westminster is a place of consensus, orthodoxy and prevailing wisdom. At any given moment, there is the Narrative, the story that everyone – or close to everyone – believes, or pretends to. The Narrative can ignore objective facts, but also change quickly when finally confronted with realities too big to overlook. I reckon the last
In the years when I wrote a lot about sex and gender and politics and law, I made the same observations many times. One, that politicians weren’t talking fully and openly about the implications of self-identified gender, and the policies and practices related to it. Second, that as a result, such policies would never be
Scottish prison service rules allowing male-born transgender offenders to be housed in women’s prisons have been suspended and are now under ‘urgent review’. The women who raised concerns about this issue for several years have thus been vindicated; their persistence and determination in raising those concerns should be noted and acclaimed. The Scottish development follows
Here are two facts about British healthcare that not enough people know. First, GPs don’t work for the NHS. They are private contractors who sell services to the NHS via GP partnerships which are profit-making businesses owned by GPs. Second, the British Medical Association is not a medical body. It’s a trade union for doctors,
New year, old politicians. Yesterday’s men will loom large in the politics of 2023. British politics has a nostalgia problem, often to the benefit of our over-large population of former prime ministers. They may have disappointed in office, but the urge to rose-tint our memories means failure is no bar to a lucrative or influential
You’re reading this because quite a long time ago now, I was a student at Edinburgh University. As well as doing a bit of academic work, I fell into journalism editing the university newspaper. It’s called the Student and it’s pretty old. Founded in 1887 – by people including Robert Louis Stevenson – it’s probably
Rishi Sunak’s latest promises on asylum and immigration suggest the PM has learned very little from his Tory forebears. Ken Clarke used to compare eurosceptic right-wing Tories to crocodiles circling the prime ministerial boat. Most Tory leaders chose to feed the crocodiles buns to keep them happy. But what happens when you run out of buns? David
‘Only the higher-than-expected numbers of migrants coming to the UK under the post-Brexit migration regime adds materially to prospects for potential output growth over the coming five years relative to the assumptions that we made in March.’ That’s from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) assessment accompanying the Autumn Statement. It’s a pretty striking line:
I wonder if the fall of Gavin Williamson is the latest evidence that British political parties are becoming harder to govern. It seems quite possible that his resignation is part of a story that will see Rishi Sunak struggle to command Conservative MPs to accept difficult choices on tax and spending. Any upset could even
Here’s a thought experiment about tax and fairness. Imagine two people, Janet and John. They’re both 30 years old. Janet did better at school and works harder than John, does longer hours and earns more. Her salary is £50,000. Her take-home pay is £37,776 – she pays £12,224 in income tax and national insurance each
Boris Johnson was finally thrown out of Downing Street because of his handling of sexual misconduct allegations by a political ally. Dozens of ministers quit his government over his lack of integrity. He remains subject to an investigation that could see him suspended from parliament for dishonesty. Dozens of Conservative MPs believe he is the
I don’t know who will become the next prime minister, and I’m not going to make a guess here. But I do make this prediction: the next leader is going to face a major internal Tory fight over immigration. That prediction is based on the thing that drove Liz Truss from office: the urgent need
Spare a thought for Liz Truss’s communications advisers. They’re following the unwritten rules of crisis management to a tee, but it’s only making things worse. They find themselves in this quandary partly because the government’s situation is uniquely bad – and partly because the Prime Minister is so bad at communicating. Watching Truss’s interview with the
Last week, I wrote here that 14 October was the key date in British politics, because the expiry of the Bank of England’s gilt-buying programme would force the Government to act to lower gilt yields. Be in no doubt: the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng today is a consequence of the Bank’s refusal to go on
These are hard times for centrists, though we should be used to that by now. My tribe – clever, technocratic, sometimes liberal and sometimes smug – has been losing arguments and elections consistently for several years, often deservingly. We may know all about how policy works, but we haven’t been great at politics. A common
James Carville, an ostentatiously aggressive adviser to Bill Clinton, once said that when he died, he wanted to be reincarnated ‘as the bond market – you can intimidate everybody’. Carville and Clinton had learned something that a lot of people in UK politics seem to be overlooking. The bond market, where government loans (gilts, in
It’s a cliche to report an air of unreality at the Conservative conference here in Birmingham. All party conferences are divorced from political reality, cut off from the rest of the country by steel fences and self-absorption. But this little bubble of self-referential noise feels even further away from normality than usual. Safe behind the
I used to write about bond markets, so I speak with some authority when I say this: bonds are boring. Really, most normal people find talk of gilts and yields extremely tedious. Likewise, terms like debt and deficit are off-puttingly technical and easy to mix up. Basically, the public finances are hard to get excited
Politics is about priorities: what do we consider to be important? I worry that Britain doesn’t attach enough importance to children and their education. As the first lockdown eased in the summer of 2020, I was unhappy that pubs reopened before schools. I thought that said something about our priorities as a nation An interview
