For many international observers, the footage of Vladimir Putin welcoming Kim Jong Un to the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East on 13 September, was evidence of how far the Russian leader has fallen since his invasion of Ukraine. “It’s another indicator of the desperation of President Putin,” remarked the former British defence minister Ben Wallace in an interview on CNN. “We have a saying in England: ‘By your friends you shall be judged.’ And I think it just shows that Putin’s circle of friendship is an ever-decreasing circle.” It was a fair point. Putin’s international stature has been drastically diminished in the last 18 months. Where previously he was a fixture at major global summits, the Russian president is ...

Tim Gurner is an Australian property developer with a net worth north of £500 million and an obsession with the pseudoscience of “anti-ageing”. Members of Saint Haven, his private club in Melbourne, skinny-dip in ice water, take IV drips, retreat to “meditation caves” and partake in something called “cryotherapy”, among other steps aimed at halting the ravages of decrepitude. When he isn’t fighting human nature, Gurner wages class warfare. At a recent property summit convened by Australia’s Financial Review, Gurner ventured to explain what ails the world: namely, working-class people’s relative gains in terms of wages and power amid tighter labour markets brought about by the pandemic and its aftermath. “We need to see unemployment rise,” Gurner declared. “Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 per ...

It may feel as though parliament has barely returned from its summer break, but there is another recess on the horizon. Ahead of party conference season, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were keen to make this PMQs count. The House was fuller than usual, and MPs were particularly enthusiastic for their respective leaders. The themes Starmer chose to go for were, predictably, ones that have made the headlines in recent weeks: “probation, prisons, schools, China,” he reeled off, listing government failings. They are tied together by the sense that this government is losing control, that it has no way to deal with the multiple crises facing Britain as a result of austerity-era spending cuts, and that it is led by ...

There is a spectre haunting Britain – of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, an 18th-century cleric whose ideas are back in vogue. His most famous thesis, that population growth will outstrip food supply, has attracted interest in our age of geopolitical insecurity. The pandemic's disruption of supply chains, Russia weaponising grain and the fight over food resources between the West and the rest seem to confirm Malthus’ pessimistic prediction. Even the point that food production has more than kept pace with the tenfold increase of the world population from more than 800 million in Malthus’s time to today, does little to dissuade his ardent advocates. They make millennarian prophecies about our impending apocalypse, amid conflict over the shrinking resources of an ...

One of the brighter moments in Scotland’s recent Programme for Government was Humza Yousaf’s commitment to a further expansion of childcare. This has been a consistent SNP objective for many years, and it’s a welcome one. Good childcare eases the financial pressures on young families and allows women especially quicker re-entry to the workplace. It has obvious beneficial consequences for economic growth and productivity. The First Minister announced that communities in six council areas would be given access to early-years provision and childcare from the age of nine months to the end of primary school. The government would look at giving parents and carers more flexibility in how they can use their funded hours, taking in childminders, family centres, nurseries and after-school ...

Angela Rayner was introduced to the stage at the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) as "one of us". Labour’s deputy must be feeling very enthusiastic right now, having once again emerged from a Keir Starmer reshuffle with more power than she had before. After being promoted to shadow levelling-up secretary – a fitting platform for a politician with a compelling story of social mobility – and with her position as deputy prime minister in a possible Labour government confirmed, claims she would be sidelined were wrong. But it is Rayner retaining her role as "strategic lead" for Labour's New Deal for Working People – a wide-ranging package of employment and trade union reforms – that allies believe is the real ...

When Nicola Sturgeon resigned as Scotland’s first minister back in March, many commentators thought that was the end of Scottish independence. And the fortunes of the Scottish National Party have indeed declined since Humza Yousaf was elected as her successor. For the first time in more than a decade, the Scottish Labour Party has a chance of gaining several dozen seats from the SNP at next year’s UK general election. That could make the difference between a hung parliament and Keir Starmer having a stable majority. But the SNP is not the independence movement. Opinion polls since the spring have also shown something that almost no one expected. Support for independence has remained strong, on average around 3.3 points higher than ...

Sometimes an unorthodox idea becomes commonplace. Take the recent proposal for a minister for men from Conservative MP Nick Fletcher. Just a few years ago, this would have been dismissed out of hand. At best, it would have been fodder for a few jokes at the MP’s expense. (In fact that’s what happened when Ben Bradley MP made a similar proposal in 2020.) What a difference a few years can make. Now it is being taken seriously. The BBC’s Woman’s Hour ran a long segment on the idea of a minister for men, featuring Fletcher, followed by an extended listener call-in show. The MP also appeared on Good Morning Britain. There have been some respectful responses in the press, largely from women.  A minister for ...