According to John Curtice, the SNP’s Holyrood coalition with the Greens is playing no part in the former’s precipitous decline in the polls. Instead, he says, the fall finds its origins in this year’s somewhat bad-tempered leadership contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon. I don’t want to argue with the great guru of British psephology, but I wonder if that’s strictly true. And, of course, there’s more to politics than opinion polls, important though they are. It’s worth remembering that much of the dispute between Humza Yousaf and his challengers for the SNP leadership, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan, was over the direction of the Scottish government since Sturgeon first struck her agreement with the Greens in August 2021. Had Forbes or Regan ...

Forget the Reagan Question, how about the Ryan(air) Question? We wanted to find out how easy members of the British public find it to take a holiday compared with five years ago, and whether it was enough for them to feel rested. In exclusive polling for the New Statesman by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, most told us they find it harder now. The largest proportion of respondents, 40 per cent, said they find it harder, compared with 30 per cent who felt it is about the same level of difficulty, and 24 per cent who find it easier (5 per cent didn’t know). We also found that around a quarter of Brits now find it harder, over the same time period, to ...

In mid-July the country singer Jason Aldean released a video for his song "Try That in a Small Town". The video, like his lyrics, is full of political code. In it, he juxtaposes images of him singing in a cowboy hat in front of a small county courthouse with Gotham-like scenes of violence from American cities. In the original video, news clips from a Black Lives Matter protest – since removed – were projected against the walls of the courthouse and overlain with the lyrics, “Round here we take care of our own.” His song refers to an antiquated sort of small-town justice that allows “good ’ol boys raised up right” to patrol the streets in vigilante herds with the ...

Last week the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England voted to increase base interest rate for the fourteenth consecutive time, to 5.25 per cent. While the rationale behind this move was supposed to be curbing inflation, the consequences will be dire for those on the lowest incomes – with young people disproportionately impacted. And it is a symptom of a much wider problem. The MPC has found itself repeatedly increasing the cost of borrowing due to its own failure to get a grip on inflation earlier. Increased interest rates means that people already struggling with debt such as loans and credit cards will have to spend more of their income paying their creditors. It's often the poorest and ...

It all began with a man who wouldn’t leave his car. Murray Tepper was a mild-mannered middle-aged man but still, even when asked, he wouldn’t budge. He’d park there and read the paper. I couldn’t get enough of him, and neither could New York; by the end the police had got involved, and the mayor, and the press, and his wife. Really, it was a whole thing. It was tremendous. After that I spent some time in Sweden with some Scottish murderers. They weren’t pleasant but they were compelling, though I have to say I was secretly pleased when I was rid of them. Finally I crossed Hungary with some randy young basketball players. They spent a lot of their time ...

Over the past few decades, the Conservatives have had a strange relationship with climate change, alternating between embracing and retreating from the challenge. Margaret Thatcher was perhaps a surprising advocate for green issues in the 1980s, while her ally Nigel Lawson was one of the country’s leading deniers of global warming. David Cameron began his leadership by flying off to hug huskies, before telling his advisers to “get rid of all the green crap” a decade later. Theresa May legally enshrined the goal of net zero carbon emissions in the dying days of her premiership, while Boris Johnson came to power promising the “greenest government ever”. Now, however, the Tories seem to be turning back against the environmental agenda. Zac Goldsmith resigned ...

In the nine months since Elon Musk bought Twitter, his decision-making has proved to be a combination of unpredictable and transparent. Examples include the mass cull of Twitter staff within days of taking over, and his subsequent requests for many of them to return; renaming Twitter “X”, one of the least user-friendly names you could think of; his heralding of free speech on the platform, while suspending journalists who criticised his work. These acts have been mostly self-destructive, with Twitter itself the victim of Musk’s inconstancy (its value is understood to be half of what Musk first bought it for). But after months of detrimental tinkering internally, the CEO is now looking at those he perceives as an external threat to ...

As the two biggest parties in Westminster narrow their political offer before the next election, voters appear to be finding it hard to tell the ideology of either leader. When asked to place the two main party leaders on an ideological scale, most of the British public opted for “don’t know”, according to exclusive polling for the New Statesman by Redfield & Wilton Strategies. Charts by Ben Walker For Rishi Sunak, 28 per cent “don’t know”, 22 per cent say “centre right”, 22 per cent “right wing”, 18 per cent “centrist”, 5 per cent “centre left” and 4 per cent “left wing”. For Keir Starmer, 27 per cent “don’t know”, 21 per cent say “centre left”, 18 per cent “left wing”, 18 per cent ...