In a recent episode of his podcast, The Rest is Politics, Alastair Campbell described opinion polls as the “junk food” of journalism. He has a point. Both politicians and commentators tend to gorge on them, but come away with little nourishment and are more likely to succumb to intellectual bloating. The by-elections on 20 July largely supported this. If you'd last checked the polls at Christmas, you'd have been expecting the Tories to lose previously safe seats to both Lib Dems and Labour, which they did. You could have ignored all chatter in between about Conservatives clawing back a couple of points here and there. Equally, the local intensity of dislike for Ulez in Uxbridge is largely disconnected from national, or even ...

Women have gone Barbie mad. At frequent intervals, over the past week, I’ve seen crowds of pink-clad women and Barbie-branded taxis. Scrolling through social media, I come across, time and time again, the Airbnb listing for a real-life Barbie mansion in Malibu, California. The obvious take on all this is that Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film starring Margot Robbie as Barbie, released a week ago, provides nostalgic escapism in a time of bleakness. And then there’s the cynical take: I am told, largely by men, that Barbie mania is a product of “late-stage capitalism” (is there any other kind?). They’re not entirely wrong: I went to the Barbie-themed Selfridges pop-up and found it chaotic and clothes-strewn. A harried shop assistant guarded the entrance as people (adults, not children) tried ...

The London Mayor Sadiq Khan can proceed with the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), the High Court has ruled. Following an appeal against the legality of expanding the scheme – which charges the most polluting vehicles £12.50 a day – it will now be rolled out across Greater London at the end of August. Khan has called this “good news for London”. Labour failed to gain the outer London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip from the Conservatives in this month’s by-election, largely owing to local opposition to Ulez. But Khan sees the policy as vital for improving London’s air (and, privately, Transport for London’s diminished finances). The decision is a blow to Labour HQ, which fears losing public support ...

Scotland is an “an attractive, welcoming, inclusive place for people across the globe to come to visit, study, live, work and raise a family”, according to the minister for independence Jamie Hepburn. “The most important thing is that, no matter how we came to be here, all of us are as Scottish as we choose to be.” Well, thank heavens for that, even if cybernats in the darker corners of social media disagree that the latter point applies to unionists. Hepburn made the remarks in his introduction to the fifth in a series of independence papers produced by the Scottish government. Published yesterday (27 July) it covers citizenship, and the SNP is at pains to point out that the loveliness outlined ...

Try to picture very early humans and you might conjure up a cartoon-like image of a man in a leopard-print loincloth chasing a woolly mammoth with a spear. His wife, meanwhile, would be wearing the same style of leopard skin fetchingly tied at the shoulder – but she would be at home picking berries, perhaps with an infant strapped to her back. But recently, science writers all over the media have been excited to report on a new study, published last month on the PLOS (Public Library of Science) open-access platform, which suggests that this imagined stark division of labour is inaccurate. “Worldwide survey kills myth of ‘man the hunter’,” announced Science magazine; CNN proclaimed the same myth “shattered”; and Spanish ...

Rishi Sunak looks suspiciously like he is rowing back on the net zero agenda in the aftermath of the Uxbridge by-election – which the Conservatives won partly due to the unpopularity of Labour’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) policy. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Despite being mildly supportive of green policies throughout his premiership, the Climate Change Committee progress report of 2023 found that Sunak’s environmental record could be defined by its distinct lack of urgency; it states that “pace should be prioritised over perfection”. This lack largely stems from the Tory government’s climate policy being directed more by their perceptions of the electorate rather than any environmental realities – for instance, in the party's unwillingness to ...

We appear to be living in strange political times indeed. The sort of topsy-turvy times in which many on the liberal left are enthusiastically defending an elite private banking division of NatWest for closing someone’s account without explanation before inaccurately telling a BBC journalist that the decision was solely a financial one. While liberals and leftists demand we stop interfering in a private company’s affairs, devoted free marketeers are pausing to consider the rights of the person in question and calling for reforms to protect the public from corporate abuse. Curiouser and curiouser. Perhaps not when you consider that the person affected is Nigel Farage. Throughout this rolling scandal some of the former Brexit Party leader’s detractors have celebrated his treatment – ...

How does Labour handle someone like Nigel Farage? There are two key strands of thought. The first is championed by the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. In an interview with Channel 4, the former Bank of England economist defended Alison Rose, NatWest’s chief executive, against Farage’s campaign by saying that Rose was being bullied because she is a rare female leader of a large bank. Banker to banker, Reeves said: "I don’t like some of the, frankly, what I see as bullying attitudes towards her. She’s the first female chief executive of NatWest. She took over at a time when that bank had real big problems. It seems to me that Alison Rose has done a good job turning that bank around." The ...