Millennials dwell in the shadow of a tired post-Thatcherite politics built around individual consumer interest. This is the politics that benefited baby boomers, who now enjoy home ownership, early retirement, fat pensions, and the pleasures of life with little debt. Meanwhile, their children – my generation – face double the inflation and house prices that they did. Is it a surprise that millennials are not becoming more conservative with age? You’re more likely to find a red squirrel than a young Tory in London these days. Writing in the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch suggests that if millennials were following the voting patterns of their parents, someone aged 35 would be roughly five percentage points less conservative than the national average. Gradually ...

“Devolution through metro mayors doesn’t work.” So said the Metro Mayor of West England, Dan Norris, in a cramped Jubilee Room beside Westminster Hall last night. Norris was speaking at the launch of a new report from the Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up. He explained why the requirement that spending decisions receive unanimous support from councils produces stasis – resulting in, for instance, an unspent housing budget. Add that to the list of problems a Labour government would face. Labour politicians rarely talk about “levelling up” now, and it didn’t feature in Keir Starmer’s five national missions. Many commentators say they don’t know what “levelling up” is. For me it simply means redressing chronic regional inequality. In that sense, Labour ...

Education was on both main parties’ minds last week. This was a novelty, and that should surprise us. For virtually the entire period from New Labour through to the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, education reform, school standards and social mobility were a central feature of our politics. Yet for nearly a decade, since Michael Gove ceased to be education secretary and certainly since Brexit, education and social mobility have been at best peripheral. On the Conservative side, the running was not being made by Rishi Sunak, who save for an obsession with maths and giving huge sums of money to his alma mater, has little to say about the schooling of millions. It was left to the New Conservatives, the latest ...

The SNP insists that it wants to give Scotland’s pupils a digital edge. In its 2021 Holyrood election manifesto, the party promised a laptop or tablet for every child to use in school and at home. That pledge is yet to be fulfilled. Though some pupils now have a state-funded piece of tech, many are still waiting. Inequality is developing a digital edge, too – I’m told that laptops and tablets provided in Scotland’s poorer areas have simply disappeared. Children claim to have forgotten or lost them. Teachers fear some have been expropriated by family members, or have even been sold. There is a problem, too, with computing science. Despite its growing centrality to everyday lives and the current and future jobs ...

While Sunak is in Vilnius at the Nato summit today – where, significantly, Turkey has assented to Sweden’s membership – his Home Secretary will be taking the Illegal Migration Bill through parliament. The Lords secured a string of defeats against the government last night, which the Commons will vote on later today. While the core aspects of the bill – the deportation of those who arrive on small boats – is likely to pass, Sunak will be grateful he is in Lithuania instead of Westminster. Opposition figures, such as the Labour MP Chris Bryant, have criticised Sunak for missing two PMQs in a row. But the less he can be associated with his party, Westminster and domestic policy, the better. That’s the ...

It's 27 years (25 in the US) since the publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary – the novel by Helen Fielding that spawned Richard Curtis movies starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, two further books, and phrases such as “f***wit” and “Smug Marrieds”. A comic hit at the time, the book’s jacket was even adorned with the praise of Salman Rushdie. But since, it has often come under fire – most recently on 30 June when the New York Times published a piece for the US anniversary arguing that we deserved a better heroine than Bridget Jones. Her crimes? Chasing after men, caring too much about her weight and general ditziness. The NYT critic seemed particularly aggrieved that Bridget moves ...

It must have been a strange weekend to be one of the BBC’s hundreds upon hundreds of male TV or radio presenters. After the Sun revealed allegations from a mother that a male “household name” had “groomed” her teenage child and had them send illicit photos in exchange for payment, Twitter went on a witch hunt for the right name. This was exacerbated by a breadcrumb trail of clues – especially once the BBC said the star had been suspended and would not appear on air while the allegations were investigated. Online sleuths checked for who had and hadn’t appeared, and whether or not X or Y had turned up in their usual broadcast slot. Presenters take time off all the ...

The Conservative leadership contest last year descended into one-upmanship over tax cuts. When Liz Truss set the pace with a long list of promises, the losing Rishi Sunak camp decided to pledge a 1p cut in income tax in April 2024, with a further 3p cut over the next parliament. But when Sunak moved into No 10 following the debacle of the mini-Budget, those promises were quietly forgotten. Nonetheless, dangling the prospect of tax cuts before the next election has been key to maintaining a semblance of discipline among Conservative backbenchers. A penchant for tax cuts was Sunak’s redeeming feature as a Conservative in the hopeful eyes of some of his MPs. [See also: Will Rishi Sunak sack Jeremy Hunt?] But, in the ...