As the NHS turns 75, it’s hard to avoid thinking of Britain as “a national health service with a country attached”, just like the British economy is “a property market powered by the City of London with poor regions attached”. The UK is becoming increasingly fragmented even as we clap for carers and celebrate national institutions such as the monarchy or the armed forces. It is not just the Union that is under huge strain, nor our politics across the four nations that has become more polarised. The country’s social fabric is unravelling, as evinced by a marked decay in the relationships and institutions that make up everyday social life. There’s divorce, family breakdown and more children born outside of stable relationships. ...

There are many things in life and politics that might quite reasonably be classed as unfair. Your income collapsing and living costs spiking through decisions taken by the clown parade passing through the revolving door of Downing Street. All the costs of the benefits aimed at one generation being loaded, repeatedly, onto another. Your job, or your entire industry, vanishing one day because of Brexit. These are of course just the first-world and middle-class variants; others are available. Even so, it’s another, rather less obvious victim of unfairness that government sources are, as ever, concerned with. Last weekend Tim Shipman, chief political commentator for the Sunday Times, dutifully reported that Rishi Sunak had been seen doing the rounds at one of ...

It was very odd at first, being on Bluesky. I managed to get a very early invite to the new I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Twitter social network, and decided to use it straight away. It’s now been about two and a half months. There was, and is, something of the uncanny valley about it. It looks and feels just like the bird app, and was even created by Jack Dorsey, who launched Twitter in the first place. It was also eerily quiet for the first few weeks. A handful of us had, essentially, seen that the ship we were on was threatening to capsize, and had decided to get in the lifeboats, just in case. We sat there for a while, waiting for the ship to ...

Nigel Farage has spent the past week exposing the establishment’s latest and arguably greatest crime: the grey eminences of the deep state have swung it so that Nigel Farage, man of the people, can no longer have a bank account at Coutts, where customers must have at least £3m in cash or a proper Habsburg jaw. According to Farage, seven other banks have since refused his custom, and this amounts to an attempt to "force me out of the UK" using the extra financial scrutiny that comes with his status as a politically exposed person (PEP). Natwest, which owns Coutts, immediately offered Farage a replacement account, but apparently this still merits the attention of other well-known anti-establishment figures, such as the Prime ...

Two teenagers interrupted Keir Starmer's set-piece speech on education at a college in Kent yesterday (6 July) to protest against Labour diluting its pledge to spend £28bn a year on a green transition. Unfurling a red banner on stage reading “No more U-turns – Green New Deal!”, they demanded a “green new deal now”, and accused the Labour leader of ignoring invitations to meet their campaign group, Green New Deal Rising. Sophie Coningham, 18, who finished her A-levels two weeks ago and was not a pupil at the college in Gillingham, stepped forward and asked Starmer which side the Labour Party was on. “We are on the side of economic growth,” he replied. As she and Dieudonné Bila, her fellow protester, continued ...

As a journalist, sharing my stories with the world used to be relatively simple. Before October 2022, I would log on to Twitter – the place that most of my peers in the industry inhabited – and would share a link. Then I would wait for the responses to roll in and engage with the comments. That was easy. Fast forward nine months and things are trickier. Elon Musk has managed to torpedo Twitter’s reputation, and engagement and users have dropped precipitously. Nevertheless, decision makers remain on Twitter, and we have to show willing – so I have to post there. However, as the deathly drumbeat for Twitter’s future has become louder, alternatives have cropped up; around a dozen of them with ...

Keir Starmer wants kids to start, like, speaking properly. Oracy – the ability to speak well in grammatically correct sentences – will be key to Labour’s final national mission: opportunity. What’s not to like? Speaking with confidence and fluency is central to helping those from less privileged backgrounds to excel in the jobs market when many in the private sector already receive that support. Pivoting education towards oral examination is not new. Oxford final exams used to be delivered orally, while many Italian universities today still choose it over written examinations. Politically, the mission allows Starmer and the shadow cabinet to talk about their compelling backstories. As Andrew notes in his column this week, it allows Labour to inject some hope into ...

The potential collapse of Thames Water demonstrates just how poor our privatised water system is at performing its most basic functions. And as climate change intensifies, these failures will only worsen. Only public ownership can ensure the fair and efficient management of increasingly constrained water resources. Since 1989 the water companies have paid out £72bn in dividends while assuming £60bn of extra debt – and even though £15bn of debt was written off by the Conservative government at the time of privatisation. Investment has fallen by 15 per cent each decade since the 1990s. There’s little that can be said in defence of the current system and a leaked email from the Severn Trent Water boss Liv Garfield trying to fend off ...