Net migration was 606,000 in the 12 months up to December 2022. This figure reflects three key trends. That the government’s immigration policy since Brexit has intentionally brought more people in to fill gaps in sectors such as the NHS and social care. That the UK has welcomed thousands of people fleeing war in Ukraine and anti-democratic clampdowns in Hong Kong. And that the UK’s higher education sector is increasingly dependent on foreign students. The public broadly supports these three different groups of migrants. This helps explain why even though almost half of the public want immigration reduced they aren’t sure where those cuts should fall. In general, attitudes towards immigration have become more positive since 2016. But I’m sceptical about ...

Put charitably, Boris Johnson is a good storyteller. Of the many that he and his followers have told about his tragicomic premiership, perhaps the most powerful is about its end. This revisionism would have you believe that the great man was brought down by Twitter, by pusillanimous MPs scared of a rough patch, of the sly Rishi Sunak, of the vengeful “blob”. A plot, a coup by the assembled parts of the machine, brought down our hero. The latest revelations of the partygate affair, with the Cabinet Office referring Johnson to the police over accusations of further lockdown breaches – this time at the country retreat of prime ministers, Chequers – are a reminder of what nonsense this all is. The ...

This was supposed to be a good week for Boris Johnson. It started with a visit to Texas that included lunch with the former president George W Bush and a meeting with Greg Abbott, the state governor. Tonight (24 May) he is due to deliver what is probably another fantastically lucrative speech, this time to the Scale Global Summit in a Las Vegas casino. All the while, back in Britain, taxpayer-funded lawyers would be quietly beavering away on his defence for the public inquiry into how the government handled the Covid crisis. It has not worked out like that. In a delicious irony, those same lawyers have discovered entries in Johnson’s diaries suggesting friends and relatives visited him at Chequers in ...

Boris Johnson has taken spray-paint to the tombstone of his reputation. The former prime minister has been referred to the police for allegedly receiving visits from friends to Chequers during lockdown. The Cabinet Office reported Johnson after he gave over his diaries for the public inquiry into Covid, meaning he accidentally handed himself in. The Privileges Committee, which is expected to decide next month whether Johnson misled parliament, has been informed. Rishi Sunak wants to talk about many things; partygate isn’t one of them. The problem for No 10 at the start of the year was whether Johnson could muster a leadership challenge. Reminders that Johnson was riddled with scandal helped keep MPs from being led astray. Now that Sunak is ...

Current opinion is that the Conservative Party won’t win the next general election. The electorate has had enough and wants a change of government. At such a moment when power is shifting and authority dissolving, the ideas that will shape the future emerge in public debate. As the ascending power, these should belong to Labour. And yet, looking back over the past month, it is Conservatism that has generated energy and held attention. Every media outlet had to give an opinion on the recent National Conservatism conference. From the Guardian to Novara Media, the left reacted with predictable hyperbole about its hard-rightness. Reasoned analysis was the exception, but what occupied people’s minds wasn’t a progressive future under a Labour government, it was ...

Treasury Brain is a crippling psychological condition that leaves its victims tragically unable to read both sides of a balance sheet. So impaired are sufferers’ decision-making that it’s only a matter of time before one sells their home to cut down on heating bills. There is currently an outbreak at the Department for Transport (DfT), which is engaged in an extensive programme of making Britain’s railways very slightly cheaper, at the tiny cost of making the experience of travelling on them significantly worse. The latest edict from the department to rail operators, as reported by the one-time London mayoral candidate Christian Wolmar on the Calling All Stations podcast, is that they should stop offering wi-fi unless they can justify it financially. ...

Scotland’s local councils are, and have been for some time, grievously unhappy places. Their relationship with the Holyrood government is fractious and increasingly embittered. The cuts they are having to make to local services are infuriating voters. It is not their fault that they have little capacity to fix any of this. It is now 30 years since the Tory Scottish secretary Ian Lang redesigned local government north of the border, converting the dual regional and district councils into unitary authorities. Launching his white paper, “Shaping the Future: the New Councils”, in 1993, he told the Commons that the new structure would “make local authorities more accountable and responsive to the people they serve and will help all authorities to achieve ...

Starmer announced his third mission for government yesterday (22 May): an NHS fit for the future. The plans are ambitious. Labour hopes to go beyond simply restoring the NHS as a functioning service. It wants to raise life expectancy through better cancer treatment rates and reverse the growing rate of suicide. It wants to modernise the NHS, ensure that health is seen as a societal issue and harness technology such as AI and the NHS app. “The thinking behind the mission is: what would we actually have wanted to achieve after five or ten years in government?” said one person involved in its formulation. They said the proposals drew on work from the Tony Blair Institute and the IPPR think tank. That ...