Earlier this week, Rishi Sunak said that his government would create a police task force to tackle gangs that groomed children for sexual abuse, and claimed that victims have been ignored because of political correctness. Suella Braverman’s rhetoric has been even more extreme. Over the weekend the Home Secretary suggested to the BBC that gangs of rapists were "overwhelmingly" made up of British-Pakistani males. I was the chief prosecutor who led the teams that brought, among others, the Rochdale grooming gang to justice in 2012 for the abuse of up to 47 young girls. I then led the national response on the way that we tackle all such localised grooming and child sexual abuse in England and Wales. Let me contextualise to the Prime ...

Conservative tributes to Nigel Lawson, who has died aged 91, have focused on the former chancellor’s towering intellect and his defining influence on British politics. They have also served to highlight how recent Tory vintages lack these qualities.  Even ideological opponents have been forced to concede that Lawson was a powerhouse. Of the more than two dozen men who have served as chancellor since 1945, Lawson’s six-year tenure was one of the most impactful. He unleashed the “big bang” of market deregulation in the City of London in 1986, and not only reduced taxes but reformed them – expanding VAT and stamp duty, while cutting the top rate of income tax from 60 per cent to 40 per cent and raising ...

As we were recording this week’s New Statesman podcast about the apparent rise of social conservatives in the Tory Party, I was reminded of a joke where a conservative complains they’ve been censored for their views. Their (presumably liberal) interlocutor presses them. Was it wanting lower taxes? Deregulation? No, the conservative evasively replies, “you know the ones…”. It’s a funny joke. But it’s also a revealing one, inasmuch as both of the examples of good, respectable right-wing opinion are libertarian more than they are obviously conservative in an intellectual (as opposed to big-C political) sense. Moreover, the punchline rests on the conservative’s tacit concession that their views – it is left to the reader to imagine what they are – are ...

The result may have been close but it was definitive. As votes were counted in Finland’s 2 April general election, it became clear that the prime minister, Sanna Marin, and her Social Democratic Party (SDP) didn’t have the support required to once again form a coalition government. The party finished third, behind the centre-right National Coalition Party (NCP), which won 20.8 per cent of the vote, and the right-wing populist Finns Party, which took 20.1 per cent. The SDP won 19.9 per cent – a larger share of the vote than in the 2019 election that brought Marin to power (the party actually gained three seats this time round), but not enough to save her premiership. As the largest party typically ...

The RSC production of My Neighbour Totoro – which deservedly won six Olivier Awards yesterday (2 April) – contains one of the purest moments of stage magic I have seen. At the Barbican theatre in London it drew a noise from the audience – a cry of collective joy – that was totally unlike the irritating and knowing “mmm” that tends to greet “clever” moments in adult shows. The scene is now imprinted firmly in my brain alongside my first glimpse of the utterly alive daemons of Nicholas Hytner’s 2003 production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or the dreamlike flying papers of Théâtre de Complicité’s 1990s adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. Unfortunately, I can’t describe it to you, because to attempt to ...

On Saturday 11 February GB News broadcast Grooming Gangs: Britain's Shame. The documentary, on “grooming”, sexual abuse and exploitation of children by organised criminal “gangs” across the UK, was the channel's first investigative programme. This morning (3 April) several national newspaper front pages carried the news of Rishi Sunak's plan to stamp out "evil" grooming gangs. The Prime Minister will announce a new task force supported by the National Crime Agency, with data analysis used to help the police to “identify the types of criminals who carry out these offences”. The task force will use data on the ethnicity of offenders, which police forces have been required to collect since April last year. Labour described the plans as “hopelessly inadequate, belated and ...

“I don’t think it’s fair to say this is an adverse effect of Brexit,” said the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, yesterday about passenger delays in Dover over the weekend. Really? There are, it is true, factors that have nothing to do with our departure from the European Union. The weather last Friday caused delays that had knock-on effects over the weekend. And more coaches turned up than were expected. It is also true that delays at Dover occurred in the pre-Brexit era. Nonetheless, it is perfectly obvious that the passport procedures in place now that we are outside the EU take longer than when we were inside the EU. Whereas once it was merely necessary to check that a passenger had their passport, ...

I confess that I have always been guilty of nimbyism when it comes to short men. I’ve felt distaste at people vocally sneering at short men, but I’ve rarely dated someone short.Indeed, I have never known there to be an open prejudice justified so much by otherwise right-thinking people. Among liberal young women, “He was 5’6”, of course,” is so often the punchline to an anecdote about a man acting in a rude or entitled way. To dismiss a man, rude or otherwise, as ugly or stupid would be distasteful. But somehow, dismissing him as short is often considered funny. On social media in particular, even “woke” or right-on women feel comfortable making jokes about short men. They legitimise their prejudice ...