It’s easy to mock Keir Starmer’s pledge to give the UK the highest sustained growth of any G7 country, both for being too specific – and setting him up for failure – and too general (who doesn’t want higher growth, particularly given the UK’s recent mediocre performance?). But both somewhat miss the point: obviously economic growth should be central to Labour’s agenda, and if Labour can indeed achieve consistently faster growth few will care whether or not we outperform Canada on some cyclically adjusted measure. The question is whether Labour’s policies will deliver. Here Starmer offered some specific areas of focus, but very little in the way of detail: childcare, planning reform, a wide industrial strategy, a more strategic approach to ...

It’s easy to explain why your teacher is striking: they want to be paid more. Whether they should be is a more interesting question. The average salary for a teacher is about £42,000 a year. Someone starting as a new teacher next year will earn £30,000, and a headteacher of a secondary school can earn over £100,000. These numbers don’t sound too bad – the average salary for all workers in the UK is around £33,000. But there a couple of points to consider in favour of your teacher’s position. First: to get the job they had to go to university and do at least one extra year of training on top of their degree. That’s a lot of tuition fees to ...

The question of when to end a TV series is a perfect example of the tension between art and commerce. Many series are cancelled earlier than we’d like, provoking an outcry. Many are kept going past their prime, provoking disdain. But sometimes a writer gets the luxury of choosing the moment, and that’s what Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, has decided: the much-anticipated fourth season of his HBO comedy drama will be its last. Of course, there’s no one ideal duration for a TV show. In the UK “Fawlty Towers only did 12 episodes” is often cited as proof that all great sitcoms should be as short – at least it was, until John Cleese announced his plan to produce new episodes, ...

Africa’s most populous nation goes to the polls on Saturday (25 February) to elect a new president. One candidate, Peter Obi, who appears to have become the front runner, has captured the imagination of the western media. Obi, 61, the leader of the Nigerian Labour Party, has pitched himself as a fresh-faced progressive and outsider who will clean up the muck of Nigerian politics and build a fairer, more just nation. The country’s youth – a powerful voting bloc in a country where around two-thirds of the population of 213 million is under the age of 30 – appear to be on Obi’s side and, if you read election coverage in the international press, you might get the impression that Nigeria is ...

Just over three months ago, as the dust was settling from the implosion of the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng “mini-Budget”, we were being solemnly informed by “government sources” that a “fiscal black hole” had been discovered in the public finances, of up to £70bn, that needed to be filled with the savings from spending cuts. And yet just a few months later that same hole has mysteriously become a £30bn surplus. Nothing fundamental about the economy has changed in those three months. We haven’t discovered a £100bn pot of gold. Inflation has come down slightly, but remains unusually high, while growth has been anaemic to the point of disappearance. There is nothing in the underlying economy to justify the incredible lurch in ...

The Schleswig-Holstein question, the infamous foreign policy problem that baffled European diplomats for much of the mid-19th century, concerned an equation with no solution. Schleswig, a duchy on the Jutland peninsula, absolutely had to be part of Denmark; it could also absolutely never be divided from Holstein, the next duchy south; Holstein, meanwhile, absolutely had to be part of Germany; and Germany and Denmark absolute had to be separate. A equalled B, B equalled C, C equalled D, but D absolutely could not equal A. Oh dear. This had all been fine during the centuries when feudalism and multiple identities were all the rage, but once the era of nationalism kicked in, the contradictions became untenable – and the result, ...

The Chatterer would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when March’s edition of the Oldie landed in the Daily Mail newsroom. In his Media Matters column Stephen Glover – one of the Mail’s star writers – opens up about his concerns for the future of… the Daily Mail. Glover starts the column by venting his frustrations about how people fail to distinguish between Mail Online (“with its fascination for showbiz figures” and its “sidebar of shame”) and the actual Daily Mail (which he suggests “seems high-minded and almost prim” by comparison). He believes the “widespread perception” that they are one and the same “doubtless explains” why his company “has experienced such difficulty in building up” Mail Plus, a paid-for ...

Thérèse Coffey, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, is reported to have been booed by farmers at the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) conference. Her crime was glossing over the cause of shortages of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers on the shelves of British supermarkets. “We can’t control the weather in Spain,” she is said to have told Minette Batters, the union’s president, earning a stern rebuke from Batters and the audience, who reminded her that Brexit might also be a factor. Coffey was repeating the government line that “current issues relating to the availability of certain fruits and vegetables were predominately caused by poor weather in Spain and North Africa”, and nothing to do with the UK's exit from the EU. This ...