Let’s give Keir Starmer the benefit of the doubt. There is plenty of evidence that, just as predicted by the vast majority of credible economists, leaving the EU and the single market has had a substantial and negative impact on UK growth. Even the small minority of economists who supported Brexit now only claim that the damage is often exaggerated, not that it doesn’t exist. So when Starmer said that membership of the single market wouldn’t boost economic growth, let’s assume that he wasn’t denying the obvious, but arguing that – starting from this position – seeking to rejoin wouldn’t help. There are two planks to this argument. First, that the inevitable result would be years of uncertainty, which would – as ...

On Sunday evening (4 December), a nation rejoiced when England’s footballers bounced back from a slow start to blow Senegal away at the World Cup in Qatar. And it wasn’t even the most thrilling England win of the week. That came the next morning, 1,400 miles further east in Rawalpindi, as England’s cricketers won a Test match in Pakistan for only the third time ever. They did it in a style to which no cricket fan is accustomed. Ben Stokes, who took over as England’s Test captain in April, has not just lifted the team out of the doldrums after a dismal run of only one win in 17 games. Along with England’s new coach, the New Zealander Brendon McCullum, he ...

Britain’s current wave of strikes, according to Nadhim Zahawi, chairman of the Tory party, is “exactly what Putin wants to see”. He accused nurses of playing into the Russian dictator’s hands by taking industrial action on 15 December.  Accusing strikers of being unpatriotic is a tactic going back to the Napoleonic era. Zahawi, however, has given it a new and unfortunate twist. Because the right to strike – and form free trade unions – is exactly what Ukrainian workers are defending as they resist the Russian invasion of their country. When I visited Kyiv on the eve of the war I heard coal miners from the Donbas, in the east, explain how, in the areas Russia had already seized, their union was ...

One would think that after the country suffered more than a million Covid deaths, American politicians would have learned something about the value of paid sick days. However, last night the US Senate voted against a measure that would have granted rail workers paid sick leave and instead granted them a paltry “one personal day” per year. The Senate was forced to an urgent vote because rail workers had threatened to strike on 9 December if their demands for a wage increase and paid sick leave were not met. If the strike had gone ahead, at a busy time of the year for rail traffic, estimates show it would have cost the economy around $2bn a day. The bill that has now ...

Last year I served as president of the Oxford student union. One of the things I did during my time was run a consultation on how we could change the union to better represent students. After discussions with hundreds of students and going through several committees, the changes were made. The biggest transformation, which was finalised in June this year, was expanding the vice-president for women role to a broader vice-president for liberation and equality. The role would still include wholly or partially identifying women, of course, but was widened because there was no role to cover other protected characteristics, such as race and disability, at vice-president level. It would also include LGBTQ+ people, including those who identify as trans ...

“Kanye West has been suspended from Twitter for posting anti-Semitic images” is not a headline likely to surprise anyone that has followed the ups and downs of the rapper now known as Ye. He was banned from both Twitter and Instagram earlier in the year for the same reason, and it’s not a rhetoric he has particularly toned down since. His second booting from the platform comes with the familiar grinding sound of grim inevitability. Ye is one of several people previously blocked from Twitter who were allowed back on to the service following Elon Musk’s much-publicised takeover of the company in October. Others include the former US president Donald Trump, the conspiracist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the misogynist “manosphere” influencer ...

This article was originally published on 25 October. It has been republished in light of recent news. Kanye West was suspended from Twitter on 2 December after posting several antisemitic messages. Twitter owner Elon Musk said West had been banned for violating rules “against incitement to violence". WASHINGTON DC – Adidas has announced that it will sever its partnership with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, three weeks after he tweeted that he was going to go “death con 3 on Jewish people”. It’s a significant move: Adidas’s partnership with Ye’s company Yeezy is said to be worth billions. Adidas is not the first brand to drop Ye (Balenciaga already cut ties), but it is the most significant. Adidas came ...

Last winter, I spoke to a paramedic who had just spent an entire overnight shift – 12 hours, plus an extra two and a half – with one patient. This wasn’t a lengthy extraction of a person from car wreckage, or some kind of marathon CPR session on the scene. It was an elderly patient who had fallen and broken their hip, lying in the back of an ambulance in the hospital car park, from 6.30pm until 9am. All the while, the paramedic was hearing calls coming in on her radio – the control room asking her to respond to category one cases, the most life-threatening. She could not respond to any of those patients who needed her because she was ...