On 27 October, two days after Rishi Sunak was appointed Prime Minister, a familiar face returned to Downing Street: George Osborne, the former chancellor, was invited back to advise Sunak’s Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. Osborne is the architect of austerity, the Conservative belt-tightening strategy that helped the party to win the general election in 2010. In an effort to aid the UK’s recovery from the financial crisis and “balance the books”, Osborne slashed spending and imposed draconian pay freezes on the public sector. Austerity was, for a time, reasonably effective, but we’re still seeing the repercussions now. Figures published on Tuesday 15 November showed a 42 per cent rise in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds dropping out of the labour market since ...

At the end of George Washington’s second term of office in 1797 many world leaders still believed in their divine right to rule over their subjects and were willing to murder them to prove the point. But instead of clinging to power like his contemporaries, George Washington stunned the world by declining to run for a third term. Before leaving office he delivered a carefully worded farewell address in which he noted his longing for retirement and warned the country of what he considered to be the biggest threats to its budding democracy: political infighting and foreign intervention.  Two centuries later American democracy is at a breaking point. This month’s midterm elections revealed a deeply divided country that in some cases ...

Rishi Sunak wants the country to know that he is thinking about pensioners. Jetting off to the G20 summit in Indonesia, the Prime Minister found time to tell reporters that pensioners “will always be at the forefront of my mind”. That’s a telling comment just days away from an Autumn Statement in which his Chancellor is preparing to slash public spending and increase taxes for all. On Sunday Jeremy Hunt solemnly announced he “will be asking everyone for sacrifices” – now Sunak is sending out a very strong hint that for the over-65s any sacrifices will be minimal. This suggests that the triple lock on state pensions is almost certainly remaining. To recap: the triple lock ensures that the state pension ...

Almost all of us have done it at some point as a child – at Christmas or on our birthday, we get a gift that delights but infuriates us. It could be a remote-controlled car, or an intricate battery-powered board game, but the common factor is this: we have to know how it works. Unfortunately, the dismantling skills of a typical six-year-old are not matched by their ability to put things back together again. Quickly, we are sitting among the wreckage of what had, until recently, been our favourite toy. Thankfully, most of us take the right lesson from this and learn how not to rip apart our possessions. It is something of a tragedy, then, that Elon Musk – possibly still, ...

Trade deals! That was the exciting opportunity that was supposed to be created by Brexit. Freed from having to pander to the protectionist interests of southern Europeans, the UK would be free to strike valuable trade agreements with fast-growing countries across the world. Brexit would make us richer and more global. This was a relatively late entry to the list of arguments for leaving the European Union. The longstanding economic argument was that EU regulations on the environment and employment protection were holding us back, but these were not arguments that anyone wanted to make during the referendum campaign, especially as the target voters were not dogmatic free marketeers. Nor was this freedom to make trade deals the most prominent argument ...

It’s nice to be wrong sometimes. For months I’ve been banging on about a coming storm in the US. Having been so dramatically released at the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January last year, would the genie that refused to accept election results really be content to creep back into its bottle come the midterms on 8 November? I was pretty sure the answer was no. But the red tsunami of Republican victories that promised – or threatened – to engulf American democracy turned out to be more of a ripple. The Democrats will retain control of the Senate. Results are still trickling in, and the Republicans may well end up with a slim majority in the House of Representatives. ...

On seeing a poster for Dolly Parton’s literacy programme in my local library I briefly assumed that she was coming there to read to the children herself. It was not entirely improbable, since Dolly has the kind of philanthropy that seems to put her everywhere at once, a bit like Santa. That she gives 11,000 free books a month not just to children at home in Sevier County, Tennessee, but in the London borough of Islington is evidence of the reach of her long philanthropic arms. And in her eighth decade she continues to graduate from local to global do-gooding. Last night she became the recipient of Jeff Bezos’s annual Courage and Civility Award – $100m bestowed upon “leaders who aim ...

Discussing energy strategy with those sceptical about the need for urgent climate action can be troublesome because they don't always play straight. There are misrepresentations and distractions. The response to the UK’s planned gas deal with the US is a case in point. This week you may have encountered the suggestion, whether from a pro-fracking uncle or the onshore gas industry itself, that it is “hypocritical” for the UK government to import fracked gas from the US while upholding a fracking ban at home. The “UK political elite… relishes [the] imminent new deal,” tweeted the broadcaster Andrew Neil, despite “huge expense in terms of dollar cost, CO2 LNG [liquefied natural gas] transport footprint and balance of payments deficit.” The hypocrisy exists, ...