If you’ve been on Twitter this week, you have no doubt seen people change their handles to something that resembles a mistyped email address and then announce they have set up an account on Mastodon – usually before continuing to then tweet as normal. Mastodon has become the social network (if it counts as a social network – more on this later) of choice for those worried about the erratic Twitatorship of Elon Musk, which in a mere ten days has been on a journey from “comedy is now legal on Twitter” to perma-bans for verified users that parody Elon Musk. The number of Mastodon users has been boosted to around a million in the last week alone. But Mastodon is not ...

I am not the best person to go to with questions about the future of Twitter. The reason you shouldn’t ask me, as I will tell anyone who inquires whether I think $7.99 a month is a fair price to keep my cherished blue tick, is that I am utterly, inexcusably addicted to it. I know that this is not something to be proud of. I know that endless studies have demonstrated the link between heavy social media use and poor mental health. I know it was a toxic cesspit of abuse and fake news and petty feuds that spiral way out of control long before Elon Musk first got the perverse notion of turning it into his personal playground.  But I ...

Once upon a time, access to British democracy was limited by property qualifications. The exact requirements varied, depending on when and where you lived, but broadly speaking only those men who owned land or something equivalent were allowed to vote. It was not until 1918 that the property qualification was finally scrapped, and any man over 21 was allowed to vote. (Women in their twenties would have to wait another decade.) Since then, there has been no formal property qualification involved in British politics. There has, however, been an informal one, which guides decisions about whose votes are thought worth chasing. Consider the proposal that Ed Davey – if you’re struggling to place him, he’s the leader of the Liberal Democrats – ...

In 21st-century Britain, the belief that women are best kept in the home is so outdated it seems absurd. It is 70 years since the spotless image of a 1950s housewife was the apex of aspiration for the majority of young girls. By contrast, young women today prioritise education, pinning their hopes on a good job and the freedom that brings. We’re even beginning to see cracks in the glass ceiling, with the number of women in board rooms increasing (albeit before Covid, there were still fewer female CEOs in the FTSE 100 than men called Steve). But if the future has never looked brighter for women and their careers, why are so many now giving it all up? To anyone ...

The government has moved swiftly to deny a BBC report today, 4 November, that it was considering to review whether or not to continue to invest in the Sizewell C nuclear plant. A government official had told the broadcaster that all major projects were under review, including the plant, which is under construction on the Suffolk coast and will provide power to over six million homes when it is operational in the 2030s. When the initial report was published it was notable that Adrian Ramsay, co-leader of the Green Party, immediately tweeted that he was “pleased” to see the review taking place, arguing that Sizewell would take too long to complete and that renewables are the way forward. However, he forgets that ...

We're essentially already in a recession and it's set to last from here to the middle of 2024, according to the Bank of England. If so, it is a recession that has a political cause. It was inevitable that, as the post-Covid growth spurt petered out, the economy would slow down. But the coming round of business failures, wage cuts, job losses and cancelled infrastructure projects will be entirely due to bad policy decisions – both by the Conservative government and the Bank itself. Facing double-digit inflation alongside a slowing economy, Liz Truss took the disastrous decision to start borrowing money to give it away. Her motivation was justified: the UK's economy is stagnant after a decade of austerity and needs a ...

A little over a week into his premiership Rishi Sunak has made his first major U-turn. On 2 November the prime minister announced that he would be travelling to Egypt for the Cop27 UN climate summit next week after all. No 10 had previously said he was too focused on fixing the domestic economy to attend. The U-turn is welcome. The initial decision was alarming not just because the climate emergency is one of the world’s most pressing concerns; there’s also the fact that at Cop27 the UK hands over the conference’s presidency to Egypt, and Sunak’s absence would have been a stark statement that Britain wasn’t capable of engaging on the world stage. As Boris Johnson’s chancellor throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Sunak built a reputation for dependability and pragmatism when it came to the ...

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has today chosen to push the rate of interest it controls to 3 per cent – the rise of 0.75 percentage points is the largest sustained leap in its base rate for three decades. The reason it gives for the increase is that a painful but necessarily sharp adjustment is needed to try to pull inflation back down to the Bank’s target level of 2 per cent. The move will undoubtedly be painful, particularly for those on variable-rate mortgages, and risks a longer and deeper recession as consumers pull back on spending. But as an attempt to control inflation, it is wholly and completely misguided – the result of a collision between the ...