Liz Truss is in a pickle. Since the mini-Budget delivered by her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, on 23 September the markets have been in the kind of turmoil that normally presages political disaster. Interest rates on public debt have soared, along with mortgage rates, and the pound has collapsed ignominiously against the dollar. To add insult to self-inflicted injury, the Office for National Statistics announced yesterday morning (12 October) that the economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in August. This is all on top of the fourth horseman of the economic apocalypse: inflation at levels not experienced since the early 1980s. Some of the UK’s economic woes have been building inescapably since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February but it is ...

As a Tory, it is easy to see the attraction of cutting the foreign aid budget – as Kwasi Kwarteng reportedly aims to do by removing £5bn from the international development budget. From our point of view, the money we send overseas is often used wastefully, or acts to subsidise other nation’s follies. Equally, it is a politically expedient budget line to cut, being among the least popular areas of expenditure, and with little impact on day-to-day life in the UK. As the cost-of-living crisis tightens, there is an obvious and easy case for prioritising the poor in Britain ahead of the poor overseas. Yet this would be a strategic and moral mistake.  For all its challenges, the UK remains one ...

At any other time a government not fully behind anti-smoking initiatives would appear quite odd. The harms of smoking to the individual, to their family and to wider society are well-established and irrefutable. We are, though, not in ordinary times, and this is no ordinary government. The Khan review, commissioned by Sajid Javid when he was health secretary, set out the route towards a “smokefree” UK by 2030. Implementing it would be a bold and welcome government intervention that would save tens of thousands of lives a year, lift around 2.6 million people out of poverty by saving them money, and have a net positive effect on the UK economy of around £5 billion. The review is well-considered. In its recommendations an incrementally ...

This week, Liz Truss’s government is reportedly looking to drop two key Conservative housing commitments from the 2019 election: the requirement for affordable housing in new developments, and ending “no-fault” evictions. It’s a bad look for a government to break manifesto promises, and this one will likely sabotage the little hope the Tories had of building the electoral support they need among millennials and Gen Z. It increasingly feels like the government is struggling to think beyond its next U-turn, flailing about for any issue to distract from its mismanagement of the economy. The Tories used to be a party of housing. Perhaps not in the way most people would think of, but they long argued that property should be the ...

If you were thirsting for more signs that we are edging towards dystopia, the Sun on Sunday was there to prove it this weekend. In an exclusive report – tastefully sub-titled “Bonk for Britain” – a cabinet minister told the paper that to shore up the British economy, the government ought to take inspiration from Viktor Orbán, the right-wing nationalist prime minister of Hungary.    “Look at the labour shortages we are suffering from,” the anonymous “Top Tory” told the Sun. “We need to have more children. The rate keeps falling. Look at Hungary – they cut taxes for mothers who have more children.”   The paper drooled that the “wacky policy already exists in Hungary”, as if this were a piece of salacious gossip. The ...

John Cleese has always been the member of the Monty Python team most keen on a verbal skirmish. At his best he can be quick, biting and vicious. The most famous example of this came in 1979, when he and his fellow Python Michael Palin took part in a late-night TV debate over their film The Life of Brian, a razor-sharp take-down of religious dogma, blind faith and people’s tendency to follow the pack. (“Yes!” a crowd shouts back in unison to Graham Chapman’s Brian in one of film’s most famous scenes. “We are all individuals.”) Cleese and Palin were paired with the evangelical Christian and former satirist Malcolm Muggeridge and the outspoken Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, who felt the film to be distasteful. To ...

If the Labour Party can be described as a family, it’s not necessarily a close-knit and happy one. Its gatherings resemble something more like a meeting of extended families, with various second-cousins, great-aunts and the like nursing old grudges and resentments. This is the party’s weakness, but also its strength: the Labour Party is a product not just of its history, but also of the UK’s first past the post electoral system, which requires a coalition of interests to combine into a broad party, one that in recent years managed to accommodate Jeremy Corbyn, Frank Field and Jess Phillips alike. Advocates of proportional representation – a catch-all for a range of electoral systems that to differing degrees break the constituency link ...

The serious criminalisation of cannabis users started as a result of Richard Nixon being elected US president in 1968 and then perpetrating his “war on drugs”. The rest of the world followed suit, with the UK doing so in part, many would argue, because of antipathy to the growing Caribbean population, many of whom used cannabis. Now the US has reversed its policy. Almost half of Americans have legal access to recreational cannabis and Joe Biden, the president, has now pardoned thousands of people convicted of cannabis possession. In the UK we seem to want to go backwards. We have calls from Conservative police commissioners to make cannabis a Class A drug with enhanced sentences. Suella Braverman, our new Home Secretary, ...