If you want to know what’s most troubling the British public, any local radio DJ that hosts a phone-in will be at least as good as the best of focus groups. The issues on which people call into radio shows might not tally exactly with polling, but they do tell you what is worrying people enough to make them pick up a phone to a stranger. The people who spend several hours a day, four or five times a week, talking to the public are going to be well in touch with what is bothering the people in their area. It is, then, a foolish mistake to underestimate local radio. Paul Mason – uncharitably and uncharacteristically – did exactly that, suggesting that ...

In the year 399 BC Socrates was convicted by a 501-member jury of his peers of corrupting the youth of Athens. The philosopher had been aggravating local citizens by hanging around the agora and probing young people with anti-democratic questioning. The jury sentenced him to death, forcing him to drink hemlock. For Socrates’ pupil Plato, losing his mentor to what he surely perceived as a bunch of ignorant, illiterate fools was one of the formative experiences of his youth. After his teacher’s death he hopped on a boat and sailed abroad to do what many young people do – find his own definition of justice and meaning to life. Twenty years later Plato came up with The Republic, a work of political ...

Anyone can believe in something that has yet to be proven. The mark of true faith is the ability to keep believing when something is shown to be wrong. For a few months, more than half a decade ago now, I wrote a regular column concerning the thoughts of Daniel Hannan, the MEP who had long been one of the noisiest and most steadfast advocates of Brexit. The reason this column focused on a man who wasn’t even an MP, let alone a minister, was that there was something that many on this side of politics found uniquely irritating about Hannan: it wasn’t merely that he could say the sky is green, but that he could do so in a manner ...

Keir Starmer wants to show that Labour is ready for power. The days of irresponsible policies and crank MPs are over. They are the adults in the room after successive waves of Tory crises. Only a few hours before his speech at the Labour Party conference on Tuesday this pristine image was dented. At a conference fringe event Rupa Huq, the MP for Ealing Central and Acton, said of the Chancellor of Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, that “he superficially is a black man”. She added, by way of absurd evidence: “He went to Eton, he went to a very expensive prep school… if you hear him on the Today programme, you wouldn’t know he’s black.” Huq had the whip suspended for these ...

The consultants who rebranded the Royal Mail’s parent company in 2001 were looking for a name that could mean anything, to encompass the fact that the Post Office plc (as it was then) was embarking on a future in which it did far more than deliver letters. They settled on a name that meant nothing – Consignia – and after just over a year of contempt and derision, they changed it to Royal Mail Group. In July, the name changed again, and if anything the new name (International Distributions Services) is even more tedious, but this time it does actually mean something. This is a company of two parts: the Royal Mail, which has committed to deliver a letter anywhere in ...

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s box-fresh, righter-than-right soon-to-be prime minister, has claimed in a speech that is going around Twitter like wildfire that the left sees the family unit as a frightening enemy. The left, says the leader of the Brothers of Italy, is attacking national, religious, gender and family identity because these are things that define Italy. She asserts that she can no longer define herself as Italian, Christian, woman and mother, which seems odd given that she’s just run an election campaign and won using those very identities for political capital. She claims she is reduced to a number – “gender x, parent 2”. I assume this is because now sometimes at schools they refer to “parents and caregivers” to ...

There is a scene in Withnail & I in which the two protagonists, having failed to procure food or fuel for the Lake District cottage they are spending the weekend in, accost a local farmer in the pouring rain. “You’ve got to help us,” they wail. “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.” Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are currently starring in a live-action remake. To recap, yesterday (26 September) sterling fell to its lowest rate against the dollar since records began in 1971, while the cost of borrowing – which is how they will finance their plans – suffered one of the biggest rises since 1979. Having bumbled their way to Downing Street and failed to procure funding for their spending plans, the ...

We often hear the refrain “the UK is not the US”. When it comes to a potential housing crisis, though, that doesn’t always work in the UK’s favour. Because British banks hadn’t issued mortgages quite as excessive as the subprime loans handed out by US banks prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the UK didn’t have either the same scale of housing crash or nearly so many repossessions or foreclosures as America did. But there is one crucial difference between how British and American mortgages work that makes being unable to afford the loan on your home there – though still terrible – not quite so bad as here. In the US if you hand back the keys to your home ...