Before a vote was cast at the Labour conference, Keir Starmer had told delegates that the issue of electoral reform most of them supported, proportional representation (PR), would not appear in his election manifesto. Despite suggesting that he might support the policy in his party leadership campaign, and his spokesperson saying the leader was relaxed about the conference vote on the matter only this week, Starmer has now tried to shut the door on reform. Why? It is partly because the leadership don’t want any talk of coalitions that PR implies. The "coalition of chaos" charge is regularly made by tabloid newspapers against the prospect of Labour allying with smaller parties to govern, but it will be so whatever Starmer says. It ...

The daughter of the late archbishop Desmond Tutu, a tireless campaigner against apartheid, revered human rights activist, and once one of the most famous Anglicans in the world, has been barred by the Church of England from officiating at the funeral of her godfather Martin Kenyon, one of her father’s dearest friends. The reason is that Mpho Tutu van Furth, formerly an ordained Anglican priest in South Africa, is married to another woman, and while Anglican churches in the US, most of Canada and other parts of the Communion marry same-sex couples and fully accept openly gay and married people as clergy, the English church has a more “nuanced” position. Priests may be gay, and may enter into civil partnerships, but on ...

WASHINGTON DC – “Our world is in peril – and paralysed,” tweeted António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, on 20 September. “Cooperation and dialogue are the only path forward. No major global challenge can be solved by a coalition of the willing. We need a coalition of the world.” An excellent idea, Secretary General! What should we call it? Countries Together? People Assembled? Maybe something like “United Nations”? The UN today, 23 September, wraps up “High-level week” of its General Assembly. Over the course of this week, the idea that the United Nations as an organisation remotely capable of ensuring peace and security has been undermined. While world leaders convened to give lofty speeches about their countries’ place in ...

Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-Budget abolished the 45p rate of income tax paid by those earning more than £150,000 a year. That's a tax bung for just 629,000 people, according to HMRC data. It will cost – by my calculation, because Kwarteng refused to present one – £7.4 billion over the next five years. That's money that could have been spent on services or reducing people's gas bills. Those 629,000 people, a bit less than 2 per cent of the workforce, will get their basic rate of income tax cut, and see taxes on dividends slashed by £4.4bn over the same period. If they work in banking, where £150k mid-career salaries are normal, they'll have the cap on their Christmas bonuses removed. This, in ...

In September 2008, with the financial crisis poised to begin its most exciting and terrifying phase, the Chancellor of the Exchequer cut stamp duty. This stamp duty holiday was extended in 2009; further cuts were announced in 2010, 2014 and 2015. (In 2012, in a clear attempt to ruin my intro, George Osborne actually increased it on pricier properties.) In 2020, with the economy tottering once again thanks to Covid, Rishi Sunak came up with a novel idea to support it: why not cut stamp duty? None of these reforms, best one can tell, have led to a sudden explosion of GDP growth. At some point surely we have to accept that either this button isn’t connected to anything, or else ...

You don’t realise how entangled our lives are with the private digital services that underpin our economy until they’re gone. It’s a lesson that the professional polemicist and free speech advocate Toby Young is learning quickly, as he finds himself and the organisation he set up in 2020, the Free Speech Union, locked out of their PayPal accounts. The online payments company, through which Young gathered donations for his group – which has campaigned for the reinstatement of social media accounts for those who expressed scepticism about the Covid vaccine, and has defended gender-critical academics – also shut the account of Young’s website, the Daily Sceptic, and his personal one. On the face of it, this sounds like a troubling development. It’s eminently ...

Every Thursday evening, furious viewers mass on Twitter to denounce BBC One’s Question Time. Fiona Bruce, the host, is deemed “irritating” and “rude” and seemingly winds up just about everyone, while viewers across the spectrum cry "bias!" without anyone being able to agree on which side her supposed bias lies. Described simultaneously as anti-Brexit, pro-Tory and a “left-wing mouthpiece”, Bruce has inadvertently made herself the figurehead for the culture war in broadcasting, where the right accuse the BBC of wokeism, and the left accuse the BBC of pandering to the establishment. On 23 June, Bruce asked the RMT union boss Mick Lynch whether driving up public sector wages would increase inflation, seemingly in the place of the treasury minister Rachel Maclean, ...

In 1975, Margaret Thatcher declared: “The other side have got an ideology… we must have one as well.” Liz Truss is of a similar mind. As Stephen Bush reported in the New Statesman last year, she would complain to her aides “when they would draft remarks criticising Jeremy Corbyn for being ‘ideological’, telling them that the only good thing about Corbyn was that he had a clear ideology”. Truss is far from the first Conservative prime minister in recent history to cut taxes. David Cameron’s government abolished the 50p income tax rate and reduced corporation tax from 28 per cent to 19 per cent. But whenever possible, Cameron and George Osborne would clothe their actions in progressive garb (recall “we’re ...