A prime minister has arrived in No 10 with, for the first time in living memory, a promise not to cut government borrowing – but to rapidly expand its size and scope, to the reported tune of £100bn. Liz Truss's indifference to the one-time sacred cows of government debt and the deficit follow the trail blazed by Boris Johnson, whose antipathy to austerity was allowed free reign during his premiership. After Brexit, after the terrific fright of the 2017 election, the Tories realised the game was up for spending cuts: even the relatively well-off might, by 2016-17 have started to detect a certain inadequacy in the provision of public services, from schools to local authorities. Johnson immediately increased real terms ...

How harsh will Europe’s energy crisis be this winter? That’s the question dominating the continent’s politics this week following Russia’s decision on 2 September to cut flows of natural gas to Germany via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. For weeks deliveries had already been running at 20 per cent of capacity but they were severed in the wake of a decision by the G7 to impose a price cap on Russian oil last week. Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy giant, initially blamed the pipeline’s shutdown on an oil leak at a gas turbine in a compressor station. Yet on 5 September, Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that Nord Stream gas supplies would not resume until Western sanctions on Russia over ...

I’m going to be honest with you: I didn’t watch Laura Kuenssberg's BBC politics show yesterday morning. I didn’t even click on the Joe Lycett clips when they first started doing the rounds. I’ve nothing against him, or against her: I’d just assumed that it would be more of the same. I used to do ballet when I was a kid, and it’s what the Sunday shows usually remind me of. It’s all choreography. A minister comes on; doesn’t really say anything; the MP representing the opposition whinges that nothing was said; a journalist puts the non-quotes into context by talking about what they’ve heard in parliament recently. Demi-plié; grand plié; relevé; fondu. Sometimes there is a comedian on the panel too; ...

It all started with a guy I was seeing three months ago. He came to visit me in London and, in this city of museums and nightclubs and the West End, he only really seemed excited about one thing. So one weekend we went and rode the Elizabeth Line: he slumped happily on his seat, inhaling the air-conditioned particles, and we rode up and down the enormous escalators. But it didn’t stop with him. One of my male friends messages me weekly with updates on “the Lizzie line” (on the Transport for London map, as a new transport "mode" it is called “the Elizabeth Line”, while mere Tube lines are called the “Victoria” or the “Bakerloo”); others will spend a half hour ...

The heatwave has given way to grey cloud, the summer is over, and across the country millions of children are heading back to school. Many parents will be scrambling to sort out their school uniforms: buying plenty of the right colour socks, and a pair of shoes that fit and won't fall apart after a few weeks – an endeavour that is prohibitively expensive at the best of times, particularly now as the cost-of-living crisis intensifies. Luckily for me, much of my daughter's uniform from last year is still usable, but like many other parents, I still had to do a bit of scrambling. And last week, my scrambling took me to the local branch of a British retailer in search ...

WASHINGTON DC – Last week, the US president Joe Biden said that the former president, Donald Trump, and his most ardent supporters represent “semi-fascism”. Last night (1 September), in a speech in Philadelphia, he made it clear that this was no slip of the tongue. In a 24-minute address, he said that Trump and “Maga Republicans” – “Maga” being the acronym of “Make America Great Again”, Trump’s catchphrase – are extremists and constitute a threat to democracy.  “Not every Republican. Not even a majority... But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans.” And that, he said, was a threat to American democracy.  To put it plainly: Biden was right. ...

Tory politicians used to talk a lot about family. It was a traditional Tory tune for when they addressed any social problems. In a speech delivered earlier today the children’s commissioner of England, Rachel de Souza – hardly a partisan figure – has challenged our frit politicians to start talking about this issue once again. She cited new evidence that the family as we once knew it is disappearing. For the first time in the history of England and Wales, more children are now born to unmarried parents than parents who have walked down the aisle (indeed, walking down the aisle is decreasing too). Divorce is slowly dropping as well, with increasing numbers of cohabitation households. De Souza published new statistics ...

In 1851, the Great Exhibition introduced the British people to the marvels of industry, empire and the world. In 1951, the Clement Attlee government arranged the Festival of Britain, a way of showing that a country exhausted by war and austerity was still a place of invention and creativity. In September 2018, the then-prime minister Theresa May announced that 2022 would see another such event, a “celebration of the creativity and innovation of the United Kingdom”, known as the Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Nobody called it that. They called it the Festival of Brexit. That name, which was never official but was embraced and propagated by the pro-Brexit newspapers, had the unfortunate effect of implying that that accursed ...