That the housing market in London and the south-east of England is broken seems to be broadly accepted by everybody except the politicians who could do anything about it and out-of-touch boomers with nice houses they bought in the Nineties. Yet even for people as empathy deficient as the “let them quit avocados” brigade, the news that four in ten people under 30 are spending 30 per cent (or more) of their salaries on rent ought to be a cause for concern. The renters are of course the most obvious losers, caught between rising rents and energy bills and inflation pushing up the cost of leisure and essentials. But they aren’t the only ones. The young are more likely than older ...

Tens of thousands of rail workers are on strike this week, refusing to take a real-terms pay cut and have their jobs threatened with redundancy.And yet rail companies made £500m in profits during the Covid lockdown – that’s enough to give every single one of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT)’s 40,000 rail workers going on strike this week £12,500 each – a pay rise of more than 30 per cent. I’m quite sure the leaders of the rail unions would settle for considerably less than that, but it illustrates the fact that the money is there. The issue, as ever, is who is getting it. Britain’s railways are a mess – and were made so by ...

Today is A-level results day, the first since 2019 on which students are receiving results based on public exams. As predicted, the number of top grades has fallen, while the number of students who applied but have been left without a university place has risen to more than 20,000, a 46 per cent increase on last year. There are many reasons for this – competition from lucrative international students, regulators trying to control grade inflation, a backlog caused by universities over-offering – but the most persistent reason is this: our continued gambling on predicted grades. Predicted grades are infamously inaccurate. Only 16 per cent of students actually achieve them, according to research by University College London; in 2019, 84 per cent ...

In 2012, Liz Truss and four of her Conservative colleagues published Britannia Unchained, a sort of manifesto which, among its various Thatcher-on-steroids policy prescriptions, contained the following, now-infamous quotation: “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor.” Rishi Sunak reminded her of this during one of the early debates of the Tory leadership contest; Truss replied shiftily that that particular bit was the work of Dominic Raab, who was, as it happened, backing Sunak. And given that this information fits with everything we know about the politics, personality and political skill of Dominic Raab, I, at least, thought no ...

Look, it is an absolute, irrefutable fact that no human being has ever uttered anything funnier than when, asked what her name was, my then-18-month-old deadpanned: “bum bum”, before breaking into a knowing grin. Admittedly, her sense of humour errs on the scatological. Toddlers aren’t generally known for their wry or sophisticated wit, or their understanding of political nuance. Which is why I probably wouldn’t take the aforementioned child to an hour-long Edinburgh Fringe show by a comedian hailed as “our foremost satirical stand-up”. It would be terribly awkward. She’d laugh at all the wrong bits. Still, this week one man bravely chose to cast such doubts aside and took his newborn to an Edinburgh Fringe show by the comedian Matt ...

The comic Jerry Sadowitz has been cancelled, according to various figures on the right. This is appalling, they say: everyone knows Sadowitz should be allowed to get his penis out on stage, wave it at a woman and call Rishi Sunak a P*** with zero consequences. Jerry has always been offensive, so he should be allowed to continue being offensive well into the 22nd century. And the Pleasance Theatre, the Edinburgh Fringe venue that booked his performance last Friday (12 August), had no right to cancel his next gig. They should have known what he was like and not booked him in the first place. It’s censorship on a par with what’s happened to Salman Rushdie, they claim. Sigh. Unless the news ...

The New Statesman is not usually in the business of giving financial advice, but following the announcement that a new lender, Perenna, has been awarded a licence to bring 50-year mortgages to the UK market, I will make an exception and tell you this: do not apply for a 50-year mortgage. These are ludicrously expensive products that the government should never have allowed, and the very fact that they exist suggests that the housing boom is at an end.   The idea might not sound too bad to begin with: 50 years of paying 4.5 per cent interest, and never having to worry about where interest rates will go. Just buy a house, and very slowly pay for it. A slight snag is that ...

On hearing the news on Friday evening (12 August) that the author Salman Rushdie had been stabbed more than ten times at a literary event in New York state, most people likely had a similar reaction: chilling shock, then dread that the act was likely motivated by a 33-year-old fatwa, or edict, calling for his murder. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the $3m bounty for Rushdie’s death shortly after the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), when geopolitics and culture were intersecting in a unique moment. Rushdie spent almost a decade in hiding. Despite the decades that passed it may still have led to his hospitalisation. He could lose an eye and a kidney, as well as the function ...