James Cleverly, the new Home Secretary, is in a scramble to reduce immigration to the UK. After the record high net migration figure of 2022 was revised up to 745,000, ministers have been under pressure from Tory backbenchers to bring the numbers down. The government now says it will stop employers paying overseas workers in shortage occupations 20 per cent less than British employees, raise the minimum salary threshold for skilled migrants from £26,200 to £38,700 and stop care staff bringing family with them to the UK. These measures are not as dramatic as they sound. Health and care workers, teachers and other public sector workers on national pay scales are exempt from the raised salary threshold, after all. And the ...

Keir Starmer did not announce anything new in his speech on the economy at the Resolution Foundation yesterday (4 December). But the details of Labour’s proposition have become more pronounced. The fundamentals have not changed. But it is worth reciting what they are. Labour’s fiscal rules dominate its plans for government. Their precise nature remain ambiguous. The £28bn green prosperity fund is still official policy but is mentioned with reluctance, as if it were the brainchild of a vexing coalition partner. Labour’s big fiscal bet remains that cheap, supply-side reforms (such as liberalising planning for houses and infrastructure) will unleash growth, which in turn will provide the revenues that the state can invest – not the other way around. Starmer says ...

We live in an age of anarchy. The post-1989 utopian dreams of perpetual peace between East and West have given way to the dystopian nightmare of proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Illusions about a worldwide convergence towards Western-style liberal market democracy and the inevitable forward march of free-market globalisation collide with the reality of rising authoritarianism across the West and “the rest”, combined with a marked shift towards protectionist policies in the US-China trade and technology wars. For years, if not decades, the liberal world order has brought about chaos and conflict. In a world of disorder, geopolitics is characterised by three forces of profound instability. First, a great-power rivalry over economic resources and civilisational norms opposing the West and ...

Two stories this morning must have caused Rishi Sunak to grimace into his yoghurt and blueberries. The first is the monthly cabinet league table published by the website ConservativeHome. December’s poll of Conservative members puts the Prime Minister’s net satisfaction rating at -25.4 per cent – his lowest to date, and significantly behind any of his cabinet colleagues. While it’s impossible to measure Sunak against Liz Truss, as the only ConHome league table of her short premiership came out before the full economic calamity became clear, his rating is lower than Boris Johnson’s was days before an avalanche of cabinet resignations forced him to quit. Johnson’s fall from grace was more dramatic given his long-standing popularity with the Conservative membership (which Sunak ...

Who’s leading in Scotland? On independence, the No side – those not in favour – has a narrow lead. But in party terms, it’s much closer. The previously moribund Scottish Labour has enjoyed a resurgence in fortunes, while support for the SNP has plummeted since Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.  This polling transformation was most clearly seen in the October by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, where Labour far outperformed forecasts. While the numbers pointed to Keir Starmer’s party winning by five to ten points, Labour beat the SNP by 31 – 23 more points than it got at the previous election in the constituency. If the same swing was replicated across Scotland, the party’s number of MPs would increase from two to ...

Labour leaders have a habit of lauding Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair said he “always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done”. Ed Miliband offered the more muted reflection upon her death that she “broke the mould”. Gordon Brown described her as a “conviction politician” who saw “the need for change”. Even Keir Starmer said that Thatcher was “right” about law and order in his speech on crime in March. It should come as no surprise, then, that the current Labour leader once again praised the late Tory PM yesterday for her capacity to bring about “meaningful change”. In the Sunday Telegraph, he wrote: "Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting ...

There was a kind of grim symmetry. As the inquiry into the Covid pandemic turned its attention to Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, the death was announced of a very different figure, who had steered Britain through a very different crisis – though one almost as serious. It is hard to imagine a politician more different from the performative, self-indulgent antics of Johnson’s Downing Street than Alistair Darling. Here was a man who listened intently, respected experts and institutions, but who brought a bracing dose of scepticism to every conversation.  In public he could seem dryly austere. In private he had a biting, sardonic wit. His wife Maggie, a warm and gregarious working-class Scottish journalist, kept a table overflowing with food and laughter ...

Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: Matt Hancock is being marmalised by the Covid inquiry. Today was day one of Hancock’s second appearance before the inquiry, for Module 2, focused on “core UK decision-making and political governance”. Having chosen somewhat bizarrely to wear the same washed-out salmon pink tie as when he appeared in July for Module 1 (perhaps he felt it had brought him luck the last time he faced the austere Hugo Keith KC, or perhaps he wanted to evoke the memory of the early Covid briefings, during which pink ties featured heavily), the whipless MP for West Suffolk was visibly wilting in his chair minutes in. Keith had begun by questioning the accuracy of Hancock’s book, ...