A new economic consensus is taking shape. Gone is the idea that globalisation is inevitable, that the future lies in the “knowledge economy”, based on transferrable skills like PowerPoint presentations and that Britain can merely compete in internationally tradable services such as finance and corporate law. We're finding that our “just-in-time” economy built on short-term profit maximisation has not served us well in an age of insecurity in which we need longer-term capacity “just-in-case”. Covid-19 shone a harrowing light on the lack of critical medical supplies such as face masks and PPE, which we had to import from the country where the virus originated. Meanwhile, the geopolitical shocks of the wars in Ukraine and now in Gaza have laid bare our lack ...

The largest numerical majority to be felled in by-election history (Mid Bedfordshire). And the largest percentage point majority to be felled in postwar by-election history (Tamworth).  This isn’t standard midterm blues for the government of the day. This is indicative of everything I’ve been writing about for the past year and a bit. Exhaustion. Apathy. Indifference. Stop the world, I want to get off. All of these sentiments capture the state of politics and why Labour picked up ultra-safe Conservative seats last week. And this is likely to crystallise into something awfully dramatic for the Tories at the next general election. Exhaustion with the cost-of-living crisis. Concern for this issue continues to transcend any other across every stratum of society. It matters in ...

Someone once noted that to play the video game of British politics as the Conservative Party is to play on “easy mode”. A key element of this is how most of the important newspapers are perennially on their side. Even in an age when print readership is declining, those papers’ ability to shape the narratives on which most of Westminster’s unreality game is based is usually a huge asset to the party. It is an important part of a wider media-political ecosystem that is hardwired to view the world from a right-of-centre perspective. We are in one of the rare periods in which this asset is a liability. The lens through which politics is seen, always a little askance, a bit ...

As a general rule, when trying to evaluate the state of public opinion, we should care less about by-election results than we do. When voters go to the polls in a by-election, there is usually very little at stake other than the scale of the discontent aimed at the government of the day. Voters ask themselves the question “would you like to give the government a kick up the backside?” to which the answer is usually yes. If we really want to understand the current state of public opinion, it is much better to look at the opinion polls. Does this give the Conservatives any comfort given their defeats in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire? In this particular case, the answer is no. For starters, relying ...

Labour has overturned huge majorities in two Tory strongholds: voters in Mid Bedfordshire have decided they want an MP for whom the seat isn’t merely a platform for a TV career, and the people of Tamworth have turned down the opportunity to be represented by someone who makes crass jokes about hungry children.  Calls for a general election sooner than the last possible moment (January 2025) will now increase, and are likely to be ignored, because the Conservatives will want as much time as possible to deliver on targets such as reducing inflation (see here for a full explanation). We’re going to hear a lot about Rishi Sunak’s “zombie government”.  The downside for the Conservatives of waiting longer is that more of the public realm is going to ...

These two middle England by-elections don’t change the story, or even bend it much; but they strongly confirm it. Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth are not seats you would expect Labour to win unless it was on an almost unstoppable course towards national power. Tick. They are mid-1990s Blair-sized victories. Tick. Overturning majorities of more than 24,000 in Mid Beds and more than 19,000 in Tamworth is a huge achievement of discipline and organisation, one that senior members of Keir Starmer’s team thought unattainable only a few weeks ago. Bookies were equally uncertain. The Westminster gossip last week had been of the Tories narrowly retaining both. So let’s not be too world-weary. But does it really matter that the opposite happened? We know ...

In one of the most remarkable nights in UK electoral history, the Conservatives have suffered two dramatic defeats to Labour in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. In the latter constituency, previously held by Nadine Dorries and never won by Labour, Keir Starmer’s party overcame a Tory majority of 24,664 – the largest numerical majority yet overturned. Meanwhile, in Tamworth, Labour achieved its second largest by-election swing since 1945 (23.9 per cent).  Professor John Curtice, the polling expert, acknowledging Labour’s other recent by-election victories in Selby and Ainsty and Rutherglen and Hamilton West, said the UK was witnessing “a sequence of by-election swings of the kind that we had in the 1992 to 1997 parliament”, which ended with Labour winning a majority of 179 ...

On Tuesday 17 October, a blast struck the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. The origin of that blast was unknown. Videos filmed from multiple angles show that the blast occurred at 4.59pm GMT (6.59pm in Gaza). News of the explosion began to reverberate across social media within 80 minutes, as the BBC News at Six was concluding.  Shortly after the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, reported that 500 people had been killed in the blast, which they blamed on an airstrike by the Israeli defence forces. A spokesman for the IDF said it was investigating its cause. Minutes later, at 6.51pm, the BBC’s Breaking News account on X (formerly Twitter) sent out a post to its millions of followers ...