The first PMQs after conference season is usually a fiery edition, with both leaders eager to challenge the policies announced by their opponents and to capitalise on any momentum gained. In normal times, one would expect Rishi Sunak to be questioned by Keir Starmer on his sudden U-turn on HS2 and the shambolic announcement of transport funding that followed, and for the Prime Minister to perhaps accuse Labour of wanting to concrete over the green belt. Today’s session was an altogether different affair. In the wake of the devastating explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, in which hundreds of civilians were killed, the usual cut and thrust of party politics was put to one side. The first question, from the ...

In the second quarter of this year Britain’s rentier economy quietly arrived at a turning point: the end of the buy-to-let property market. According to research published by Savills yesterday, there is no longer any profit to be made from buying a home with a typical loan-to-value ratio (meaning a deposit of 30 per cent or less) and renting it out to someone else. For the first time since 2007, mortgage rates have moved the returns on a typical new buy-to-let into negative territory. The small landlord business is dead. These buyers were the core of the BTL market. Since 2014, 73 per cent of new buy-to-let mortgages have been taken out by people with a deposit of less than 30 ...

This hasn’t been a vintage SNP conference. Ministerial speeches have been low on quality, and the sparkle and fizz that defined these events in recent years has been missing. It’s been hard to avoid the sense that this is a party that knows it is past its peak, however loudly it shouts from the stage. This is one reason that Humza Yousaf’s speech needed to lift the mood. Another is that the First Minister, who took over in March, has so far failed to win over Scotland’s voters – polls show low approval ratings. There is little confidence that he is up to the job, particularly coming after Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, two giants of the independence movement. So this ...

Necessity is the mother of invention and it is necessity that has driven the Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, to announce a new approach to sentencing. In future, there will be a presumption against custodial sentences below 12 months. Quite right, too. This is broadly the policy I sought to implement in 2019 when in the same role. The rationale is that short sentences are not effective in reducing reoffending and can even make matters worse. It is much better to focus on effective community sentences than put people inside for a short period of time when no effective rehabilitative support will be provided. The necessity is that we are running out of prison places. Ever since the government announced its commitment to recruit ...

Exit polls in Poland have confirmed that the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) remains the largest after the country's general election, but it looks like Donald Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform will be in a position to get a coalition together, forming an outright majority in the 460-seat parliament. According to the exit polls, 56 per cent of the electorate voted for parties of the opposition on Sunday (15 October), with a surprisingly high score for the Third Way alliance. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the PiS leader, conceded that it was not clear that his party had won a third term in office. The final results won’t be known until Tuesday 17 October but the Ipsos exit poll seems pretty solid, sampling 90,000 voters ...

The future of conservatism looks uncannily like a return to its recent past. On both sides of the Atlantic the right is doubling down on libertarian economics and culture wars – a curious blend of Truss and Trump. But this is driven by panic and the failure to learn from errors in office, and it is self-defeating: the chaos unleashed by reviving libertarian economic policies will strengthen the case for technocratic solutions. Right-wing populism endorses the same broken market model that leaves millions of people disillusioned and alienated from politics. Mixing economic liberalism with social illiberalism intensifies what I have previously described as our anti-political age. This right-wing revolution is not wholly new. Its origins can be found in the converging ...

As the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and Downing Street in London were lit up with the blue and white flag of Israel – as were many other European landmarks in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Saturday 7 October – no such similar move was made in Dublin. And while scenes of Palestinian revellers on the streets of London or at the base of Sydney Opera House over the weekend may have been met with open-mouthed shock, the throng of Palestinian activists outside Government Buildings in Dublin was hardly unexpected. The pro-Palestinian disposition, which is general to much of Ireland, emerges from an erroneously held sense of kinship. In spite of the obvious and vast differences between the Israel-Palestine conflict and ...

At least Lisa Cameron didn’t defect to Labour, the SNP high command will be telling itself today. Cameron, since 2015 the MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow in the west of Scotland, has crossed the floor of the House to join the Conservatives. Normally, in SNP circles, switching to the Tories would be regarded as heresy on an almost unthinkable scale. The party of Brexiteers, tax cuts, heart-on-the-sleeve Britishness, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – nothing could be more alien to the narrative of what the SNP and the broader independence movement stand for and what they stand against. But timing is everything. Had Cameron joined Labour, especially in the wake of last week’s emphatic SNP defeat in the ...