Clacton is back in the news. When I visited earlier this year, I didn’t realise it would briefly become the epicentre of British politics. Nigel Farage is fighting a by-election against Count Binface. If he wins, he has beaten a bin. If he loses, he’s been beaten by one. Farage himself has considerable form when … Read more
I spent over a decade working in Government commercials. From outsourcing deals to NHS PFI. I was even a member of the DWP commercial board for a few years. There is one part of Government commercials which puzzles me: The Government insists that Britain exports very little military equipment to Israel. At the same time, … Read more
Andy Burnham and Treasury Death Grop aren’t the hot new indie band coming out of Manchester. It is a central part of the our new Prime Ministers strategy. He has declared war on one of Britain’s oldest institutions. Not Parliament, the Bank of England or Whitehall civil servants. His target is the Treasury. For decades, … Read more
We all know what GPs used to look like. Mostly men with beards, they made house calls, wore tweed jackets and carried their patient notes around in battered Lloyd George envelopes. Those days have largely disappeared. Home visits are now rare, many practices no longer have a single full-time partner, and patients are often more … Read more
The Trump administration has made MAHA – Make America Healthy Again one of its defining domestic initiatives. The movement promises to tackle chronic disease, improve diets and reverse the decline in Americans’ health. Some of its proposals have attracted widespread criticism and may well make matters worse. Central to the MAHA world view is the … Read more
The pharmaceutical agreement between the UK and the United States was signed last year, but it has suddenly become politically controversial. Incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham is under pressure to cancel or renegotiate it. The broad bargain was straightforward. The deal has returned to the headlines because of a paper published in the British Medical … Read more
It’s the 40th anniversary of the end of the miners strike and I went back to Redhills to watch a documentary about the. strike. People who grew up in former mining owns bemoaned the decline of manufacturing and similar industries, and the disappearance of the tight knit communities that grew up around them Thatcher’s period … Read more
For much of the last forty years, Britain’s economic direction appeared settled. Governments argued about tax rates, spending priorities and public services, but the broad framework changed little. Privatisation, deregulation, competition, independent regulation, free trade and globalisation became part of the political consensus. Even Labour governments largely accepted the settlement created during the Thatcher years. … Read more
The US government is refunding $81bn in tariff payments to importers, following the Supreme Court’s February 2026 ruling that Trump did not have authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose many of his tariffs. Not every business has been repaid: In June alone, about $49.2bn was refunded; May and June together accounted … Read more
