Americans go to the polls next week in the midterm elections, with Donald Trump’s Republicans facing the prospect of losing control of Congress. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll puts the Democrats eleven points ahead among registered voters, 47% to 36%, with the Republicans struggling against rising prices and an increasingly toxic president. There is even the … Read more
Every few months, a familiar story appears in the newspapers and across social media. Public-sector workers are enjoying bigger pay rises than their private-sector counterparts. The implication is usually that those employed by the taxpayer are doing rather better than the people whose taxes pay their salaries. There is some evidence to support the claim. … Read more
It is Andy Burnham’s first Labour conference as PM. The big headline is that he wants social care to be free at the point of use, and that some, but not by any means all, of the funding will come from scaling back the pensions triple lock. At first sight, this sounds like an obviously … Read more
When I moved back to the UK from Spain last year, two things struck me. Every British city centre smells of weed. Brits are angry, and they are at their angriest behind the wheel of a car. I have written before about how the UK quietly decriminalised weed. Theresa May cut police budgets, police forces … Read more
It’s September and the students are going back to Uni. Half a million new graduates will be getting their student loan documents. I have been writing about student loans for a while. Back in 2018 I wrote The Great Student Loans Swindle, followed a month later by Student Loans Swindle 2: Cash from Chaos. Earlier … Read more
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a slightly tentative blog about small boats crossing the Channel. Something odd appeared to be happening. In August 2025, the number of people arriving in Britain by small boat had fallen by around 40 per cent compared with the previous month. It was the lowest August figure for … Read more
I’m in Albania, one of the European countries with a Muslim majority. When people talk about Islam in Europe, the conversation often starts in the 1950s or 1960s, with immigration from former colonies and labour migration into countries such as Britain, France and Germany. Increasingly, it degenerates into conspiracy theories about Muslim invasions or the … Read more
This summer I visited Northern Ireland for the first time in more than twenty years. The last time I had been there was shortly after the Good Friday Agreement. I worked for a while with Mo Mowlam when she was MP for Redcar, and my memories of Northern Ireland were inevitably bound up with that … 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
