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Andrew TettenbornThe Spectator |
Hidden in the hot air of Angela Rayner’s devolution white paper published just before Christmas – there are promises, for example, to empower...
Labour’s election promise to respect Brexit and at the same time reset our relations with the EU was easy to make. Keir Starmer must have realised...
Stories of two-tier justice are back. On Monday, Victoria Thomas Bowen, the model who doused Nigel Farage with milkshake on the Clacton campaign...
There was nothing seriously unexpected in Rachel Reeves’s speech today to EU finance ministers. Most of it was non-committal flim-flam: ‘I believe...
There was something predictable in the government’s agreement last week to accept defeat in the Belfast High Court. The overtly republican Irish...
It’s grim up north in Scotland, we’re told. A mission from Edinburgh has produced a report about the woes of life in the Highlands and Islands,...
Education Minister Bridget Phillipson wants to make our schools engines of ambition and social mobility. Good for her. Unfortunately, some of the...
It’s police overreach season again on free speech and non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. On Remembrance Day morning, we had Essex police’s...
There’s a beguiling simplicity to the idea behind Kim Leadbetter’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, published yesterday. If someone is...
Universities in the UK desperately needed Bridget Phillipson’s announcement this afternoon of a rise in home tuition fees. They will now rise from...
The East Riding of Yorkshire is flat, prosperously agricultural and slightly off the beaten track. Deeply conservative, it isn’t the place you...
The firearms officer Martyn Blake was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba this week. Kaba was a serious wrong ‘un: a violent gangland enforcer with a...
Adam Smith-Connor was this week convicted of a heinous offence, slapped with a conditional discharge and a costs order for £9,000. The actual crime...
In Labour’s manifesto this year, Keir Starmer cannily sought to reassure any Brexiteers out there by ruling out a return to the EU single market....
Nobody should be surprised that Boris Johnson favours a referendum on leaving the ECHR, as his book now makes clear. Boris is an instinctive...
The fees English universities are allowed to charge home students in England are fixed by government fiat. At £9,250 per year, they are some of the...
There are not many women in prison, but those who are inside show worryingly high rates of mental illness, suicide and self-harm; their families...
The fleet of border control cutters responsible for patrolling in our waters (and at times for dealing with irregular migrants on them) is showing...
Our universities are in a mess. Too many degrees lack intellectual quality and utility, and leave those doing them with little but disappointment...
The decision to scrap one or two-word Ofsted inspection grades for England’s schools is good news for teachers – but bad news for just about...
It’s a curious political world. Few who voted Labour last month actually wanted Labour policies, or for that matter had more than the haziest idea...
The longer it continues in office, the more reactionary and beholden to vested interests this government turns out to be. So far it has surrendered...
The Labour party is in a bind over cars. Its instincts – collectivist, green, managerialist – strongly favour anti-car measures like low traffic...
University hopefuls trepidatiously opening their official A-level emails this morning will on the whole be happier than last year. All the...
The riots of 2024 will be remembered for many things. One of them is the way the establishment spectacularly closed ranks on online speech. ...
Authorities encountering the kind of civil disorder that has marked the last few days in Britain are best advised to keep a cool head and quietly...
Nobody said much about it before the election, but the new government inherits a ghastly financial problem with the higher education system. Rising...
The prison sentences passed on the Just Stop Oil protesters who immobilised the M25 – five years for Roger Hallam and four for the others – were...