Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has hit the ground running. Since entering Downing Street, the new prime minister has been keen to give the impression that a new era has begun. There have been surprise ministerial appointments from outside of parliament, and a flurry of policy announcements, belying the accusation that the party is devoid of ideas. The question is whether these ideas will work: are they enough to deliver the “decade of renewal” and rebuild a dilapidated public realm in an era of fiscal constraints and high interest rates? Perhaps the party's intellectual hinterland is the same as its electoral support: broad but thinly spread, wide but shallow. Much of the likely legislative agenda will take the form of structural, legalistic ...

Government, Keir Starmer said as he stood on the steps of Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time last week, should “treat every single person with respect”. “Whether you voted Labour or not,” he went on, “especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.” This should be no big deal: it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to say when you win an election. Margaret Thatcher said something similar in her “where this is discord, may we bring harmony” speech, and it’s fair to say that neither her record as Prime Minister, nor the fact Starmer is channelling her words, are likely to convince those who feel suspicious about the new guy’s ...

Keir Starmer’s national dominance belies the instability plaguing Welsh Labour. Vaughan Gething could be out as First Minister within a year of his election. His position has been fragile since he lost a vote of confidence 78 days after taking the job in March. Even though he dismissed the defeat as a gimmick and refused to resign, the vote exposed the divisions within his party. It revealed a leader who had failed to bring his members of the Senedd (MS) together – and who will soon face the consequences. Politics is a numbers game. Fundamentally, Gething's Labour does not have a majority in the Senedd. His scandal-strewn leadership has pushed away Plaid Cymru, whose votes Labour needs to govern, as well ...

England are through to their second tournament final of my lifetime, and only their third ever, and yet it still doesn’t quite feel like it. So far, there’s been none of that uncompelled participation that defined the euphoria of the last few tournaments - no lads queuing up to get imitation Phil Foden haircuts, far fewer flags, little of that sense that the football team might serve as a blazon or symbol for the nation at-large. Even Gareth Southgate’s outfits have tumbled, from those distinctive waistcoats to these awful white knit polos. The only obvious trace of the last Euros is the choruses of “Sweet Caroline” which do still leak out of the television while Harry Kane is completing his dumbfounded ...

Picture a Reform MP in your mind’s eye and you will probably conjure a grizzled yet clubbable male boomer who looks like he’s just nipped out for a fag during Henley Royal Regatta. Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and Rupert Lowe all fit the bill – but not the party’s fifth MP. South Basildon and East Thurrock’s James McMurdock, a 38-year-old father of four who grew up in a council house near Basildon, was elected in a shock result for the party and the wider political world after a recount on 5 July. I spent election night at the London Cruise terminal in Tilbury where McMurdock eagerly awaited the South Basildon and East Thurrock verdict. Essex has been viewed as ...

New Labour’s constitutional reforms are arguably its most enduring domestic legacy. Devolved administrations have only been handed more power by the Tories since 2010. And now Keir Starmer has promised to go further with greater devolution across England. In his “Take back control” speech last year, he promised a new law to boost devolution to England’s mayors. To prove his seriousness – and this first week in power is as much about indicating seriousness as delivering policy, hence the trips to Odesa, Europe and the dawn-to-dusk work ethic – England’s 12 metro mayors were invited to Downing Street this morning to discuss the government’s plans to expand devolution over, for instance, employment support or transport policy. The mayors, most of whom are ...

Whether or not 2024 was Britain’s first “TikTok election”, the next one certainly will be. Some politicians, notably Nigel Farage, have built up significant followings on the platform. All our major political parties are on the app too. They don’t really have a choice: TikTok is the social media platform of choice for young voters today, their primary cultural snorkel. But it does come with its own biases. As Marshall McLuhan originally observed of television, “the medium is the message”: we learn just as much about culture from its technological carrier as from its actual content. And this means a politics that is transacted on TikTok will be very different from anything that came before. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves ...

Vladimir Putin’s apologists like to reduce his war on Ukraine to bloodless geopolitical terms. “This all comes down to Nato expansion,” they will argue. “You have to understand what George H.W. Bush did or did not say to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.” “Really, it was the West that provoked Russia to act.”  But then you look at the reality: on 8 July, Russia bombed the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine.   A two-storey wing of the Okhmatdyt hospital in Kyiv was demolished, trapping children and medical workers. “We hear voices, people are under the rubble,” said the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Among the departments hit was the intensive care unit, the operating theatres and the oncology ...