It was impossible to miss the explosion of joy and relief from campaigners that greeted the UK Supreme Court’s verdict that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas,” tweeted For Women Scotland, the group that had challenged the Scottish government on the issue. There were tears, hugs and champagne. This ruling had been a long time coming, and followed years of abuse and threats towards those who stuck their necks above the parapets and refused to pull them in. The UK’s highest court left no room for confusion in its finding. “The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a ...

Despite becoming the mouthpiece for the Trump administration’s unprecedented hostility towards their European allies, vice-president JD Vance has made himself popular in one corner of Europe by whispering the magic words that make every British conservative of certain persuasion simply melt: “You were right over Suez.” Even though Vance’s recent admission that “the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal” was just a throwaway line in a longer interview which focused on the need for Europe to be more independent of the US, it struck a nerve with a portion of the British right who have been waiting to hear this for years. The Spectator magazine responded with an article celebrating Vance ...

At what point does a legislator – particularly one of the same political party as the government – have to intervene and restrict the powers of the government over trade negotiations?    This is the question that Republican members of Congress should currently be asking themselves. Donald Trump may have partially retreated on his “Liberation Day” announcements, but he has still implemented a dramatic increase in tariffs and is doing much damage to the global and US economies. Even if Trump retreats further or succeeds in agreeing bilateral trade deals with some countries, the uncertainty created by his erratic policy approach is destroying business confidence. This is not a good place to be.  Congressional Republicans (many of whom, no doubt, are New Statesman ...

The names of Graeme Roy and Stephen Boyle won’t ring many, if any, bells with the average Scottish voter. They are, however, two of the most significant and consequential figures in public life. Roy and Boyle are the people’s brain and voice when it comes to keeping watch over the devolved state’s performance, the former as head of the Scottish Fiscal Commission, the latter as Auditor General. Over the past few years, both have produced a series of sharp-toothed reports examining the outcomes of government policy, the domestic and external pressures being brought to bear on the nation, and its prospects. They have done so ruthlessly, banging on dials, scouring the data and issuing ever doomier prognostications. Roy and Boyle have fearlessly ...

One of the ironies of Brexit is that since leaving the EU, the UK has become a more European country. Tax and spending levels – once likened to the US’s – are beginning to resemble Germany’s. Britain’s “flexible” labour market is undergoing continental-style regulation. And it will soon be the government’s job to make the trains run on time. The UK’s politics, too, has an increasingly European appearance. Two opinion polls published this week – by YouGov and More in Common – feature four parties on between 17 and 24 per cent of the vote: Labour, the Conservatives, Reform and the Liberal Democrats (riding an anti-Trump wave). Throw in the Greens (on between 7 and 9 per cent) and this starts ...

At the beginning of a crisis, actions always trail behind events. In autumn 2007, as the first bank run for 150 years began, Gordon Brown refused to nationalise Northern Rock (fearing it an “Old Labour” remedy). By the following year he had taken the commanding heights of the banking system into public ownership. In early March 2020, as the worst pandemic for a century began, Boris Johnson declared that it was “business as usual” and reacted with libertarian incredulity to calls for a lockdown. A few weeks later he was amassing emergency powers and ordering the UK’s “free-born people” to stay home. Even as a new world comes into being, politicians cling to the old one. They, like us, are creatures of ...

The question every finance minister, factory owner, stockbroker and person who uses money to buy stuff is trying to answer is whether Donald Trump’s tariffs are permanent. Will he back down on his huge wave of tariffs once other countries drop their own tariffs on American products? Or is protectionism the point? Team Trump itself does not seem to know. Each day more loyalists start to sound as if they hope the president is lying but fear he is being honest. Advisers look scattered during interviews trying to explain the strategy behind these tariffs. As markets crash, the treasury secretary Scott Bessent has spent a week evading questions with the nonchalance of someone who has not been the treasury secretary during ...

A few weeks ago, a reporter asked President Donald Trump whether he was still going to impose tariffs on Canada. A simple “yes” would have sufficed, and been terrifying enough; but Trump being Trump, that question was enough to inspire a long and rambling answer which strongly implied that Canada was not actually a real country at all. His response brought to mind Vladimir Putin’s ominous 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukraine”. The bit that jumped out at me, though, was this: “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the US, just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago.” In ...