A new political era has begun. July’s cataclysmic election still left the UK stranded between the past and the future. Labour struggled to achieve political definition despite its landslide victory; Rishi Sunak continued to lead the Conservatives – and was even called “prime minister” by Keir Starmer. Rachel Reeves’s Budget and Kemi Badenoch’s election as Tory leader have ended this phoney war. The former made clear in word and deed that the UK is under new economic management. Public spending will settle at 44.5 per cent of GDP – its highest sustained level in history. Taxation will reach a record high of 38.2 per cent (putting Britain closer to the European social democratic norm).  Reeves has inverted the Conservative mantra that strong ...

The thing about buses, right, is that they’re not very sexy. Agatha Christie did not write murder mysteries set on one; Brief Encounter did not begin at a bus station. Even transport nerds prefer trains, because they look cooler, and because they often come with good maps. Throw in the fact that people who work in London are vastly more likely to commute by train than people anywhere else, and our political class has often seemed strangely oblivious to what remains the UK’s most used form of public transport. In much of the country, buses are not merely the main, but the only form of public transport available. Yet the deep cuts to local services that came with austerity have gone ...

Fundamental to the business culture of Silicon Valley is the idea of the moonshot, in which a company stakes its capital and its reputation on an idea that could change the world. As in the original Apollo programme, prodigious investment is justified by claiming the competition as a zero-sum game. A successful paradigm shift makes the opponent irrelevant. After the iPod, CDs are finished. After Facebook, local newspapers are finished. For investors in the AI bubble, the idea that such technology could wipe out millions of jobs is not a risk but a promise. That is what it means to be disruptive, and it is central to the offer that technology companies make to the market: invest enough and they ...

Towards the end of 1979, Michael Heseltine unveiled a policy which he claimed would lay “the foundations for one of the most important social revolutions of this century”. Heseltine, then Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary, announced the government’s plans to give council tenants the right to buy their homes at a discount. It is not an overstatement to say that his announcement has irreversibly damaged the British housing market. Heseltine was right that Right to Buy would spark a social revolution, though perhaps not of the kind he intended. The introduction of this policy came off the back of more than a decade of prolific housebuilding in the UK. The efforts of Harold Wilson’s government had seen the proportion of council ...

Conversations with the Scottish Labour leadership have not been happy ones in recent months: wrinkled brows, worry, prevarication, hedging.  If they never quite thought they were on a glide path to victory at the 2026 Holyrood election, Keir Starmer’s entrance into Downing Street certainly helped them believe it was likely. But then came a summer and autumn of wild missteps. Too many own goals at Westminster, too little dynamism, a reckless squandering of what should have been a useful honeymoon period. Starmer’s personal poll rating has cratered. John Swinney’s SNP has started presenting as a more reasonable, moderate and agreeable force. Eek. The effect is that Anas Sarwar’s momentum has stuttered. We’ll see what the polls say in the coming months, but ...

This Budget was the one that Labour always promised to deliver – if you listened closely enough. As I wrote before the election, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ pledge to “prevent austerity” was only achievable through larger tax rises. These, I suggested, would be imposed after Reeves discovered “the books are worse than thought”. That’s exactly what has happened. The £41.5bn of tax rises announced by Reeves put the UK within touching distance of the western European norm (a tax take of 38.2 per cent of GDP will leave us level with the Netherlands and not far off Germany). Combine this with a new industrial strategy, stronger workers’ rights and the highest public investment since Harold Wilson and a distinctively social-democratic ...

The political row over this Budget will be about whether Labour has stuck to its manifesto commitments on tax and borrowing. As I argued yesterday, the government is not on strong ground on this point. It promised to stick to its existing fiscal rules and maintained that – beyond the very limited tax increases it had identified – there would be no need for higher taxes. The spending plans which they inherited were recognised as being tight but not undeliverable. Any additional spending would be paid for from higher economic growth. That is not what we heard from Rachel Reeves today. Instead, we heard an argument for higher spending funded by higher taxes and higher investment funded by higher borrowing. The political cost ...

It has been an eventful decade for Rishi Sunak. Ten years ago this month, as a bright-eyed hedge fund manager with no political experience but a first in PPE from Oxford, he was selected to succeed William Hague as the Conservative candidate for Richmond in Yorkshire. Today – having delivered several of his own budgets as chancellor and faced Keir Starmer in dozens of PMQs sessions – he stood at the despatch box as leader of the opposition and delivered what is all but certain to be his final performance in frontline politics. Or perhaps that should be his final performances. Because there were two Rishi Sunaks in the House of Commons today – both dramatically distinct from his persona as ...