Rishi Sunak has essentially ruled out a May election, telling reporters on his trip to Mansfield today that “my working assumption is we’ll have a general election in the second half of this year”. His comment comes after fevered speculation over the Christmas break that the government was preparing the ground for a spring election (coinciding with the local and mayoral elections in England on 2 May). The biggest hint was Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that the Budget would be held earlier than usual, on 6 March, which followed his decision to introduce the 2 per cent cut in National Insurance in January rather than at the start of the tax year in April. As I wrote on Tuesday, there are obvious reasons ...

Keir Starmer’s New Year speech today in Bristol was all about politics. What is it? Why do people hate it? And what makes for good politics? He used this slot last year to riff on the same theme. Back then, before co-opting the language of “Take back control”, Starmer sharpened his criticism of Westminster being obsessed with the short term at the expense of the national interest. This was, he said, “sticking-plaster politics” – a phrase that now occupies a top spot in the Starmer lexicon. Lobbing a few criticisms at Westminster while channelling the language of Brexit was a smart move for a knight who has been at the centre of British institutions for decades. But it presented a problem: how ...

It’s not often that a fringe party steals the news agenda, but funny things happen when Nigel Farage is (or is at least rumoured to be) involved.  In a packed (if rather soulless conference room) in a glitzy hotel in London Victoria, the tension was palpable. The big announcement of the press conference was to be Reform UK’s candidate in the upcoming Wellingborough by-election, triggered by the suspension from parliament of the Tory MP Peter Bone. Might Bone, who lost the Conservative whip in October, defect to Reform (founded by Farage in 2019 as the Brexit Party) and stand as their candidate? Or might Farage himself make an eighth attempt to become an MP? The Reform party leader Richard Tice was ...

This may be the year in which more than a decade of Tory rule ends, when Keir Starmer could be in No 10, hosting cabinet, attending the National Security Council and negotiating with foreign powers. But what obstacles lie ahead? Business confidence and the government’s grip on parliament might be better under Labour but the country’s fundamental problems will be the same whoever wins the election. A stagnant economy, struggling public services and unstable foreign affairs won’t disappear with a change in ministers. The international context is growing more fractious. Conflict between states, as Adam Tooze notes, was rising even before the 7 October Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. This year will see elections in Pakistan, India, the US, ...

January is the best month of the year because January is honest. It doesn’t lie to you and it doesn’t let you lie to yourself. It starts not at midnight on New Year’s Eve – that tired final festive fling that no one needs – nor on the fug of New Year’s Day, when you might manage to struggle to the corner shop, dodging the broken glass and the strange quiet outside. No, it’s in your first week back at work, when you wake to hear the rain against the bedroom window, and it’s still dead-of-night dark, save for the light of your phone or your SAD lamp (which uses light therapy to imitate summer sunshine) that the month properly begins. Picture yourself ...

The “cult of personality” that forms around successful leaders is often criticised. And it makes for an easy target, especially once they’re gone. Mhairi Black, the firebrand SNP deputy leader, is the latest to take aim, saying today (2 January) that the focus on Nicola Sturgeon during the former first minister’s leadership left her “uncomfortable”. Black told Times Radio that Sturgeon’s departure from office was “quite healthy because I’m a big believer in politics should be about policy as opposed to personality”. There should have been greater focus on the wider independence movement, she added. “There’s a balance to be struck and I’m not convinced that we always got the balance right.” There are a few things to be said about this. ...

The New York Times has become the first major media organisation to begin legal action against the use of its journalism by large language models and the “AI” chatbots, such as ChatGPT, on which they are based. In a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed in New York yesterday (27 December), the NYT claims that millions of its articles – products it spent “billions of dollars” creating – have been used to train the technology behind ChatGPT. On the one hand this seems like a fairly straightforward case: publicly available information confirms that the NYT was the largest privately owned component of the Common Crawl dataset – a “copy of the internet” that comprised 60 per cent of the data used ...

The Scottish budget began, as it always does under the SNP, with a prolonged whinge. There is not enough money, said Finance Secretary Shona Robison. This is all the Tories’ (read: the Union’s) fault. In the absence of complete control of the Scottish economy, she could only mitigate the damage inflicted by Westminster. Poor Shona, with her titchy £60m swag bag. Given the SNP’s preference for penal tax rates, it’s hard not to be grateful that her powers are limited. Even within her curtailed remit, Robison was able to introduce yet another new tax rate of 45 per cent on earnings between £75,000 and £125,140. The Scottish tax system now has six separate rates, introducing a heroic level of complexity. Further, ...