This year, for the second time in two years, Sheffield Council will not turn on the city’s Christmas lights. The local authority is currently projecting a £34.3m overspend and as a result has had to find costs to balance the books. In Birmingham, where just over a year ago the city council declared itself effectively bankrupt, the streetlights will be dimmed to save money. This is part of a £300m programme of savings which the council must make in order to keep running. For Birmingham’s residents, this means cuts to adult social care services, children’s services, flood defences, and highway maintenance, and a 10 per cent rise in council tax. The council has said its cuts programme could see the loss ...

Diagnosing British class is a sly business. Observe two strangers from the highly sensitive middle echelons meet for the first time and you can see the antennae twitching. The major as opposed to minor public school, the ambition of the family holiday (Costa Brava vs Côte d'Azur), the closely surveyed slopes of accent and vocabulary – all are brought in for trial and judgement. But for those weary of these routines, there is hope. According to a new study published in the journal English World-Wide, Nancy Mitford’s “U and Non U”, the most famous account of social distinctions in everyday speech, has been made redundant. A statistically significant sample of British people simply couldn’t distinguish upper from non-upper. The carefully ...

This autumn marks the end of traditional steel making in South Wales and the shut down of the UK’s last coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire. The closure of the Tata Steel blast furnace at Port Talbot is the culmination of a long-drawn and deliberate running down of the UK’s steel industry by governments without serious industrial ambition and in thrall to global capital. The UK’s remaining blast furnaces at the Chinese-owned British Steel plant in Scunthorpe are also soon to close, ending our domestic capacity to produce primary steel, an accolade shared with only Saudi Arabia in the G20. Let’s not forget, too, the loss of as many as 5,000 jobs, a devastating blow to families and communities ...

If Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Israel this week to call for a ceasefire is anything like his other ten visits in the past year, it might look something like this. Halfway through a fruitless two-hour negotiation with the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an alarm signalling a rocket attack will ring. They will descend six floors to a bunker, where Blinken might catch a word with the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, who will restate his view that Israel is fighting “human animals and we are acting accordingly”. Meanwhile, Blinken’s adviser will wander off into the bunker’s garage to find a phone signal so he can update the national security adviser Jake Sullivan on the Israelis’ intransigence. Back ...

After an uncertain start, the Budget offers Labour a chance to light up the story we told when we first launched our manifesto. Keir Starmer was bold: Labour’s number-one promise was wealth creation. But how to make good on that pledge? Whenever we talk about wealth creation, the guiding question is simple: who are we creating wealth for? The last 14 years of Conservative rule have been very good for some. The top 1 per cent in Britain have seen their wealth grow by £1trn. The average 1 per-center has enjoyed a £2.2m boost to their fortunes since 2010, 41 times more than the remaining 99 per cent. £850bn of quantitative easing (QE) kept interest rates low and saw asset prices soar. ...

Back in August, during my interview with Sadiq Khan, I asked him about the upcoming US presidential election. He explicitly backed Kamala Harris, adding, “It’s no secret many Labour Party members go and volunteer for the Democrats during presidential elections. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Many of my staffers helped all three: Obama, Clinton and Biden.”  As the US election enters its final fortnight, Labour staff have duly travelled to campaign for Harris. A now-deleted LinkedIn post by Sofia Patel, the party’s head of operations, spoke of “nearly 100 Labour Party staff (current and former) going to the US” with ten remaining places (“we will sort your housing”, she promised). This act has prompted an extraordinary row with the Trump campaign. In ...

“I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s,” said Donald Trump as he exchanged his suit jacket for a yellow-strapped apron. It’s the motion every member of the McDonald’s crew across the world on kitchen shift must perform to begin work. But Trump was there as part of a shrewd political strategy: a photo-op showing him working at the fast-food chain for a day, a simple stunt that has produced some of the most bizarre yet powerful images of the entire presidential campaign. Clearly, Trump wasn’t working a real McDonald’s shift. The store in Feasterville, Pennsylvania had been closed down for normal business so that it could be used by his campaign. The “beautiful” people he handed bags of food to were ...

When John Spencer, the West Wing actor who plays Leo McGarry, President Bartlett’s chief of staff, visited the UK he was surprised to find senior politicians gushing at him. One told him that his visit was “one of the greatest moments of my life”. Jonathan Powell, then Tony Blair’s chief of staff, even made time to meet him at No 10 to get his advice.      In reality, no one beyond the Westminster bubble would have heard of the Downing Street chief of staff until Dominic Cummings made the headlines under Boris Johnson. More recently, the role has been in the spotlight again after Sue Gray lasted less than 100 days in government. Gray officially left because she had “become the story” – ...