James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.
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Here are some numbers that too many people who work in and around politics don’t know. In any given year, around 700,000 young people turn 18 and leave school. A little under half of them go on to higher education (HE). The other half, around 360,000, do something else. Roughly half of these non-HE school
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Schools should stay closed until September, according to a big teaching union: In view of the continued and pressing public health challenges and the considerable task that will be required to ensure that every school is ready to admit increased numbers of children and adults into safe learning and working environments, the NASUWT urges ministers
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Every now and then, the House of Commons sees one of those speeches, a moment when an MP, generally a backbencher, speaks with power and clarity and honesty. Speeches that deserve to be heard far beyond parliament, partly because of what they say and partly because of how it’s said. Speeches that give politics a
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It is open season on the Lobby. Social media is full of condemnation for political correspondents over the questions they ask at the daily coronavirus briefing. Polling, private and public, shows that UK trust in media reporting has suffered badly in this crisis. Ministers and officials privately rage about the quality of reporting on much
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Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus comparable to a man who accosts you in the street and tries to steal your phone and wallet? Boris Johnson used the image of virus-as-mugger in his Downing Street statement today: If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger, which I can tell you from personal experience
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It seems odd to be writing about the transgender debate amid the coronavirus crisis, but in some ways, it’s important that normal life, where possible, goes on amid that crisis. That is one good reason for parliament returning to business this week. That business includes Commons select committee hearings on things other than coronavirus. Today,
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This week, school starts again, but not in anything like the normal way. Were it not for Covid-19, millions of children would wake tomorrow to the familiar routine: a hurried breakfast, perhaps a panicked search for missing shoes or a stray jumper, then a dash to avoid being late. Instead, what awaits young minds that
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Matt Hancock’s badge for carers is a perfectly good idea. The mockery of it is in many cases shallow, ill-informed, revealing and hypocritical. You don’t need me to describe the badge or the mockery. Anyone with an internet connection and a glancing familiarity with what passes for ‘news’ these days is aware that the Health
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‘Boris is a very tough, very resilient person. … I’m sure he’ll come through this.’ That was David Cameron on the Prime Minister. ‘I’m confident that he’ll pull through because if theres one thing I know, he’s a fighter.’ That was Dominic Raab. I’m quoting those two simply because they’re the most prominent examples, but
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Coronavirus commentary often takes a familiar form, which can easily be parodied thus: ‘Why the Coronavirus crisis justifies the thing I was arguing for before the crisis.’ I mention this because this article could, I suppose, be written off in that way. It is a column of praise for technocratic, wonkish politician-managers written by someone
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It’s almost reassuring to learn that even amid the coronavirus horror, some things don’t change. Even though the country is at a standstill, the Labour party’s civil war over sex and transgender issues goes on. Earlier this week, the Labour party – you remember, the party of fairness and kindness and compassion and equality –
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In some ways, it’s easy and even important to keep Rishi Sunak’s performance in announcing his coronavirus job retention scheme in perspective. It should, after all, be pretty easy to be popular in politics when you are offering to spend literally limitless amounts of money protecting people from economic hardship. A cynic would also say
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Be honest: when you first heard about self isolation, did you think, just for a second: ‘that sounds good’? Many of us made the same mordant jokes about how we’d watch TV, catch up on reading books, generally enjoy some quiet and peace away from the constant noise of normal life. I certainly made those
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There is an old Westminster joke that says if you want to keep something secret, say it on the floor of the House of Commons. Day-to-day parliamentary business doesn’t often get the attention of national media outlets and thus the wider country. This is understandable but also a pity because we often end up missing
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Even if the Covid-19 coronavirus does not become a mass killer on the scale of, say, the Spanish Flu in 1918, the mere possibility of such severity still carries huge weight. Just the potential for a disastrous pandemic demands a response whose seriousness and nature will have political and social implications. Even in this first
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There is chatter in the Westminster village about Boris Johnson’s low-profile. Why isn’t he visiting flooded towns? Why isn’t he fronting efforts to reassure a country worried about pandemic coronavirus? Here, I think it is worth quoting at length a speech given before becoming prime minister: ‘If we win the election we will get our
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OK there are bigger stories in the reshuffle, but the tale of Jake Berry is an important one. He quit to spend more time with his family – and really meant that. Berry was minister for the northern powerhouse. He is also one of Boris Johnson’s oldest allies in the Commons. These days (almost) everyone
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This is an article about the power of language in the transgender debate, about how the trans agenda has been advanced by the skilful capture of language, and about a government minister who has rejected that capture in favour of facts. It’s a bit complicated, so bear with me while I try to explain a
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Oh, Laura Pidcock. The former Labour MP for North West Durham, former shadow cabinet member, and former leadership hope of the Corbynite left may be gone from parliament but she has not left the political stage. Pidcock, it seems to fair to say, is on the left of politics. A proud socialist who said she
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The first chapter of Britain’s Brexit story ends tonight. For some, that’s something to celebrate. For others it means sadness. For most of us, I suspect, emotions are mixed: a bit of relief at the sense of clarity that underpins politics; a bit of optimism that we might all learn from the psychodrama/culture war of
