Home Before Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered the Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility accidentally released its contents. She will increase the tax take to an all-time high of 38 per cent of GDP in 2030-31. She froze tax thresholds until the end of 2030-31 and introduced a council tax surcharge on
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On November 7th, the finalists for the 2024 Innovator of the Year Awards joined The Spectator and Rathbones at a gala evening in central London. There, they found out the regional and category winners for this year’s awards. In this episode, our business editor Martin Vander Weyer, one of the founders of the awards, announces the winners
We’re looking for a new producer to join The Spectator‘s broadcast team. You would be one of four on the broadcast team and one of only 30 journalists working here at The Spectator, producing a suite of podcasts ranging from British and US politics to lifestyle, religion and literature. The team is also behind Spectator
David Cameron has been ennobled and made Foreign Secretary. James Cleverly is the new Home Secretary after Suella Braverman’s sacking. Steve Barclay is now Environment Secretary, after Thérèse Coffey resigned from government. Victoria Atkins takes Barclay’s place as Health Secretary. Rachel Maclean has been sacked as housing minister and replaced by Lee Rowley. Esther McVey
Home The Conservatives argued about tax and HS2 at their conference in the former Manchester Central railway station. At the end, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, announced cancellation of the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2. He promised £36 billion for a ‘Network North’ and for transport outside London (where there would be a ‘Euston
The sanctity of the ECHR Sir: Jonathan Sumption’s criticisms of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘Ruled out’, 30 September) are as lucid and as logical as one would expect from such an admired jurist. He provides a persuasive case as to why the UK could withdraw from the ECHR while preserving all the basic
The Conservatives gather in Manchester this weekend for what may well be their last hurrah as a governing party. Bookmakers are offering odds of 7:1 to anyone bold enough to bet on Rishi Sunak winning the next general election. The Prime Minister himself is in a gambling mood and has started to make some brave
Home Dozens of armed police in London laid down their guns after a Metropolitan Police officer was charged with the murder of Chris Kaba, 24, shot in Streatham Hill last year. The army stood by, but enough policemen returned to armed duties to make Military Aid to the Civil Authorities unnecessary. Rishi Sunak, the Prime
Home Average wages (including bonuses) in the three months to July were 8.5 per cent higher than a year earlier. This should mean that state pensions rise by 8.5 per cent from April 2024, if the government does not claw back anything; the predicted rise would bring into the tax-paying bracket 650,000 more pensioners, a
Identity politics Sir: Your lead article (‘On board’, 12 August) highlights numerous issues related to refugees, but does not offer much in regard to why this country is a magnet for economic migrants. You state that this is a rich country. How can this be the case when government debt is 100 per cent of
Over decades of service as a floating hotel, the Bibby Stockholm has accommodated all manner of people. It has housed workers for a Swedish wind farm and for the new Shetland gas plant; homeless people in Hamburg, asylum seekers in Rotterdam. It was briefly considered as a ‘high-end’ barge for students: with 222 en-suite rooms,
It is quite right that the Prime Minister has chosen to approve new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, in spite of the bitter reaction from climate activists, the Labour party – and some of his own MPs. Chris Skidmore, who just recently completed a review of net zero policies on
Joe Shmoe Sir: Your piece ‘Not so special’ (Leading article, 8 July) was right. Joe Biden doesn’t like us and a brief 45 minutes with Rishi Sunak last week doesn’t change that. In Saudi Arabia last year, Biden compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Britain’s past in Ireland. This was outrageous – what about the
Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to introduce a Bill which would oblige schools to disclose to parents the materials whichare being used in their children’s sex education classes. The Bill is necessary because the Conservative government has allowed sex education in
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Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s Low Life columnist, died this morning at his home in France. He was 66. For 23 years, his column was, for many readers, the first page they turned to in the magazine. Here is a brief selection of the best of Low Life: On self-confidence 30 March 2002: ‘Two Christmases ago,
Home ‘China is carrying out the biggest military build-up in peacetime history,’ warned James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, in his Mansion House speech, but said ‘no significant global problem’ could be ‘solved without China’. The government borrowed £139.2 billion last year, £13 billion less than expected, bringing public debt to 99.6 per cent of GDP.
By George Keir Starmer was mocked for showing footage of Glasgow in a video he made to celebrate St George’s Day. But the legend of St George (who is, after all, also the patron saint of Georgia and Ethiopia) did not leave Scotland untouched. – Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Stirling all have churches dedicated
Home Boris Johnson appeared before the Privileges Committee, publishing in advance a 52-page defence of his actions while Prime Minister regarding Covid regulations. He said that ‘the House of Commons was misled by my statements’ but they were ‘not intentionally or recklessly’ misled. Before the hearing he was reselected as the Conservative candidate for the
Something in the air A US fighter plane shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon which had drifted across Canada and the US. Balloons have a long history in military operations, being deployed widely in the American Civil War and in the Siege of Paris in 1870, when they were used to get messages out of
