House prices are at a two-decade high, the government now spends over 80 per cent of its housing budget on housing benefit and at least one child in every London classroom is homeless. For a new generation, renting has become the norm. Keir Starmer’s mission to build 1.5m homes by the end of this parliament is clearly intended to reverse this trend. But focusing too deeply on the UK’s lack of affordable housing and declining home ownership obscures the duality of this crisis: it is one of quantity and quality. Britain’s housing landscape is blighted by a collection of poor-quality homes, many of which fail to meet liveable standards, as determined by the Decent Homes Standard. Some are plagued by damp and ...

It is now looking increasingly plausible that at some point this year, Rachel Reeves will be required to deliver a combination of tax rises and spending cuts to comply with her fiscal rules. It may even happen in March, when the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) delivers its next economic forecast. If it happens, whenever that might be, it will be a deeply damaging moment for the government and the Chancellor. Reeves’ pitch as shadow chancellor was that she would provide stability and strength. After years of drama and crises, she would provide calm. She would be the anti-Truss: prudent, methodical and reassuring. She would have just one fiscal event a year (which has been long desired by Treasury officials), putting ...

On the day Keir Starmer became Prime Minister there was one appointment above all that was not in doubt – that of Rachel Reeves as Chancellor (“I hope you know,” he quipped as he told her the news). In opposition Reeves had made herself indispensable to Starmer by reviving Labour’s fiscal credibility and improving relations with business. Starmer, who does not have an economics background and came late in his career to Westminster in 2015, leaned heavily on Reeves for advice (in 2023, we deemed her the most powerful person in Labour). Here was a truly joint partnership. But for Reeves, sorrows have come not as single spies but as battalions. Economic growth – on which she staked her reputation – ...

These are tricky times to be a Scottish Conservative. To be fair, that’s not an unusual situation. But 2025 would seem to present a particularly thorny challenge. There are a good few reasons for this. One can be seen in the relative invisibility of the party over recent months. This is not due to a lack of effort on the part of its new leader Russell Findlay. He is an able parliamentary performer, an energetic campaigner, and makes a robust and consistent argument for “common sense” conservatism, albeit with many of the details yet to be filled in. But that is not enough. Findlay’s problem is that there is only room for so many narratives in politics at once. During the 2000s, ...

On the evening of the 2019 general election, as it became clear that Boris Johnson had triumphed, Nigel Farage declared: “This victory for Boris was hugely helped by us and is far better than the Marxist Corbyn and a second referendum”. The description used of Corbyn was a revealing one. Though the former Labour leader is a far less obviously Marxist figure than John McDonnell (once confessing that he had not read “as much of Marx as I should have done”), Farage was happy to place him in this category for political purposes. It signified that his principal objection to Corbyn was his hostility to capitalism. Five years on, Farage is playing a rather different tune. In an interview with PoliticsJOE this week, the Reform leader ...

In 2016 there was a Trump Bump: a boost for left- and right-wing media from US audiences either repelled or enraptured by their new president. This time it’s a Trump Jump, with media owners vaulting over each other to win favour in the run-up to the inauguration. (I was going to say Trump Hump, which while perhaps more accurate just sounds a bit gross.) A stream of the biggest players in US media has made a festive-season pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago bearing gifts. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s owner and publisher of the Washington Post, brought offerings including a $1m donation to the inauguration fund, another $1m in-kind contribution and a new Amazon documentary about Melania Trump made by Brett Ratner, who hasn’t ...

What is Labour’s biggest headache this week? You might think the answer is the world’s richest man taking digital potshots at Keir Starmer. But there’s an alternative contender: the bond markets. Yesterday’s debt auction saw the government pay interest of 5.2 per cent on 30-year bonds – the highest level since May 1998. That reflects a number of factors: stubbornly high inflation (which has slowed interest rate cuts), weak UK economic growth, and anxieties over a second Donald Trump presidency. The primary cause is less important than the effect: higher debt interest costs (which already stood at 3.9 per cent of GDP). The more Rachel Reeves spends on servicing government borrowing the less she has for everything else. That’s a serious problem ...

At Reform's East England Conference on Saturday, held at Chelmsford City Racecourse, Nigel Farage considered the growing support for right-wing politics among young men: “Something big is going on” he said, “we're seeing it in France... Italy... [a little bit] in Germany” and, of course, in the United States: “Who would have thought that Trump would have got 44% of the under 30 vote." (Exit polls has this figure closer to 43%.) This youth swell, he concluded, seemed to be evident “today, here in Chelmsford” too. Pause. Citation needed here. Is any of this true? First, Reform's weakest demographic in Britain is young people. Recently Zia Yusuf, Reform's chairman, appeared to reveal via some screenshots that young members (under 25s) accounted for only ...