For some years now, education reformers in Scotland have looked towards the English state school system with something like envy. The academy model introduced by Tony Blair and further developed by Michael Gove has had a significantly positive impact on performance. The combination of school autonomy, supportive clusters and the focus on a knowledge-based curriculum have all helped England climb the international charts – it now comfortably outperforms the other nations of the UK. There is, therefore, puzzlement at the Labour government’s plan to rein in aspects of academy freedoms in its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, specifically around pay and conditions, the curriculum and teacher qualification status. Tory critics of the bill may be overstating its likely impact, but Kemi Badenoch ...

Upon stepping into Parliament’s committee room six yesterday afternoon (22 January), I felt like I had travelled back in time. Otherwise, there is little to explain the anachronistic, ignorant questions put forward by members of the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) and their bizarre choice of witnesses, who were ill-equipped to answer them. All it went to show is how so many politicians have failed to engage in the detail of the debate on how best to care for gender-distressed young people and how far we are, still, from settling it. The committee had chosen to hold a one-off session on the “Evidence base on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers”. This seemed strange given the recent four-year review into ...

In January 2009, as Gordon Brown’s government argued over whether to build a third runway at Heathrow, the senior civil servant Jeremy Heywood was moved to declare: “Who is this new minister holding up the wheels of government like this?” That new minister was Ed Miliband – who had become energy and climate secretary three months earlier. Building a new runway, he warned, would make it almost impossible for the government to achieve its pledge to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Fierce rows between Miliband and Brown, his political godfather, and fellow cabinet ministers Ed Balls and Peter Mandelson ensued. A compromise was eventually achieved: Miliband accepted a third runway in return for stringent limits on aviation ...

“Terrorism has changed,” the Prime Minister said this morning, responding to the unexpected guilty plea of 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana to the murder of three little girls, and the attempted murder of ten others, in Southport in the summer of 2024. Keir Starmer is right. The information that has emerged in the last 24 hours about Rudakubana’s unhealthy obsession with gratuitous violence, and his past attempts to act on it, highlight once more that Britain faces a new kind of threat, which is not adequately dealt with by our current terrorism legislation. We have hitherto viewed terrorism as an organised force, perpetrated by groups with flags and symbols, that uses violence and the threat of it to pursue political aims. Few could argue ...

Every Labour chancellor has a primal fear of falling foul of the financial markets – and with good reason. Stretching all the way back to Philip Snowden’s currency crisis in 1931, the party’s history is studded by run-ins with the massed forces of capital in which capital has invariably emerged victorious. The devaluations of 1949 and 1967, together with the sterling meltdown of 1976 and the “cap in hand” International Monetary Fund humiliation, are an indelible chunk of Labour’s collective memory. Gordon Brown is unusual in being chancellor for so long and not to have experienced the sinking feeling that accompanies a run on the pound – but that was only because he moved from 11 to 10 Downing Street a ...

The received wisdom in Westminster is that the Brexit process was so bruising and divisive that no party aspiring for power will want to go near the European question for at least a decade. Radical reform, such as rejoining the single market and the customs union, let alone full EU membership, will be off the table, just as it was a non-issue in the 2024 general election campaign.  It is a familiar theme of these columns to question that opinion for three reasons. The economic and geopolitical arguments for a much closer relationship are fundamentally strong; public opinion has largely concluded that the 2016 Leave vote was a mistake; and our political parties will eventually recognise that there are votes to ...

Labour’s 2024 manifesto is very clear that it “will not tolerate fraud or waste anywhere”, and specifically identifies an area in which money is wasted: “The excessive use of consultants.” It states that the government aims to halve spending on management consultancy, saving £750m a year. How’s that going? From Labour’s arrival in power to today, 1,979 contracts have been awarded that fall into the category of “business and related consultancy and related services” (CPV code 794000000, public-sector procurement fans). This amounts to £2.17bn in new business for the consultancy sector, according to the government contracts data platform Tussell. In the same period (5 July – 17 January) last year, the (Conservative) government awarded 1,872 consultancy contracts, with a value of £1.29bn. ...

After nearly 500 days of brutal war, a ceasefire in Gaza has been signed. Seemingly endless negotiations between Israel and Hamas – brokered by Qatar, the US and Egypt – ended in a deal on 15 January, with a multi-phase plan due to begin on 19 January. Though the deal is still subject to agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, who will vote on it today (17 January), once enacted the first 42-day phase would see Israel halt fighting in the Strip, allowing displaced Palestinians to return to what is left of their homes and the delivery of humanitarian aid. Hamas will also free 33 of the 98 remaining hostages captured during its 7 October attack; in exchange, Israel will release ...