“When the facts change, careful consideration of our response is appropriate.” With those ostensibly gentle words, Ian Blackford, the former Westminster leader of the SNP, launched, if not a nuke, then a well-timed grenade into the heart of his party. It has long been an article of faith among Nats that they are committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. An independent Scotland would have no nukes – Trident would be banished from the Clyde. The UK should give them up anyway. There is no place for these destructive weapons in any decent world. It’s perfectly reasonable to have a baleful view of nukes – who doesn’t? But it’s also important to understand that we don’t live in a decent world, and in fact ...

Rachel Reeves and welfare have a complicated history. In 2013 she told the Telegraph that Labour would be “tougher” than the Conservatives on benefits (such was the opprobrium that resulted that – eight years on – Reeves used an interview with the New Statesman to clarify her comments). Then last July, to broader outrage, she announced that all but the poorest pensioners would lose their winter fuel payments. And yet, as Reeves counts the cost of anaemic economic growth, it is welfare to which she has once again turned. The Chancellor yesterday submitted billions of pounds of planned cuts to the Office for Budget Responsibility as she seeks to avoid breaching her fiscal rules. That Reeves has alighted on welfare is no surprise. Total spending is projected by ...

If a woman ever cheated on him, the American-British kickboxer and social media influencer Andrew Tate has said, he would “bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck: shut up, bitch”. Women, he has said, bring sexual assault upon themselves. He is, in his own words, “absolutely a misogynist”. When he ran a pornographic webcam business, he said, “I had 75 women working for me in four locations and I was doing $600,000 a month from webcam.” Tate posted a tutorial on his strategy on social media, instructing men on how to make women fall in love with them, then turn those women into webcam sex workers and enjoy the profits: “My job was to ...

One of my favourite poets, Blackpool’s Nathan Parker, once wrote: “The working class spirit, the folk I admire the most: we founded the NHS, tea breaks, and beans on toast”. In his own self-deprecating way, he was making the point that the most important fixtures in our lives all come from ordinary people achieving extraordinary things.  Politicians are quick to take credit for social progress. But such progress relies on a partnership between government and working people. For as much as Nye Bevan is responsible for healthcare free at the point of service, so are the many millions who have worked in the NHS since. As much as Barbara Castle passed the Equal Pay Act, so did the women of Dagenham.  But ...

Donald Trump is susceptible to charm and flattery; he is impulsive; he can change course when the predictable consequences of an earlier decision come to light; he can be shameless in denying previous positions; he has no political principles. These are not good qualities in a leader, but the best that can be said about his approach to Ukraine is that these flaws may mean that not all hope is lost. It is possible that his hostility to Ukraine will be reversed – and the US’s traditional allies will continue to hope that does happen – but it is unlikely. European leaders should continue to encourage the US president to support Ukraine, but should be realistic in recognising that the real ...

The liberal aesthetics that dominated social media in the 2010s have receded to make way for an internet that bends towards a narrow, small-c conservatism. Tradwives, homesteaders, even standalone trends that portray womanhood as archetypally hyper-feminine and girly, have abounded on TikTok and Instagram in the last three years. We now know influencers like Hannah Neeleman (aka Ballerina Farm), Nara Smith and Estee Williams can draw in millions of fans and tens of millions of views by sharing a glossed-over version of reality where men provide, women cook, clean and care for children and silly ideas about 21st-century feminism never enter the picture. The success of this content has been dependent on its implicit arguments – sometimes even suggesting that the ...

So, she went. All Westminster had been wondering whether Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, would resign over Keir Starmer’s decision to fund higher defence spending by cutting overseas aid (as I suggested she may on the New Statesman podcast). Yesterday, I was assured by an Anneliese-friendly cabinet minister that she wouldn’t. Dodds is one of the most reasonable, loyal, unshowy of politicians. She faithfully accepted her demotion from the job of shadow chancellor in 2021 and since then she had been a “just-get-on-with-it” slogger for the Labour cause. Not now. Aid matters viscerally and emotionally to the Labour tribe and she could – if she chose – begin something really dangerous on the Labour benches for the Prime Minister. But even ...

In politics, you can tell how well you’re doing by the level of panic in your opponents’ response. By that measurement, Reform UK is flying in Scotland. First Minister John Swinney this week announced a cross-party summit to tackle the rise of Nigel Farage’s party. Mainstream politicians are alarmed by Reform’s surge in the polls, which suggest it will win as many as 15 seats at the next Holyrood election in May 2026, potentially putting it in the position of kingmaker. If this seems like a principled response, then that is certainly part of the thinking. At a press conference at Bute House, his official residence, on Wednesday, Swinney attacked Farage for having “a fundamentally racist view of the world”, and said ...