Anas Sarwar has cut back on the coffee. I’m told the Scottish Labour leader had developed an expensive Starbucks habit, but is now limiting himself to two cups a day. His hard-working aides reflect, somewhat ruefully, that there has been no consequent reduction in his prodigious energy levels. That’s probably for the best because Sarwar has, as he said this week, “a mountain to climb”. Labour, which six months ago appeared on course for victory in the next Holyrood election, once again finds itself in the all too familiar position of trailing the SNP in the polls. As the psephologist John Curtice put it, support for the party seems to have “imploded”. It was not supposed to be like this. By the ...

Obituaries for the Conservative Party have never aged well. In 2005, Geoffrey Wheatcroft published The Strange Death of Tory England on the “likely extinction of what was the most successful political species in Britain”. It was precisely at this moment that the Tories’ fortunes began to recover. By electing David Cameron, the party demonstrated that it had not lost its capacity for reinvention (the same would later prove true of Boris Johnson’s victory). Remarkably, though their majority proved intermittent, the Tories increased their vote share at four consecutive elections (peaking at 43.6 per cent). After Labour’s victory last July, there was a strange sense of relief among some Conservatives. Though their party had suffered the worst result in its history, it had ...

Nothing, we are told, should strike fear in our hearts more than our increasing dependency on smartphones. It isn’t just the threat of surveillance, radiation or damage to our attention span. It’s making you depressed and anxious. It’s giving you body dysmorphia. It’s making you antisocial, afraid of the outside world. Ultimately, in whatever way the harm manifests, it’s causing your brain to rot.   So all-consuming is the anxiety about “brain rot” that Oxford University Press named it as its word of the year: “The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” The Atlantic last year published a long ...

It’s easy to be caught up in the granular detail of our 24/7 news cycle, forgetting this viral put-down or that Prime Minister’s Questions will not change the course of British politics forever. We can obsess over how votes changed since 2019, comparing one election to another, but in doing so we miss out on the long(er)-term trends; zooming out and asking big questions is necessary from time to time. And so, in spirit of the idea, here is a big question: is Labour still a working-class party?  This will be an imperfect exercise, given how many competing definitions of “working class” there are. Who counts? Anyone who identifies as working class? That would mean 56 per cent of us qualify, including ...

The government is right to want a third runway at Heathrow. It is exactly the type of pro-growth measure the country needs.   It is, however, a decision that it is difficult to justify if one’s sole focus is reducing carbon emissions. Aviation is hard to decarbonise and, for all the arguments about planes currently circling Heathrow waiting for a landing slot, or how passengers use other hub airports, an additional runway will mean more flights and more flights will mean more emissions. We live in a world of trade-offs and the government has evidently concluded that the cost of suppressing emissions from Heathrow is too great given the damage this does to economic growth. It cannot explicitly admit this without offending those who ...

Each generation declares that it has settled the European question; each time it returns in a new form. So it is with Brexit. Rather than resolving the argument over Europe, the referendum eternalised it. Before the vote, the EU was a matter of indifference to most. After it stood two great tribes: Remainers and Leavers. A slapdash trade deal was destined to be wrangled over (as Norway and Switzerland could have advised). For Keir Starmer, Europe is a familiar thread. As a lawyer, he championed the expansion of European human rights law – authoring a 938-page tome on the subject – and saw the EU underwrite peace in Northern Ireland and cross-border security. As a politician, he used the Remain cause to ...

“We will cut our waiting lists.” With this declaration, John Swinney tied his future to delivering something that has so far proved well beyond the SNP. Launching his plan to reform the NHS, the First Minister this week promised “tangible improvements that we can and will deliver.” It was hard not to be impressed by his certainty. It was equally hard not to be sceptical about the prospects of delivery. This isn’t based on doubts around Swinney’s personal commitment to change. I’m told that he has taken control of health reform, aware that it’s the voters’ top priority and therefore the best route for the SNP to win the 2026 election. But public sector reform and the Nats have always made for uncomfortable ...

In his book Great Britain? Torsten Bell – the recently appointed Treasury minister – tells a revealing tale. The slowdown in income growth, he writes, began around 2004, “but no one in government noticed until 2009, five years later. I remember the meeting at which it became clear what had happened, but by that point there were more immediate problems such as collapsing banks to worry about.” Why did ministers miss the slowdown? “Because headline GDP growth remained strong right up to the financial crisis – averaging 2.8 per cent between 2000 and 2006.” That’s one instance of how living standards can become decoupled from GDP. It’s a subject that has defined politics in recent years. Recall the heckle that a woman in Newcastle ...