One of the most troubling statistics from the UK economy is this: in the year to June of this year, customers of Nationwide, the UK’s largest building society, spent £51.8m on pets and £37.1m on childcare. As a nation, Britain appears to spend more looking after the children of other species than it does on its own offspring. The roughly £10bn a year the British public spends on dogs is ten times what the government spends tackling homelessness. Pets are also over-represented in how people think the country should be run, as evidenced on Bonfire Night earlier this week by the delivery to Downing Street of a petition, containing more than a million signatures, requesting “an urgent review of firework regulations” that includes “restricting private ...

The SNP has, in recent years, given us a fairly stark example of government not working. It would take too long to list each and every instance here, but they are all well enough known – from the attempted gender law reforms to the failed restrictions on coastal fishing rights to the half-baked approach to creating a national care service, this has been an administration that has given the big state a bad name. John Swinney and Kate Forbes are trying to move the SNP away from this self-defeating adventurism, and have addressed some egregious cases of overreach. But too much damage has been done – mainstream Scotland is not the trusting soul it once was. One doesn’t want to draw too ...

Why did Kamala Harris lose the US election so badly? Here’s one answer: she was an incumbent. Across the democratic word, holding office has become a reliable predictor of a bad night. Take this year alone: the Democrats have lost the popular vote for the first time since 2004, the Conservative Party has suffered its worst ever result, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has endured its second-worst ever result, and, in South Africa, the African National Congress has lost its 30-year majority. Incumbent parties also saw heavy losses in France, Austria and Belgium.  This trend, as the political scientist Rob Ford notes, can be traced back to the inflationary spike that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are some exceptions: in Greece and ...

There are plenty of weeks when PMQs is far from the top story in political news, but one would not normally expect the first session of a new party leader to fall into that category. Nonetheless, when the Conservative Party set out its timeline for electing a new leader they knew attention would be across the Atlantic. They perhaps did not predict that Donald Trump would have just been elected for a second term. Kemi Badenoch sought to turn the risk of being overshadowed to her advantage, by seizing on the topic of the day and highlighting Labour’s awkward history with the new US President-elect. Beginning on a characteristically combative note by thanking Keir Starmer for his “almost warm welcome”, ...

This is not the US election result that the Labour Party wanted – but it is the one that it prepared for. Victory for Kamala Harris would have heralded a new phase of transatlantic centre-left cooperation. But the threat of Donald Trump’s political rebirth loomed far larger. Mindful of this, Keir Starmer and his team sought to insulate themselves from the dangers. Long before becoming prime minister, Starmer remained studiously neutral on the US election and attempted to build bridges with Republicans. This culminated in the two-hour dinner that he held with Trump in New York in September (Starmer and Harris never met) – one deemed by both sides to have gone well. Accompanying Starmer was David Lammy who, as a student ...

A new leader of the opposition means a new shadow front bench. Whether or not you define it as a reshuffle (personally, I wouldn’t even call it a shuffle), this was Kemi Badenoch’s first big opportunity to define her leadership by selecting her top team. And she took her time over it, dragging the process out throughout the day on Monday and this morning. So what have we learned so far? Badenoch promised during the leadership contest that there would be jobs in her shadow cabinet for all the candidates, and that she would draw talent from across the Tory party when appointing her front bench. Partly, this is a necessity of filling up to 120 shadow ministerial roles with a ...

The eye-catching Iowa poll – which gave Kamala Harris a lead over Donald Trump in the traditionally Republican state – is an outlier. Harris winning Iowa is unlikely (though not impossible). Most importantly, the poll points to a heartening scenario for the Harris campaign: Democrat gains among white voters in Iowa could mean easier than expected wins in the Midwestern Rust Belt states, even if Iowa itself remains a long shot. The poll was conducted by Selzer, a firm with a reputation for astonishing accuracy. But in its wake, three other pollsters – all with links to either the Republicans or the Trump campaign – published figures very much at odds with Selzer’s findings. There are several partisan pollsters in the mix ...

Floods can make, or break, politicians in Europe. In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s response to the Elbe flooding in 2002 helped him win an improbable victory in that year’s federal elections. Conversely, Armin Laschet torpedoed his own chances in 2021 after he was caught joking during a visit to a flood-hit town. Elsewhere, Giorgia Meloni managed to emerge from flooding in Emilia-Romagna in 2023 with her reputation intact, while in Hungary this September, the opposition politician Péter Magyar seized floods as an opportunity to criticise the Viktor Orbán government. Two important qualities most voters expect of their leaders are competent crisis management and empathy. Floods put both to the test. In Spain, however, there is less chance of them changing the political ...