There is one clear political winner from the Epping asylum hotel ruling: Nigel Farage. True, the technical victor, as so often in English life, may be the Town and Country Planning Order (the owners of the Bell Hotel failed to apply for new planning permission). But that’s not something Farage felt obliged to mention, hailing “a great victory for the parents and concerned residents of Epping”. That’s a message that will resonate with an electorate increasingly wondering whether to gamble on the Reform leader (Farage’s party has led every opinion poll since May). It was the Bell Hotel that became an emblem of a dysfunctional model after one migrant living there was charged with sexual assault (a second asylum seeker was arrested last week). Confronted ...

The new left-wing party in the process of being launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana might lack a name, a leader and a policy platform beyond tackling “the crises in our society with a mass redistribution of wealth and power” and “campaigning for the only path to peace: a free and independent Palestine”. What it doesn’t lack is potential supporters. New polling by Ipsos, seen exclusively by the New Statesman, finds that one in three people who voted Labour in 2024 would consider voting for the new Corbyn-Sultana initiative. That figure rises to nearly half (46 per cent) among 2024 Labour voters who would consider voting for an alliance between this new party and the Greens. The new outfit says that ...

In student halls and campus cafés, the conversation about Labour is quieter than it was a year ago – and colder. To many young people, the party feels less a political home and more a remote, managerial institution, obsessed with electoral machinations at the expense of its values. The war in Gaza dominates these discussions, not as a niche single-issue debate but as a moral litmus test. As the party leadership’s political messaging fails to match the urgency on the ground, frustration is turning to detachment, and detachment into departure. In the heyday of Corbynism, and before that under Harold Wilson, students were at the vanguard of Labour’s national campaign. But across universities, Labour clubs are confronting the same question: ...

For Labour, this has been an uneasy summer. Average support for the party has reached a new low of 21 per cent, a fall almost unprecedented for a one-year government. Reform, which has led every poll since May, is insurgent on the right; a new party is gestating on the left. Should one be needed, the Tories offer a preview of how quickly “midterm blues” can become an existential crisis. In these grim times, MPs cast around for signs of life in the Labour family. Away from Westminster, their eyes are drawn to Manchester. In an era when incumbents are defined by their unpopularity, one figure stands apart from this trend: Andy Burnham. It’s easy to dismiss the twice-defeated leadership candidate (and ...

What is a hero? Rory Stewart, whose latest BBC miniseries The Long History of Heroism has recently concluded, is surely in a position to know – and he suggests Theresa May. Where and in whom one sees heroism is, of course, a personal question, and one which says quite a lot about you. But I confess that even as someone who admires May for the same qualities as Stewart does (“an incredible sense of dignity and a real attempt to do what she thought was the right thing”), “hero” seems a bit of a stretch. I suspect the fact that she “sacrificed her political career” to try and deliver a soft Brexit plays a larger role in Stewart’s calculations than in ...

JD Vance is on holiday, but it looks more like a diplomatic mission to spread Maga cheer deep into the British right. Images of him spending an evening in the Cotswolds with former Apprentice contestant and rumoured Reform candidate for Mayor of London, Thomas Skinner, have struck many as odd. But Vance has form here, adding to his Amazon Wishlist all the Brits he would like at his political picnic: Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, Danny Kruger, Chris Philp. I wonder if they appreciate just how unpopular Vance and Trump are to their British audiences. Vance is touring a Britain that, were it a US state, would have voted for Kamala Harris by more than California, 68 to 32 per cent. Current ...

Last spring, Britain’s newspapers and money-watchers promised a mass exodus of wealth. Labour’s plan to scrap the “non-dom” tax status, Henley & Partners warned, would drive high-net-worth individuals from Britain in droves. Henley, who make money selling passports to the globally mobile rich, said the scale would be historic, a fiscal catastrophe in the making. Within days, the spectre of a millionaire migration was front-page fact. Rachel Reeves’s first fiscal move as chancellor would unravel before it began. HMRC’s new payroll data has proven otherwise. The number of top earners on PAYE, the best real-time proxy for high-income residents, has not collapsed. In fact, receipts from that group are holding up. There is no sign of the disproportionate departures Henley forecast, ...

Has some of the gloom about the UK economy been overdone? Rachel Reeves certainly thinks so. This morning’s release by the Office for National Statistics suggests that GDP grew by 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of this year, a period which saw the introduction of the National Insurance rise and the imposition of tariffs by Donald Trump. That’s down from 0.7 per cent in the first quarter but far ahead of City forecasts of 0.1 per cent. These numbers mean that the UK remains the fastest-growing G7 economy so far this year – comfortably surpassing the US – and, as a Reeves aide points out, that per capita growth in 2025 has matched that in 2024 (a period that ...