by Kevin Meagher My Mum’s informal media monitoring service is always spot on. ‘They had some treasury minister on with Ed Balls this morning,’ she told me the other day. ‘She was absolutely hopeless. He made mincemeat out of her.’ Turns out the hapless victim of Ed Balls’s perfectly reasonable probing about the inflation rate was treasury minister, Laura Trott, putting in yet another faltering media appearance to add to the long, painful, list of similarly egregious examples. I have these conversations with my Mum every day. One hopeless minister after another does the media round, only to be ..read more

by Kevin Meagher I was born under Harold Wilson, started school under James Callaghan and left under Margaret Thatcher. My 16-year-old daughter was born under Gordon Brown, started school under David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss and is set to leave under Rishi Sunak. A stark 2:1 ratio in a single generation. In the modern age, it seems PMs are like buses. And this presumes Sunak will last until my daughter’s GCSEs in the summer. He remains the potential victim of either an early general election defeat, or a last- minute putsch by his own backbenchers to replac ..read more

by Rob Marchant Yesterday – as many wags observed, fittingly, the first of April – is the first day of possibly the most illiberal piece of legislation in the UK during at least the last three decades (and it has been almost 36 years since the enactment of Section 28, the Margaret Thatcher’s notorious anti-gay legislation, so that pretty much fits). It essentially creates a hate crime, which can be pretty much whatever imagined slight the person who reports it says it is. It is also a crude attempt to secure gender self ID through the back door, because it talks about “gender identity” (not a ..read more

by Paul Wheeler 2024 is the year of elections including amongst others the UK and US. For decades political pundits here have been able to point an accusing figure to the Southern States of the US when it comes to the dark arts of voter suppression. Well thanks to the current Government Britain has lost the moral high ground. The credentials required to vote in person here are more restrictive here than in Georgia. Student ID is a permissible form of ID in Georgia a form of ID specifically excluded in this country. The case for voter ID in Britain was always thin but the way that it has been i ..read more

Politician of the year: Team Starmer For the 2023 award, Uncut is bending the rules a little to hand the politician of the year gong to a team. There is a logic. Keir Starmer had an excellent year, he has palpably learned, adapted and overcome the challenges in front of him. But politics is a team sport and while he has been front of office, the back-office team have made much of this progress possible. In the 1990s, Tony Blair had a close-knit team around him that propelled him to power. The big names are well known – Jonathan Powell, Anji Hunter, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Sally ..read more

Worst and Best Takes on the Israel-Gaza Crisis It has been a decade since the last major flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. In that time, millions of Britons have come of age and many more millions, lacking the excuse of youth, seem not to have paid any attention to the facts of a complicated conflict and prefer easy, soundbite answers. In 2023, there was not a mere escalation in tensions but a horrific upsurge of violence, triggered by a single day of massacre of civilians on the 7th of October. We struggle for comparisons, but a simple way think of it is as the Israeli 9/1 ..read more

by Jonathan Todd We are entering Rosa Luxemburg’s year. “Capitalist civilization cannot continue,” she wrote a century ago. “We must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.” A similar contrast was recently drawn by Doyne Farmer, an American scientist and entrepreneur, which was quoted by Alastair Campbell in a fantastic speech: “We are in a race between Armageddon and awesome.” Farmer’s Armageddon is a brutal Malthusianism of climate chaos: more and more of the world becoming unhabitable for humans, driving hundreds of millions of desperate people towards shrinking ..read more

by Rob Marchant If the horrific news coming out of Israel and Gaza resulting from Hamas atrocities were not sufficient, the last six weeks have been the worst period of antisemitism in living memory, not just in Britain but in many other parts of the world. Some Labour figures have not exactly covered themselves in glory: if you can manage to live with the cognitive dissonance of framing the “ceasefire” narrative as a neutral one, rather than one which helps Hamas; or recent serial hate marches as “peace demonstrations” – as it seems both Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan were able to, not to mentio ..read more

by Jonathan Todd The Labour party and the rest of the country want the same thing: big change. The country knows the essential precondition of this: getting the economy right. We look to Rachel Reeves for that. Jess Philips spoke movingly at political therapy last week at 1000 Trades about the pervasive hopelessness that she encounters among the electorate. The deep struggles in a country where nothing works. The exhausting dysfunction hardwired into many facets of national life. “People have had enough,” Rachel Reeves told the FT over the weekend. This feeling, while it has grown over the 13 ..read more

by Rob Marchant Philip Gould’s book, The Unfinished Revolution, was an emblematic tome of the late 1990s, documenting New Labour’s lead-up to governing in 1997. But in the 2020s, have we yet reached where we need to be? Polls: clearly good. Policy programme: we are making respectable progress and cutting out the mad, or madly-expensive, stuff. Tick. Tick. News management: we are perhaps not yet as ruthlessly disciplined as we need to be, but we seem to be getting a lot less accident-prone than we were even this time last year. And, looking at our opponents this last week, the Tories are hardly ..read more