The risk for Britain is not just falling further in the global rankings, but settling into a new normal of diminished economic ambition and reduced prosperity for its people, something that seemed unthinkable just a generation ago.
If the Corporation cannot persuade even half the public it offers a well informed and unbiased public service, it will need to change.
Freezing working age benefits in cash terms whilst pensioners get a surge above prices or earnings cannot be defended, even by pensioners who care about future generations. The time has come to redress the balance and do a bit more for working age families.
The Government’s proposals risk a rushed abolition of one of our most fundamental and historic rights – and removing one of the key features that holds up public trust in the judicial system – for a hurried attempt at backlog cutting that is unlikely to work.
In British right of centre circles, suspicion of scientific expertise is growing more common, even among those who can quote Cicero but not explain carbon capture. If we want to be taken seriously, then we must not sneer at evidence and think like rational adults.
The harsh reality of opposition is that often all you can do is watch the government make mistakes. On employment, Labours errors have been readily predictable.
These recent polls are ones that ten years ago – or on say June 9th 2016 – nobody would have imagined possible, and they are polls whose outcomes were brought about by Boris Johnson and yet he has no framework for that.
By pairing support with accountability, we can restore fairness, incentivise effort, and ensure that welfare remains a safety net, not a substitute for work.
The average child in a Welsh classroom is performing at the same level as the poorest children in England. That is not levelling up. It is selling out a generation.
Either we can continue in the delusion that further borrowing and increased taxes will help us out of this mess, or we can be honest and call for real economic reform.
Unsurprisingly their plans have come unstuck. It has come unstuck because it was, and still is in its U-turn form, woefully unambitious about savings, conspicuously lacking in compassion, and achieves no meaningful reform of a system we all know is broken.
Three things have coalesced that seem to have warped everything. Aggressive climate based direct action, the war in the middle east and how recent protest is policed has morphed the traditional marches and PR stunts of before into something beyond a ‘right to protest’
We need a three-phase approach to tackle the problem: through effective prevention, tougher enforcement and sentencing, and rehabilitation. Now as an MP, I will be making the argument for this approach as effectively and persuasively as I possibly can, so no-one has to have the conversation I had to.
If the West is always the villain and its institutions irredeemably corrupt, what exactly are we trying to preserve? Why not tear it all down?
Starmer’s attacks on Brexit and its impact on the economy are as predictable as they are risible. If we want an honest conversation about growth, productivity, and our place in the world we must not let recycled myths be part of it