01/10/2022
1 Oct 2022

What crisis?

1 Oct 2022

What crisis?

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Kate AndrewsKate Andrews
What crisis? A tough week for Trussonomics

What’s the sign of a successful Budget? Chris Philp, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, gave his answer moments after Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s statement last Friday: a strong pound. ‘Great to see sterling strengthening on the back of the new UK growth plan,’ he tweeted out. A (temporary) rising pound made sense to Truss supporters, who argued that markets would support their transition to a lower-tax, higher-growth economy.

What crisis? A tough week for Trussonomics
Katy Balls
‘We’re so close’: there’s a cautious optimism at Labour conference

When Liz Truss scheduled her mini-Budget for the Friday before Labour conference, there was concern in Keir Starmer’s office. After months of meticulous planning, Starmer’s team feared the new Tory government would use their event to upstage his and distract from the party’s annual gathering in Liverpool. They were right to think that Kwasi Kwarteng’s statement would dominate the headlines; what they didn’t realise was that this would work entirely to their advantage.

‘We’re so close’: there’s a cautious optimism at Labour conference
Bernard Cornwell
The ups and downs of driving a Tesla

I began the week in Miami, looking forward to what a friend of mine describes as ‘the finest sight in all Florida – the departure lounge’. That is a little unfair; a tour of Cape Canaveral is mind-blowing. But beyond that I confess I find the state brash and gaudy, a fitting place for Donald Trump’s retirement. If indeed the 45th President has retired. No one will be surprised if he runs again, nor if he is re-elected with the help of his Republican party which has been busy restricting voters’ rights and playing origami with constituency boundaries.

The ups and downs of driving a Tesla
Dan Hitchens
Why has Oxford killed off a much-loved Catholic college?

Few institutions can match the global prestige of Oxford University. Just look at the gifts lavished on it, like offerings brought to some mighty emperor of the ancient world. There’s the Saïd Business School, controversially funded with £50 million from Wafic Saïd, who helped to broker the British-Saudi arms deal. There’s the carbuncular Blavatnik School of Government, criticised by Russian dissidents for how the funder made his millions.

Why has Oxford killed off a much-loved Catholic college?
Paul Sargeantson
Red kites should never have been reintroduced to Britain

I own a grass farm in the Chilterns which provides grazing for horses and haymaking. It also provides habitat for hares, skylarks, lapwings and field voles (the staple diet of my resident pair of barn owls) – which is why I am so set against the red kites. Between 1989 and 1994, red kites from Spain were imported and released into the Chilterns by the RSPB and Natural England. The population here had dwindled and the RSPB describes the reintroduction programme as ‘one of the UK’s biggest conservation success stories’.

Red kites should never have been reintroduced to Britain
Jenny McCartney
There’s a growing sense that tomorrow belongs to Sinn Fein

Where can Ulster Unionism go now? If it were a person, it would be someone in the grip of a long depression, whose occasional bursts of anger mask the fact that they so often feel despondent and betrayed. The widespread reaction to the latest Northern Ireland census, in which Catholics narrowly outnumber Protestants for the first time, is unlikely to give it a reason to be cheerful. A jubilant Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Fein vice-leader, was quick to claim that ‘historic change is happening across this island’, while other party members called for a referendum on unity.

There’s a growing sense that tomorrow belongs to Sinn Fein
Sam Leith
What does it mean when Giorgia Meloni quotes G.K. Chesterton?

For a UK audience, the most striking moment in the new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s victory speech will have been that she anchored its peroration to a quote from G.K. Chesterton. ‘Chesterton wrote, more than a century ago,’ she said, ‘“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” That time has arrived. We are ready.’ G.K. Chesterton? The creator of the excellently herbivorous Father Brown mysteries, the Isaac Newton of what we now call ‘cosy crime’? That G.

What does it mean when Giorgia Meloni quotes G.K. Chesterton?
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