What governments and regulators decide and what it costs: budgets and tax, regulation and public services, weighed against the evidence.
15 articles
LatestStudent Spotlight
The government's new first-time buyer scheme promises to make homeownership more accessible and boost housebuilding. But how much of the benefit will reach buyers, and how much could end up with developers?
7 min read
Britain’s turn to drones and a ‘hybrid’ navy is sound strategy but funded at the margins and arriving in years with no money allocated, it is modernisation bought on an austerity budget.
Washington’s new sanctions have left no middle ground between Washington and its adversaries. The UAE has given way, Turkey is hedging, and India is bending, but the evidence indicates that the middle ground is not disappearing but moving.
From next April, the full state pension will be taxed for the first time. Two policies that were never meant to meet have collided, and the Chancellor has until the Autumn Budget to decide who pays.
Reform's £72m donor row shows Britain isn't turning into America, the rules are stricter and tightening, but the scale and the alleged foreign-money dodge make this a genuinely serious case, not just media noise.
Ireland's centuries of conquest, famine and partition never actually got resolved, they just got paused by the Good Friday Agreement, and Brexit has now reopened the constitutional question that Burnham says he won't touch but his own Northern Ireland Secretary admits is coming anyway.
The prison system is on the brink of collapse; almost at capacity with increasing demands from a crumbling service. How did we get here, and how do we get out?
Burnham's built his premiership on the argument that previous generations of politicians let big problems drift, but his own record as mayor shows that even correctly diagnosing that failure doesn't guarantee you can fix it once the constraints get bigger.
The White House and major AI companies meet to finalize the Voluntary AI Framework. With all discussions happening behind closed doors, Americans are left in the dark about the future of artificial intelligence and their government.
New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has big plans to decentralise his government from London, but how will he do this, and what difference could it make?
Democracy only works if the people inside it understand how it works, yet a postcode lottery in political education means most young people never get taught how it works at all.
AI data centres promise growth, but infrastructure constraints are creating political and economic resistance.
Is the problem water companies, or the system meant to regulate them?
Labour's new inheritance tax reforms cap relief on agricultural assets at £2.5 million, introducing an effective 20% tax above this threshold and reshaping how family farms are passed on.
How tensions involving Iran are driving energy prices and reshaping UK politics.