Politics

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative Life peer, writer and columnist. He was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Initiative for Free Trade. What can one country practically do to halt crimes against humanity in another? The answer is far from obvious. At one end of the…

Nick Hoile is a health policy specialist and a Senior Director at MHP Communications. After making it through the most gruelling January in its history, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for the NHS. The number of people in hospital with Coronavirus is slowly falling, as the lockdown pays off by…

Paul Howell is the MP for Sedgefield and Heather Wheeler is the MP for South Derbyshire. After our landslide election victory last year, the Prime Minister made a promise to unite the country and level-up our nations and regions. The jobs-first approach and once in a generation levels of public investment in infrastructure announced by…

James Frayne is Director of Public First and author of Meet the People, a guide to moving public opinion. The public row over the Government’s intention to suspend its 0.7 foreign aid commitment will likely become an intra-party row in the coming weeks. It seems assured that at least some Conservative MPs will rebel against…

Eight years ago, the TaxPayers’ Alliance reported that “in the last year, five times more Labour people were appointed to public bodies than Tories”. It currently reports that almost half of avowedly political appointees last year owed their allegiance to Labour Party, compared to less than a third for the Conservatives. Despite the selection of…

Ryan Bourne is the author of Economics In One Virus, a forthcoming book available for pre-order on Amazon UK. As Boris Johnson’s February 22 “roadmap out of lockdown” day draws closer, the Prime Minister faces sharply conflicting advice. The backbench Covid recovery group (CRG) demands that schools return on March 8, and that all lockdown…

Cllr David Fothergill is the Leader of Somerset County Council and the Health and Social Care spokesman for the County Councils Network. We’ve heard the phrase “health and social care are two sides of the same coin” plenty of times over the last few years. The Department of Health became the Department of Health and…

Chris Goddard and Philip Mitchell are both members of Lewes Conservative Political Forum. 2020 provided a reality check in relation to China: no longer was it enough to promise, as the Cameron and May administrations had done, that Britain was “open for business” and that unpleasant features of Chinese nationalism could be overlooked because of…

Stephen McPartland is MP for Stevenage. Royston Smith is MP for Southampton Itchen. More than three and a half years on from Grenfell, the fallout of the cladding crisis is still being felt by millions of leaseholders today. Since then, the cladding crisis has only increased in magnitude. It has grown from the slow uncovering…