The dam of ‘woke' tyranny has finally been broken by the Supreme Court
On the latest Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson discuss the Supreme Court ruling that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the 2010 Equality Act referred to biological sex, not acquired gender.
Having covered this topic many times in her columns, Allison gives her view on why the case had to be brought to the public's attention; 'I think we've been under a kind of maligned spell… an aggressive trans movement bullying and cowing institutions... How many politicians have dreaded the question: What is a woman?'
Allison also adds that 'as a words person', a large concern for her is the 'perversion of language,' saying ' we have mothers in some NHS trusts referred to as 'birthing persons'... this unbelievably ugly, cumbersome language, which is like a cage that's put over the truth. Well now the truth can breathe again.'
Liam highlights the role of a few determined campaigners, including Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce, who stood firm when faced with backlash in the media, 'The political and media class has massively failed during this debate… while ordinary people have suffered.'
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The Independent
27 minutes ago
- The Independent
Roll up, roll up for the Rachel Reeves buy now, pay later spending review
It was the Klarna spending review. (If you're wondering what I'm on about, please do bear with me.) Klarna, you see, is the buy now, pay later shopping app beloved by zoomers, which offers the opportunity to pay for your shopping in 30 days or three monthly instalments, depending on your status and the shop you're buying from. The problem with it is that it is a marvellous way of building up bills, debts, and big problems that will come back to bite you if you're not careful. This is the principal issue with the government's spending review. Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered big number after big number. 'Labour choices', she declared, to get Britain moving again. Billions will be pumped into clean energy, carbon capture and nuclear power. There will be extra cash for the NHS. Defence spending is being pushed up to 2.6 per cent of GDP, if one includes the extra money for the spooks. There's more money for free school meals and to fix crumbling classrooms. A veritable treasure chest. And, as we already know, the decision to means-test the pensioners' winter fuel payment was (largely) reversed so that 75 per cent of them will now get it. However, at the same time, Reeves made clear that she planned to stick by her fiscal rules that say day-to-day spending must be paid for by tax receipts. There should be no current account deficit. Now, it is true that a big chunk of what was announced (or re-announced) will be covered by extra borrowing. Per those rules, she is allowed to borrow to invest, which covers things like energy and the announcements on rail, prisons and social housing. There is a lot of borrowing going towards this new investment spending – some £140bn. However, borrowing to invest is generally considered to be good borrowing. There is a caveat. To make it work, those investments need to produce an economic return. Will the government's plans do that? That is a very big – and open – question. The NHS, schools, policing, defence, local government and more are largely covered by day-to-day spending. Here, things are going to be less cheerful than Reeves would have us believe, except for the review's clear winners, health and defence. 'To make sense of today's spending review, you need to understand what the government is calling Phase One and Phase Two. Phase One is last year and this year, 2024-25 and 2025-26,' the non-partisan number crunchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) explained. 'Phase Two starts next year, 2026-27, covers the rest of the parliament, and is the focus of today's announcements. Take Phase One and Phase Two together, as the government does, and growth in government spending looks rather strong. Take Phase Two only and things look tighter.' So far, so familiar. It doesn't matter which party they come from; chancellors always quote big numbers that apply a glossy coat of paint to their speeches in the House of Commons, while leaving the gritty reality to the swathe of accompanying documents. It is pushing it to describe what the IFS found in those documents concerning Phase Two as austerity 2.0. But it still looks set to get rather chilly for several departments, potentially enough to draw blood. Even the schools budget is being frozen in real terms, at least if you strip out the extra for free school meals. Now consider what happens when future pay settlements are factored in. There may be trouble ahead. So where does Klarna come in? None of this changes the chancellor's big problem, namely the amount of fiscal headroom she has within those rules. There is barely any. But there were no announcements on any tax changes, because they are saved for the autumn Budget. Last year, this was unveiled at the end of October. If Reeves holds to form, this year's will be with us in just over three months' time. Watch the government's monthly borrowing figures carefully from now on. The recent ones have made for difficult reading for the chancellor. UK Plc has been writing many more IOUs than she would like, and than the economists expected. The progress of the economy hasn't been terrible, but it has hardly been going gangbusters, to quote the previous PM. Reeves had a lot of fun brandishing big numbers and blowing (not undeserved) raspberries at the opposition. But unless the economy or those borrowing figures improve quite significantly, her next big event will not be anything like as much fun for her, and especially not for us.
Belfast Telegraph
an hour ago
- Belfast Telegraph
Fact check: 2025 spending review claims
On Wednesday Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered the Labour Government's first spending review, outlining its spending plans for the next few years. We've taken a look at some of the key claims. How much is spending increasing by? At the start of her speech Ms Reeves announced that 'total departmental budgets will grow by 2.3% a year in real terms'. That headline figure doesn't tell the full story, however. Firstly, 2.3% is the average annual real-terms growth in total departmental budgets between 2023/24 and 2028/29. That means it includes spending changes that have already been implemented, for both the current (2025/26) and previous (2024/25) financial years. The average annual increase between this year and 2028/29 is 1.5%. Therefore, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said, 'most departments will have larger real-terms budgets at the end of the Parliament than the beginning, but in many cases much of that extra cash will have arrived by April'. Secondly, it's worth noting that the 2.3% figure includes both day-to-day (Resource DEL) and investment (Capital DEL) spending. Capital spending (which funds things like infrastructure projects) is increasing by 3.6% a year on average in real terms between 2023/24 and 2029/30, and by 1.8% between 2025/26 and 2029/30. Day-to-day departmental budgets meanwhile are seeing a smaller average annual real-terms increase – of 1.7% between 2023/24 and 2028/29 and 1.2% between 2025/26 and 2028/29. Which departments are the winners and losers? Ms Reeves touted substantial spending increases in some areas (for example, the 3% rise in day-to-day NHS spending in England), but unsurprisingly her statement did not focus on areas where spending will decrease. Changes to Government spending are not uniform across all departments, and alongside increases in spending on things like the NHS, defence and the justice system, a number of Government departments will see their budgets decrease in real terms. Departments facing real-terms reductions in overall and day-to-day spending include the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (this factors in reductions in aid spending announced earlier this year to offset increased defence spending), the Home Office (although the Government says the Home Office's budget grows in real terms if a planned reduction in asylum spending is excluded) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Did the Conservatives leave a '£22 billion black hole'? Ms Reeves made a claim we've heard a number of times since it first surfaced in July 2024 – that the previous Conservative government left a '£22 billion black hole in the public finances'. That figure comes from a Treasury audit that forecast a £22 billion overspend in departmental day-to-day spending in 2024/25, but the extent to which it was unexpected or inherited is disputed. The IFS said last year that some of the pressures the Government claimed contributed to this so-called 'black hole' could have been anticipated, but others did 'indeed seem to be greater than could be discerned from the outside'. An Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) review of its March 2024 forecast found an estimated £9.5 billion of additional spending pressures were known to the Treasury at that point in time, but were not known to the OBR as it prepared its forecast. It's true that this review didn't confirm the £22 billion figure, but it also did not necessarily prove that it was incorrect, because Labour's figure included pressures which were identified after the OBR prepared its forecast and so were beyond the scope of the OBR's review. We've written more about how the Government reached the figure of £22 billion in our explainer on this topic. How big is the increase in NHS appointments? Ms Reeves took the opportunity to congratulate Health Secretary Wes Streeting for delivering 'three-and-a-half million extra' hospital appointments in England. The Government has previously celebrated this as a 'massive increase', particularly in light of its manifesto pledge to deliver an extra two million appointments a year. Ms Reeves' claim was broadly accurate – data published last month shows there were 3.6 million additional appointments between July 2024 and February 2025 compared to the previous year. But importantly that increase is actually smaller than the 4.2 million rise that happened in the equivalent period the year before, under the Conservative government – as data obtained by Full Fact under the Freedom of Information Act and published last month revealed. What do announcements on asylum hotels, policing, nurseries and more mean for the Government's pledges? Ms Reeves made a number of announcements that appear to directly impact the delivery of several pre-existing Labour pledges, many of which we're already monitoring in our Government Tracker. (We'll be updating the tracker to reflect these announcements in due course, and reviewing how we rate progress on pledges as necessary). The Chancellor announced an average increase in 'police spending power' of 2.3% a year in real terms over the course of the review period, which she said was the equivalent of an additional £2 billion. However, as police budgets comprise a mix of central Government funding and local council tax receipts, some of this extra spending is expected to be funded by increases in council tax precepts. Ms Reeves said this funding would help the Government achieve its commitment of 'putting 13,000 additional police officers, PCSOs and special constables into neighbourhood policing roles in England and Wales', a pledge we're monitoring here. The spending review also includes funding of 'almost £370 million across the next four years to support the Government's commitment to deliver school-based nurseries across England', which Ms Reeves said would help the Government deliver its pledge to have 'a record number of children being school-ready'. The Chancellor also committed to ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of this Parliament, with an additional £200 million announced to 'accelerate the transformation of the asylum system'. When we looked last month at progress on the Government's pledge to 'end asylum hotels' we said it appeared off track, as figures showed the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels was higher at the end of March 2025 than it was when Labour came into Government.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Rachel Reeves has given the Starmer administration a new narrative: Investment, growth and expansion
What a difference a (fiscal) year makes. In 2024, Rachel Reeves spent far more time than she would ever have wished to looking worried, being gloomy, talking about the infamous £22bn 'black hole', and unleashing nasty surprises such as tax hikes and cuts to the pensioners' winter fuel allowance and other areas of social security. She may even have succeeded, as her critics claimed, in talking down the economy so hard that she made her own job even more difficult. In the end, she had to reverse her most high-profile (and most hated) policy and give most of the OAPs their fuel money back. Wisely, she got that U-turn out of the way, lest it blight the bright sheen cast on the economy by the spending review. Now, facing the Commons with a spirit rarely glimpsed since that glad confident morning after the general election, the chancellor of the Exchequer seems a woman transformed. Now the talk is of nothing less than the renewal of Britain, with significant and genuine increases in investment in the NHS, schools, housing, industry, AI, defence and infrastructure. The statement was a dizzying cornucopia of road, rail, energy and other schemes reaching every corner of the kingdom, but, compared with earlier statements, it placed greater focus on the Midlands and the North, and was much more about 'levelling up' than about austerity. We need not get carried away, though. As the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, reminds us – now that the Tories are the professional pessimists – inflation is up; so is unemployment; so are taxes; and growth forecasts have been marked down. The cost of living crisis is far from over. What's more, expert analysis suggests that even more tax rises may be needed, and even on the chancellor's own figures, borrowing will also increase for some years – with the national debt and the tax burden still at new postwar record highs, even on the most optimistic assumptions. Voters, badly bruised by the disappointments of the past year or so, will wonder whether, as ministers claim, Labour really will be able to do all that it promises. They will rightly fear that there is a catch. Indeed, even with as well-received a package as this, some nasties could be seen sticking out from under the polished Treasury veneer. Council tax will likely rise by the maximum 5 per cent a year for the rest of this parliament, and rail fares may also continue their journey upwards, renationalisation or not. Some departmental budgets are being cut by significant amounts, perhaps unrealistically so. There is a good deal, for example, riding on the ability of the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to clear the asylum backlog and save large amounts of money by emptying the so-called asylum hotels. There's more money for that – but will it be enough? Without an accompanying assessment from the Office for Budget Responsibility – and given the uncertainty, until the Budget, about the progress of social security reform and Labour's plans for taxation and borrowing – it is also impossible to say how much 'fiscal headroom' Ms Reeves has provided for herself to allow for domestic disruption, such as public sector pay demands, or external shocks, such as a global trade war. Her principal error since coming to power has consistently been to sail too close to the wind in regard to her fiscal rules. Even now that she has adjusted them (as she had promised not to), her room for manoeuvre may still not be sufficient to prevent further tax rises. The bond vigilantes will be watching (albeit the initial response of the gilt market, at least, was positive). On the face of her statement, however, there does seem to be the prospect that the chancellor will be more successful than most of her postwar predecessors in one crucial respect: boosting investment. Far too often, governments have given way to the immediate short-run demands for extra 'current' spending on public services, or for tax cuts, often under intense pressure from vested interests or the electoral cycle. For about seven decades, 'stop-go' and then 'boom and bust' policies from successive administrations left trend UK growth at best uneven, with both living standards and the quality of public services deteriorating over time. Such pressures have worsened in the period since the global financial crisis of 2008. In recent years, the need to insulate the economy from the shocks of Covid and the energy crisis has left the national debt – and the cost of servicing it – far too high, but there were also fundamental, permanent forces at work, most insidiously, Brexit. The problem underlying Britain's sluggish growth – poor productivity – was easily identified, but the remedy – greater investment – was rarely given the priority it demanded. A 'dash for growth' was more common than were efforts to create the long-term conditions required to boost confidence. Now, Ms Reeves has the chance to give the Starmer administration a new narrative: of investment, growth, and expansion. The funds flowing into green energy, transport, housing, AI, R&D, training, and alleviating child poverty (a fine investment in human capital) also draw important political dividing lines between the government, the Conservatives and Reform UK – and the chancellor was right to deride Nigel Farage's latest false prospectus. At last, the public can dare to hope for the 'change' Labour pledged to deliver. Alongside the Brexit reset (and hopefully more to come there), new trade deals, and the planning reforms, these latest investment plans should result in a stronger economy with a better long-term growth rate. But it will take time. The results will not be entirely apparent by the next election, or sufficiently palpable to be certain to underpin an electoral recovery for Labour. Should they fail to do so, it would be a tragedy for the Starmer government – but, for a change, it should stick to its plans, and to the slogan the prime minister used so much on his way into Downing Street, which has been heard seldom since: country first, party second.
