Latest news with #NewStatesman
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Labour are U-turning it up
Winter fuel cuts? Two child benefit gap? Rachel Reeves' fiscal rules? Angela Rayner? The team discuss what will stay and what will have to go for Labour in the coming weeks and months, and where Nigel Farage is lurking to capitalise on Labour and Tory struggles. Anoosh Chakelian is joined by George Eaton and Rachel Cunliffe. Subscribers to the New Statesman can listen ad-free in our app. Download it on iOS or Android. Not a regular podcast listener? Read our guide on how to listen to New Statesman Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
As Gaza faces famine, where does the US stand on Israel?
Last week, the Israeli military launched a major new ground assault on Gaza. The aim, according to Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to force the surrender of Hamas, free the remaining Israeli hostages, and bring the entire territory under Israel's control. The UK, France and Canada have demanded Israel halt 'its military operations' and 'immediately allow aid' in. While Trump spoke about his support for Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu during his campaign, in recent weeks his patience seems to be wearing this. The US ambassador to Israel maintains Hamas is still responsible for starting the war by attacking Israel on 7 October 2023, and says the militant group must release the 58 Israeli hostages it is still holding. Meanwhile Hamas has been in private talks with the US about a ceasefire. Katie Stallard is joined by Raja Khalidi and Rajan Menon. Subscribers to the New Statesman can listen ad-free in our app. Download it on iOS or Android. Not a regular podcast listener? Read our guide on how to listen to New Statesman Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New Statesman
5 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Nigel Farage's booze offensive
Photo byChampagne breakfast with Nigel Farage, four bottles of fizz delivered to the stand, chauffeur service so the permanently inebriated don't drive and a porter on tap are merely a few reasons why a corporate £250,000 'accelerator package' at Reform UK's weekend national conference in Birmingham this September is one of the most, ahem, unusual to be offered by a political party aspiring to power. Which, if any, companies and organisations buy access to the leader and book exhibition space will be a pointer to where the wind is blowing. Whether any executives recall who they met after unlimited complimentary drinks in a platinum bar is another matter. Not exactly short of advice, Keir Starmer's right ear is to hear more. Labour's fledgling red wall group of MPs is to launch as a formal Brexity, migration-hostile faction at the party's conference. Head insurgent Jo White revealed details on Politics Inside Out, a new podcast by Gloria De Piero and Jonathan Ashworth. The Bassetlaw MP's most startling disclosure was that her mother was a communist which means so too was the mother-in-law of White's hubby, hammer of the left Lord John Mann. Harry Pollitt would be wondering where it all went wrong. Herculean seed sower Boris Johnson's one-man campaign to reverse Britain's declining birth rate may exacerbate big daddy's strained family relations. Baby number four with third wife Carrie, his ninth in all (that we know about), arrived shortly before a daughter with second wife Marina marries this weekend. Invitations and the seating plan would be a challenge for the diplomatic corps. After guest editing last week's New Statesman, Gordon Brown made his successor as Labour Prime Minister appear a little smaller by delivering a 60-minute mesmerising John Smith memorial lecture without notes. The son of a preacher man reeled off stats, cracked jokes and recited poetry. Hair-shirt Broon expressed contempt for fees charged by Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon. His quip that Liz Truss should pay to be heard, prompted a Tory to scoff so should one-gear Keir. The current PM is monotone even talking of subjects he loves like Arsenal. Twice-divorced Nigel Farage returning early after the bank holiday to float tax breaks for married couples triggered ridicule after he'd been caught playing hooky, missing Starmer's European deal to sneak away on holiday before the parliamentary recess started. One Labourite wondered aloud whether a self-styled man of the people, registering nudging £1m from outside interests on top of his £93,904 MP salary, booked ahead to beat school holiday surge prices. With 10 'second' jobs Farage could afford any £80 fine for unauthorised absence. Kevin Maguire is associate editor(politics) of the Daily Mirror [See also: The economic fantasies of Reform UK] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New Statesman
5 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
How the weather changed on the 'cruel' two-child benefit cap
Illustration by Michael Villegas / Ikon Images Labour is in the middle of a slow-motion U-turn on the two-child benefit cap. Our political editor, Andrew Marr, revealed on last week's episode of the New Statesman podcast that it was Keir Starmer's 'priority' to reverse the George Osborne-era cut to benefits for third-born children, and there have been similar reports over the bank holiday weekend. The government's child poverty taskforce, which was supposed to report in the spring – ahead of the Spending Review and Spring Statement – has been postponed until autumn, supposedly to give the Treasury time to work out how to fund the reversal of the policy. Labour promised in its manifesto to reduce child poverty in this parliament. It had little chance of achieving this with the two-child limit still in place – it is responsible for hundreds of thousands of children living in poverty. Starmer's decision not to lift the cap ahead of the 2024 election was a blow to many within the Labour Party, civil society, and families claiming benefits. The issue emerged again once the party entered government, when Labour MPs voting against the cap had the whip removed. Pressure built yet again in May, when the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown guest edited a special issue of the New Statesman on Britain's 'child poverty epidemic', setting out the bleak picture of life for nearly five million children in the UK today, and funding ideas to help them. In his strongest intervention yet, in a podcast and YouTube interview accompanying this issue, Brown told the New Statesman politics podcast that the two-child cap is 'cruel', turns third siblings into 'second-class citizens', and said it has 'got to change' – remarks picked up in the press and in the House of Commons. Much has been reported about the influence of Tony Blair and his policy institute on the current Labour administration, but less has been said of Gordon Brown's role. He is close to frontbenchers, such as the employment minister Alison McGovern, and was tasked with a commission on rebuilding Britain's economy when Labour was in opposition – when he was said to have a 'direct line' into Starmer's office. There are reports, for example, that the child poverty taskforce will recommend the return of Sure Start children's centres: another suggestion Brown made in his New Statesman podcast interview. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Reluctant to be seen as a backseat driver, Brown had avoided politically inconvenient interventions since Labour took power – most notably on the party's cut to winter fuel allowance, which he introduced as chancellor. As well as on the two-child cap, he has also now spoken out on that subject, suggesting there is 'a case for' excluding top-rate taxpayers from the once-universal payments. The question now is whether Chancellor Rachel Reeves adopts some of his revenue-raising ideas, including a gambling tax, commercial bank levy, and changes to Gift Aid, to help tackle child poverty. Brown told the New Statesman in the same interview that these funding proposals would be possible without 'breaking the government's tax commitments' or 'breaking the fiscal rules, which, of course, Rachel Reeves is obviously right to be concerned about'. [See more: Letter from Wigan] Related
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
For 20 years this novel has reduced the most hardened critics to tears
For more than a decade, Kazuo Ishiguro had a box file in his study marked 'Students Novel'. In it were notes, diagrams and some pages of a story he'd tried to write in 1990, then again in 1995. Each time he'd abandoned the attempt and had written a completely different novel. He knew his students would share a strange destiny that would shorten their lives but also make them feel special. But what would that destiny be? Here was where he got stuck. He'd played around with ideas such as a virus or radioactive poisoning, but it all seemed too melodramatic. In 2001, he returned to his project with fresh ideas. They were inspired partly by new developments in science, and partly by the contact he'd had with a new generation of British writers such as Alex Garland and David Mitchell. While Ishiguro had come of age in an era when literary fiction avoided any whiff of 'popular' genres, the younger writers had no such qualms. They blithely incorporated all sorts of influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror into their work. 'My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me', Ishiguro writes. 'They opened windows for me I'd not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.' He writes this in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Never Let Me Go, the extraordinary novel that gradually emerged from those early notes. It's the Nobel Prize winner's most-read novel, has sold in millions, is widely studied and has been translated into 50 languages. It's been adapted into a film, two stage plays and a Japanese TV series. Like many fans, I remember vividly my first reading. It starts so quietly, narrated in simple and artless prose by Kathy, a student at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school in the English countryside with kind teachers and a nostalgic Enid-Blyton feel. We follow the everyday lives of Kathy and her two schoolfriends, Ruth and Tommy, as they grow into young adults. Gradually the purpose of the school is revealed. I won't give it away except to say there's a dark future for these idealistic, hopeful kids and their tender feelings for one another. Talking of tender feelings, this is a novel that reduces the most hardened critics to tears. 'No matter how many times I read it … it breaks my heart all over again,' writes Alix Ohlin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'I was nothing less than stunned by it,' David Sexton writes in the New Statesman. He reread it on a day ferry when he was a judge for the 2005 Booker Prize (it nearly won, but the casting vote went to John Banville's The Sea) and was glad he was in a windowless cabin, 'so tearful it made me'.
