The Iron Chancellor’s gamble

How to raise taxes

Labour has the political freedom to make unpopular decisions.

Letter of the week: Starmer’s rhetoric gap

Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.

Green Ed’s red rage

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

How the fight against sleeping sickness was won

We are closer than ever before to consigning the “the colonial disease” to history.

Film in the family

Plus: my paean to female friendship and Ian McKellen on marvellous form.

Carol Vorderman is coming for Labour

From Countdown to unlikely revolutionary – the broadcaster and social media star is a political conundrum.

Workers’ rights or growth? Another “tough choice” for Labour

Will pressure from business and their own economic priorities force Starmer and Reeves to dilute promised employment reforms?

Is Paul Marshall challenging Rupert Murdoch’s media empire?

The UnHerd owner has added The Spectator to his media stable.

There is an intellectual sickness on the American right

When free speech is treated as the highest good, it gives rise to shock-jock politics.

Those delighting in the EU’s decline should be careful what they wish for

Squeezed between the US and China, the bloc is in a life-threatening crisis.

AI will never understand what makes writing great

I don’t doubt that AI will one day write a “good” novel. But why would anyone want to read…

Lynn Barber’s conversation pieces

The celebrity interviewer on men speaking over her, her most interesting subject, and entering her ninth decade.

WH Auden’s visions of England

The poet as a young man became the “mouthpiece of an epoch” by connecting his private world with the…

David Peace’s footballing saints

The novelist laureate of English football succumbs to hero-worship in his reimagining of the Busby Babes’ tragic demise.

Liz Truss’s alternate reality

Anthony Seldon’s all-access account fails to explain how a pound-shop Thatcher could take the highest office in the land.

From Rachel Kushner to Mark Rowlands: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Stone Circles by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings and The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective…

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice resurrects ancient material

Tim Burton’s sequel attempts to recapture the spirit of the original. Is he just cashing in on the past?

Colin from Accounts is back, and hilarious, wicked and true

This antic, immaculate show cuts both ways, sending up the tediously woke and the tediously un-woke alike.

The Death of England trilogy captures a nation adrift

The strengths of these plays – staged on a St George’s Cross – is that they are largely led…

Fred Again, EDM’s everybro

How did the unassuming producer of polite, emotive dance music become social media’s superstar DJ?

A digested history of British protein and its strict social hierarchies

The macronutrient has a physiological role as well as a cultural and commercial one.

AI won’t solve all of medicine’s problems

Technology is invaluable to the future of healthcare – but we must also be realistic.

A new flat and a new joint life – the dream is no longer a dream

I pled with the universe, God, and any other higher powers I could think of. Finally, M— and I…

Listening to Debussy at thrash metal volume

One shouldn’t use a fork to scoop ear wax out, but I was getting frantic.

This England: Told down the river

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…

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Anthony Joseph Q&A: “I’ve collected around 30,000 vinyl records”

The poet on Chris Ofili and a fascination with reality TV.