Iain Martin

3 weeks ago | reaction.life | Iain Martin

This post is free to read. To receive Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter for subscribers upgrade to paid. For Reform, it was all going so well. The party is riding high, leading in the opinion polls and even breaking through in Scotland where it has hitherto been about as popular as a Margaret Thatcher impersonator turning up at the Scottish Trades Union Congress annual bunfight to deliver the Iron Lady’s greatest hits as an after dinner speech.

3 weeks ago | reaction.life | Iain Martin

Almost 17 years after British taxpayers rescued what had briefly and disastrously become the biggest bank in the world, the UK government has announced it will finally sell off its remaining shareholding in NatWest Group, the successor to RBS. In 2008 and 2009 ministers spent a total of £45bn acquiring an 84% stake in the bank, because they feared its collapse would cause a chain reaction, destroy the financial system and devastate the British economy.

1 month ago | reaction.life | Iain Martin

When Donald Trump won last year’s US election, opponents of Britain’s Chagos Islands deal assumed he would ride in and reject the agreement forged by Sir Keir Starmer. To their bafflement, the Trump administration instead went along with the deal. Why? Last week, the UK government signed the controversial agreement giving Mauritius sovereignty over the islands, which include Diego Garcia, home to a joint US-UK military base that is a vital staging post in the Indian Ocean.

1 month ago | reaction.life | Iain Martin

For as long as I can remember it has been a fixed point in my worldview that one of Britain’s greatest advantages since the Second World War has been its two party Westminster system. Yes, of course, in the literal sense there are more than two parties in operation. The Liberal Democrats, the heirs to the old Liberal party, are always with us, although their numbers in parliament fluctuate. They have 72 MPs today, yet got only eight as recently as at the 2015 general election and eleven in 2019.

1 month ago | reaction.life | Iain Martin

“The battlelines for Ukraine are the frontline for western values,” said Keir Starmer today, who insisted: “The argument that defines this age is simple: National security is economic security.”The Prime Minister was speaking at the London Defence Conference on the 80th anniversary of VE Day, on the same week reports emerged that the Cabinet Office is secretly drawing up plans for how it would respond to a direct military attack by Russia.