Sam Freedman

2 weeks ago | samf.substack.com | Sam Freedman

Politics, policy analysis, and foreign affairs from Sam and Lawrence FreedmanOver 73,000 subscribersBy subscribing, I agree to Substack’s Terms of Use and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy“I love the taste of crunchy policy analysis in the morning, and nobody does it better than the Freedmans.”“Brilliant analysis, beautifully written. An essential source of nuanced information”“Substack done really well.

2 weeks ago | samf.substack.com | Sam Freedman

Before starting on the criticism there were some positives about the way this spending review was done. Thank God that Rachel Reeves changed the fiscal rules in October to enable more capital spending, the best decision this government has made so far. The Tory plans she inherited would have seen a big drop off in investment at the worst possible time, whereas she has been able to put substantial sums into social housing, transport, defence, and energy infrastructure.

2 weeks ago | samf.substack.com | Sam Freedman

A few months ago I did a post recommending ten books that help explain the world right now. Several readers got in touch afterwards to say that “When the Clock Broke” by John Ganz should have been on the list. It wasn’t out in the UK at the time but serendipitously his publisher got in touch shortly after to send me a copy. I read it and it should have been on the list - there’s a reason President Obama picked it as one of his summer reads.

3 weeks ago | samf.substack.com | Sam Freedman |Lawrence Freedman

Thanks for our largest ever haul of readers’ questions over the past week. We’ve done our best to anwer as many as possible but have had to cut some to stop this post being literally the length of a short book. Apologies if we haven’t answered yours this time.

3 weeks ago | samf.substack.com | Sam Freedman

There are ten days to go until the spending review that will define the ambitions of this government for the rest of the Parliament. For a long time, well before they were elected, I’ve been arguing that this would be when fiscal reality finally hit home and the consequences of Labour’s election tax pledges would become clear. But rather than just preview what’s likely to happen I thought I’d try to give readers a sense of what it’s like going through one of these reviews.