Will Dunn

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

On Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Russia has now used more than 27,000 aerial bombs, more than 11,000 armed drones and thousands more guided munitions to attack Ukraine. Among the victims of this week’s attacks were an emergency worker, his wife and their one-year-old grandson, the 632nd child killed in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. And yet British businesses continue to enable the Russian state to secure its main source of income: revenue from oil and gas.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

On a quiet high street in Devon, outside a boarded-up M&S, I stopped to speak to two men who had obviously spent some time going down certain digital rabbit-holes. One was stood in front of a hand-made flag that declared: “CO2 is the gas of life, stop net zero.” The other was stood in front of a bigger, printed banner from which a huge pair of reptilian eyes, surrounded by ones and zeroes, peered out. “Cash is freedom,” declared this banner.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

On Friday 23 May, Donald Trump threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on what is arguably the world’s most successful consumer product, the iPhone. This would be a historic tax hike on American consumers, because Apple currently sells around 70 million iPhones in the US for about $1,000 each; the US government would ask for $17.5bn in additional taxes on a single product line from a single company.

4 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

“Liz Truss all over again”: this is how Keir Starmer characterised Reform UK’s offer to the British people at a speech in a glass factory in St Helens. What Nigel Farage is offering, the PM said, is “billions upon billions of completely unfunded spending, precisely the sort of irresponsible splurge that sent your mortgage costs, your bills, and the cost of living through the roof”. Farage responded that this was “Project Fear 2.0”. The politics of this are interesting.

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Will Dunn

The news that net migration effectively halved last year, falling from 860,000 in 2023 to 431,000 in 2024, will have been received with relief in Downing Street. Is this anything to celebrate? Do we actually want fewer people in the country? For a Labour party that now claims Reform is its main opponent, the answer is yes. The figures present an opportunity to follow in a long political tradition of taking credit for someone else’s numbers.