by Elizabeth Stephens | 30 Sep, 2026 | Talking Points
Andy Burnham promised Liverpool “a real speech”. Real, it turns out, means the difficult bits arrive after everyone has gone home. Take the two great beasts of public finance: the triple lock and social care. Burnham tackled both with the courage of a man defusing a...
by Elizabeth Stephens | 21 Sep, 2026 | Talking Points
Sunday’s state elections looked contradictory: the AfD took Mecklenburg-Vorpommern outright on 38.3%, crushing the CDU to 4.9% and zero seats. In Berlin, Die Linke topped the poll on 25.7%, its best-ever result, campaigning to expropriate large corporate landlords....
by Elizabeth Stephens | 10 Sep, 2026 | Talking Points
Every government eventually faces the oldest trade-off in statecraft: guns or butter. In peacetime, that trade-off is a matter of preference. In a period of heightened geopolitical tension – contested sea lanes, a revisionist Russia, an assertive China, proxy...
by Elizabeth Stephens | 6 Sep, 2026 | Talking Points
Italy has cycled through more than 60 governments since 1946 – a merry-go-round so reliable that political scientists have built entire careers cataloguing its instability. So, when Giorgia Meloni’s coalition ticked past Silvio Berlusconi’s old...
Recent Comments