Matthew Brooker

Never let a good crisis go to waste, runs the adage attributed (apocryphally) to Winston Churchill, a man who disliked school and didn’t go to university. The career of Britain’s wartime prime minister should be evidence enough that you don’t need a degree to succeed in life, contrary to the thrust of UK higher-education policy for the past three decades. The financial distress afflicting universities will be a missed opportunity if it fails to prompt a reset of the sector’s business model. The

Steelmaking in the UK has been in decline for a long time — so long that even the 1979 XTC hit Making Plans for Nigel, which envisioned its subject having his future “as good as sealed” with a job at British Steel, was a satire on out-of-touch parents. At that point, the industry had already shed tens of thousands of jobs and was heading into a period of much sharper retrenchment. Today, the sector employs about 37,000 people, not much more than a tenth of its early 1970s peak. Yet the quest for

When Iran imposed an internet blackout following Israeli airstrikes last year, hundreds of social media accounts devoted to Scottish independence suddenly went quiet. Profiles such as “proud Scottish lass” Fiona were no longer online to share false details of protesters seizing Balmoral Castle or the UK government’s plans to turn tracts of the Highlands into weapons labs. It’s hard to imagine an experiment more effectively designed to demonstrate the presence of malign foreign interference.

When you’ve got a bad toothache and there’s no immediate relief available, you need something to take your mind off the pain. The Competition and Markets Authority’s study into the supply of private dental services in the UK has the look of a distraction. The antitrust regulator initiated the review last month following a request from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves. But focusing on private dentists obscures the real source of discomfort: an unsolved crisis in state-provided care.

A mob of teenage shoplifters tore through a street in southwest London just before Easter, setting off a political backlash and wave of moral agonizing over Britain's perceived societal dysfunction and inability to control record levels of store theft. The incident may serve as an epitaph for a 12-year experiment in crime management that's about to be unwound. A lesson has been learned: Soft-pedaling lower-value offenses is a good way to get more of them. A lot more.

Chelsea FC fired its manager after losing five straight Premier League games without scoring a goal, marking its worst run of defeats in more than a century. Management changes are nothing remarkable in the results-driven business of top-level football, but the upheaval at the west London club has a wider resonance. The team’s imploding form and the rising disenchantment of supporters call into question the compatibility of private equity-style methods with English soccer. Four years after US in

US President Donald Trump says he will raise the case of imprisoned Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai when he meets President Xi Jinping in China next week. It might seem implausible that Beijing would consider releasing the pro-democracy businessman, an arch foe who feuded with the ruling Communist Party for decades, only three months after he was given a 20-year sentence on national security charges. The obstacles are formidable and shouldn’t be underestimated. But there are enough reasons to t

Many places have representative offices in the UK, from Canadian provinces to Spanish regions to outposts of the former British empire such as Bermuda. The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office is unusual in enjoying consular-style privileges that are generally only available to national governments — staff immunity for official acts, tax and customs advantages and inviolable premises. When these benefits were granted, it was never imagined that the office would become an arm of China’s transnatio

Nigel Farage adopts the affable persona of a pub-going man of the people most of the time, but can quickly switch to thin-skinned tetchiness when questioned on matters he would rather were left alone. That tendency has been on display as the Reform UK leader comes under scrutiny over an undeclared £5 million ($6.7 million) gift from a crypto billionaire, now the subject of a parliamentary standards inquiry. The controversy has drawn renewed attention to the influence of overseas money in British

The demise of the UK buy-to-let sector has been predicted many times in the past. This time may be different. A landmark law that came into force this month shifts the balance of power away from landlords and toward tenants in what amounts to the biggest shakeup of England’s rental property market in almost four decades. Home sales by small investors have accelerated. This has the look of a turning point.