Author: Blake Anderson

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.An obscure Oxford rail freight line closed to passengers for more than 60 years has emerged as an unlikely battleground in the UK’s quest to boost sluggish economic growth.   Leading scientific organisations, including a major new institute funded by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, have launched a campaign to revive the three-mile Cowley branch line to link up Oxford’s growing research centres.  The line, which for decades has only transported newly built Minis from a BMW plant, is a tale of both Britain’s industrial past…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Twelve people have appeared in court on corruption charges after a six-year investigation into the awarding of local authority property contracts in Liverpool. The charges have been brought under Operation Aloft, a lengthy probe by Merseyside police into how public contracts were awarded in the city between 2010 and 2020. Joe Anderson, 67, the city’s former Labour mayor, was among those to appear at Preston Magistrates Court on Friday. Derek Hatton, who was Labour deputy leader of Liverpool council during the 1980s, is among…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Sentencing Council has rejected a call from the UK government to abandon guidelines criticised as leading to a “two-tier” justice system, deepening a row with Downing Street.Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he was “disappointed” after the council refused to backtrack on guidance that encourages judges to request pre-sentence reports for offenders from particular backgrounds.Number 10 said “all options are on the table” — including “reviewing the role and responsibilities” of the council — after the body said the updated guidelines…

Rachel Reeves was forced to slash spending to balance the books in her Spring Statement this week. Welfare spending will be cut more deeply than initially trailed, prompting warnings that 250,000 people — a fifth of them children — could be plunged into poverty. Economists also fear the chancellor will face further tough choices — more cuts or a fresh tax raid — in the autumn. Host Lucy Fisher is joined by the FT’s George Parker and Stephen Bush, as well as economics commentator Chris Giles to discuss the winners and losers, and the main economic takeaways. The panel also…

“In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,” wrote the art critic Kenneth Clark. Fry — prolific art critic and writer, and a painter himself — was a passionate champion of the latest work coming from France in the early 20th century, and determined to convert the English-speaking world to his way of thinking. He was also a central figure in the circle of thinkers, writers and artists dubbed the Bloomsbury Group (for the London district in which many of them lived), and of whom Dorothy Parker later quipped “they lived in…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.“Ah, look at all the lonely people.” When The Beatles bemoaned the solitary existence and unmourned death of Eleanor Rigby it was 1966, and a cup of tea would have cost you a few pennies. A chat in a café with the waitress perhaps, or someone at a nearby table, may well have meant a lot to our Eleanor — and she doesn’t come over in the song as a high-net-worth individual.For a decade or so, I enjoyed engaging with the…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Sir Keir Starmer’s director of communications Matthew Doyle is to step down from his role after just nine months in the post.The 49-year-old served as a special adviser to former prime minister Tony Blair and led communications for Liz Kendall’s leadership campaign in 2015.Doyle wrote in a letter to colleagues in Downing Street that “when I started working for Keir four years ago, not many people thought we could win a general election and certainly not in the emphatic way we did”.…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.MainFT:WHSmith branded shops will disappear from UK high streets following a £76mn deal to sell the business on Friday. The group will offload all 480 stores in town centres to Modella Capital, which also owns HobbyCraft in the UK, to focus on its lucrative international travel retail business, which accounts for 75 per cent of group revenue and 85 per cent of trading profit. The WHSmith stores will be rebranded as TG Jones as part of the deal, the company said on…

This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday. If you’re not a subscriber, you can still receive the newsletter free for 30 daysGood morning. Stephen is having a rare break from his mad schedule and we’re all punch-drunk from digesting the implications of the Spring Statement. You can find a cache of excellent FT analysis here. But in the meantime, I’m going to give Inside Politics readers a break too — at least from the economic gloom. Let’s have a look at the May electoral…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.British retail sales unexpectedly rose by 1 per cent in February, propelled by an increase at department stores as well as clothing and household goods shops.Friday’s monthly data from the Office for National Statistics showed the volume of goods bought exceeded the 0.4 per cent contraction expected by economists polled by Reuters.However the figure fell short of January’s 1.4 per cent increase.Retail sales rose by 0.3 per cent in the three months to February compared with the previous three months, indicating resilient…