Kemi Badenoch and the economy: a plan stuck in the Tory comfort zone by The Guardian Editorial

To outlast a prime minister always counts as some kind of achievement for an opposition leader, although Kemi Badenoch cannot claim credit for Sir Keir Starmer’s downfall. Sir Keir’s wounds were mostly self-inflicted. To the extent that opposition pressure was involved, it was electoral threats from Reform UK and the Green party that stoked Labour party frustration to a regicidal pitch. The Tory leader’s role was largely as a spectator.

Shares for the Many, Not the Few: What Dangote’s IPO Owes to Margaret Thatcher, and What It Might Teach Her Country by Lawson Akhigbe

The theory behind all of it, gas, telecoms, water, rail, was called popular capitalism, and it rested on a wager: that if enough ordinary Britons held shares directly, they would develop a stake, literal and psychological, in the fiscal health of the nation. Capitalism would stop being something done to people and start being something done by them.

Austerity: Britain’s Longest-Running Political Fancy Dress by Lawson Akhigbe

There is an old British habit that refuses to die. When the public finances look awkward, someone reaches for the national costume box, pulls out the Union Jack, and declares that the only patriotic course is to ask the people with the least to tighten their belts a little more. The word of the hour is always “austerity.” The justification is always necessity. The result is almost always the same.

Is David Cameron the Worst Thing to Happen to Modern Britain? By Lawson Akhigbe

Some political leaders leave office and quietly retreat into the background. Others spend their retirement writing memoirs that nobody reads and giving speeches that nobody remembers.

The NGO Trap: How a $1 Trillion Industry Learned to Love African Poverty by Lawson Akhigbe

Somewhere in a glass-and-steel conference centre in Geneva, a distinguished panel is convening to discuss Africa's poverty crisis. The room costs £18,000 a day to hire. The keynote speaker flew business class from Washington. The catered lunch is exceptional. The conference proceedings will produce, in due course, a forty-seven page report recommending as the 1994 report did, as the 2003 report did, as the 2011 report did, more aid. Africa, meanwhile, remains poor.