Will Dunn
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Business editor @NewStatesman
Articles by Will Dunn
Was Britain really better off in the 1980s?
Photo by Allan Olley/Mirrorpix/Getty Images Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage have something in common: neither man can stop talking about the Eighties. Each believes in his own way that it’s all been downhill since Bananarama were in the charts and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the world’s most important actor. For Farage, the Eighties were Britain’s greatest decade. In October 1986 the London Stock Exchange switched to electronic trading and the financial services sector was deregulated.
Chi specula sulla paura dell’ia
Nell’inverno del 2022 milioni di persone in tutto il mondo si divertivano con ChatGpt. Ma mentre si meravigliavano di questa nuova tecnologia, i ministri e i funzionari del governo britannico cercavano d’immaginare i potenziali effetti catastrofici. Facevano simulazioni e organizzavano riunioni in cui si chiedevano se qualcuno avrebbe potuto usare i chatbot per attaccare i sistemi democratici o creare neurotossine da rilasciare nel Tamigi.
AI's silent coup
Good morning. This Will Dunn, business editor of the New Statesman. Over the past year I have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former ministers, officials and advisors, technologists and MPs about our government’s headlong rush into the AI future. The UK has committed to adopt AI more quickly than any other G7 economy. Plenty see it as a source of economic growth and a means to produce a smaller, more effective state.
Il potere del denaro
Scorrendo le email di Jeffrey Epstein si percepisce qualcosa di simile a quello che Hannah Arendt aveva notato nel 1963 assistendo al processo contro Adolf Eichman. Nei documenti pubblicati finora ci sono molteplici allusioni ai crimini di Epstein: per esempio quando un suo tirapiedi discute la costruzione di una “stanza dei giochi” per lui in un albergo o quando Epstein scrive “mi è piaciuto molto il video con la tortura”. Ma l’impressione generale è quella di una normalità terrificante.
Finland: Sanna Marin presents her autobiography
Marin's story is all the more inspiring because she doesn't present herself as a victim, Helsingin Sanomat notes: “Marin's book conveys to international readers the image of a young woman who shakes up the institution of prime minister and only wants to dance with girls and gays at wild but innocent parties. ...
Modernizing Rigging and Lifting in Iron and Steel Foundries
In the world of iron and steel foundries, failure is not just expensive—it’s dangerous. Whether it’s a 2,800°F ladle of molten iron, a 4,000-lb mold being repositioned mid-shift, or a crane moving a critical casting to the cooling bay, every lift matters. The pace is relentless, the environment is punishing, and one wrong move can halt production—or worse, cost lives. Foundry work has always demanded grit, precision, and strong backs. But in 2025, that’s no longer enough.
Morning Call: What’s up docs?
Good morning, Will here. Resident doctors have today begun a five-day strike over pay. Wes Streeting has said he will try to keep disruption to a minimum, but previous strikes in 2023 led to more than a million appointments being cancelled. Are their demands reasonable?
Morning Call: Britain vs the bond market
Good morning, Will here. It’s a hot Friday morning, Britain’s economy contracted by 0.1 per cent last month, and I’m going to try to make you care about the Bank of Japan. Come back! It might be important! Normal British people don’t spend much time thinking about the Japanese central bank. Normal Japanese people probably don’t, either, but decisions taken in Tokyo can have significant effects for you.
Morning Call: Labour faces another rebellion
Good morning, Will here. It’s not easy being Labour: yesterday, there was the very positive news that the government has replicated what was arguably one of New Labour’s most popular and successful policies, Sure Start, with “Best Start”, a major expansion of parenting support hubs to every local authority by April 2026.
Good morning, Will here. Prime Minister’s Questions is often hard to watch, because it’s a brief and unedifying spectacle of competitive boasting and jeering. But yesterday’s PMQs was hard to watch because the Chancellor was crying. The image on the front of all of today’s newspapers shows a seemingly oblivious Prime Minister standing at the despatch box, failing to support his Chancellor as she struggled to maintain composure on the front bench.
Morning Call: Leaning tower of Lisa
Good morning, Will here. The Commons’ Treasury Committee has published a report today into George Osborne’s Lifetime Isa policy. It was great for inflating the housing market, it turns out, but less good for everything else. Read more below. The Lifetime Isa sounded like an unbeatable idea: put up to £4,000 a year into a savings account and the government would add 25 per cent on top.
Morning Call: Let the non-doms leave
Good morning, Will here. Rachel Reeves is reportedly considering changes to the rules around “non-doms” – people who declare themselves to be “non-domiciled” in the UK in order to pay less tax – in response to a protracted media campaign against the policy. On a daily basis, newspapers from the Telegraph to the Independent are warning that the abolition of the non-dom regime is causing an exodus of millionaires.
Morning Call: Summer of sewage, 2025 edition
Good morning, Will here. The National Audit Office’s report on the water sector doesn’t look good for anyone, particularly our regulators. More below. On 5 February 2003, a pipe organ in a 14th-century church in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany began sounding the first notes of a work by the American composer John Cage called Organ2/As Slow As Possible.
Morning Call: The state pension is being siphoned off abroad
Good morning, Will here. In this exclusive story, I reveal how the UK government does not know how many people who live overseas have been exploiting a loophole through which they can receive the state pension. People from other countries are buying access to the UK state pension and receiving a retirement of guaranteed, inflation-protected income at the expense of the British taxpayer.
Morning Call: How should the UK respond to Trump’s tariffs?
Good morning, it’s Will. The fallout from Donald Trump’s tariffs continues. I explore this further below. Napoleon Bonaparte famously said: “When somebody punches you in the face, do not immediately offer him a piece of your birthday cake.” Admittedly, the source for this quote is not particularly reliable (the source is me; I made it up).
Good morning, Will here. In her Spring Statement speech on Wednesday, Rachel Reeves mentioned the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 19 times. I explain below why this is such a problem. It was supposed to be a speech about how well the Labour government was handling the economy; it was to a great extent a speech about how well the Treasury had managed to pass its exams.
Morning Call: Would a wealth tax work?
Good morning, Will here. Like a hungry passenger on an early Ryanair flight, Rachel Reeves has just been served a deeply unpleasant breakfast and she’s going to have to eat it. This morning’s fiscal gruel is served by the Office for National Statistics, which reports that the UK has borrowed £132.2bn so far this financial year (since 6 April 2024), almost £15bn more than the same period in the previous year.
Morning Call: What the public thinks about benefits
Good morning, Will here. As George wrote yesterday, Keir Starmer faces a rebellion by Labour MPs, particularly those on the left of the party, who disagree with his planned changes to the benefits system. However, new polling by Ipsos, shared exclusively with the New Statesman, suggests the public is more conservative on benefits – though it might not agree with Labour’s plan to fix them.
Morning Call: Sitting on defence?
Good morning, Will here. In an unexpected statement in the House of Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister announced the government’s intention to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027. Today, I discuss the realities of making that happen.
Morning Call: The Trump whisperers
Good morning, Will here. The Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz will likely form the next German government after yesterday’s federal election. But the vote confirmed how the far-right Alternative for Germany party is now, as Nicholas Harris writes for the New Statesman this morning, “making the political weather” in Germany for the first time since the Second World War (and with a high turnout, too). UK politics this week, however, will be dominated by Keir Starmer’s trip to the US.
Morning Call: Westminster’s WhatsApp addiction needs to end
Good morning, Will here. It has not exactly been a relaxing recess. Whatever the government had hoped to talk about, this week has been dominated by geopolitics. Keir Starmer will have much on his mind as he prepares for his trip to Washington next week. On the New Statesman website today, Katie Stallard tries to make sense of Donald Trump’s move to make Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams come true, siding with Russia over Ukraine and sending Europe into a tailspin.
Morning Call: Who scotches the watchmen?
Good morning, Will here. The Labour government seems to view red tape as a barrier to economic growth. But is it? The Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, gave a speech yesterday at a Brand Experience Space, which is apparently a sort of very large shop, in which he said he was hearing “day in, day out” from business leaders who told him that “regulation and regulators are too cumbersome”. His answer to them was to “watch this space” for “wider regulatory reform over the coming weeks and months”.
Morning Call: The Iron Chancellor’s steel dilemma
Good morning, and happy Bake Your Own GDP Narrative Day. The UK economy is growing! Sort of: GDP was up a whopping 0.1 per cent in the last quarter of 2024; BUT per-capita GDP seems to have fallen (BUT this is based on projections that will be revised); BUT real wages seem have grown; BUT business investment is down. So, if you’re on one side of the house you can claim the UK’s economy is stagnating, and if you’re on the other you can say that the economy has grown since Labour won the election.
Morning Call: How to handle Trump’s tariffs
Good morning, Will here. The UK is in a tricky negotiating position as it faces Donald Trump’s trade belligerence. But there could be a way – provided the US president abandons his vindictive energy. At a dinner in the City of London last night the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, summed up the UK’s position on our exposure to Trump tariffs: “Don’t jinx it,” he told attendees.
Morning Call: Why the Brexit debate will never die
Good morning, Will here. Today marks five years since the UK officially stopped being an EU member and began its “transition period”. But five years on, and the spectre of Brexit still looms large. Today we’ll be discussing why this is and if it will ever go away. By the time Brexit sort-of actually happened, five years ago today, most people were already sick of talking about it.
DeepSeek has exposed America’s AI fiction
19 hours ago Apple’s Calendar app has been on the iPhone since the start, and rarely gets changed. But in the last few months, Calendar has been the subject of some compelling upgrades. And now, iOS 18.3 adds a feature that provides another reason to use the app. Calendar got several rare upgrades in iOS …
Morning Call: Has Rachel Reeves given in to the non-doms?
Good morning, Will here. Today we’re scrutinising if nom-doms really are leaving the country, and if so, how many. The news from Davos yesterday was that Rachel Reeves had been persuaded to “relax non-dom rules amid millionaires’ exodus” (Economic Times). The Chancellor, it was reported, was planning to water down Labour’s longstanding pledge to tax overseas income after a report “found more than 10,000 millionaires left the UK in 2024” (BBC News).
Morning Call: Has the bonfire of consultants begun?
Good morning, Will here. Labour’s 2024 manifesto is very clear that it “will not tolerate fraud or waste anywhere”, and specifically identifies an area in which money is wasted: “The excessive use of consultants.” It states that the government aims to halve spending on management consultancy, saving £750m a year. How’s that going?
Morning Call: Well, that Zucks
Good morning, Will here. In the increasingly heated competition to see which Silicon Valley centibillionaire can show the least moral character, Mark Zuckerberg edged ahead of Jeff Bezos this week by announcing a bold plan to get rid of the fact-checking and content-moderation programmes behind his social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram.
Good morning, Will here. Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday, which reset his government’s targets, is a much more realistic way for people to judge his economic policies. This is good – because people care more about the price of eggs than they do GDP. I explore this below. In the final week of the 2015 election campaign, Ed Miliband travelled to a car park in Hastings and unveiled an 8-foot, 6-inch limestone slab on which six pledges had been carved.
Mosca va dritta verso il disastro
Il pil è uno degli indicatori economici meno sofisticati, un singolo numero per descrivere i miliardi di eventi e decisioni che muovono l’economia. Ha sicuramente una sua utilità, e il suo principale obiettivo è raccontare la storia più semplice possibile su dove sta andando un’economia: sta crescendo o si sta contraendo? Le storie semplici, però, sono spesso fuorvianti.
Morning Call: The truth about sick-note Britain
Good morning, Will here. Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has announced what the government is describing as the “biggest employment reforms in a generation” to address the fact that 9.25 million people in the UK are economically inactive. The reforms include a new National Jobs and Careers Services, changes to how apprenticeships are funded, an overhaul of the Jobcentre system, mental health support and other public health measures.
Morning Call: Rachel Reeves’s retirement revolution
Good morning, Will here. Today we’re looking at the problems with UK pensions. The British are world leaders in weird traditions. In most villages there is at least one weekend of the year dedicated to chasing some walnuts down a hill while dressed as a heron, or offering libations to the trees, or just having a bonfire and singing a few songs about trying to kill the King. It’s all good fun and an important part of our heritage. However, there is one British tradition that must be stamped out.
Morning Call: Trump vs the UK economy
Good morning, Will here. There’s nothing I could write about the US election that would compare to the brilliant reporting and analysis of Katie, Freddie, Megan and others at the New Statesman. There are, however, two stupid questions I can ask about the result. After that I’ll try to explain what it could mean for us. The first stupid question is why Americans are so deluded about their own economy, which was the most important issue in voting.
Morning Call: Up the workers?
Good morning, Will here. Former justice secretary and New Statesman columnist David Gauke has been announced as the head of the government's sentencing review. You can read an exclusive piece by him on how he aims to fix the prisons crisis here. But first, let’s get into the real cost of Labour’s plan for workers. To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman.
Morning Call: The hardened-carbon jargon bargain
Good morning, Will here. Today I’m discussing how growing the economy is at the heart of the government’s decision to invest in carbon capture usage and storage. To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
Morning Call: Making stans for Nigel
Good morning, Will here. Reform UK begins its annual party conference in Birmingham today facing a question. Can it be taken seriously as a political force, and not a general expression of voter disgruntlement? To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
Morning Call: Is Labour talking down the economy?
Good morning, Will here. Today I discuss how the UK’s fiscal habits may prove to be the antidote to Labour’s stark warnings about the economy. To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
Morning Call: Good will hunting
Good morning. Will here. Say what you like about Kwasi Kwarteng, and most people have, but at least he believed in something. Wrongly, as it turned out, and with such fervour that he took a rather exciting punt with millions of people’s retirement savings, but he tried. And then along came Jeremy Hunt, the smug prefect, and he did what people like Jeremy Hunt do: he smoothed things over.
Morning Call: Bonfire of the salaries
Good morning. Will here. In a sign that the populace might not have been all that well served by its representatives in recent years, the House of Commons will debate today whether Members of Parliament, who are paid £91,346 a year (plus considerable expenses), should actually do their jobs. This is necessary because in recent years, certain MPs have decided to supplement their already significant incomes by advising private companies or appearing on reality TV.
OBR-mighty
Good morning. Will here. One of the 40 bills announced in the King’s Speech was the Budget Responsibility Bill. And while it is, of course, a relief to have people in government who aren’t willing to gamble the nation’s pension funds on a half-cooked economic theory, Labour runs the risk of pretending that you can avoid making political choices and that it’s all just a big maths puzzle.
Morning Call: It was the housing market wot won it
Good morning. Will here. Home ownership remains a vital political issue. But fixing the housing market will not be easy for the new government. To enjoy our latest election news and analysis with unlimited access to our coverage, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
Morning Call: The deepfake election
Good morning. Will here. Or is it? To enjoy our latest election news and analysis with unlimited access to our coverage, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events. Earlier this year I realised, to my profound disappointment, that I hadn’t really been listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Morning Call: Roiled mail
Good morning. Will here. What does the potential sale of Royal Mail to a Czech billionaire mean for Labour? To enjoy our latest election news and analysis with unlimited access to our coverage, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events. Election season can be a good time to do business.
Morning Call: The truth about Labour’s tax plans
Good morning. Will here. What will be the tenor of the tax debate in the election campaign? Also, Ben gives us the latest Britain Predicts election forecast. A key attack line the Conservatives will use against Labour in this election is the idea that the latter will raise taxes if it forms the next government.
Will Dunn on Fstoppers
Ever since I saw images online of the total solar eclipse that crossed parts of the USA back in 2017 I knew I had to witness this celestial event. I learned that the next total solar eclipse was to occur in 2024 so my mind was set. I was glued to the weather models weeks before the eclipse date and about a week before the event, things were not looking good weather-wise.
Morning Call: Reeves to upheave what HMRC retrieves
Good morning. Will here. Rachel Reeves has this morning announced a new plan to “take on the tax dodgers” and raise an extra £5.1bn a year by the end of the next parliament. Then, the former UK national security adviser Peter Ricketts writes on Britain’s relationship with Israel after seven food aid workers were killed in a strike. And Ben looks at how repelled 2019 Tory voters are by Keir Starmer.
[COPY] Morning Call: Discount Rishi
Good morning. Will here. Today I look at Conservative Party plans to monetise its membership by sharing data with big brands. Also: Ben Walker on why the polls may yet narrow come election time. Today’s Morning Call can be read in full on our paid tier.
Morning Call: The self-serve state
Good morning. Will here. Today I discuss HMRC’s aborted “efficiency saving” plans. It’s all part of a much wider political direction – the self-serve nation. Also, Armando Iannucci writes on the way realpolitik in Westminster has given way to feelpolitik, or Wishful Verbiage – when someone says something because it sounds better than what’s true. Here’s a snippet: This retreat from the real is now spreading exponentially.
The Saturday Read: Distorting mirror
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s weekly guide to politics, culture, books, and ideas. This is Harry, along with Pippa, George Monaghan, and Will Dunn. This week we interviewed Thomas Piketty, perhaps the most consequential economist of the 21st century (it’s early yet). You may enjoy the conversation.
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