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When I first lived in Japan as a student, there were no women in the cabinet. Then there was a change of government and…still no women in the cabinet. My home country, Britain, had a female prime minister at the time, but Japanese politics seemed extraordinarily unwelcoming to women. Yet today the most powerful woman in the world is probably Takaichi Sanae, who won a landslide victory at a snap election on February 8th, and is in a stronger position than any recent prime minister to reshape Japan.
Our
cover story in Asia
this week asks how she will use that power. Her thumping majority gives her a chance to tackle the hard problems that have long been ducked, such as reforming social security, shifting firms away from lifetime, seniority-based employment and dismantling rules that discourage women from working. The danger, we argue, is that she may alienate Japan’s neighbours with nationalist posturing or spook markets with fiscal recklessness. If she wastes her mandate, more corrosive alternatives will flourish. Watch our
latest Insider show
to hear our editors unpack all of this.
In Britain our cover is about Sir Keir Starmer, whose government has been more gravely damaged by the
Jeffrey Epstein revelations
than America’s has been. Sir Keir’s reputation as dull, clean and competent is in tatters, as Britons learn that he knew of Peter Mandelson’s long friendship with the dead sex criminal when he appointed Lord Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. With or without Sir Keir, the Labour government is likely to retreat to its soft-left comfort-zone, rather than pursuing reforms to unleash growth. But
as we argue,
a prime minister who clings to power by handing out treats is not running a government but an ice-cream van.
In the rest of the world we have a
contrarian cover story.
Politicians of the left and the right have converged around a single, bad idea: that to protect children, they should ban them from using social media. This will do more harm than good. Children will find ways to evade controls: some have already found they can fool AIs into thinking they are older by scrunching up their faces. Rather than raising age limits, governments should lean on tech firms to make their products safer for teens. | 
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