Of course tax rises won’t help economic growth

What’s the most idiotic question ever posed by an interviewer? There was the real-life Sally Jockstrap who asked David Gower whether he considered himself a batsman or a bowler. Or the Radio 1 DJ who asked Marc Almond – at the height of his fame with Soft Cell – whether he was going steady with a girl. But my nomination goes to Anna Foster on the Today programme this morning. In the midst of an interview with economist Mohamed El-Erian about Britain’s dire fiscal state, she suddenly posed: ‘Would raising taxes at this stage, would that help growth?’

I had to listen back on the catch-up facility to check that she really had said these words, but there it was loud and clear. A BBC presenter really does apparently believe that extracting more tax from the pockets of individuals and businesses might actually encourage them to spend more and increase economic activity. El-Erian is nothing if not polite, but even he could scarcely conceal his mirth. “Unfortunately, no, it will not help growth,’ he replied. I got the impression, however, that if Foster had been a fresher in economics at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where El-Erian is president, he would be having a quiet word with the admissions tutor.

It might be inevitable that Rachel Reeves has to raise taxes in the Budget in order to stave off a run on UK government bonds. She is going to have to balance the risk of a bond rout against the depressing effect of tax rises. Some tax rises would be more harmful to growth than others – with possibly none so negative as what Reeves did last year in ratcheting up employers’ National Insurance contributions.

Some might argue that fairness is more important than economic growth, so what the hell if GDP grows a little more slowly? You can argue that tax rises are essential to stave off an economic collapse which would come with a sovereign debt crisis. But the idea that taxing people could, in itself, have a positive effect on economic growth betrays a mindless, economically-illiterate strand of leftism that seems to have become embedded in a fair part of the Labour party and the Left in general.

Foster, I fear, is not alone. We are increasingly governed by people who seem to believe that tax rises are an economic cure-all. Reeves is now being advised by Torsten Bell, a former think-tanker who is brimming with ideas – almost every one of them, sadly, some new tax. Keir Starmer, seemingly untrustful of his Chancellor, this week appointed his own economic adviser, Minouche Shafik. What was the point of that when she is almost of the same mind as Bell – her background, too, is the Resolution Foundation.

We have a yawningly long time until the Budget on 26 November. Businesses face a long period of uncertainty while they weigh up what could lie in store for them and what strategies they might have to employ in order to limit the damage. But the idea that a likely £20 billion tax hit could improve their output and profits deserves derision. The only businesses cheering will be those involved in tax planning and international removals.   

The Met can’t blame politicians for the Linehan arrest

If it had been a sketch in one of his many comedy shows, it would surely have been rejected as too absurd. 

After landing at Heathrow on a flight from Arizona, Graham Linehan, the Irish comic who created Father Ted, was arrested by five armed police officers for tweets that he had posted five months ago. The 57-year-old was told he was being held on suspicion of a public order offence. He was taken to a police station and questioned for several hours, before being released on police bail. 

Linehan’s arrest followed a post published on X in which he said that women who encounter men in female-only spaces should ‘make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls’. Police told him this was ‘deemed to be intended to stir up hatred and incite violence on the grounds of sexual orientation.’

Linehan has a history of anti-transgender activism. His comments and messages on the subject have got him into hot water numerous times and he’s been banned from X at least twice. Perhaps this factored into the police’s decision to detain him (we don’t know because it remains a ‘live’ investigation) but it provides no justification whatsoever for dispatching five police officers with firearms to arrest him. What did they think he was going to do? Over the top is an under-statement.

You get the sense that Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, thinks so too. Of course he hasn’t said so explicitly, but his announcement that the force will put in place a ‘more stringent triaging process to make sure only the most serious cases are taken forward in future’ is a tacit admission that hauling people into custody for posting messages that some might regard as offensive or upsetting is not what his officers should be doing.

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Nevertheless, Rowley sought to deflect the blame for what was an egregious waste of police resources by singling out ‘successive governments who have given officers no choice’ but to record incidents as crimes where people threaten violence.  ‘Then they are obliged to follow all lines of enquiry and take action as appropriate,’ he said in a statement. He says the law and guidance need to be ‘changed or clarified’.

Have governments really given the police ‘no choice’ in such matters? Every day, officers have to make decisions about whether certain behaviour crosses the criminal threshold and whether and how it should be investigated. Sometimes the decisions are made in the heat of the moment, for example, during a highly-charged public protest, at the scene of a pub fight or in a domestic setting where one person alleges that another individual has assaulted them.  

There are multiple guidelines for dealing with such incidents, as well as official advice about how to record crimes and what the correct approach is to an investigation. In spite of the voluminous guidance, mistakes are sometimes made: officers may over-react – or not respond quickly enough; people who have done nothing wrong may be arrested and investigated; occasionally, a victim is mistaken for a perpetrator. 

Online offending and hate crime also have their own laws (some of which have only just come into effect) and a raft of guidance. But ultimately, police rely on experience, judgement and common-sense to make decisions. That has always been the case – but at Heathrow Airport on Monday morning there was no sign that those human qualities had been applied. 

That’s what makes what happened so disappointing. No one at the Met, it seems, could see Linehan’s tweet for what it was – even though it had been posted in April. No one said, ‘Steady on, why are we sending five officers with guns to this?’  You can draw up new guidelines, but unless police officers are trusted and encouraged to use their common-sense, without the fear that a mishap will land them in a months-long misconduct process, there’ll be more such cases.

The Commissioner is correct to say that police should not be ‘policing toxic culture wars’. We need them to focus on real crimes such as shoplifting, mobile phone theft, and violence against women and girls. Instead, it should primarily be the responsibility of those of us who use social media, particularly politicians, celebrities and influencers, to keep the debate civil. The platform providers, too, need to do more to remove posts that potentially cross the line into the incitement of racial hatred or violence, or those that appear to target individuals. There will be a need for light-touch monitoring by police where people are vulnerable, and of course there are times when it will be right for them to intervene. But a comedian’s stab at dark humour? No. 

Watch: Farage warns Congress about UK speech laws

Prime Minister Keir Starmer took aim at Nigel Farage in PMQs today for not being in the Chamber. In fact, the Reform leader is on the other side of the Atlantic, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee on the state of free speech in the UK. The timing couldn’t have been better for Farage, what with the release of Lucy Connolly from prison (after she was incarcerated over a social media post) and the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan providing extraordinary case studies for the Clacton MP.

And the Reform politician was not holding back. First saying that he would have brought Connolly with him, had she not been restricted by travel rules following her conviction, he launched into quite the speech about freedom of expression in Britain. Using Linehan’s case as a warning for American travellers, Farage fumed:

He put out some tweets months ago when he was in Arizona. And months later, he arrives at Heathrow Airport to be met by five armed police. Armed police. Not a big deal in the USA, a very big deal in the United Kingdom. Five of them. And he was arrested and taken away for questioning. He’s not even a British citizen. He’s an Irish citizen. This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow, that has said things online that the British government and British police don’t like. 

He went on, taking aim at legislation that allows police to monitor social media posts in the first place:

It is a potentially big threat to tech bosses to many, many others. This legislation we’ve got will damage trade between our countries, threaten free speech across the West because of the knock on rollout effects of this legislation from us or from the European Union. So I’ve come today as well to be a klaxon, to say to you, don’t allow piece by piece this to happen here in America, and you will be doing us and yourselves and all freedom loving people a favour. If your politicians and your businesses said to the British government, you’ve simply got this wrong. At what point did we become North Korea? 

Strong stuff! And it seems even Labour politicians are rather perturbed by Linehan’s arrest, with Health Secretary Wes Streeting this morning suggesting that the law could be amended to ensure police focus instead on more serious crime. But given the outrage whipped up at the treatment of both Linehan and Connolly, even this could be too little too late…

Watch the clip here:

How could Badenoch fail to skewer Starmer this time?

It was taxes that eventually did for Al Capone. And Spiro Agnew. And Judy Garland. So now the taxman’s bell tolls for Big Ange – who has often presented herself as a sort of mix of all three of those figures. The hard-partying working-class girl turned union bruiser turned second most powerful politician in the land. 

Scandal has become second nature to Labour ministers, to the extent that they now have a sort of standard issue hangdog look to wear in Parliament which indicates to the world that bringing up their bad behaviour is actually not very #BeKind, and so when you think about it, they’re the real victims. Ange deployed this to great effect as she shuffled into Prime Minister’s Questions today. She earned herself a pat of sympathy from Lucy Powell. What is completely astonishing is that no matter how appallingly and hypocritically they behave, nothing seems able to shake Labour out of the intense belief that they are the Good Guys™. 

Inevitably then, surely Ange would be front and centre of the questions today? Not so, only a brief mention from Mrs Badenoch at the start of her questioning before she proceeded to build Sir Keir his own soapbox to pontificate about not taking lectures from the party opposite. The Leader of the Opposition is like a vampire cursed with haemophobia – every time the jugular is presented to her she manages to avoid it. 

That Sir Keir seems honestly to believe – or more accurately think we’ll believe – that the country is in the midst of some economic miracle is enough to have him sectioned under the mental health act, but every time Mrs Badenoch mentions the economy it gives him a chance to perform his show-reel of platitudes about trade deals and growth in the G7. She should be skewering him, not letting him play nasal P. T. Barnum. Surely exploiting the fact that his party is reaching Renaissance papacy levels of corruption and the fact that he and his deputy visibly loathe one another ought to have been a better use of Badenoch’s time?

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So it went back and forth, nothing changed, no lessons learned. It was like watching a couple fight about whether the heating should be on in their house in Pompeii, AD 79. The other questions weren’t much better. We got the rhetorical equivalent of embarrassing teenage love poetry to the ECHR from Ed Davey, and the standard issue incoherent rant about weather which we’ve come to expect from Ellie Chowns, the woman too unimpressive for even the Green party to elect as leader. There were no questions from Reform – Mr Farage was notably absent in Washington, something Sir Keir oinked about with great glee. Whether he’ll be as happy if Mr Farage succeeds in lobbying the Americans to sanction Britain for its increasingly authoritarian approach to free speech is another matter. 

On the subject of which, there were two decent questions – first from new Tory MP Jack Rankin about the arrest of Graham Linehan. Inevitably the Prime Minister didn’t answer the question but went into his usual pseudo-patriotic guff about the ‘proud tradition of free speech’ (which he and his party are doing their best to snuff out). It was sub-Churchillian, by which I mean the dog which used to flog car insurance in the Noughties. 

Sir Julian Lewis quoted criticism of the Chagos treachery deal at the PM; former sea lord and Labour minister Admiral Lord West had called the decision ‘disgraceful’. The PM belched out one of the trademark scrutiny-phobic non-answers before abruptly sitting down again. ‘I have the misfortune to disagree with him’, he barked, sounding more than usual like a Dalek with a head cold. To be fair, ‘we are paying a China-aligned country billions of pounds to take over sovereign British territory because my dodgy lawyer mates said so’ isn’t really something you can admit to in Parliament. 

So Ange lived to fight another day. Let’s see how the week progresses. Given what she’s managed by way of defence so far it doesn’t bode well. When asked about whether it was accurate that she had evaded tax, she told the BBC it was accurate ‘in a different sense’. Ah yes, that special form of accuracy which only kicks in when a Labour minister as opposed to a Tory one is found snout-in-trough. This isn’t just two-tier governance – it’s the whole tiramisu. Still, a silver lining, things must be bad for Rayner, on her way out of PMQs she got a hug from Rachel Reeves. I give her a week.

Keir Starmer comes to Angela Rayner’s defence at PMQs

Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer clearly didn’t spend their summer breaks working on their performances at Prime Minister’s Questions. Today’s exchanges between the two leaders fell quickly into the usual meandering grudge match of accusations about blowing up and running down the economy, and ministers resigning or not resigning. Each question was ostensibly about the economy but included a barb about Angela Rayner’s tax affairs, and each answer offered a rambling defence of Labour’s policies, the standard criticism of Tory mess and a defence of Rayner. We learned very little, and Starmer was neither under pressure nor impressive.

Mind you, perhaps we did learn that Starmer is more prepared to be effusive about Rayner than he was about Rachel Reeves earlier in the summer: he took care to say he was proud to have her alongside him on the front bench. He also emphasised how difficult it had been for her to apply to lift a court order which protected details of her housing and financial arrangements for her son, who has special educational needs. That lengthy praise and defence of the Deputy Prime Minister came in his first answer, which was also a response to Badenoch asking when the last time the cost of government borrowing was so high. On that, Starmer told the Commons he was not going to take lectures on the economy from the party opposite. 

Badenoch rather acidly pointed out that ‘I’m not sure we would have heard all that sympathy if it was a Conservative deputy prime minister who was being attacked.’ She added that ‘if he had a backbone, he would sack her’. She then included in her reprise of the question about government borrowing being so high a defence of the Tory economic record, saying the Conservatives had ‘left him the fastest-growing economy in the G7’. Starmer responded that ‘if it had been the party opposite, there wouldn’t be the accountability that there now is’, and made a joke about Badenoch’s claim she had been offered a place at Stanford when she was 16.

The Tory leader moved onto former members of the Monetary Policy Committee ‘warning we are heading for a crash’. She then went back to why borrowing costs were so high, this time with the argument that the markets thought Starmer was ‘too weak to control spending’. In response, the Prime Minister quoted an interview Badenoch had given where she had said, ‘I’ve inherited a gigantic mess and I’m cleaning it up, it’s going to take a while.’ He added that ‘I know exactly how she feels’.

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Badenoch’s questions continued to be a bit messy: she returned to the Rayner story, saying ‘we’re not the ones referring ourselves to ethics advisers’ before complaining that the country was going to have to wait until 26 November for the Budget. This allowed Starmer to joke that the Conservatives not referring themselves to ethics advisers was ‘one of the reasons they got booted out’. He added a few automated lines about the Tories blowing up the economy and taking no lessons from them.

The final question from the Tory leader was quite good, though it could have been delivered better. It was designed to sum up how adrift Starmer seems already as a leader. Badenoch said:

This week he had another reset. This morning the Prime Minister scrapped his five missions, and after scrapping his three foundations, scrapping his six first steps for change and his seven pillars for growth, the truth is this man has got no clue, zero clue. But this is serious, the Prime Minister’s incompetence is hurting real people.

Starmer continued to talk about putting out Tory fires.

As is so often the case these days, the second half of the session was more revelatory. Starmer gave Ed Davey grief for refusing to come to the state banquet for Donald Trump after the Lib Dem leader asked about Gaza, but the Prime Minister also said that the ‘horrifying’ situation in Gaza was a ‘man-made famine’ that he would be raising with all leaders.

In his second question, Davey asked Starmer to rule out withdrawing from or suspending the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Starmer’s answer showed how far politics has moved on this matter in just a few months. He said:

We will not withdraw from the ECHR. We do need to make sure that both the convention and other instruments are fit for the circumstances we face at the moment and therefore, of course, we have been, as we made clear, looking at the interpretation of some of those provisions. It would be a profound mistake to pull out of those instruments because the first thing that would follow is every other country in the world that adheres to these instruments would pull out of all their agreements with this country. That would be catastrophic for dealing with the problem that we’re actually dealing with.

Starmer was more energised in criticising Davey and the leaders of the smaller parties than he had been in attacking Badenoch. As you’ll have seen from the account above, the Prime Minister uses the same lines every week about the Tory leader and sees her exchanges largely as something to get through. But he took care to accuse Davey of not showing leadership on the Trump issue, to mock the new leader of the Green party for his ‘very strange comments about women’, and to accuse Nigel Farage of flying to America to ‘badmouth and talk down our country’ and of having ‘gone there to lobby the Americans to impose sanctions on this country to harm working people’. He added: ‘You cannot get more unpatriotic than that.’

It’s almost as though the threat to Labour comes from the parties chipping away at its foundational vote, rather than the Tories opposite.

China’s parade spells trouble for Taiwan

The massive military parade in Beijing today definitively marks the end of the post-World War Two era. Nominally, the 80th Anniversary of China’s victory in ‘The War against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’, it has been used by China’s president Xi to, in the words of Reuters, ‘…demonstrate Xi’s influence over nations intent on reshaping the Western-led global order’ – an order that began with the end of World War Two.

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Sharing the podium with Xi – but not invited to review the parade – were presidents Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Their client status to China is also clear: without China’s financial and industrial support, Putin could not sustain his war in Ukraine; and, albeit sometimes with a nosepeg on, China has acted as the ultimate guarantor of North Korea’s prickly, and now nuclear-armed, independence. Western leaders were few on the ground and the rest of the attendees were mostly the most compromised members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Communist China has not always commemorated the end of World War Two in any significant manner. Partly, because it was seen as a predominantly Chinese Nationalist victory, but also because, while marking the end of the Japanese War, this was a much more conditional surrender, more akin to the ends of the ‘cabinet wars’ of eighteenth-century Europe, than the German’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945.

The Emperor remained on his throne; the Japanese perpetrators of the horrific Rape of Nanjing, in which thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were most brutally murdered, went largely unpunished; and, perhaps most peculiar of all, many thousands of Japanese soldiers remained under arms, albeit under Allied direction. In Indonesia, Japanese soldiers participated in the attempted suppression of anti-colonial insurgents who were unwilling to see the Dutch colonialists resume their control. At sea, the Japanese mine-laying and counter mine measures force was never disbanded and continued its operations until the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force was reconstituted in 1954. The last formal surrender of Japanese forces took place in February 1946 in Malaya. It is perhaps not surprising that the Chinese took a somewhat jaundiced view of their VJ Day, not least because it merely marked a pause in the civil war between Mao’s Communists and Chang Kai Shek’s Kuo Min Tang, a struggle that remains unresolved, as far as Xi is concerned, with Taiwan’s continued independence.

Comparisons with the 1930s are always fraught but there was definitely something of the Nuremberg Rallies about this parade. President Xi has defiantly stated that China’s hour has come and that China’s rise is unstoppable. Joseph Goebbels used to say that, the rallies changed a participant “from a little worm into part of a large dragon”, which seems a suitable metaphor for what we have witnessed.

Following this parade, we should also expect that the threatened invasion of Taiwan is more likely than not. Xi had directed the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for an invasion by 2027 and, through a series of increasingly sophisticated exercises and deployment of new weapons, that is becoming more than a potential staff college exercise. It is very unclear how the USA and the West will respond: arming the Taiwanese even to the extent that the Ukrainians have been armed will be a stretch; resupplying them, in the event of conflict, is considerably more complex. Leadership and consistent messaging is critical but this is missing.

We should not expect that any aspect of the ‘law-based international order’ will henceforward go unchallenged and prepare accordingly: this will prove uncomfortable to say the least, not least as our economies are so intertwined. For Donald Trump and the USA, the scales may also have finally dropped. On his ‘Truth Social’, Trump posted congratulations to Xi. He then directly accused Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-un of conspiring against the USA: budding bromances with Messrs’ Putin, Xi and Kim may have to wait.

We live, as the Chinese say, in interesting times, but should have no doubt what we have just witnessed: the post-war era is over.

In Our Time won’t be the same without Melvyn Bragg

The education system may produce ignoramuses (my daughter finished school in June, never having been taught a thing about Napoleon, the French Revolution, Julius Caesar, the Industrial Revolution, or any basic geography), but there was solace out there for the unlearned and undereducated: they could always listen to In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio exploration of fabulously random assorted subjects with three (formerly two) specialists in the field. Bragg has announced today he is stepping down from the show, which he has hosted since it was created in 1998.

In Our Time’s themes were mediated by a presenter who is both a natural communicator and naturally curious. They ranged from Aristotle (ethics) to Zenobia, dragons to hypnosis, slime moulds to the electron – there are over a thousand episodes – and Melvyn addressed them all with the same unruffled gusto. Nothing seemed beyond him, not physics (Grand Unified Theory), not the planet Mercury, not superconductivity, though on the really abstruse stuff he would take the discussion as far as he could and allow the panellists to take over from him.

He is, in short, that old fashioned creature, a polymath, in an age of specialists. That lecture by C. P. Snow in 1959, ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, about the gulf between the artsy people and the scientists was confounded by Melvyn, who, though an arts man himself, took the view that any subject was accessible to an intelligent person who asked obvious questions. He didn’t let the specialists get away with jargon or needless complexity and he asked the sort of questions that we might all ask, if we weren’t too ashamed of looking ignorant. He was there for the autodidacts, those people who might not have had the benefit of further education, but who are, nonetheless, curious, interested and willing to learn.

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In Our Time is like sitting in on a university lecture for beginners, only with the best people addressing any subject. Obviously, some episodes were better than others (the one on relativism in which a vapid Scottish academic had a go at Pope Benedict for being anti-gay wasn’t the greatest) but at its best (Diarmaid MacCulloch and Eamon Duffy on Erasmus, for instance) the programme left your feeling that you knew enough about the subject to talk about it. And given that there are now so many holes in the education of even graduates, this is the BBC’s service to the education of the nation, the perfect way to fill in the gaps.

Bragg himself is a product of the old order whereby a boy from an ordinary background – his parents owned a pub in Wigton – could, through the meritocratic grammar school system, end up in Oxford, running rings round the expensively educated.

Naturally Melvyn had his favourite contributors – my friend Angie Hobbs, the philosopher, for one – and he always included women in the programme, regardless of the subject. He is more at home with the classics, religion and humanities generally than with the sciences, but he’s up for the lot. The programme might nowadays be considered highbrow, but it’s not really; it’s just a civilised discussion on the subjects that any well-rounded person might be interested in. But intelligent programming of that kind is vanishingly rare in the BBC now or anywhere in broadcasting; the South Bank Show which he presented for LWT doesn’t really have an equivalent today. And do I need to go on about the dumbing down of Radio 3, once the home of presenters like Cormac Rigby, and now plugging music to relax with, like Classic FM? Melvyn Bragg is the antithesis of all that. And once he goes, there’s not much of that kind of programming left. Fortunately he’ll still be broadcasting, just not on the programme that educated so many of us. Thank you, Melvyn.

Why has the University of London put a trigger warning on ‘Twilight’?

Kneeling for Black Lives Matter, making pronoun declarations, and taking children to drag queen story hours: some things will be forever associated with ‘peak woke’. With any luck, these actions will soon become so unfashionable that no one will ever own up to having dabbled. Sadly, however, not all relics from this past mania are so easily discarded. Trigger warnings – those few words that promise safety from emotional distress by giving away the endings of novels and plays – continue to proliferate.

In recent months, theatres have proved to be the most fertile breeding ground for these pesky plot spoilers. Back in December, Bromley Little Theatre warned those attending its production of Nicholas Nickleby that the play contained ‘Dickensian slurs’. Frankly, I’d want my money back if it didn’t. Audiences were also told to be prepared for ‘murder, sexual assault, kidnap, mental illness [and] sexism’. In January, the Royal Shakespeare Company tipped off parents bringing children to see its adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, to prepare for ‘stage blood, derogatory language, scenes of grief and physical cruelty’. Thank goodness they clarify that the blood is not real!

March brought with it a warning to theatre-goers off to see Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express that they will encounter ‘themes of death, grief and guilt’ as well as ‘reference to, and depictions of, murder and manslaughter’ and ‘reference to, and depictions of, weapons.’ Again, I’d be Googling ‘Trade Descriptions Act’ if it did not. Then, like all good thesps, summer saw the trigger warning migrate to Edinburgh. A fringe performance of Macbeth warned viewers of violence, swearing, and ‘distressing themes’. But if prizes are being handed out, then the Royal Opera House must surely take first place. Last week, it warned audience members to prepare themselves for a curtain-up bell that ‘is loud and can be startling’.

Now, with the new academic year, trigger warnings are back in their native environment: the university. Literature students at City St George’s, University of London, will be warned about all manner of disturbing themes that have a nasty habit of popping up in books, including ‘eating disorders, difficult pregnancies and non-traditional or blasphemous religious beliefs’.

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A Freedom of Information request submitted by the Telegraph reveals that lecturers in charge of the ‘contemporary genre fiction’ module have a penchant for ‘vampire’ stories. Dracula, I Am Legend, a 1954 horror novel by Richard Matheson, and Twilight, the 2005 book by Stephenie Meyer, feature on the reading list.

Let’s leave to one side the merits or otherwise of requiring university students to read popular ‘young adult’ page-turners when there are so many more worthwhile novels they could be studying. These rather tame books come with a trigger warning for ‘toxic relationships, apocalyptic themes, sexually transmitted diseases, and mental anguish’. Bizarrely, the vampire-themed list also warns of  ‘taboo’ depictions of cannibalism.   

Clearly, University of London staff take a very dim view of their own students if they think they need telling not only that vampire books feature cannibalism but that this practice is actually ‘taboo’. Protect me, please, from those students who see novels as instruction manuals! But as the theatre trigger warnings show, it is not just lecturers who think we’re all either idiots or forever teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. It seems our cultural guardians see themselves as the last line of defence when it comes to safeguarding not just our mental health but also our morals.

The continued use of trigger warnings means I’m not yet ready to celebrate woke’s demise. The idea that people are emotionally fragile – particularly to threats to their identity – is one of the key principles that has underpinned everything from transgender rights activism to the rise of critical race theory. But trigger warnings have never just been about emotional safety. They’ve always had a political component, too. Warnings about sexism, racism, classism, ‘outdated language’, and ‘toxic relationships’ plant a red flag over any text or play. This is less about protecting mental health and more about prompting an emotionally correct response. Don’t sit back and simply enjoy this production, we are being told. Don’t think this book is just a good read. Keep your guard up and prepare to condemn wrongthink.

The excesses of the woke era may be less visible than they were just a couple of years ago. But the continued pox of trigger warnings, like the lingering after-effects of a horrible virus, means a relapse cannot be ruled out.

Why In Our Time must go on

‘Hello’. It’s strange to think that Melvyn Bragg has said that for the last time on In Our Time. That was how every show started – more than 1,000 of them. Each episode began with the minimal courtesy, and then we’re off: ‘Hello. In 61 AD, an east Anglian queen took on the might of the Roman empire and lost’.

All In Our Time listeners have wondered when this day would come. Bragg is 85, and with age, the episodes slowed slightly, and his voice had become slightly breathier. Bragg’s powerful mind did not wane, but his age always meant there was a time limit.

The brilliance of In Our Time has been said before, in many places. But it has to be said again, because the BBC needs to hear it. In Our Time succeeded because it did not chase ‘relevance’. In Our Time succeeded because it respected its listeners’ intelligence. In Our Time succeeded because it believed in a simple idea: that it’s better to know things than not to know things. 

Like most things good that the BBC does, it was an accident. Bragg was presenting Start the Week in the 1990s, and was shuffled off to the 9am Thursday ‘death slot’ for an ill-defined show when he became a Labour peer. There were concerns about impartiality after his Blair-given peerage. No matter. If Bragg was meant to remain aloof regarding the world of politics, it meant that he could scratch that argumentative itch with fierce fights about the more important stuff: science, art, literature, philosophy, religion, sort of anything. His contempt for waffle – ‘no, you still haven’t quite explained what the primordial soup was made of’ – has been well celebrated. 

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Just as captivating are the moments where he lost it, most notably on an episode about the Industrial Revolution. When confronted with a voguish modern historian who said British inventors didn’t have a consequential role in the Revolution, Bragg exploded. He thumped his hand on the table, kind of squashing all respect he may have had for modern historians as he did so, and he roared… OK, maybe he was taking it a bit too far, but there will have been plenty of listeners doing the same.

Still, I don’t know anyone that thought Bragg did a bad job. The scepticism of jargon was universal, the treatment of academics fair in its targeting at all political persuasions and historical inclinations. The Rest is History is very popular now, and it’s an excellent podcast to have on while doing the dishes: for enough knowledge, historical enthusiasm, matey banter, etc. To understand something, though, there’s no substitute for the rigour and effort that goes into In Our Time.

I’m an In Our Time obsessive, who has been listening through all the episodes in order for several years now. I associate some episodes with weird memories: ‘Neuroscience in the 20th Century’ with a five-hour south London walk, ‘The Aztecs’ on a beach in Malta, ‘The Lunar Society’ while on the way to the Israel-Lebanon border. The earlier shows of the late 1990s – before the show narrowed down its topics – contain some rare gems: Gore Vidal and Alan Clark on ‘Politics in the 20th Century’; Will Self vs Roger Scruton on ‘Modern Culture’; Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag on ‘The American Ideal’. 

Bragg has also been a delight in some interactions I’ve had with him. For my 18th birthday, two friends wrote to him, and he sent me a hand-written birthday postcard, which I still have. Three years later, when I commissioned him for our Spectator Christmas poll, he filed an entry on Just William. He said he wasn’t feeling too well, and apologised for the standard. It was obviously still better-written than most of the others, but before we ran it, he re-filed. He said he was writing from a bench on Hampstead Heath after a Lemsip and a malt whisky, on a dark winter night. I found the image peculiarly moving.

Some people have called for the BBC to axe In Our Time now that Bragg’s gone. It’s certainly terrifying to countenance a post-Bragg show: Ed West wrote that ‘I lie awake at night fretting about what complete ninny the BBC will put in his place’.

Yet the show shouldn’t be canned, because that amounts to giving up. Bragg has been singular and brilliant, and is irreplaceable. But there are still more topics to cover, and the BBC must fight to keep unashamedly intellectual, ambitious, perhaps even inaccessible broadcasting in prime slots. There will be the usual ‘Amol Rajan’ jokes – whisper it, he’d be alright – but save us from someone who thinks all historical opinions are valid. Incidentally, and although he’d hate to read this, anyone that’s listened to our Book Club podcast knows Sam Leith would be a good choice.

In Our Time started in 1998. After four years of listening, I’m only at the 2005 shows. As the show has kept going, my list of episodes to listen to has got longer. It’s bittersweet to think there might be a full stop, but I don’t welcome the task getting any easier.

Rayner admits she didn’t pay enough stamp duty on second home

To the Deputy Prime Minister, who has been in the spotlight over the last week over accusations she avoided tax on one of her properties. Angela Rayner has now given a rather revelatory interview in which she admits that she didn’t pay enough stamp duty on her Hove residence, she has referred herself to the independent adviser on ministerial standards and has even considered resigning over the whole affair. Crikey!

Speaking to Sky’s Beth Rigby, Rayner admitted that she underpaid stamp duty on her seaside flat in Hove, incorrectly paying the lower rate of tax on the residence after the ‘advice [she] relied upon’ misled her. The Deputy PM could owe as much as £40,000, according to experts.

Rayner’s revelation will do her no favours with voters increasingly turning away from Labour. The MP – who explained that she shares a family home with her former husband in order to look after her son while also having a flat in the south of England – said that she had applied to have a court order lifted so she could talk freely about her situation, and today admitted:

I took expert counsel advice on all of my affairs to ensure that everything was done proper and that expert counsel said that the advice that I received was inaccurate because of the trust. I don’t own the property. That is true. I only own one property that is mortgage like most people. But because of the nature of the trust that was set up by the court, that I would be liable to pay the additional stamp duty. 

Pushing her, Rigby asked: ‘So the accusations you didn’t pay stamp duty on Hove, they’re actually accurate?’ Rayner confessed: ‘They are accurate. Yes. There. Accurate in a different sense. I think the accusations were that I set up a trust and I flipped it to try and avoid paying it. But actually the complex area of the trust which the advice that I relied upon didn’t pick that up.’

The Deputy PM told Sky News that she has been ‘in shock’ over the news, adding: ‘It is devastating for me.’ But while she accepts she ‘made a mistake’, Rayner has hopes that people will go easy on her over her attempts to resolve the situation. Quizzed on whether she had considered resigning her position, however, the Deputy PM revealed she had discussed stepping down with her family:

I spoke to my family about it. I spoke to my ex-husband, who has been an incredibly supportive person because he knows that all I’ve done is try and support my family and help them… I think hopefully most people can see, if you take, if you rely on advice given to you by lawyers and you follow that process and then you find out that that process is wrong and that advice is wrong, I’m rectifying it at the earliest opportunity.

Will the public be so generous? Stay tuned…

Zack Polanski: the police were right to arrest Graham Linehan

The arrest of comedian Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport this week over his Twitter posts sparked outrage across the country – but you can count on the Greens to take an opposing view. While shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has condemned the move as ‘ridiculous’ and Health Secretary Wes Streeting has even suggested the law could be changed to ensure forces are more focused on tackling in-person crime, the new leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, told the Beeb that he, er, backs the decision.

Speaking to presenters on BBC Newsnight, Polanski fumed that Linehan’s tweets about transgender people – available here – were ‘totally unacceptable’. He went on:

I accept that people in politics, we get lots of abuse. But we shouldn’t get lots of abuse. I recognise that women get more abuse than I do for instance, I get a lot of antisemitic abuse, I’m one of the few Jewish leaders in British politics, today a Muslim man was elected as my deputy leader, Mothin Ali. I’ve seen the amount of Islamophobia he gets. We also know that for all of those groups, trans people have been in the sights of the nastiness and toxicity for a long time. I accept proportionality of police response is a conversation need to have… I think it was proportionate to arrest him.

Crikey! Polanski did add that he was unsure as to why, um, five armed police were sent to detain the Father Ted co-creator. So much for proportionality there, eh?

Watch the clip here:

What China’s show of force means for the new world order

Today’s vast military parade in Beijing is the climax of three days of political theatre orchestrated by President Xi Jinping, with supporting roles played by those pantomime villains Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. The smirking North Korean and Russian dictators joined Xi to witness the People’s Liberation Army’s goose-stepping soldiers and shiny weaponry rumbling through Tiananmen Square. ‘Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,’  Xi told the crowd of some 50,000 carefully selected spectators (which roughly matched the number of soldiers). He said the Chinese people ‘firmly stand on the right side of history’.

Xi warned that China was ‘unstoppable’ and is ‘never intimidated by bullies’ before climbing on the back of an open-top car to inspect what seemed like miles of hardware lining Chang’an Avenue, warplanes flying overhead. China’s military expansion and modernisation is racing ahead at a rate rarely seen in peacetime, and today’s show, reckoned to be China’s largest-ever military parade, was a showcase of some of the results, designed to throw the gauntlet down to the West.

Western military attaches will no doubt be doing their own forensic inspections of Xi’s new kit, which included sea drones and multiple missile systems, among them intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the United States. It also included cruise missiles and an array of anti-ship missiles, dubbed ‘carrier killers’, whose purpose is to deter American involvement in a war over Taiwan.

It was the first time Xi, Putin and Kim had met together publicly, and in many ways it was a clarifying moment to witness as they walked shoulder to shoulder, the three protagonists of the Ukraine war. Putin, its architect; Kim, who is providing weapons and soldiers; and Xi, who is underwriting the whole enterprise through his economic support for Moscow.

The parade, which lasted around 90 minutes, was supposed to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender and the end of the Second World War. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party played only a marginal role in defeating Japan, with its rivals, the nationalist Kuomintang, doing most of the fighting. Mao Zedong cynically calculated that Japan would weaken his opponents, who could then be more easily defeated in the Chinese civil war. Mao would later confess that the communists would never have won without the Japanese invasion, going so far as thanking Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka for his ‘help’ in defeating the nationalists, according to a memoir by Mao’s personal physician.

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In the run-up to the parade, a propaganda blitz has attempted to portray the victory over Japan as a ‘people’s war of resistance’ against Japan, whipping up a frenzy of nationalist sentiment, which has resulted in Tokyo expressing concern for the safety of its nationals in China. Last month, a Japanese women and her child were attacked in a subway station in Suzhou, one of a growing list of violent anti-Japanese incidents, which included the stabbing to death of a 10-year-old Japanese boy near a Japanese school in the same city.

The 26 world leaders who attended the parade were mostly a familiar line-up of authoritarian faces, though they included Serbia’s Russia-friendly president Alexandar Vucic and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. Sharp-eyed Australians also spotted Daniel Andrews, a former Labor premier of Victoria, standing sheepishly at the back of a family photograph, with Xi, Putin and Kim to the fore. This is causing a storm down under.

Today’s parade follows a meeting in Tianjin of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a usually dozy talking shop, whose members include Russia, China and countries of central and south Asia. Xi used the platform to make his most audacious bid so far for world leadership. He criticised ‘bullying’ and gave a woolly vision of a new China-centric world order to challenge the United States. The most significant images of the event were those of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister cozying up to Putin and Xi.

Some commentators have been quick to proclaim this week’s theatre as a seminal moment, of Donald Trump’s comeuppance, and Xi’s new world order becoming a reality. Not so fast. Wily and transactional leaders of the ‘global south’, while hardly enamoured of Trump, are not about to ditch the American ‘hegemon’ in favour of a Chinese one. Modi feels bruised and intimidated by his treatment by Trump but is sending a message to Washington, playing a game. His suspicions of China, with whom India fought a brief border war just five years ago, run deep and won’t be salved by Xi’s empty words at Tianjin. The SCO itself is riven with divisions; the former Soviet States of central Asia, each with big Russian-speaking populations, are deeply uneasy about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

Even the stars of today’s show – Xi, Putin and Kim – have deep mutual suspicions. Putin was very much the supplicant in Beijing, bringing a host of officials with him from the oil, gas and arms industries, and even the governor of Russia’s central bank. All an expression of just how dependent he has become on Chinese support. Russia was quick to announce new deals on a much-delayed gas pipeline; China said little, since much of the detail, notably the price of the gas, has yet to be worked out.

It’s fair to speculate as to whether Xi felt any unease today about the loyalty of the troops he was inspecting, having purged a swath of top military leaders in recent months – including the top echelons of the Rocket Force, which oversees those shiny new missiles. Today’s display, and Xi’s fiery words, certainly invoked visions of 1930s Germany, but it would be premature to proclaim the start of the new world order that China’s leader so craves.

Streeting suggests law should be changed after Linehan arrest

Well, well, well. The arrest of Graham Linehan this week sparked outrage after the Father Ted co-creator was taken into custody by police after landing in Heathrow on Monday. The comedian was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence in relation to his Twitter posts about transgender people before being bailed pending further investigation. Shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick slammed the move as ‘ridiculous’ – and now this morning Health Secretary Wes Streeting has weighed in.

During his morning round on the airwaves, Streeting was adamant that the police forces should be ‘policing streets, not just policing tweets’. He told Times Radio: 

I think the prime minister and the home secretary have been very clear that with the law and order challenges we’ve got in our country we want to see people being kept safe by policing streets, not just policing tweets. 

Going further, the Health Secretary even suggested the government could change the law to ensure police were focusing on in-person crime. ‘One thing I would say,’ Streeting added, ‘because it’s always easy for people to criticise the police, the police enforce the laws of the land that we as legislators provide. So if we’re not getting the balance right then that’s something that we all have to look at and consider… If the police are enforcing things that we think are a waste of time or a distraction from more important things, that’s on us to sort out.’ Strong stuff…

Certainly the optics of police forces hauling people in for questioning about social media posts are rather suboptimal – to put it mildly – given that this afternoon Reform leader Nigel Farage will testify in the US to the House Judiciary committee on free speech in the UK. The Reform UK leader has promised to raise both Linehan’s arrest and the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly when he gives evidence to Congress today. A number of senior US figures have already expressed concerns about the policing of speech in Britain, including Elon Musk and even Vice President JD Vance – who earlier this year told the Munich security conference that in Britain free expression is ‘in retreat’. 

The whole saga is yet another headache for a beleaguered Prime Minister just weeks out from the Labour Party conference…

Digital IDs won’t fix the migrant crisis

Will the compulsory ID card lobby ever give up? For more than two decades it has been trying to exploit every national crisis to push its product on the country: terrorism, violent crime, Covid and now illegal migration. Apparently the answer to all of them is to force all of us to carry about a digital ID on our phones.

What difference would that make? Will boatloads of illegal migrants now be turned back mid-Channel because they are unable to show coastguards their digital ID? Er, no. Will asylum applications be speeded up so that those who fail can be returned much more quickly? No chance. Will it now become possible to return foreign rapists and murderers to their home countries once they have completed their UK prison sentences? Forget it – digital IDs will do precisely nothing to slaughter the real swine in this case: the European Convention on Human Rights.

Keir Starmer is said to be sympathetic to an argument made by Emmanuel Macron: that migrants are flocking to Britain because they find it easy to work illegally here. The reason, thinks Macron, is that Britain, unlike France, does not have a compulsory ID card system. Yet we do have an ID which signals our right to work in the UK: a National Insurance number. If you cannot produce one of those, no above-the-board employer is going to offer you a job. That is not to say that there are not illegal workers who have been taken on by dubious employers who operate below the radar of HMRC and other authorities. But the introduction of digital ID would do nothing to stop that. If you are not going to ask your employees for a NI number, then you are not going to ask them for their digital ID either.

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All that would be achieved through digital ID is to create new offences – and to generate money-making opportunities for the companies who ran the system, which is the real reason behind it. No ID on you, sir? Sorry, you can’t get on this train/ enter this bar/ come into this concert. Can’t show a police officer your ID? That’ll be a £100 fine. Can’t access your ID because your phone has run out of charge? Sorry, that’s no excuse, Sir. It’s your responsibility to ensure your phone is working.

Proponents of ID cards tend to present their adversaries as nutty right-wing libertarians who object to the very idea of government, but the real objections are far more mundane. ID cards would create yet one more layer of bureaucracy, one more form of malfunctioning technology which we would be forced to navigate. And to what purpose? They would have done nothing to prevent any of the terror attacks of the past two decades, which were committed by people who did not try to conceal their identity, only their intentions. We might have stopped the Manchester Arena bomber, on the other hand, had a security guard at the venue not been reluctant to raise his concerns for fear of being branded a racist. IDs wouldn’t have prevented muggings and murders either – although an increase in stop and search might have done. They would have done nothing to end Covid sooner – the vast majority of people were always going to have a vaccine; there was no need to bully the vaccine-shy by trying to restrict their movements. And now they would do nothing to tackle illegal migration.

Sorry, but we shouldn’t fall for this latest push for ID cards. It makes no more sense than any of the previous attempts to push them on us.

Spain’s wildfires have exposed the inadequacy of its politicians

Since early August, Spain has been reeling from its worst forest fires in decades. Exact estimates vary but so far more than 360,000 hectares – an area the size of Mallorca – have been destroyed in dozens of blazes. The flames have forced the evacuation of thousands of villagers, wiped out tens of thousands of hectares of farmland and killed at least four people. The Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, a major source of tourist revenue, has been partly closed and the high-speed rail link between Madrid and the north-west was suspended for seven days. The financial cost is expected to run to hundreds of millions of euros. The forests may take decades to regenerate.

The immediate cause is obvious: a long, hot, dry summer, capped by a 16-day heat wave during which temperatures reached 45°C combined with strong winds. The fires have raged mostly across western and north-western Spain where, after decades of exodus from country villages, the population density in some areas is similar to Lapland’s. In places where previously villagers would clear undergrowth and cut firebreaks now there is only scrub, tinder and pine. In many villages the average age of the few who remain is close to 60; elderly residents can only shake their heads in dismay as the land around them grows dense with combustible vegetation.

These remaining villagers have little time for the politicians. One said, ‘We are fighting this alone, I repeat, alone.’ Ignoring evacuation orders, villagers have organised night-watch shifts to monitor possible flare-ups: ‘I stayed to defend what was mine – along with my neighbours, with our hoses and our buckets.’ The condemnation of the politicians first heard after last year’s devastating floods in Valencia is circulating again: ‘Only the people can save the people.’

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Spain is a heavily decentralised country divided into 17 autonomous regions. While the central government is left-wing, the regions hardest hit by the fires – Castile-León, Galicia and Extremadura – are governed by the right-wing Partido Popular. That is a problem because Spain’s political life is woefully polarised and brutally adversarial; the animosity between left and right runs very deep. In this case the division of responsibilities – fire prevention and forestry management are largely the regions’ responsibilities but the central government has to be ready to provide additional aircraft and military emergency units if required – has left abundant scope for mutual recrimination.

Preparations were clearly inadequate. The firemen complain of ancient equipment, poor conditions and insufficient training; when Castile-León’s regional president turned up to thank them for their efforts, they refused to shake his hand. The central government meanwhile was overwhelmed by the regions’ simultaneous requests for help and had to call on its EU partners. It was no surprise then that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also been jeered when visiting affected areas.

But rather than address their failures, the politicians have, as usual, traded insults. The transport minister, socialist Óscar Puente, was quick to blame the regions: ‘If we look back at the history of disasters in this country, there isn’t one that has found [the right-wing regional governments] at work.’ And he made a tone-deaf joke also aimed at the regional governments: ‘Things,’ he chuckled, ‘are getting a little hot.’ The right-wing Partido Popular’s spokesman, Elías Bendodo, displayed the same bad taste and desire to shift the blame when he described the central government’s head of civil protection as ‘just another pyromaniac’. In short, it’s the same disgraceful spectacle that Spain’s politicians produce every time something goes wrong.

At the time of writing the wildfires seem to be under control in the worst affected areas but the political ramifications are just beginning. Spain suffers major forest fires every summer and this year’s wet spring produced unusually dense vegetation – extra fuel. So everyone knew that these fires were a disaster waiting to happen. Yet prevention and fire-fighting measures were inadequate, underfunded and poorly coordinated. And, coming less than a year after 228 avoidable deaths in the Valencia floods, it’s clear that Spain’s politicians are once again a large part of the problem.

The Budget that could make, or break, Starmer’s government

As the Chancellor Rachel Reeves gets to work on her second Budget – to be delivered on 26 November – red lights flash everywhere. Gilt yields were up again as markets lost faith in her ability to balance the books. Reeves or Darren Jones – whoever is really calling the shots – will spend the next few weeks fixated on those yields. The price they land at when the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) settles their Budget forecast could make or break the government.

I understand that the initial plan was to have a Budget much earlier, but that the decision was taken to put it off for as long as possible in the hope that yields come down a bit in that time. We may even hear calming words from the Treasury today aimed at achieving just that.

It’s not all on Reeves though. The Chancellor does not shoulder all of the blame for the mess we’re in. The Bank of England has questions to answer too.

To fund the massive expansion of the state that happened during lockdown the Bank printed hundreds of billions of pounds. At the same time it tried to keep money cheap by holding interest rates near zero. The result was inflation that soared to 11 per cent. Even now inflation is back at near double the Bank’s 2 per cent target and is expected to peak at 4 per cent. Combine those two factors and you produce huge upwards pressure on the size and cost of the debt Reeves must now tax us to finance.

But in undoing that money printing the Bank is making things even worse for the Chancellor. That process – known as Quantitative Tightening (QT) – involves selling gilts held by the Bank back into the open market. So far they’ve been offloading longer-dated debt at a time when there’s less demand for it because of a change to the way pension funds are structured. These big institutional investors aren’t jumping to buy that longer-term debt and so the yield goes up further. When the Monetary Policy Committee meet later this month, Reeves will be praying they decide to at least slow the pace of those ‘long-end’ sales.

This longer-term debt shows just how concerned investors are at the prospect of systematically higher inflation and the fact there's ‘not even a seed of a conversation’ about reining in Britain’s unaffordable spending commitments’. They absolutely matter for the nations book but, luckily for the Chancellor, they'll have less of an immediate effect on the Budget. Most of the debt the Treasury Debt Management Office (DMO) now issues is shorter term. So while the 30-year yields reaching new heights is a screaming alarm about our economic future it doesn’t play too much into calculating the size of the black hole she will have to fill in two months' time.

That said, the ten-year gilt – which had stayed relatively flat this year – is now back at January levels. That alone could wipe out her slim £9.9 billion headroom, even before Starmer’s u-turns on welfare cuts and winter fuel cash bungs to pensioners are factored in. And, while the 30-year yield won't be directly factored into the OBR's calculations, they certainty point to where things are going 'across the curve'.

The problem for Reeves is that Torsten Bell may be able to squeeze just enough out of tax rises to plug the hole and get her very slim headroom back. But markets are clear: it's not enough. If yields keep rising – as inflation fears grow and the triple lock continues to live – such slim headroom will quickly evaporate again. What then?

She'd have to make cuts she doesn't want to make, she'd have to break manifesto pledges she's promised not to break but a much more radical budget restoring much larger headroom would be the smart thing to do. By giving herself more room to manoeuvre, she could not only reassure the markets but also arm herself – and Starmer – with the firepower needed for the next election. Will she be bold enough?

Americans like me are troubled by Britain’s free speech crackdown

For much of my career, beginning as a foreign policy adviser to the United States Congress, I have proudly stood as one of America’s strongest advocates for Britain. I have defended her history, her institutions and her role as the original home of liberty. I have championed the UK in forums throughout the US and in publications across the globe, reminding audiences that our shared values of liberty and democracy, bequeathed by our mother, England, form the bedrock of transatlantic strength. Today, for the first time, I find Britain indefensible. The affection and historical respect remains. The confidence is gone.

Britain now prosecutes her own citizens, not for violence or treason, but for words. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a tweet in the wake of the Southport murders last year. Her crime was expression, harsh perhaps, but still speech. This week, Graham Linehan, the award‑winning creator of Father Ted, was arrested at Heathrow Airport by armed officers for online comments defending women’s spaces. Arrested, by police carrying weapons, for his opinions. This is the country that gave the world John Stuart Mill.

Such cases expose what Britain has become: a two‑tier system of justice. Those branded far‑right, nationalist or ‘Islamophobic’ are persecuted with zeal. Those spreading incendiary rhetoric from Islamist or minority factions are, all too often, met with indulgence. Swift punishment for those the state distrusts. Hesitation and leniency for those it fears. Law as weapon, not protection.

This has not happened by accident. Britain’s institutions have been captured. Its police, judiciary and bureaucracy answer less to the people than to a class of activists embedded at the top.

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Leading them is a man who knows the law. not as a shield for the people, but as a sword for ideology: Keir Starmer. Starmer did not merely elevate activist lawyers to high office. He is one. He has built his career knowing how to bend legal frameworks into blunt instruments. Now in Downing Street he deploys those instruments against the liberties Britain once bequeathed the world.

A particularly chilling example lies in the push to enshrine a definition of “Islamophobia.” What is presented as tolerance resembles, in practice, a new blasphemy law, that risks criminalising criticism of religion and culture whenever it offends official sensitivities. The land that abolished the Star Chamber is now flirting with prosecuting thought crimes.

The suspicion of national pride runs just as deep. Starmer has cautioned against using the St George’s Cross or the Union Jack ‘divisively’. To ordinary Britons, these flags are symbols of unity and heritage. To their government, they are red flags of extremism.

Meanwhile, foreign flags fly freely across London without question. The message is unmistakable: pride in your own country is suspect. Allegiance to any other is acceptable.

Immigration policy tells the same story. Labour boasts of progress, yet more than 32,000 asylum seekers remain in taxpayer‑funded hotels at a cost of £2.1billion a year. Whole communities are expected to accept disruption without complaint, and if they speak out they are branded intolerant. Concerns about security or cohesion are brushed aside as if no decent Briton could possibly hold them.

From abroad, the shift is impossible to ignore. Elon Musk has called Britain’s censorship Soviet‑style. JD Vance has condemned its crackdown on speech. The US State Department now lists Britain as a country presenting significant risks to free expression. I never imagined America would place Britain alongside nations that treat liberty as a nuisance. That day has come.

For those of us who have long defended Britain, it is heartbreaking. This is the country whose strong institutions enabled America’s own rise and whose commitment to liberty inspired ours. Yet under its current leadership Britain has stumbled into repression, constraint and fear, where ordinary citizens look over their shoulders before speaking.

Still, there is a chance for recovery. A counter‑movement exists. Figures such as Nigel Farage – who is in Washington today to talk about free speech in Britain – Robert Jenrick, Ben Habib and the Reform UK party speak plainly about borders, free speech and sovereignty. They refuse to accept that patriotism is extremism or that questioning official orthodoxy is hate. For this they are demonised by the governing elite. But for this they are listened to by ordinary citizens who have had enough and are reasserting their national pride as manifested in the tidal wave of Union and St. George flags that have flooded cities throughout the UK through efforts such as Operation Raise the Colours.

Britain must decide. It can continue down its present course, where speech is policed, justice is politicised and Starmer’s legal class governs not on behalf of the nation but against it. Or it can remember its own inheritance, trusting its people and restoring freedom as the organising principle of national life.

The world does not need a Britain that jails her patriots. It needs the Britain that once taught us all to be free.

British shipbuilding is booming again

‘Pigeons, beaten to a fine lead by hunger, flickered amongst the rusted girders of the railway bridge… rubble was being trucked from busted gable ends, and demolishers worked in a fume of dust and smoke. You would’ve thought that the Ruskies had finally lobbed over one of their big megaton jobs.’ Jeff Torrington’s brutal poetry in Swing Hammer Swing! captured the death of Glasgow shipbuilding, when the Clyde’s cranes fell silent and the yards were written off as relics.

Half a century on, the noise is back. The clang of cranes, the hiss of welders, the shuffle of apprentices in overalls: the Clyde is stirring again. Shipbuilding jobs in Scotland have risen from 6,000 to more than 7,200 in the past decade. It is not the mass employment of the 1950s and 60s, when tens of thousands crowded the slips, but it is real, durable, investment-driven work. BAE’s new Janet Harvey Hall at Govan – a cavernous cathedral of steel, large enough to construct two warships side by side – symbolises a return of ambition.

The turning point was the 2017 National Shipbuilding Strategy. Its promise was simple but transformative: a steady pipeline of modern, export-friendly ships for the Royal Navy, giving British yards the confidence to invest in skills and technology. No more boom and bust, no more idle cranes. The results are visible. Rosyth hums with the Type 31 frigate programme; Glasgow is pioneering digital design and advanced welding; Babcock is expanding its apprenticeships.

The export story is equally striking. The Type 31 is being built on time and already sold abroad to Indonesia and Poland. More dramatically, the Type 26 frigates have become the most valuable naval export programme in the world: Australia, Canada and Norway together account for an extraordinary £66–74billion of orders, dwarfing rival frigate or submarine projects. Add Britain’s share of the Aukus submarine pact, expected to generate up to £20billion in exports to Australia over the next quarter-century, and a new reality emerges. After decades of decline, Britain is not just building ships again – it is back as probably the world’s leading naval exporter in programme value.

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Nor is the revival confined to warships. The Advanced Propulsion Centre, launched in 2013 with £1billion of joint government–industry funding, has backed more than 300 projects, from Wrightbus hydrogen fleets to Jaguar Land Rover’s electric drivetrains. Its purpose is simple but transformative: to make Britain a leader in low-carbon transport while anchoring supply chains and skills at home. The results include £1.65billion of investment secured and the safeguarding or creation of 59,000 jobs.

There are other successes. The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre near Coventry provides state-of-the-art kit to accelerate electrification. The Catapult network, launched in 2011, channels £1.6billion into bridging research and industry, from offshore renewables to advanced manufacturing. Each mirrors the shipyards’ winning formula: patient capital, ecosystem investment and a clear national purpose.

Defence has another grand project in play: the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with Italy and Japan, also known as the Tempest. Set in motion by the Combat Air Strategy of 2018, it committed nearly £2billion over a decade to preserve sovereign design and manufacturing. The stakes are immense: industry projections suggest the programme could sustain 21,000 jobs annually and deliver £26billion in value by 2050. GCAP is not just about producing a sixth-generation fighter by 2035 – it is about ensuring Britain remains able to design and build at the cutting edge of aerospace. With the Franco-German rival reportedly hitting the buffers, the British-led programme could prove even more successful.

But it would be naïve to think industrial strategy always delivers. Britain has a long record of plans that faltered. Theresa May’s 2017 Industrial Strategy was abandoned within two years, its initiatives in skills and regional growth left to wither. The much-trumpeted Green Homes Grant of 2020, billed as a £2billion boost to create 100,000 jobs in retrofitting, collapsed within six months amid administrative chaos. These failures underline that strategy alone is not enough: consistency, competence and political will are as vital as capital.

For years, critics argued that government’s reluctance to back small modular nuclear reactors was another such failure, even though Rolls-Royce appeared to have the strongest SMR product on the market. That stance has now shifted. With a dedicated SMR strategy in place, Whitehall is finally aligning behind the company – but Rolls-Royce had already taken the lead. Its SMR programme shows how industrial strategy can begin in the boardroom as much as in government. Each compact, factory-built unit promises not only clean power, but an economic prize of £52billion to the UK, 40,000 jobs by 2050 and a supply chain that is 80 per cent British. The export potential is vast: deals secured in the Czech Republic, serious prospects elsewhere in Europe, and the chance of as much as £250 billion in overseas sales. Here is British engineering not waiting for Whitehall’s blessing, but forcing it to catch up.

The shipbuilding story is not about nostalgia. It is about the rediscovery of industrial strategy as a tool for national renewal. Whether in shipyards, aerospace hangars or nuclear workshops, the formula is the same: long-term planning, skilled people, predictable pipelines and the confidence to invest. This is not about picking winners for old times’ sake. It is about strategic stewardship in a world where resilience itself is a measure of power.

Britain, so long suspicious of industrial policy, has stumbled into an unlikely success story. The slipways of the Clyde, the new complex at Govan, the apprentices learning their trades: these are not ghosts of the past. They are evidence that decline is not inevitable. With strategy, Britain can build again. Rivet by rivet, reactor by reactor, fuselage by fuselage, a new age of national industrial success is taking shape.

The English countryside isn’t ‘racist’

Three researchers from Leicester University’s Centre for Hate Studies produced a curious report on Monday about the English countryside. Their theme is that much of rural England is a white racist redoubt, where anyone from an ethnic minority is made to feel unwelcome and psychologically, if not physically, excluded. People of colour, it is said, find themselves unaccepted, stared at, and occasionally insulted or worse. Serious measures, we are told, are called for to remove this injustice.

You could dismiss this as yet another predictable production from a group of tiresomely progressive academics. And in a sense you would have a point. The name of the authoring group, the Centre for Hate Studies, says a lot; and in addition, one of the authors is the same academic who was commissioned five years ago by the National Trust amid high controversy to report on links between its properties and slavery and colonialism. But that would be unfair. The authors are respectable academics; universities are there to accommodate all views, even those we may dislike; and there is no suggestion of dishonesty or any other academic skulduggery. And besides, there are rather better reasons to suggest that this document is best politely ignored and left to gather academic dust.

One point concerns its nature. Though based on much research, in the sense of in-depth interviews with a number of ethnic minority visitors to the countryside, it is unashamedly activist. It refers repeatedly to the existence of widespread racism in contemporary Britain, and on occasion to what the authors see as the pervasive colonialist stain polluting the English rural idyll. Next to a reference to inviting minorities in the countryside to send in artistic work and creative writing, there is a telling aside that this is all ‘grounded in a commitment to co-production and racial justice’.

In the report we see sustained attacks on Restore Trust for seeking the erasure of history, and on those who fail to see racist connotations in everything rustic, from gardening to pub names, again for being racially illiterate. And that’s before you reach the recommendations for action: we must all, for example, ‘validate and respect lived experience’, and ’embed ethical accountability’ in rural history by – yes – getting white researchers to ‘disclose their connections to colonial and racial violence’, amongst other things.

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Polemics like this are a fine academic tradition, even if somewhat tiresome to read. But what this one does not do is add a great deal to our knowledge about the English countryside.

That brings us to the second point. What is fascinating about this rather dour academic document is not what it says but the scale of what it misses. It essentially sees the English countryside largely as a beautiful environment giving visitors (and residents) a wonderful sense of peace and communion with nature and then as an amenity whose enjoyment is unfairly denied to many racial minorities.

But this view of countryside-as-desirable-amenity is arguably the problem. That could equally apply to (say) a well-maintained country park at the edge of a city or a leafy, rich, not-quite-suburban paradise on the lines of Westchester County in New York. What makes the English countryside so much more than either of these is not its vistas but its human ecosystem. This comprises many things: a strong sense of place and community of outlook, not to mention a reverence for continuity with the past. It also, importantly, includes a feeling that those who have lived on and worked in the English countryside for decades, if not generations, are probably better placed to set the tone of the place than visitors or recent incomers.

It also tracks with the idea that those who live in the country and make it what it is expect visitors and incomers to respect its customs and preserve what they visit. Visitors seeking to impose their own different values, whether because of alien culture, suburban brashness or anything else, will not be well regarded; on the other hand, the countryside is a very live-and-let-live place. Of course there is head-banging racism in Widdecombe-in-the-Moor, just as in Walsall or Walthamstow. But generally speaking, respectful non-conformity is probably much more accepted in the sticks than in most of suburbia.

This matters. It is precisely the expectation that visitors should respect countryside customs even if they go against their own culture that produces the quiet, unhurried continuity and the escape from the bustle of the city. It is this which makes our countryside so popular and so interesting.

Unfortunately, the Leicester report comes close to demanding that this must go in the name of equality and racial justice, and that the people who live in the country must adopt the egalitarian, cosmopolitan landscape of our cities – and university towns. And there’s the problem. Do this, and you won’t have an inclusive English countryside. You’ll have a dreary, soulless and very expensive version of Camden Town with fields. Does anyone, even an ethnic minority visitor to the Cotswolds, really want that?

How the West infantilises Palestinians

Belgium will become the latest western country to recognise a Palestinian state. Its foreign minister Maxime Prevot cited ‘the violence perpetrated by Israel in violation of international law’ and Belgium’s obligation to ‘prevent any risk of genocide’. He maintained his government was not ‘sanctioning the Israeli people’ but ‘ensuring that their government respects international and humanitarian law’. Belgium, he added, was ‘taking action to try to change the situation on the ground.’

Palestine is the net zero or gender self-identification of 2025: a cause that gains esteem in intellectual, institutional and cultural circles and becomes policy in countries where politicians act for their counterparts in other nations rather than the public in their own. That is not to dismiss the Palestinians’ legitimate grievances. They ought to run their own affairs free from the interferences and impositions of the Israeli army and the Shin Bet. Whether that takes the form of a sovereign state or some other arrangement is secondary to the goal of ending the misery so many endure in Gaza and the West Bank. But that goal cannot be achieved by unilateral actions like the one Belgium has taken. In fact, such actions push peace further away.

The only road to Palestine goes through the Palestinians. There is no alternative route. The Palestinians have to accept Israel not only as a political or military reality but as a legitimate country, the nation state of the Jewish people, the ingathering of an indigenous and exiled people to their historic and spiritual homeland. This used to be doctrine among two-state solutioners, not least because Yasser Arafat had demonstrated how formal recognition was no barrier to continued incitement and rejectionism. (Example: on December 16, 2001, under post-9/11 pressure from the United States to clamp down on terrorism, Arafat gave a speech urging ‘a complete cessation of any operation or actions, especially suicide attacks’, and was duly feted in world capitals and by the media. Two days later, with international attention elsewhere, he gave a speech in Ramallah declaring that ‘one martyr in the Holy Land is worth 70 martyrs anywhere else’.)

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But substantive recognition has fallen out of fashion, along with other safeguards intended to secure a lasting peace. Those who have grown impatient with or hostile towards Israel say that requiring the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel as the Jewish state requires them to profess Zionism, and that is implausible if not impossible. It might well be, but no more so than a two-state solution itself. The only way that paradigm can work is if there is a genuine and enduring truce between the two nations. A mere end to hostilities would be insufficient. The Palestinians must want to live in peace with Israel for a Palestinian state to be sustainable. There is plenty of work, self-reflection and sacrifice to be done on both sides but while Israel’s role in the conflict is spoken of – it sometimes seems like we speak of little else – the Palestinian contribution to this endless war is seldom discussed candidly.

Notice, for instance, how we talk about the October 7 attacks. We say that Hamas and other terrorists entered Israel and murdered its citizens, but Hamas is not just a terror organisation, it is the de facto government of Gaza. How did it become so? Well, there was a civil war between Hamas and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority that ended with Hamas in charge of Gaza and the PA running the West Bank. What prompted the civil war? As part of his mission to spread democracy in the Middle East, George W Bush pressured the PA to hold legislative elections and, in concert with experts and foreign ministries across the West, dismissed Israeli warnings that Hamas would win. So Palestinians went to the polls in January 2006 and duly elected Hamas in a ballot monitors from the Jimmy Carter Centre attested to have been ‘peaceful, competitive, and genuinely democratic’. Fatah and Hamas proved incapable of governing together, and in accordance with Palestinian political tradition began killing one another.

Bush’s arrogance is damnable but we shouldn’t lose sight of the most pertinent detail here: the Palestinians voted for Hamas. Hamas was not an unknown quantity at this point. It had been murdering Israelis for years and affirmed in its charter: ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.’ Four months before polling day, Hamas kidnapped Sasson Nuriel, an Israeli businessman and father of three. They blindfolded him, made him read pro-Hamas propaganda on video, then stabbed him to death and discarded his body at a rubbish dump. Palestinians voted for the political face of that. I’d like to think if Reform started abducting and murdering people, it would have an adverse impact on their poll numbers.

Yes, we are told, but that was 20 years ago and many Palestinians weren’t even alive to vote in that election. That supposes a fundamental transformation of Palestinian culture and attitudes in the past two decades, for which there is scant evidence. Although its leadership is unpopular, and would likely lose a presidential contest to someone like Marwan Barghouti, a May poll on voting intentions for legislative elections put Hamas comfortably in the lead. Polled in December 2023, 72 per cent of Palestinians backed the October 7 massacre, a figure which has since fallen but nonetheless sits at 50 per cent today. These are not the responses of a populace ready to co-exist peacefully with its neighbours. Call them a state, give them a full seat in the General Assembly, do whatever you like but it won’t change Palestinian national culture. Only the Palestinians can do that.

States reflect national culture and a State of Palestine that has not made its peace with Zionism will not be secure in its peace with Israel. Its leaders might say all the right words, some might even sincerely mean them, but a Palestine which does not accept Jewish sovereignty in part of the Land of Israel will be a Palestine that cannot be relied upon to resist political forces pushing fresh confrontation with Israel. It is not enough to get rid of Hamas or marginalise likeminded factions. Palestinian national culture must come to reject the impulses and prejudices that lead so many to support these factions and to console themselves that Israel is a temporary entity squatting on Arab land and will one day, inshallah, be dismantled.

Two states living side by side in a sustained peace will only be possible if the Palestinians accept not just the reality but the legitimacy of Zionism. Only they can make that choice but the international community could, if it wanted, encourage them. By penalising rather than rewarding extremism and rejectionism. By holding the Palestinians to standards that would shape any future state to be stable, peaceful and self-sustaining. By telling them that the world stands ready to bring their awful plight to an end but won’t wait forever for them to take the steps needed on their part. This the international community will not do because in the framing of western liberalism the Palestinians are victims, not participants in a conflict but the captives of an oppression.

Left, right and centre there is a pronounced shift away from Israel and towards this worldview. It is every bit as arrogant and foolhardy as Bush’s insistence on Palestinian elections, and Israelis and Palestinians will pay the price with another generation of death and suffering. The Palestinians are oppressed but they are also belligerents and the former status will not change until the latter does. That’s a harsh truth but a truth all the same.

Those who consider themselves sympathisers with the Palestinians reject this analysis not because it is wrong but because they cannot conceive of the Palestinians as anything other than righteous victims, a people without agency who can be rescued from their circumstances only by western pressure on Israel. It is a patronising, paternalist worldview, and perhaps even a little racist. And no matter what the Palestinians’ would-be saviours do to Israel, October 7 has reminded Jerusalem that the world, including the United States, has very limited tolerance for Jewish self-defence. Israel cannot rely on anyone but itself and so its security must be airtight. It will not permit the imposition on its borders of a dysfunctional state that could readily become a launchpad for terrorism.

All this rather than tell Palestinians the truth and plead – demand – that they make their peace with Israel. The truth could, in time, bring about more autonomy, security, and prosperity, perhaps even a state to rival Israel in growth and innovation, but the world prefers to lie and allow the Palestinians to remain trapped in their saintly dispossession.