The Spectator’s Notes | 23 February 2017

Last month, at Policy Exchange, I met a charming, quiet American general called H.R. McMaster. In conversation, I was struck by his zeal for Nato and his concern wherever the alliance is now weakest, as in Turkey. In his speech to the thinktank, he said clearly that Russia and China are attempting to ‘collapse’ the post-1945 and post-Cold War ‘political, economic and security order’, with unconventional forces hiding behind conventional ones, subversion, disinformation, propaganda, economic actions and ‘proxies’ such as organised crime networks. The situation had echoes of 1914, and the risk of a great-power war was the highest for 70 years. He emphasised that, ‘despite public comments by our President’, the need to combat these threats by having strong alliances was ‘inescapable’. This week, Lt Gen McMaster replaced the pro-Russian Mike Flynn after his brief, turbulent stay as Trump’s national security adviser. The appointment looks like a belated outburst of sanity.

It is almost always unwise to postpone the introduction of a big, scheduled tax change, but often tempting at the time. George Osborne, when Chancellor of the Exchequer in the coalition government, postponed the revaluation of business rates, when it fell due two years ago, for obvious political reasons. So now it is happening, and it hurts more. The current rates are based on the rental value of business properties in 2010. Since then, the scene is transformed. The internet has called the whole concept of the ordinary physical shop into question. Values have vastly altered and the political problem — as with the poll tax in the 1980s — is that some rises are huge and losers are more vocal than gainers. The political assumption always was that you could get away with changes to these rates because businesses have no votes. But it turns out that the ‘just managing’ classes lauded by Mrs May are feeling aggrieved.