World

Thursday

Nyrola Elimä

The grim reality of being a ‘model Uighur’

I left China a decade ago when life there as a Uighur simply became too difficult. People know about the ongoing genocide of the Uighurs, but it didn’t come out of nowhere: it followed years of smaller scale persecution, which I experienced daily. I first grew aware of how bad things were in 2009, when I got a job in an inland city that required me to travel — a role that became impossible because hotels would refuse to let me stay. Receptionists would see my identity card, which bore my ethnicity, and curtly reply that there were no rooms available. Once, one smiled kindly and told me to wait

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The EU’s new emperor: what would Macron’s second term look like?

Montpellier Emmanuel Macron, with eagle eyes, is staring at Europe like stout Cortez. Elected president of France almost five years ago aged just 39, he dreams beyond the renewal of his lease on the Élysée Palace in the April election. Now Angela Merkel has left the world stage, Macron’s ambition is to replace her as Europe’s de facto leader and to father a European federation, a United States of Europe, with France and himself at its centre. On New Year’s Day, France assumed the rotating six-month presidency of the European Council, the supreme institution of the European Union, an organisation some might think besieged by unresolved crises and policy conflicts

Matt Ridley

The universal appeal of the African savanna

My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been warm, sunlit and free while so many in Britain were not won’t endear me to most readers, I realise. Nairobi was rife with Covid and Christmas cancellations devastated the tourism industry. So we had the extraordinary Elephant Watch Camp run by Saba Douglas-Hamilton in the Samburu National Reserve almost to ourselves. Baboons and vervet monkeys wandered freely through the camp, and in the night the river flash-flooded after a storm in the hills to the west, but the tents were safe. Elephants were everywhere, feasting on fresh vegetation after a

Wednesday

Daniel Rey

Why England lost the Ashes

England’s wretched performance in the Ashes – which saw the side lose three tests and so the series to Australia last week – has been more abject than even the most inspired pessimist could have imagined. No sane observer expected England to win against Australia, but to lose the five match series little more than two days into the third test was a pitiful show. Inevitably, even as England continue to play the fourth test this week, there have been calls for a cricketing inquest. The standard of the domestic game, the structure of the English season and England’s pivot towards the one day and T20 formats are all expected

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s potty-mouthed outburst is deliberate – and calculated

President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration that he intends to ‘emmerder’ – which loosely translates, excuse my English, as ‘piss off’ – the non-vaccinated has been widely reported this morning as the mother of all political gaffes.  Macron declared, in an interview with Le Parisien, France’s best-selling newspaper:  In a democracy, the worst enemy is lies and stupidity. We put pressure on the non-vaccinated by limiting their access to social activities as much as possible. In fact, almost all people, over 90 per cent, have signed up. It is a very small minority that is resistant. How do we reduce this minority? We reduce them, I’m sorry to say, by annoying them

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has crossed a line in his war on the unvaccinated

The new year has not started well for Emmanuel Macron. It began badly when some bright spark in the Elysée thought it would be a good idea to mark France’s six-month presidency of the European Union by unfurling the bloc’s blue and gold flag under the Arc de Triomphe. Millions of French were not amused at what they regarded as a sacrilegious gesture. Macron’s two main rivals on the right, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally and Valérie Pécresse of the Republicans, accused the president of dishonouring the memory of the country’s military. By Sunday, the EU flag had made a tactical withdrawal, to the delight of Le Pen,

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Why won’t Joe Biden stand up to Iran?

This week marks two years since Iranian terror mastermind Major General Qassem Soleimani was torn apart by a Reaper drone missile in Baghdad, on the orders of Donald Trump. The Iranian regime has marked the anniversary with a flurry of antagonism throughout the region. On Monday, a coalition base outside Iraq’s main airport was attacked by two drones armed with missiles with the words ‘Soleimani’s revenge’ on them. Both were safely shot down. That same day, two Israeli newspaper websites, the Jerusalem Post and Maariv, were hacked and made to display a picture of a missile being launched from Soleimani’s ring at Israel’s nuclear reactor. These provocations were preceded by a

Lukas Degutis

The EU’s weak response to Russian aggression plays into Putin’s hands

The European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell is in Ukraine today. His mission? To show solidarity with Kiev in the face of Russian aggression. But the visit is too little too late. Former Soviet states, such as Ukraine, have grown used to the lofty rhetoric and empty gestures of their EU. The reality is that when it really matters, the West is failing to stick up for its allies. Linas Linkevičius, Lithuania’s former minister of foreign affairs, says it’s time for Brussels – and the rest of the West – to change tack when it comes to dealing with Russia. Linkevičius is a stand-out Kremlin critic within European politics who

Tuesday

Matthew Lynn

The hypocrisy of Elon Musk

Tesla’s sleek, if expensive, electric cars are leading the battle against climate change. Its batteries are moving renewable energy into the mainstream, while its founder Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, likes to present himself as a free-thinking radical. It is hard to think of a company more right on than Tesla — well, okay, perhaps Unilever — or one that depends more on its politically correct credentials. But hold on. There turns out to be one opposed minority that Tesla couldn’t care less about: China’s Uighurs. Most of the corporate world will sooner or later have to make a tough decision: do they care about human rights? The company has landed

Amber Athey

AOC and the self-absorbed left

Raise your glass to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who hypocritically escaped record Covid cases in her home state of New York to drink cocktails and attend a drag brunch in free Florida. It’s not uncommon for a politician’s vacation to become the subject of national criticism, but in response, AOC has managed to deploy the worst communications strategy since ‘hiking the Appalachian trail’ became code for banging your mistress in Argentina. After being called out on Twitter for her newly attained snowbird status — and her boyfriend’s gaudy choice in footwear — AOC declared that her critics are just upset that they don’t get to sleep with her. It’s no secret

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany’s China-friendly approach is continuing under Olaf Scholz

As Angela Merkel prepares to write her autobiography, ‘explaining her key decisions in her own words’, her successor has his hands full dealing with the decisions she did not make. Germany’s new chancellor Olaf Scholz has taken captaincy of a ship on a course to nowhere in particular. He is beginning to find out just how difficult it is to steer his predecessor’s middle course between China and the West. Sooner rather than later, some difficult decisions will have to be made as their political world drifts too far apart to be navigated in tandem from Berlin. Admittedly, this dilemma is not of Scholz’s making. Over the course of Merkel’s

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The problem with ‘vaccine equity’

‘A stain on our soul’. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure of the west to ensure that the whole world is vaccinated. In a previous attack on western policy — at the end of November, just as Omicron was emerging — he wrote of “hoarding” and ‘vaccine nationalism’. Take Africa: it is certainly true that vaccination rates in many countries are very low. While the UK has managed to deliver 195 doses per 100 people, Nigeria has only managed seven, Ethiopia and Somalia nine, and Chad and South Sudan two. Can all this be blamed on the failure of western nations to donate

Sunday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Inside Joe Biden’s disastrous negotiations with Iran

One of the West’s great foreign policy failures of 2021 was the Iran nuclear negotiations, which remained bitterly unresolved as the clock passed midnight. Having spoken to a number of diplomatic sources on different sides in recent weeks, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the process has been woefully inept. Not only has there been a dramatic failure to extract any concessions from Tehran – even a meaningful freeze on progress towards the bomb has remained elusive – but western negotiators have become enveloped themselves in an Asterix-style dust cloud of infighting, competing agendas and tension. All of this, of course, is a gift to the Iranians, who

Saturday

Constantin Eckner

How anti-lockdown protesters are outwitting German police

As Germans marked the new year last night, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s message was somewhat muted: ‘It’s clear to all of us: the pandemic is not over’, Scholz said in a televised address: ‘I appeal to all of you: let yourself be vaccinated.’ His message was aimed at the large number of Germans who are yet to be jabbed. Only 71.2 per cent of Germans are fully vaccinated, one of the lowest rates in western Europe. As well as encouraging his countrymen to get vaccinated, Scholz and Germany’s other leaders face another problem: how to deal with protests following the introduction of new restrictions. Social gatherings across Germany have been limited to ten people since 28 December and

Friday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China could be more dangerous than ever in 2022

Twenty twenty-two is the year that Xi Jinping plans to seize power for life, but it is not going according to script. He is retreating further into his bunker – a self-isolation that is amplifying the Communist party’s arrogance and insecurities. Challenges are mounting at home and abroad, which will make for a bumpy year in China’s growing rivalry with the West. Xi’s most immediate problem is Covid-19, where he has backed himself into an increasingly untenable ‘zero tolerance’ cul-de-sac, just as most of the rest of the world is learning to live with the virus. Just before the new year, gun-toting police in the city of Jingxi paraded four people

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why warmer days in Alaska are not a sign of climate armageddon

It’s climate panic again. This time, under headlines such as ‘Baked Alaska’, we are informed that the most northerly US state has experienced ‘absurd’ temperatures for December. ‘In December when temperatures would normally be well below zero,’ states the Independent, the town of Kodiak has registered a temperature of 67 degrees Fahrenheit (19.4 Celsius). ‘In late December I would not have thought such a thing possible,’ a climatologist is quoted as saying on CNN. ‘When smashing a temperature record it’s normally by a fraction of a degree,’ tweets the Met Office, ‘not by 20 degrees. But that is what happened in Kodiak, Alaska.’ The subtext, as ever, is that this

Thursday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Could Covid finally end the tradition of Japan’s dreaded ‘bonenkai’ parties?

John Updike described America as a ‘vast conspiracy to make you happy’. Japan, a wonderful place to live in many ways, at times seems like the opposite; if not a vast conspiracy to make you unhappy, at least anxious, uncomfortable, and exhausted. This is especially true for those legions of salarymen and women sighing inwardly at the dread prospect of the ‘bonenkai’: the obligatory end of year company party.  It comes as little surprise to learn that many Japanese loathe these jamborees, which they have to attend, whether they like it or not. A survey for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper suggests many regard bonenkai as unpaid overtime, and would rather

John Jenkins

A blurred distinction between refugees and migrants is a recipe for chaos

Among the most evocative and distressing press images of the year were those of Maryam Nuri Hama Amin. The 24-year-old Kurd from Soran, in northeastern Iraq, drowned along with 26 others in the Channel last month. In photographs published after her death, she is seen at her engagement party smiling at the camera in a park, by a lake, amid fallen leaves. She looks beautiful, bright, confident and full of hope. If you read reports and trawl through Twitter, you’ll find that many believe Maryam was a victim of a heartless international order, of European xenophobia, of the British government’s inability to manage its own affairs properly. But how did she

Wednesday

George Chesterton

Banana republic Britain and the curse of reverse exceptionalism

A day did not go by on social media in 2021 without some high-profile performative outrage about Boris Johnson and the hell hole he has bequeathed us. Britain is a ‘banana republic’ apparently. We live in a ‘tinpot dictatorship’ and are an ‘international embarrassment’. This sort of thing is most often touted by talk radio hosts, former Labour spin doctors, actors and anyone who’s ever appeared on Live At The Apollo. The consequences of this language, both for the health of the nation and for those wishing for some especially humiliating deposition in Number Ten, is that it achieves nothing. It merely legitimises the idea of reverse exceptionalism: that Britain’s

John Keiger John Keiger

France has the most to lose from Britain’s turn away from Europe

It was Napoleon who declared that ‘a state has the politics of its geography’. We do well to remember that in taking stock of European international relations as we speculate on a new year and beyond. By Europe is meant the European continent, ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, in de Gaulle’s words. Not the 27-member European Union, which Brussels linguistically and imperialistically conflates with the 44 sovereign states that the UN defines as Europe. Of those 44 states, four are still the European great powers, as they have been since at least 1870: Britain, Germany, France, and Russia. They are still the continent’s most populous, wealthiest (except Russia), and