Politics

PMQs began with a tussle over Universal Credit. Jeremy Corbyn’s team of wordsmiths and brainstormers had spent the morning ransacking a thesaurus for words meaning ‘destructive’. They found ‘broken, damaging, dangerous, callous, cruel, punitive and vicious.’ They added ‘very cruel’ for good measure. These were the labels Corbyn applied to Universal Credit. ‘It should go,’ he urged. As for ‘very cruel’, he spoke of ‘the very cruel and callous two-child limit which caps benefits for larger families.’ Now that Britain’s parents have received this warning, they can avoid the ‘very cruel’ cap by capping their fecundity. Boris replied with a set of cheerful statistics about economic growth and rising employment.

Given that Labour has just faced its worst electoral defeat, arguably since 1935, it always looked odd – and dangerous for the Opposition – that the final run-off might have been between two candidates, Sir Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey, whose hands were well and truly in the blood of that disaster, as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. So the decision of the big GMB union to endorse Lisa Nandy will make for a more interesting contest and a proper choice for Labour members. Nandy’s most important claim to be leader is she is the only candidate to have argued as a backbencher that Labour should have worked seriously

In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Roger Scruton often mulled on the nature and techniques of twenty-first century denunciation. For Roger, like others who had seen totalitarian societies up close, knew what intimidation and officially-imposed forms of thinking were actually like. Which is not to say, of course, that modern Britain or America are totalitarian societies. Only that we have people among us who act with precisely the same techniques as those did in totalitarian societies. In modern Britain, as in communist Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the habits are the same. A member of a profession comes into their workplace in the morning to find