Politics

It’s not easy to say this, but Ukraine’s offensive to retake lost territory has fizzled out. Autumnal weather has turned the rolling steppe into a sea of mud. Like last winter, the conflict has entered a renewed phase of static, attritional warfare. It means that any new attempt to break through Russian lines will need to wait until at least April of next year. Ukraine’s failure is easy to explain. First, Russia’s defensive line has proved to be much more impenetrable than anyone expected, with minefields that run nearly a mile deep in places. Second, although the West has donated a number of armoured vehicles, including Leopard 2 main battle

At times, the Covid public inquiry has had the appearance of a show trial – one that starts with the premise that lockdown was essential to saving lives and should have been imposed earlier in the spring of 2020, and that is seeking to find the guilty parties who prevented this happening. As Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, writes in The Spectator this week, the inquiry is failing to provide much illumination on the question that matters rather more: did lockdowns actually work, and did they do more good than they did harm? Another participant with an interesting perspective on the subject of lockdowns

Mums begging for help and being ignored, mums in labour turned away from hospital and sent home sometimes for days and days, midwives and obstetricians who are supposed to care instead shrugging and rolling their eyes, the most basic failures in care – observations not done, monitoring ignored, an air of lackadaisical ignorance and complacency. Babies fade away and die on the very brink of life, coming into the world silently, or die within hours or days of birth because of catastrophic failings of care during labour, or are born alive but their brains irreparably injured by oxygen deprivation, leaving them with serious disabilities and shortened lives.  While Secretary of State Steve