SNP treasurer’s arrest overshadows Humza Yousaf’s big speech

Just what Humza needed on the day of his Big Speech to Holyrood: another arrest in what has inevitably been called the ‘campervangate’ affair. This time it was the party treasurer, Colin Beattie, who was taken into police custody this morning. The 71-year-old has now been released without charge, pending further investigation. It is the latest stage in the two year long police investigation (Operation Branchform) into what happened to that now infamous £600,000 sum for a referendum campaign that never happened. Earlier this month, the former SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, was arrested and released without charge – pending further investigation – in what Police Scotland say is an ‘ongoing investigation’.

Colin Beattie, MSP for Midlothian North and Musselburgh, had been treasurer for the SNP for 16 years until 2020 when he lost out to MP Douglas Chapman. But in 2021, he took over from the Chapman when the latter resigned only seven months into the job after claiming he was being denied ‘the financial information to carry out the fiduciary duties of the National Treasurer’.

On Saturday, Beattie reportedly told the SNP’s National Executive Committee meeting he was ‘having difficulty in balancing the books due to the reduction in membership and donors’. He was contradicted the very next morning by the former Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, who insisted that the party’s finances are ‘in robust health’ and that the SNP can meet all its financial obligations. Make of that what you will. 

As always the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal’s Office have sounded the contempt siren and warned anyone who comments on Beattie’s arrest, or on the police investigation, risks two years imprisonment or an unlimited fine. However, this train of events is having a very serious political impact. We are not supposed to comment on criminal investigations in case they prejudice the jury the outcome of a trial, but the succession of arrests has already arguably prejudiced the public against the Scottish National party and its former leader, Nicola Sturgeon. As Professor Sir John Curtice, our leading polling expert, pointed out on BBC radio last week after the police erected that forensics tent and surrounded Nicola Sturgeon’s home with police cars, ‘these pictures make it very difficult for Yousaf to establish himself in the minds of the public as a leader they want to follow’.

The sight of the party treasurer being taken into police custody is another blow to the party’s image and to the standing of Nicola Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf. How he wishes he had never let it be said that he is the ‘continuity candidate’. Today he was going to set out his priorities for government; it was to be the moment he drew a line under the succession of bad news stories afflicting the party and outlined his vision of a ‘progressive Scotland’ and a ‘wellbeing economy’. Well he can forget that: tomorrow’s media will be all about the police arresting another SNP official and about the ‘missing’ £600,000. No one has suggested any wrongdoing on Mr Beattie’s side.

Yousaf has already had to contend with demands that Nicola Sturgeon be suspended and – or – forced to resign her seat. He said yesterday that the former SNP leader should not be suspended adding: ‘We are far past the time of judging what a woman does based on what happens to her husband.’ This is true – but the SNP has been only too willing in the past to suspend politicians and officials when there is the slightest hint of wrong doing or questions about their character.

Critics will cite the suspension of the former children’s minister Mark McDonald in 2017 when he was accused of sending inappropriate texts, and the MSP Michelle Thomson in 2015 when police investigated her property deals. No action was taken but Thomson has only recently been able to restart her career and McDonald never did. The SNP is certainly guilty perhaps of double standards in not giving the same treatment to Sturgeon – but at the same time, two wrongs do not make a right.

People, especially in politics, love to see the powerful humbled, and everyone has been hugely excited by the implosion of the once dominant force in Scottish politics. Like everyone else involved in this most bizarre criminal investigation, however, Nicola Sturgeon also has a right to natural justice. That leaked video of her insisting there was no problem with the party finances back in 2021 is not incriminating in any obvious way – it’s what you would expect the party leader to tell the National Executive Committee. Yet it has somehow been presented as proof positive of a cover up.

Today’s speech was underwhelming: we remain none the wiser about exactly how Humza’s ‘wellbeing economy’ differs from the economy the rest of us live and work in. Nor did we learn how he intends to end poverty in Scotland, his number one priority. Yousaf announced a delay on the much-criticised deposit return scheme for bottles and cans but gave no indication about how it can be made to work.  The ban on alochol advertising  has been binned for the time being – at least in favour of a ‘fresh look’ – and the First Minister confirmed that that Scotland will be returning to international league tables of school performance but gave no commitments on closing the educational attainment gap. 

There is indeed nothing in this ‘fresh start’ but putting off till tomorrow what the new First Minister could be doing today. Perhaps he has already realised what many believe: that he’s a here-today-gone-tomorrow leader of a government on its last legs. At any rate there was nothing in the speech likely to eclipse the financial scandal consuming the SNP and his administration. That he had to deny to reporters that the SNP is a ‘criminal’ organisation speaks volumes about the state of the party he leads.

Sturgeon has declined to come to Holyrood this week and she watched Humza Yousaf’s big speech remotely. But she is rapidly spinning out of the world of active politics altogether because of the succession of arrests of individuals close to her when she was leader. There is, to repeat, no evidence of any wrong-doing, and no one has been charged in Operation Branchform. But this police investigation into the party finances, as it grinds on and on, is chewing up Sturgeon’s reputation and the authority of the First Minister who replaced her.

The SNP, meanwhile, has been hit by the political equivalent of a force ten hurricane and there is absolutely nothing it can do about it. 

The EU is alienating eastern Europe

For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders to its vassals, into an organisation based on broad consensus between elected governments, it is likely to find itself side-lined or even facing a continental schism.

The latest illustration of this arises from a sudden glut of Ukrainian grain. For the last nine years or so this has enjoyed largely tariff-free access to the EU. Until recently this was no big deal, since although Spain and the Netherlands imported a fair amount for cattle-feed, the rest of the Ukrainian grain nearly all went elsewhere, especially to the developing world.

War, however, has upset things. Mountains of grain have now been diverted to eastern Europe, which threatens to undercut and bankrupt local growers. In the last few days Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – all states with potent agricultural constituencies, and the last two with elections due this year – have reacted smartly, banning imports. Bulgaria may well follow suit, and farmers in Romania (where there is an election next year) have also been up in arms.

For anyone other than a Eurocrat, it’s difficult not to have a great deal of sympathy with the growers and the politicians behind them. Even given wartime shipment difficulties, the growers can argue that there are plenty of markets outside Europe for Ukrainian grain, and indeed people in them who have more need than Europeans. Furthermore, despite the whiff of protectionism, their governments’ quick action is very understandable. Free trade may generally be good, but no decent administration can stand aside and let globalism run riot when it creates a sudden and existential threat to a large part of its agricultural sector.

All this puts Brussels, which as a matter of EU law controls external trade, on the spot. True, the EU ostensibly backs Ukraine and its interests. Nevertheless, it also needs to stand behind its member states; they have every right to expect a thoughtful, nuanced and swift-footed reaction, or even some sympathetic words from Ursula von der Leyen. Unfortunately they have not got this. So far, the reaction from Berlaymont to the concerns of those in Warsaw, Budapest and Sofia has been a brusque emailed statement from the Commission in a kind of EU Dalek-speak. ‘We are aware of Poland and Hungary’s announcements… in this context, it is important to underline that trade policy is of EU exclusive competence and, therefore, unilateral actions are not acceptable.’

If you were looking for the most inept way to run an organisation like the EU, this comes close. For one thing, it shows up Brussels’s long-standing failure to understand eastern Europe. It has not grasped that, unlike in much of the West, large-scale relatively efficient agriculture is an important industry in the region that needs encouraging. If the EU understood this, it would not have peremptorily forbidden the governments of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia from doing what was necessary to avert an existential threat to their survival. Nor, for that matter, has much of the Eurocracy ever really comprehended that eastern states that until 30 years ago lived in the Russian shadow do not have the same unthinking loyalty to the supranational authority of Brussels as other member states.

For another, the chances are that the orders barked from Brussels will not be very effective, even if reinforced by orders from a complaisant European court. Previous attempts from the centre to impose measures seen by eastern European states as either affecting their internal affairs or their vital interests have not gone well. (Think, for example, of the order to Poland to shut down the Turów lignite mine, seen by the court as a matter of environmental tidiness but by the Polish government as an issue of keeping the lights on in Warsaw. Poland simply ignored the court’s order and declined to pay the fines imposed on it.) It is perfectly conceivable that elected governments who regard farmers, food and elections as more important than abstract propositions of European law will do the same if they are ordered to import Ukrainian grain that will hammer a large sector of their agricultural economy.

For the moment, despite a disastrous start, Brussels still has the opportunity to redeem itself and appear as a body on the side of the governments and voters who pay it. It could say that it will seek an urgent answer to the problem, if necessary agreeing to some temporary exclusion of the grain mountain from the EU market. 

Will it? The signs are not good. It is more likely that the EU will see this as an abstract legal problem and call for harsh measures against those who disobey its orders. If it does, it will run the risk of becoming increasingly like the chancellery of some latter-day Holy Roman Empire, giving ever more stringent orders to vassals who take ever less notice. But that is perhaps too far down the line for the Brussels mandarins to worry about. By then, indeed, it could well be someone else’s problem.

Why is Just Stop Oil targeting the snooker?

Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed – to glue herself to the other table. Both have been arrested. Meanwhile, enraged snooker fans everywhere are trying to work out what on Earth their sport has got to do with climate change.

We could speculate. The tournament is sponsored by online used-car dealer Cazoo, which is perhaps particularly complicit in the defilement of Gaia, according to those lunatics. But in truth the setting was almost incidental. The scenes at the Crucible were just another ridiculous attempt to preach the eco-gospel, from a group convinced the world is coming to an end and that almost anything is justified to try to prevent mass death.

‘We know new oil and gas will kill millions…Why would ordinary people not try everything in their power to stop that?’, JSO tweeted after the incident, seemingly missing the fact that these howling protesters are far from ordinary, and that the vast majority of ordinary people are furious about these ridiculous stunts.

We needn’t waste too much time rebutting the claims of the activists here. For the most part, their statements are self-discrediting. They fail even the most cursory sniff test.

Roger Hallam, the pony-tailed, Charles Manson-resembling ‘mastermind’ behind Just Stop Oil, likes to claim that six billion people (that is, the vast majority of people currently on Earth) will die this century due to climate change and the chaos he says it will unleash. He has repeatedly failed to back this up when challenged (including when I asked him during a debate on Spectator TV in 2021). He has also put out videos, explicitly aimed at young people, suggesting that an apocalyptic future awaits them, in which their eyes will be gouged out by marauding rape gangs (seriously). 

But the scenes at the Crucible – and those at the Grand National at the weekend, where more than 100 animal-rights activists, linked to Extinction Rebellion, were arrested for trying to disrupt the race – remind us not only how mental, but also how joyless this lot are. These assorted groups’ campaign to save Mother Nature rarely seems to target government or fossil-fuel firms with their antics. Nor are they content with blocking roads and disrupting transport, as has been their calling card up until recently. Now they’re going after football, racing, snooker and priceless works of art. All the things that make being a human being in the 21st-century fun, pleasurable or inspiring apparently bring these plummy weirdos out in hives. 

What we’re dealing with here is not simply an environmentalist movement. Just Stop Oil is another cheek of the arse of a modern bourgeois puritanism that dominates so many areas of public life today. Over-educated killjoys seem intent on imposing their lifestyle, morality and preoccupations on the rest of us – to tell us what we should say, do, eat, drink, think and enjoy. The justifications might change – eco-warriors say they want to save the planet; wokesters pose as the saviours of minorities; nanny statists say they are finger-wagging for the sake of our own health and wellbeing – but the endpoint is always the same: a world in which we are all as miserable as they are. Never let them win.

Angela Merkel doesn’t deserve to be honoured by Germany

It must rank as some form of political satire that Angela Merkel has been awarded Germany’s highest political honour. Not least because the former Chancellor will most likely be remembered foremost for turning a blind eye to the security threat posed by Russia.

The Grand Cross of the Order of Merit has previously been given to only two of Germany’s greatest postwar leaders. The first went to the Federal Republic’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who achieved the remarkable feat of reconciling West Germany with its former enemies, especially France, and, by supporting Nato, helped ensure his country became an integral part of the Western bloc. The other recipient is Helmut Kohl, who was responsible for German unification and created the European Union.

It is more than an understatement to suggest that Merkel barely deserves mention in the same breath. Merkel led her nation for 16 long years. During that time her cautious and lowkey leadership style produced cult-like levels of devotion. She was often lauded as the only adult in the room, possessing unrivalled diplomatic skills and empathy, qualities deemed missing in many of her male counterparts on the world stage.

She was, for a time, anointed the anti-Trump and, in the words of no less an authority than the New York Times, ‘the liberal West’s last defender’. It turns out this was wishful thinking masquerading as political insight. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put paid to such Merkel worship. Her wilful blindness or ignorance – perhaps both – when it came to reading Putin’s motives and dealing with Russia ranks as postwar Germany’s gravest foreign policy error.

Merkel ignored the growing evidence of Putin’s repression, including the murderous silencing of political opponents. She appeared indifferent to Russian corruption and the country’s role in spreading disinformation. All that appeared to matter was access to cheap Russian gas. Long term strategic issues such as Europe’s security came a distant second.

This short term opportunism remained the case even after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014: Germany’s largest gas storage facilities were sold to Russia’s Gazprom regardless. It left Germany vulnerable and heavily dependent on Moscow for energy supplies. In 2020, it was estimated that Russia supplied more than half of Germany’s natural gas and about a third of all the oil that Germans used to heat homes and run factories. The Putin regime was quick to exploit this energy dependency as leverage in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. 

Since leaving office, Merkel has expressed not a word of real regret or contrition over this colossal strategic misjudgment. There is no self-criticism and certainly no lessons learnt: ‘You always act in the time in which you find yourself,’ she told journalists in Lisbon last October when questioned about her government’s attitude towards Russia. That is as complacent and self-serving an explanation as you will ever hear from any political leader, especially one as experienced as Merkel. 

Her handling of China, another autocracy with illicit territorial designs over its neighbours, is arguably just as big a strategic error. Here too Merkel aggressively pursued trade with Beijing, regardless of the wider consequences. It certainly paid off in the short term: China became Germany’s biggest trading partner, trebling its share of German exports – but at what long term strategic cost?

German manufacturers are now dangerously reliant on China for at least part of their supply chains. This closeness to China comes despite growing international concerns over Beijing’s human rights record and its increasingly bellicose attitude towards Taiwan.

Once again Merkel is revealed as a leader who made the wrong calls on the big issues. Her approach, dubbed ‘quiet diplomacy’ because it avoided explicit criticism of the Chinese regime, smacks of exactly the same kind of appeasement shown towards Russia. Merkel simply paid lip service to democratic ideals but this didn’t stop her making shabby deals with unsavoury regimes. 

The same disconnect between rhetoric and reality is evident in her patchy domestic record. Merkel was lauded in some quarters for her controversial open-border policy during the 2015 migrant crisis. But she did little to win over voters, leading to a surge in support for far-right populist parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The military under her watch has been enfeebled to the point where Germany is struggling to pull its weight when it comes to Nato commitments. All of this deserves fierce condemnation rather than grand prizes.

The decision to honour Merkel shines a far from flattering light on a cosy German political establishment that is complacent, inward-looking and out of touch with the real world. The only award Merkel really merits is one for leaving her country and the rest of Europe perilously exposed to its war-hungry Russian neighbour.

Has the single sex trans school conundrum finally been resolved?

For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that has emerged will reassure single-sex schools that they can indeed remain single-sex.

The rules around such schools have always allowed for some discretion. A boys’ school, for example, might admit a girl into the sixth form if the local girls’ school doesn’t offer her desired combination of A-Level subjects. But nobody would be under any illusion that the child has changed sex to do so. Her admission would be an ‘exceptional circumstance’, and the school would retain its single-sex-status. She would also need to be provided with appropriate facilities for her sex.

But transgender-identified pupils – of the opposite sex – present a very different challenge. They are unlikely to want to be singled out for special treatment in, for example, sports, changing rooms and toilets. Pressure would no doubt be put on the school to include them, and the other children risk being deprived of their right to single-sex activities and facilities. 

Such pupils also present a challenge to the entire concept of single-sex education. If single-sex has meaning it must mean that; not single-gender – whatever gender might mean. Because admitting children of the opposite sex is not a zero-sum game. If boys – male children – are admitted to girls’ schools then girls who wanted a single-sex education lose out.

Of course, children struggling with ‘gender distress’ – a much better term than gender dysphoria, in my view – should not be excluded from single-sex schools designated for their own sex. Children struggle with many things during adolescence, and gender is just one of them. They need care and support, but support in a framework that has solid foundations: the reality of biological sex.

If children had not been made promises that they could change their sex and be treated as their preferred sex for all purposes, then none of this would be an issue. But the concept of gender identity has taken root in our society. There is no proof that it exists and claims cannot be falsified or tested. It is merely an assertion of feelings. Not only that, it is an unnecessary concept. I am transsexual – as an adult, I went through a process of gender reassignment involving hormone therapy and surgery – but I do not claim a gender identity.

We need to be honest as individuals and with society: being transsexual does not mean a person changes their sex. This is what schools need to understand, and it seems the DfE guidance is leaning in that direction.

There will no doubt be howls of protest when the guidance is released. Possibly there has already been pushback from within Whitehall, given that we had been promised this guidance would be published by the summer term. But critics must not prevent schools receiving guidance that reassures us that we are doing the right thing when we uphold the truth we have always known. Boys are male, and girls are female. There is difference between male and female, and that difference matters.

SNP treasurer quits following arrest in finance probe

Another day brings another bombshell revelation about Scotland’s ruling party. Yesterday morning the SNP treasurer Colin Beattie was arrested by police investigating the party’s finances. It now transpires that Beattie has quit as the SNP’s national treasurer following his arrest. He also states that he will ‘be stepping back from my role on the Public Audit Committee until the police investigation has concluded’.

The arrest follows the arrest of Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband who was previously the party’s chief executive, earlier this month. Murrell was released without charge pending further enquiries. In a statement, Police Scotland said:

A 71-year-old man has today, Tuesday, 18 April 2023, been arrested as a suspect in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the Scottish National Party. The man is in custody and is being questioned by Police Scotland detectives. A report will be sent to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. The matter is active for the purposes of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 and the public are therefore advised to exercise caution if discussing it on social media. As the investigation is ongoing we are unable to comment further.

It comes two days after Beattie was reported to have told the party’s ruling council that it was running out of cash following an exodus of 30,000 members and the unexpected legal costs linked to the continuing police investigation into the party’s funding. He told the national executive committee that the SNP was ‘having difficulty in balancing the books due to the reduction in membership and donors’ and that ‘We need to find money to keep the party going forward or we’ll keep cutting our tail until there’s nothing left.’

What will be left at this rate?

Six things we know about the Fox Dominion defamation trial

Who needs Succession when we have Dominion? A billion-dollar lawsuit involving a media tycoon, the 2020 presidential race and a potential Supreme Court showdown. But for Rupert Murdoch and Fox News this is no fictional drama. They are about to begin one of the most anticipated defamation trials in American history, over the claims that Fox broadcast about voting systems used in the 2020 presidential election. Dominion Voting Systems – whose equipment was used in 28 states during the election – is seeking damages of £1.3 billion in damages over the anti-Dominion conspiracy theories and demonstrably false claims made by Fox News on-air personalities during the weeks that followed the election. Below is a round-up of six things we know about the defamation trial thus far:

Dominion’s accusations against Fox

Dominion argues that it was defamed by Fox News when the network broadcast baseless claims that its machines ‘rigged’ the 2020 presidential election by flipping millions of Trump votes to Biden. Fox aired claims suggesting that Dominion’s software and algorithms manipulated vote counts, that it was owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for former president Hugo Chavez, and that it paid ‘kickbacks’ to government officials who used its machines in the 2020 election. 

The voting company says it lost millions in unrenewed state contracts because of the controversy and that it resulted in company personnel being put in physical danger, requiring almost £500,000 in additional security measures. Dominion says that Fox knew these claims were false but ‘recklessly disregarded the truth,’ as some of its biggest stars including Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo aired them on their shows.

Fox’s defence

Fox News has argued that it was reporting on extraordinary claims of election fraud by Trump. Its lawyers maintain that there is no evidence of a high-level conspiracy to peddle a falsehood, or that Rupert Murdoch and his colleagues were, ‘reckless with the truth.’ They have also argued that Dominion’s business wasn’t damaged and that Fox Corporation wasn’t involved in publishing the claims and therefore isn’t liable for the alleged defamation.

In the pre-trial stage Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis narrowed Fox’s defence, forbidding the company to claim that what it said about Dominion was true. He also expressed frustration with the ‘bizarre’ claim of Fox attorneys that that Murdoch wasn’t an officer of Fox News, only to reverse on the eve of a trial.

There is speculation the trial might not even go ahead

Reuters, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have all reported in the past 48 hours that Fox has been pursuing settlement talks. A mooted nine-figure compromise settlement is likely to be less of an issue however than Dominion’s demand for a public apology from Fox. And if they want to call off the trial they better move fast – jury selection is due to be completed today. Opening statements to the 12-member panel will begin shortly thereafter. The case which is expected to last six weeks.

The key case battleground

Davis has already concluded that Fox News and Fox Business did broadcast false claims about election-rigging. However Dominion must prove that Fox employees acted with ‘malice’ in airing the unsubstantiated claims. This is why their case will rely heavily on emails, text messages and depositions handed over in the case which show that Fox employees – including producers, journalists, TV stars and executives – questioned and mocked the claims about Dominion. The precedent for this is the ‘actual malice’ test as laid down by the Supreme Court in the 1964 case of New York Times v Sullivan. That puts the bar for defamation at a high level: the question is can Dominion pass it?

An interesting case study is offered by Tucker Carlson, the network’s biggest star. His testimony will be a flashpoint. The Dominion case has already revealed embarrassing private text messages from Carlson to another Fox employee, saying of Trump ‘I hate him passionately’. Fox’s critics have leapt on this as evidence that Fox knew they were lying to their audience. Yet Carlson says he was merely venting his frustration after a Trump staffer misled his show about ‘dead voters’ who were actually alive.

Donald Trump’s role in all this

Donald Trump did not react kindly to Rupert Murdoch’s earlier deposition back in February. After the Fox Corporation Chairman admitted that there was no truth to Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, the former president attacked him for ‘throwing his anchors under the table.’ On Monday Trump doubled down and urged Murdoch to back his claims, warning that the network is ‘in big trouble if they do not expose the truth on cheating in the 2020 election.’

The principles at stake here

The figure being demanded by Dominion is high – £1.3 billion – but the stakes are arguably even more significant. The case hinges on the protections afforded by the US Constitution and could therefore end up in the Supreme Court. Regardless of what happens in the coming weeks, some analysts believe that the pre-trial stage has already set a new precedent for American news coverage, serving as a warning to networks about what can and cannot be broadcast. A victory for Dominion could also alter the bar for defamation in the US and fuel similar lawsuits in future.

Is Britain getting back to work?

The UK’s labour market is cooling down, slowly. Although unemployment rose from 3.7 per cent to 3.8 per cent, figures published by the Office for National Statistics this morning show that job vacancies have fallen for the ninth consecutive period. They’re now down 47,000 but still stand at over a million. The number of people out of work and not seeking it (economically inactive) fell too, as students started hunting for work.

The most startling figures, however, were those for wage growth. They showed that average pay rose 6.6 per cent in the three months to February. Hefty pay raises in normal times – but adjusted for inflation, that’s a real terms fall of 3 per cent: one of the largest falls in wages since comparable records began in 2001. So wage pressures – which the Bank of England feared was fuelling inflation rather than chasing it – seem to be easing. This increases the chances that interest rates are held at 4.25 per cent when the committee meets next month. But if we don’t see inflation figures budge (the next update is out tomorrow) another rise to 4.5 per cent can’t be ruled out. 

The gap between public and private sector pay continued to narrow, too. Wages grew 5.3 per cent in the public sector: this is the largest growth experienced outside of the pandemic for nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, wages grew 6.1 per cent in the private sector, with the fastest growth recorded in financial services (8.3 per cent) and construction (6.2 per cent). 

These real-term pay cuts will quietly give the Bank of England some relief: its governor Andrew Bailey has warned numerous times against inflation-based pay raises, which he fears might bake price hikes into the system. They will cause a much bigger headache for the chancellor, however: while the government has been holding out on inflation-based raises for the public sector, Jeremy Hunt will be acutely aware of how these pay hits are fuelling the cost-of-living crisis, making people feel much worse-off.

Meanwhile, there was a noticeable fall in the inactivity rate. In December 2022 to February this year, 153,000 entered the labour market, bringing the inactivity rate down to 21.1 per cent. However, there are still some 422,000 workers missing from the job market since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020, rising inactivity (which traditionally falls over time) was driven by 16-24 year olds before 50 to 64 year-olds commenced ‘the great retirement’. But the most recent fall was driven again by that 16-24 year old group as students began to look for work. 

Of course if Sunak and Hunt want to speed up filling those vacancies to reduce inactivity further, there is an obvious untapped pool of workers. An estimated 5,000 workers are signed onto sickness benefits every day, while nearly 800,000 sick notes were issued for mental health and behavioural reasons last year alone. Those out of work due to long-term sickness rose to another record high: of 2.5 million. Accelerating plans to get these people treatment, and back into the workforce, should be paramount for jumpstarting the economy.

Inactivity matters because Hunt left himself the smallest ‘headroom’ in his Budget since the establishment of the Office for Budget Responsibility 13 years ago. A large part of that £6.5 billion Hunt held back is based on unlikely assumptions about fuel duty: that he will unfreeze it next year and roll back the 5p cut. But the labour market plays a big part in that calculation too. The OBR said that a labour market ‘downside scenario’ would completely wipe that headroom out. 

With an election possibly just a year away Sunak and Hunt will be looking for some kind of giveaway, with senior Tories calling for a cut in the basic rate of income tax. The chancellor’s headroom gives him very little chance to do this – but he certainly won’t be able to if the labour market figures don’t keep heading in the right direction. 

Does Macron regret celebrating Lula’s Brazilian victory?

The headline in the Guardian could not have spelt it out more clearly: ‘World leaders rush to congratulate Lula on Brazil election victory’.  From North America to Europe to Australia, the sigh of relief that Lula had beaten Jair Bolsonaro in last October’s general election was audible. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was cock-a-hoop, so too French president Emmanuel Macron, who heralded the turning of a ‘a new page’ in Brazil’s history and declared. ‘Together, we will join forces to take up the many common challenges and renew the ties of friendship between our two countries.’

It turns out the friendship Lula values most isn’t with Macron or anyone else in the West but with Xi Jinping. Lula was in Beijing at the end of last week, warmly welcomed by the Chinese president (in contrast to the humiliation endured by Macron a few days earlier), who called the Brazilian leader his ‘good old friend’.  

Friends they are, and Lula explained that the purpose of his jolly to China was to strengthen ties. ‘We want to raise the level of the strategic partnership between our countries, expand trade flows and, together with China, balance world geopolitics,’ said Lula,  

It was a fruitful trip for the 77-year-old Lula, who signed a dozen agreements with Xi, said to be worth $10 billion (£8 billion), and who clearly hopes a new world order is emerging.

‘Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar,’ he said, adding that it is high time that the nations in the BRICS Grouping –  Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – agreed an alternative currency to the dollar for trade deals.

That wasn’t Lula’s only swipe at the West during his time in China. He was very proud to have paid a call on telecom company Huawei, under US sanctions, declaring that it was a ‘demonstration that we want to say to the world that we don’t have any bias in our relationship with the Chinese, and that no one will prohibit Brazil from improving its relationship with China’. 

Lula also upbraided the USA for ‘encouraging war’ in Ukraine, a criticism he applied to European nations who he said were not doing enough to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The remarks were appreciated by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who arrived in Brazil on Monday for trade talks with Lula. He told reporters that Moscow was ‘grateful to our Brazilian friends for their clear understanding of the genesis of the situation.’

The White House has rejected Lula’s accusation of war-mongering and called his stance ‘misguided’. The same could be said of how the West responded to Lula’s re-election last year. After all, this is a man who has served time in prison for corruption (even if the conviction was subsequently annulled on a technicality).

During his first time in office (2003-2010), Lula dropped the odd clue about how he viewed the West. He blamed the 2007-08 banking crisis on ‘the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes’, and he angered Italy by personally intervening to prevent the extradition of Cesare Battisti, a Communist killer convicted of killing four people in the 1970s.  

Battisti’s luck ran out in January 2019 when he was extradited to Italy (where he pleaded guilty to his crimes) by the newly elected Jair Bolsonaro. It was, explained the right-wing president, a ‘little gift’ to Italy.  

Bolsonaro came to office wanting to be a friend of the West and not caring if he upset the Chinese. He visited Taiwan and warned that China’s strategy is ‘not buying in Brazil; it is buying Brazil’. It was a deliberate policy of Bolsonaro to break from previous administrations which had been ‘friendly with communist regimes.’

At the same time, Bolsonaro declared his admiration of US president Donald Trump, a friendship for which he was never forgiven. As Foreign Policy put it last year, the Brazilian president became ‘persona non grata in the West’, a man despised by the political and media elite. This contempt increased once Biden replaced Trump in the White House. Rejected by the West, Bolsonaro softened his stance towards China.  

A month before Lula was re-elected president of Brazil, there was another tumultuous election victory. But in this case western leaders did not rush to congratulate Giorgia Meloni on becoming the first female prime minister of Italy. There was stony silence or, in the case of French prime minister Elisabeth Borne a sullen warning to Meloni that ‘in Europe, we have certain values and, obviously, we will be vigilant’. 

What values was Meloni endangering? She hadn’t made eyes at Putin – on the contrary she had expressed her staunch support for Ukraine – and nor had she harboured a terrorist killer. She has also never seen the inside of a prison cell. 

But what Meloni had done was express opposition to the progressive ideals of open borders and gender ideology, while sticking up for her belief in family and church. For those heinous crimes she will never be forgiven by her fellow world leaders. 

Sudan’s dreams of democracy appear to be over

Fighting is raging once again in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where a power struggle between rival factions has claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Around 185 people have been killed and more than 1,800 injured in the wake of an attempted coup.

A US diplomatic convoy came under fire yesterday and the EU’s ambassador in Sudan, Aidan O’Hara, was reportedly assaulted at his home. Journalists have been detained and beaten up by soldiers for breaking newly-imposed curfews. Across Sudan, international agencies, non-governmental organisations and charities are scrambling for a solution to prevent further bloodshed.

Military aircraft have flown low over urban centres and engaged targets on the ground. Residents in Khartoum are terrified of the eruption of what feels like a war within what is normally a peaceful city. Gunfire has been heard on state TV, presumably taking place within the building.  

A contest appears to be shaping up between the country’s regular army – which is effectively a military junta – and a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, was supposed to be a figure in the current military regime: a council of officers, led by the army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. But the council, it seems, has been dissolved. 

This feels a little like a traditional military coup, where the aims are to capture state TV, the national leader’s residence, and so on. It has, however, hit a few snags.  

The RSF announced – even crowed about – its capture of Egyptian soldiers, who were arrested and photographed blindfolded and in custody in Merowe, between Khartoum and the Egyptian border. The RSF has said it will return the troops, but already the damage is done: Egypt has a large military and a strongman leader; it won’t be happy that some of its visiting personnel were detained. Whether Cairo will seek revenge remains unclear. 

Meanwhile, the fighting continues, with very little sense – at least outside the country – what is going on and who is winning. 

The military council on which both Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan sit had held power since a military coup in 2021. This regime had overturned a provisional government that formed after protests in 2018-19 brought down the country’s long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir.  

At that time, the protestors were jubilant. Their revolution had been peaceful and – significantly for both the region and the international media covering the story – led by women. At least initially, the army and its various groups seemed pleased Bashir was gone. They said they would respect the will of the people.  

They promised a swift transition from temporary council rule to a full democracy. A document was drawn up in 2019, a draft constitution, that seemed to point a way forward. Activists hoped the country could become a democracy, or at least increase the political rights of the people, whose representation in power has in living memory been limited. This is a country which has been defined for decades by civil conflict – including with South Sudan, which is now independent – and allegations of genocide in Darfur. 

The Bashir government was a pariah internationally. Many hoped that, with his removal, better things – and better governments – were possible. They hoped that Bashir could be handed over for international trial for allegations relating to the war in Darfur, and that Sudan could benefit from the aid and trade that tends to flow to countries who oust their dictators – if they can stabilise things. Sadly, it did not work out quite like that. 

This has been a period of military coups in Africa. We have recently seen multiple coups in Mali and in Burkina Faso, in Guinea Bissau and the Republic of Guinea. Sudan is only the latest in a long list. Part of the reason for this wave of coups is to do with the pandemic: economic crises, exacerbated by Covid, made unpopular leaders even less popular and tempted generals to chance their arm. Many uprisings involve outside actors: Russia is often alleged to be behind coups and coup attempts, with the intention of creating a new alliance of military regimes dependent on Moscow and prepared to do Moscow’s bidding.  

Things remain muddy in Sudan. We don’t yet know what will happen, or why it has happened at all. But one thing’s sure: this is the precise opposite of what millions of Sudanese wanted when they took to the streets for democracy less than five years ago. 

Can Scottish Labour pull off an election victory?

After decades in the shadows, members of the Scottish Labour party are back out in the open, their confidence growing. Emboldened first by polls signalling the very real prospect of Sir Keir Starmer becoming the next prime minister, Scottish Labour politicians now watch with tastefully concealed glee as the SNP – under the stewardship of new leader Humza Yousaf – sinks into deepening crisis.

The mood in the party – which is led in Scotland by 40-year-old Anas Sarwar – has, says a senior source, changed completely. ‘It’s like night and day. When Anas Sarwar became leader in 2021, people might sidle up to him at events and whisper good wishes, now they’re happy to be open about their support.

‘Anas and Keir did an event for business leaders in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago and more than 150 people came along. Two years ago, we’d have been lucky if 15 had signed up.’

During the 2014 independence referendum campaign, the SNP so successfully characterised Labour as ‘red Tories’ to be despised that there were genuine concerns for the then-leader Ed Miliband’s safety when he visited Edinburgh to campaign for a ‘No’ vote. Now, Starmer racks up his frequent flyer points with regular trips north of the border.

‘Keir’s been up five times this year, so far,’ says a source, ‘and once the English local elections are out of the way in May, he’ll be back a lot more. We need to get to the point where it’s unremarkable for him to come. He wants to be prime minister of the whole UK so we can’t have trips to Scotland being seen like state visits. We need to get to the point where the news is “Starmer was in Glasgow today” rather that “Starmer was in Scotland”. There’s a real difference between those two narratives.’

Labour has struggled in recent years to counter election campaign attacks from both the SNP and the Conservatives. The Scottish nationalists’ line has been that, since polling has predicted Labour defeats, only a vote for the SNP can mitigate against the Tories. Meanwhile, as per that famous attack ad showing Ed Miliband tucked into Alex Salmond’s breast pocket, the Tories have argued that, in order to form a working government, Labour would be required to cook-up a coalition deal with the SNP.

Scottish Labour strategists are no longer worried about these lines of attack. ‘The nationalists,’ said one senior figure, ‘can’t go on the idea that Labour can’t win. People aren’t stupid. They can see the polling that shows Keir’s in a strong position.

‘Those Tory posters showing Ed in Salmond’s pocket cost us more votes in England than they did in Scotland. They worked to the extent they did because people knew who Salmond was. The Tories aren’t going to get the same cut through with posters of Humza Yousaf, are they?’

Just three weeks into his leadership of the SNP, Yousaf has more pressing matters to deal with than planning the next general election campaign. Each day brings new – sometimes bizarre and always damaging – details about a police investigation into the SNP’s finances while relentless briefing from within his party ranks shows he’s far from adored by SNP members.

Right now, it’s difficult to imagine what a successful SNP campaign message might look like. The party’s president, Mike Russell, is on record as saying not only that independence cannot be delivered at present but that the SNP hasn’t figured out how it might be delivered at all. While the party’s track record in government at Holyrood is conspicuously light on success stories.

And yet despite the chaos which has followed the departure of Nicola Sturgeon from the SNP leadership, polls show the nationalists remain on course to win the largest number of seats in Scotland at the next general election.

‘So far,’ says a senior source, ‘Keir has done a good job of impressing businesses in Scotland and the middle-class but he has a way to go yet with working-class voters who still have some doubts. It’s pretty ironic, really, given he’s from the most authentically working-class background of any party leader since John Major was in charge of the Tories. But he’ll keep at it, letting Scots know who he is and what he stands for.’

While Scottish Labour sees opportunities to take back as many as 20 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies, there remains, however, work yet to do.

Angela Rayner is the odd one out in Starmer’s top team

Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch ahead in the polls. A recent slight crumbliness in that lead has sparked Labour to produce attack ads which use a formulation I hadn’t seen since reading the walls at my primary school, i.e. – ‘Do you think people should wash under their arms? Janet Figgis doesn’t’ – but even these flavourful communications are all about Rishi Sunak and the Tories. 

Labour might be running the country pretty soon. We should take a closer look at them, if we can remember who they are. 

There is one exception to the findings of the focus groups, so let’s get her out of the way first: Angela Rayner. Possibly due to her striking appearance and the sounds she emits, voters at least know who she is. Big and/or unusual hair and a distinctive speaking voice did wonders for Boris – and ‘Ange’ and Boris share the quality of putting their big foot in it, something that the British find loveable, up to a point. Rayner is a firework going off on a damp afternoon, like having Bonnie Langford halfway down a chorus line of Am Dram hoofers. She throws the blandness and greyness of the rest into sharp relief.  

A couple of others are slightly familiar, fair enough, but not necessarily in a good way. Emily Thornberry is a lesser figure in the backdrop of a ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novel, the widow of a colonel, taking the Rolls to do her marketing in the main drag of Tilling. For an emissary of the party of working people, she has an unfortunate air of addressing anybody and everybody as if they were the butcher’s boy. Then there’s the Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, who as always, just looks terribly worried. This doesn’t inspire trust in someone charged with dealing with a global emergency. In a Towering Inferno situation you want Steve McQueen. Instead of rigging up a zip wire affair to get everybody down from the roof, Miliband would be commissioning an equalities impact assessment audit involving all stakeholders and communities. 

The next tier down is the circle of the very faintly recognisable. Steve Reed seems – or seemed until recently – to be a fairly watery creature. But he is apparently the genius behind those nervy attack ads, and his defence of them is very reminiscent of one of those blokes who goes in to a scrap full pelt, and immediately is all very badly concealed regret; ‘Yes, and I’d thump him again!’ with a quaking lower lip. Also on this plane we have Wes Streeting, one of those loaves of bread that people think they see a face in. And Lisa Nandy, who is interesting as she gives off all the signals of being a sane human being until she actually says anything. 

Anneliese Dodds appeals to that section of the electorate who are just very disappointed in you. Yvette Cooper wants you to go out and come back in properly. Rachel Reeves and Lucy Powell… and then we’re into no man’s land. I’m looking down the list of the shadow cabinet. Nick Thomas-Symonds? Who is that? My guess – a wispy folk guitarist and singer-songwriter whose sole album was released on Harvest in 1972, deleted after three months, and which now sells for £235 (mint) on Discogs. Louise Haigh? Nope me neither. Compiler of a twee book about punctuation that was a stocking filler bestseller in 2004? Bridget Phillipson? Played the anaesthetist from hell in Holby City?

And still the names keep coming. Jonathan Reynolds? Jim McMahon? Alan Whitehead? And I’m the kind of person who is interested in this stuff! 

For all their faults, you know the Tories are there. Rees-Mogg, Braverman, Penny Mordaunt, Patel, Raab. It’s rather like having The Addams Family living next door to the Brady Bunch. The characterful wild-card element of Labour – Chris Bryant, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Clive Lewis – is mostly confined to the back benches, though at least David Lammy is up front. Where could you find better, smarter representatives of minority communities? By pointing randomly out of the window in any city street, that’s how.  

MPs seem to divide now between the offensively bland and offensively bizarre. Labour are the faceless ones, but maybe that’s appropriate for our 21st century leaders; in office but not in power, easily swayed placeholders as even Boris turned out to be. Corporate and institutional power just steamrolls on unaccountably, over us and eventually over them.

The Internet Archive’s troubles are bad news for book lovers

The Internet Archive (archive.org), a San Francisco-based virtual lending library, is one of the quiet wonders of the modern world. A digital collection of seven million books and nearly 15 million audio-recordings, it was ambitiously intended by its founder Brewster Kahle – a member of the internet ‘Hall of Fame’ – to be a kind of online ‘Library of Alexandria’. The IA loans out its titles free of charge, the main beneficiaries being those who can’t get to a real ‘brick and mortar’ library – the housebound, those living far from cities, or people in need of rare books their own local library doesn’t stock and can’t get hold of quickly enough. It also has a ‘Way Back’ function that allows you to search for downloads, month by month, of defunct or disappeared websites (with a staggering 735 billion web-pages in its database).

Over its 26-year history it has partnered with multiple institutions and inherited the stock of numerous closing or downsizing libraries, scanning each inherited book page by laborious page, then uploading it to its database. The IA’s ethos is simple: having legally acquired the license for a hard-copy book, it then lends out its scanned copy to only one reader at a time, just like a normal high street library. These rules were relaxed only during the Covid lockdown, when at the outset over 100 closed libraries signed support for a temporary ‘National Emergency Library’. This allowed the IA to lend out extra copies. making it a lifeline for legions of readers with time on their hands and no bookstores or libraries to spend it in. 

The Internet Archive, in short, is an institution so transformative you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first came across it. In my case, it was sitting in a hotel room in Yakutsk, the coldest inhabited city in the world, needing a specific quote for an article I was writing about the place. The book – an obscure one – wasn’t published on Kindle and there was likely no hard copy for several thousand miles. Finally, without much hope, I went to the internet to hunt for it. A few minutes later, having signed up to IA and made a couple of clicks, I had the book and the quote on the screen in front of me. Problem solved. 

Soon, as a travelling journalist, I wondered how I’d got by without it. Writing an article on a particular subject, but countries away from the nearest English-language library? Wherever I found myself, the IA would offer me an ample range of books on the topic, including ones I didn’t even know about. Sometimes a scanned text would be borrowable for an hour, sometimes two weeks. Occasionally it would be checked out and I’d have to wait for it as at any lending library, yet there were usually two or more copies for loan. The Archive had numerous scanned titles that weren’t available anywhere as e-books, allowing me to downsize my hard-copy library (it had been idling in alphabetised sacks in an expensive storage space in any case) and to feel a measure of confidence that I could both travel light and do my job anywhere, any time. 

If it all seemed too good to last, that may very well be the case. In July 2020, immediately after the Covid lockdown, four publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley and Penguin Random House – decided to bring a major lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming it had ‘infringed their copyright’, potentially cost their companies millions of dollars and was a threat to their businesses. Last month the New York court found – predictably – in the publishers’ favour, rejecting the IA’s defence of ‘fair use’, and ruling that ‘although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse.’ 

Increasingly, the future of the Internet Archive looks under threat. What the four publishers are demanding and seem set legally to enforce is, according to Kahle, the destruction of around ‘4 million digitised files… This would be a book burning on the scale of the Library of Alexandria… If digital learners have no access to millions of books, aren’t they effectively disappeared?’

One can see the publishers’ point – lower revenues mean less money for authors and fewer funds to invest in new writing. Yet there is no evidence, according to IA’s senior policy counsel Lila Bailey, that their lending policy has caused ‘one dollar of harm’ to the publishing houses. Hachette director of sales Alison Lazarus, Bailey reports, admitted under oath that the notion of such losses was merely ‘speculative.’ An executive from Penguin Random House, when quizzed about lost profits, admitted ‘I don’t have any evidence.’ Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at Harper Collins, seemed to confirm this: ‘There’s no factual analysis. It’s just one inference one could make.’

So what is motivating these publishers in their desire to strike at the Archive, if not money? One can only guess, but a clue may lie in the recently updated versions of works by writers like Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl and P.G. Wodehouse. Unlike hard copies, digital versions are sold to libraries on a licence basis and must be regularly repurchased, allowing publishers to make revisions right across the board and remove earlier editions from circulation altogether.

‘In electronic form they can change all books in all libraries all at once and irreversibly without permission,’ says Kahle. ‘This is dangerous. It is not hypothetical, it is happening.’  With the future of genuine libraries looking increasingly shaky (nearly 800 have closed down in Britain alone in the past decade) and digital borrowing correspondingly on the rise, this licensing scheme has chilling implications for readers in search of an undoctored text. Also for a reading future in which their data is not open to being harvested and every turn of a page not captured by the big corporations. 

In such a Brave New World – one which the great majority of us neither desired, requested nor were ever consulted about – the Internet Archive has become the bulwark against censorship that, until recently, most readers hadn’t even known they needed. Its scanned copies – a record of what a book looked like at the time it went to print, freely available to anyone – are more crucial than ever. 

The IA now has plans to appeal last month’s ruling. Trapped as they are between the demands of major publishing houses and those of the IA’s loyal (and massive) readership, one hopes the appeal courts come to a measured – and public-spirited – decision. Libraries, Kahle says, ‘need to continue to support publishers, authors and the public by buying, preserving, and lending books. If we don’t, we go into a very dark Orwellian world. That is what is at stake.’

A beginner’s guide to (legally!) avoiding tax

You have to feel a little sorry for Rishi Sunak. When you have a wife as rich as Akshata Murty, just how do you keep tabs on all her investments, making sure that each one of them is properly declared as an interest in the House of Commons Register? The Prime Minister has suffered the embarrassment of being investigated by parliamentary authorities over an apparent failure to declare his wife’s holdings in a childcare firm Koru Kids, which potentially stands to benefit from changes in the Budget. Sunak previously nearly had his political career derailed thanks to revelations that his wife, who is an Indian citizen, was living in Britain as a non-dom – a status she later gave up. 

 But all is not lost for the rest of us. There are many ways in which we can – quite legally – minimise the taxman’s claim on our income and wealth, even if we are not married to a mega-wealthy foreigner.

1. Use your spouse to redistribute your investments. It is perfectly legal to switch assets between spouses in order to avoid tax. If one member of a couple has a marginal tax rate of 45 per cent and the other 20 per cent, you can shift shares and property from the former name to the latter.

2. Increase your pension contributions. Until the Budget, anyone with a pension fund faced paying a punitive tax of 55 per cent once it reached a value of just over £1 million. That threat has now been lifted. Moreover, Jeremy Hunt increased the amount that any individual could transfer into a pension fund from £40,000 a year to £60,000. Those who do so enjoy immediate tax relief on their contributions. When they decide to take money out of their pensions they will enjoy a quarter of what they withdraw tax-free.

3. Maximise your ISA contributions. Individual savings accounts work differently from pensions, but also offer tax advantages. There is no tax relief, but holders of an ISA do not have to pay tax on any income or capital growth – which is especially important given that the tax-free capital gains allowance is steadily being reduced. Moreover, funds can be withdrawn at any time – you do not have to wait until you have reached the age of 55. Put in the maximum of £20,000 a year and you may well end up with a nest egg worth more than £1 million.

4. Invest in a Venture Capital Trust. Tax reliefs are available for those who are prepared to invest in companies at an early stage of their development. Some 30 per cent of funds you invest in a Venture Capital Trust qualify for tax relief. Moreover, you can invest up to £200,000 a year. You will need a strong stomach, however: early-stage companies have a tendency to collapse. For every Google or Amazon, there are many start-up companies that disappear without a trace, taking their investors’ money with them.

5. Buy farmland. Ever wondered why so many wealthy people develop an interest in agriculture as they approach old age? Agricultural land can qualify for 100 per cent inheritance tax relief. You don’t even have to drive the tractor yourself: land qualifies if it is tenanted or let on a short-term grazing licence. Some woodland qualifies too. Agricultural equipment or derelict buildings do not qualify.

6. Donate money to charity. Avoiding tax isn’t all about lining your own pockets – you can assuage your guilt by donating to charity while also cutting your tax bill. When you donate money to a UK-registered charity, the charity can reclaim basic rate income tax, which increases your £100 donation to £125. But you too can claim the higher rate tax relief. So, if you are paying tax at 40 per cent, you can claim the tax relief between 25 per cent and 40 per cent.

7. Let out a room in your house. Feeling lonely as you loll around your half-empty mansion? Thanks to the government’s Rent-a-Room Scheme, you can take in a lodger and earn some tax-free cash at the same time. The scheme allows you to earn up to £7,500 a year in rent tax free. You do, however, have to live in the property yourself in order to qualify.

8. Drive a seven-year-old fuel-efficient car. There are fewer incentives available to buy low-emission cars than there used to be – grants for electric cars, for example, have been phased out. However, cars registered prior to April 2017 retain the low vehicle excise duty rates which existed when they were registered. You don’t even have to go electric. If you can find a petrol or hybrid car that – in official tests – emits less than 50g of CO2 per mile, you will pay just £10 a year in road tax. Vehicles which emit between 50g and 75g cost just £30 a year.

Self-obsession is killing music

Though I’m not the most avid fan of her oeuvre, I was cheered recently to see that Ellie Goulding wanted her new album to be less personal: ‘It was such a relief and really refreshing to not be sitting in the studio going through all the things that happened to me and affected me… it’s the least personal album, but I think it’s the best album because I got to just explore other things about myself. I just really, really enjoy writing; really enjoy being a singer.’

What a refreshing take on the creative process, which in modern times can often seem like a cross between a bulletin from the therapist’s couch and a ceaselessly-picked sore. Millennials can’t seem to get enough of spilling the tea, and that goes especially for their most successful singers. Lizzo’s latest single is called – look away now – ‘Special’ and, my word, it’s every bit as wet as the title might suggest:

Woke up this mornin’ to somebody judgin’ me/Found out it in the end that I can only do it for me/You call it sensitive and I call it superpower/You just lack empathy ’cause you think it gives you power/You’re special/I’m so glad that you’re still with us/Broken, but damn, you’re still perfect/You’re special…

What made Lizzo so refreshing was that, as someone who had once lived in her car during years of rejection from the music business (partially because she doesn’t conform to the standard sexed-up video-vixen visuals), she sang universal anthems of non-specific resilience. So this recent imitation of a world-weary piñata is dismaying, to say the least. The current music scene is a symptom of how dull culture can be when it’s so relentlessly personal. Motown dared to call itself ‘the sound of young America’ – try that in this atomised, nit-picking world.

Who are the most successful young singers around today? Ed Sheeran, of course, about whose depression, grief, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorder, drug and alcohol addictions and crushing guilt over inflicting a long string of rubbish songs on an innocent world (OK, I made that last one up) I now know literally more about than I do the problems of my closest friends. But if Sheeran ever cheers up and decides to serve us songs of universal cheer, there’s always Lewis Capaldi standing by to give us a guided tour of his navel. In his recent Netflix documentary called, perfectly, How I’m Feeling Now he offers his anxiety, panic attacks and – stealing a match on Sheeran here – a shoulder twitch later diagnosed as a symptom of Tourette’s (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Billie Eilish and George Ezra have also treated us to similar travelogues of their various travails). But don’t worry, he’ll be swearing all the way to the bank as his most recent tour will see 48 shows played in 11 countries – even though he says ‘it’s a very real possibility’ that he may well quit the singing racket quite soon. Apparently he has imposter syndrome – not in all parts of his life, interestingly, as ‘it’s only making music that does this to me’. Might that be because his music is so dreadful?

Even if Capaldi takes an early bath, we’ll be able to grimace and bear it with Adele’s weapons-grade confessionals – Mutually Assured Depression! Apparently her divorce left her ‘devastated and embarrassed’ leading to ‘an intense few weeks of bed-bound anxiety’ before she poured it all into her work – spillage alert – and bounced back with the mega-selling album ‘Thirty’ in 2021. Extraordinarily, this album featured the voice of her nine-year-old son in a song called ‘My Little Love’ as Adele explains her choice to divorce his father (totally understandable, considering the level of males she can now access) in the following words:

Mummy’s been having a lot of big feelings recently… like, um, I feel a bit confused/And I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing/I wanted you to have everything I never had/I’m so sorry if what I’ve done makes you feel sad/I love your dad ’cause he gave you to me/You’re half me and you’re half daddy/Mama’s got a lot to learn/I’m having a bad day, I’m having a very anxious day/I feel very paranoid, I feel very stressed/I have a hangover, which never helps… I just wanna watch TV and curl up in a ball/Be in my sweats and stuff like that, I just feel really lonely/I feel a bit frightened that I might feel like this a lot…

There’s the ick – and then there’s the super-ick. Of course, over-sharing by singer-songwriters is nothing new – it’s the default state of white crooners, and it’s been this way since that supreme decade of letting it all hang out, the 1960s, when Bob Dylan went from bigging up the civil rights movement to doing down his girlfriends. One of the things which pulled me towards black music as a youngster was the acknowledgement by Motown, Philly and disco that the best singers weren’t generally the best songwriters, with the rare exception of geniuses like Stevie Wonder. Actors don’t write their own words and dancers don’t choreograph their movements; the cult of personal pop has given us good songwriters who make rotten singers, such as Elvis Costello, Mick Hucknall and Bono, of whom Prince (good at both) said ‘If I had a voice like that, I’d be a janitor.’

But it’s not just the professionally self-exploring who have ensured that the personal has consumed the political. We see it in the growing tyranny of feelings over facts and of ‘my truth’ over the truth. Identity politics – far from being recognisable as in any way left-wing – are what we teenage tankies used to call bourgeoise individualism; as the Communist party of Britain recently put it so well ‘Gender-identity ideology is well-suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as opposed to collective rights’.

It’s spread to journalism too. Confessional columns seriously began in 1997, when the journalist Ruth Picardie died at 33 from breast cancer after writing about her experience in the Observer; even those who don’t find illness fascinating couldn’t deny the power of Picardie’s stoic recording of this most momentous life-event. But since then, there’s been a huge growth – I can’t call it ‘development’ as that implies maturing – of personal columns, many of them made up of middle-aged women gushing about ‘dating’ in a way that wouldn’t look out of place in the teenage magazines of my youth. And the more they do it, the more other female hacks are expected to follow their pathetic path; one of the most awful yet hilarious things which drove Hadley Freeman from the Guardian was when she asked them what she was supposed to write about as they always stopped her from writing about politics or feminism – and it was suggested that she write about her children. I blame Nora Ephron. Her writer mother told her that ‘everything is copy’ and she turned the sow’s ear of her husband copping off with Jim Callaghan’s daughter into the spiteful silk purse of Heartburn. But Nora Ephron was a writer of great skill – the opposite of the peri-menopausal mush-peddlers of today. No wonder the papers carry fewer stories about first-person celebrity heartbreak than they used to; we hacks have cut out the middle man.

I know by now that some of you may be thinking ‘pot, kettle, hack’ so let’s address the elephant in the room: me. It’s no secret that I find myself ceaselessly fascinating but then – and there’s no point in false modesty – I have the skill to make personal revelations rather powerful; I’m thinking about the Amsterdam diary in this magazine in which I was merciless about my binge-drinking or the Sunday Times piece about my son’s suicide and my shortcomings as a mother. Excellence elevates the personal – it’s why Amy Winehouse’s work was so very different from Adele’s. Yet amongst all this fake candour, really interesting personal stories go untold, with embarrassed hacks protected by weak editors.

If you can’t make your story interesting to anyone other than your immediate circle of friends, best not to show it to the world, thus adding to its wimpiness. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say being tough-minded is a prerequisite of good confessional journalism – that ‘splinter of ice in the heart’ that Graham Greene referred to – as without it, the cultural landscape is swamped by emotional incontinence. But the pursuit of the personal doesn’t seem to be going anywhere – look at the recently embarrassing attacks by Labour on the Prime Minister rather than on his party. ‘The personal is political’ was a feminist cry of the 1960s – but it’s nowhere near as interesting as politics. Mostly, the personal is just boring.

For sale: Jane Austen’s birthplace

‘There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort,’ wrote the eminently quotable Jane Austen in Emma, in 1815. ‘Nobody can be more devoted to home than I am.’  

If the incomparable Regency writer and social critic could see Steventon House, on the site of her birthplace and childhood home in Hampshire, she would doubtless approve. Although it’s not quite on the scale of the manicured estates that feature so largely in her property-obsessed novels, the Grade II listed 1820s home is all Georgian elegance, with 7,000 sq ft of living space, beautifully proportioned high-ceilinged receptions and fine period features including decorative fireplaces, cornicing, and working shutters.  

The six-bed property, in the village of Steventon, a 15-minute drive from Basingstoke, has been given a plush country-house makeover by the family that has owned it for the past eight years or so, now on the market for £8.5 million with Savills and Knight Frank. The news has set ‘Janeites’, as her hardened fans are known, aflutter, with American buyers soon expected to be jostling for viewings. 

The home’s backstory is pure catnip for Austen aficionados. Steventon House is built on the plot on which her family home once stood, close to the village’s 12th-century Church of St Nicholas, at which Austen’s father was rector for more than 40 years. The writer, one of eight children, was born in the 16th-century home in 1775 and she spent the next 25 years of her life there. As a teenager, she filled her notebooks with irreverent, witty stories of family murders and heavy drinking, and would go on to draft three of her major novels, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, under its roof.  

Much to the horror of her devotees, however, after Austen’s father retired in 1801 and decamped the family to Bath, the house was pulled down by her older brother, Edward. He rebuilt it in its current incarnation, finally selling it in 1855 to the second Duke of Wellington.  

There are clues, however, that the home contributed much to Austen’s early life, the place she dreamed up Elizabeth Bennet, Mr Darcy and the Dashwoods. Although thought to be an unreliable account of her true character, in A Memoir of Jane Austen, written by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh in 1869, the once remote rural house is described as ‘surrounded by sloping meadows, well sprinkled with elm trees, at the end of a small village of cottages, each well provided with a garden, scattered about prettily on either side of the road.’ 

Large enough to accommodate a growing family, as well as the boarding pupils the rector took in, ‘the rooms were finished with less elegance than would now be found in the most ordinary dwellings …. No cornice marked the junction of wall and ceiling,’ Austen-Leigh writes. ’There was a general deficiency of carpeting in sitting rooms, bedrooms, and passages. A pianoforte, or rather a spinet or harpsichord, was by no means a necessary appendage.’  

A 2011 excavation of the field in which the house stood revealed its foundations, as well as fragments of blue willow-pattern plate, showing the Austens were following contemporary fashions in china, but certainly weren’t living a life of Regency glamour.  

The present Steventon House remained a rectory until 1930. Today has all the hallmarks of a luxurious country home. The property comes with more than 50 acres – including a white wisteria walk, a lime tree said to have been planted by Austen’s father in 1813, an original water pump, plus a swimming pool and tennis court – as well as an oak-panelled drawing room, a vast kitchen-diner and two cellars.  

In the grounds, there is also a two-bedroom, two reception-room cottage – perfect for parking an impecunious aunt – and a brick coach house with a workshop and double garage. 

‘While the original house no longer stands, what is there today is the glorious Georgian vision of Jane’s older brother Edward, which is very befitting of the world that Jane wrote about,’ says Ed Sugden, director of Savills’ country house department.  

You also get a sense of the bucolic bliss that the Austens enjoyed. The countryside around Steventon is all pretty lanes, meadows and hedgerows, though you can be at London Waterloo within an hour from Overton station, four miles away. The church is very much the same as it was in their day – possibly with fewer bonnets – and many of the Austen family are buried in the churchyard.  

‘It’s a real cracker of a house,’ says Edward Cunningham, a partner and head of the southwest team at Knight Frank. ‘Although the global obsession with Jane Austen is expected to trigger interest from all quarters, the house is very private, set back at the end of a large drive. It’s not hard to imagine her scribbling away here. There are an awful lot of houses in Hampshire that claim connections to her, but this is the real deal.’  

Available on Savills and Knight-Frank.

Wagner mercenaries claim to have killed Ukrainian children

‘She is screaming, she is a little kid, you know – five, maybe six years old. And I took a kill shot, you know? I was told to let no one out’, said Azamat Uldarov, blowing cigarette smoke at his phone camera.

Yesterday Russian human rights organization Gulagu.net published a video with two ex-convicts and ex-commanders of Wagner Group subdivisions – Azamat Uldarov and Aleksey Savichev – confessing their potential war crimes in Ukraine. Both Russians were recruited by Wagner’s founder Evgeny Prigozhin in penal colonies and pardoned by Vladimir Putin’s decree last year in exchange for fighting at war. 

‘I hold a cigarette in this hand. I carried out an order with this hand – I killed children’, continued Uldarov. ‘What we did when we entered Soledar and Bakhmut, that was such a scene. We were the last to arrive – a unit of 150 people. We were told to kill everyone in our way. So we did. There were women, men, pensioners and children’, said Uldarov. The man also said he ‘cleaned up’ a basement in Bakhmut with 300-400 civilians – about 40 of them were children. According to him, it happened on 18 March.

Uldarov said Russian mercenaries also had no mercy towards Ukrainian prisoners of war. He said only three of 100 PoWs were usually left alive: women-snipers and commanders. The rest were violently assassinated. ‘We cut their throats with a knife on video. When Prigozhin said to use a sledgehammer, we took sledgehammers and smashed them. This is Prigozhin’s favourite method’, said Uldarov.

The evidence of possible war crimes against Ukrainian PoWs has been emerging for months. Last week, a video was published on social media showing what appeared to be a Russian fighter decapitating a Ukrainian soldier with a knife. It was one of the dozens of videos of public executions of Ukrainian military personnel. They included cutting off the head, genitals, ears, nose, limbs and phalanges on the hands. Ukrainian investigators have already identified some of the assassins. ‘We were eliminating them. We did not demand an explanation because we are nobody. We were given a command, and we destroyed them. Because we are Putin’s team’, said Uldarov.

Another ex-convict Russian, Aleksey Savichev, was appointed intelligence commander in the Wagner group after spending 30 years behind bars. Savichev said he was killing Ukrainians from fear that he himself could be killed if he did not obey orders. ‘We were told to shoot all Ukrainians aged 15 and over’, he said. When asked how many civilians they killed in February 2023, Savichev replied that 15-year-old Ukrainians ‘are difficult to call civilians’. Savichev said on 23 February this year, he was one of those shooting over 20 unarmed civilians, half of which were 15-16 years old. ‘We had orders to clear the houses. There was no such thing as getting the civilians out, and I didn’t give a damn about who was there’, said Savichev. 

Savichev also said he threw 30 grenades into the pit with about 60 wounded and dead Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian soldiers who refused to carry out orders to kill Ukrainians. According to him, it happened in January this year between the barracks and the cannery in Bakhmut. ‘There were about 60 people. Some were still breathing. I was told to come, blow everyone up and burn the remains. I am not going to check how many people were breathing there, how many were alive’, said Savichev. 

Evgeny Prigozhin, as usual, denied the accusations. He said he was too busy to watch the one-hour-long video completely but may check it later. Prigozhin also stressed that the Wagner group never shot civilians or children, and they came just ‘to save them from the [Zelensky’s] regime’. 

This rhetoric is common of the Russian command, who believe the end justifies their means. The Wagner Group has links to the Russian armed forces and receives money from the Kremlin’s defence budget. Their fighters are as guilty of killing Ukrainian civilians as the Russian government.

Both Uldarov and Savichev tried to present themselves as victims of a cruel command who instructed them to shoot children. But they have both chosen to stay in Russia and talk about joining the regular Russian army to continue fighting the war. 

The day after the video was published, Prigozhin appealed to Savichev and said Wagner group had been looking for him for 24 hours, ‘but so far could not find’ him. Prigozhin asked Savichev to contact him and explain ‘why he gave this falsification, who was behind it, how he was being blackmailed, and whether he was set any other tasks’. ‘Come and tell us everything. I give you a guarantee: you will leave alive and unharmed’, said Prigozhin.

But, in the grand scheme of the conflict, Prigozhin nor Putin will be worried about the testimonies of a handful of Russian mercenaries. For now, they are untouchable by the international justice system. And most Russian forces will stay silent and keep killing Ukrainians out of hatred or fear, for the punishment for treason or disobedience is always the same: death.

The NHS crisis won’t end soon

How long are the NHS strikes going to go on for? The collapse in agreement on nurses’ pay over the Easter recess has made it much harder for ministers to push the British Medical Association towards a deal on junior doctors’ pay, as well as undermining Rishi Sunak’s positioning as someone who gets things done. The Royal College of Nursing is now balloting its members on further strike action after they narrowly rejected the pay offer made by the government. Today, Health Secretary Steve Barclay was summoned to the Commons to answer an urgent question from Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting on how the government planned to stop further strikes. Both men have said publicly that they disagree with the walkouts, but of course the Labour line is that the strikes wouldn’t be happening because the party would somehow be better at negotiating with the unions. 

Streeting was particularly combative today, demanding that Barclay ‘look cancer patients in the eye, while they wait for life-saving treatment, and tell them to tough it out, as they are the ones who will pay the price for his failed approach’. He also accused him of being an ‘invisible man’ who had been ‘largely absent’ recently. Barclay’s approach was to tough out the session itself, giving the same basic answer to almost every MP, which was that the RCN result had been narrow, Unison members had backed the pay offer, everyone needed to wait for the NHS Staff Council to give its view on the deal before going ahead with more industrial action. 

The ‘tough it out’ line comes from briefings to the press over the weekend – but it’s one I reported on Coffee House quite a while ago. The belief that the government could yet win over pubic opinion in a long war of attrition is something Whitehall figures continue to hold onto, as patients have their operations cancelled repeatedly as a result of more strike days. It’s a risky strategy, though: in previous long-running disputes, the war of attrition has ended up damaging both sides, rather than a clear winner emerging. And it is a dead cert that the health service will be damaged still more as it tries to catch up on its backlog and maintain public confidence. 

MPs from all parties had their own stories about falling public faith in the system. Labour’s Chris Bryant put it well when he talked about poor families in his seat spending their life savings in order to access treatment because they felt it was their only option. Time was when the health service existed in place of fear of having to spend – or not being able to afford – treatment. There is going to have to be a lot of toughing out before the current crisis abates.

SNP show goes from bad to worse

A new week has come around, and it brings yet more turmoil for the SNP. Calls for Nicola Sturgeon to resign as MSP for Glasgow Southside have grown louder after a leaked video showed the former SNP leader angrily warning colleagues about speaking negatively of the party’s finances. Despite her colleagues returning to the Scottish parliament post-recess, Sturgeon’s spokesman confirmed that the former First Minister will not in fact be back in Holyrood this week – ‘to ensure the focus is on the new First Minister’. Nevertheless, Humza Yousaf’s time is still being consumed by desperate attempts to convince the public that nothing is amiss.

‘I don’t think there is any reason whatsoever for Nicola Sturgeon to even consider resigning from the party,’ Yousaf told journalists at the Scottish Trades Union Congress in Dundee today. He said earlier that he could not ‘understand the reasons or rationale’ behind those calling for Sturgeon to be suspended and remarked that ‘we’re far past the point where Nicola Sturgeon, for example, has to account for her husband’s actions.’

And Yousaf doesn’t just have his work cut out clearing up his predecessor’s mess: one of the new First Minister’s MPs, Margaret Ferrier of Rutherglen and Hamilton West, is likely to face a by-election after she was caught during the pandemic travelling from London to Glasgow by train while having Covid. Ferrier has appealed the Standards Committee’s that recommendation she be suspended from the House of Commons for 30 days – delaying a by-election, for now at least.

Four weeks in and the Union is in the best shape it’s been for 15 years. For Humza, April really is the cruellest month…

What will happen to interest rates once they peak?

As the battle of the economic forecasts rages on, it’s useful to note that (right now, anyway), the predictions aren’t all that different. The more optimistic scenarios, like the one published by EY ITEM Club today, suggest the UK will see minuscule growth this year but avoid technical recession. The pessimistic scenarios, like the IMF’s latest forecast, are being revised upwards but still show the UK economy experiencing a short and shallow contraction. 

The good and bad scenarios are, therefore, both largely within the margin of error –  and all are pretty lousy at that (albeit better than previously expected). Regardless of which proves right, this is shaping up to be another difficult year for economic growth: one that leaves us all feeling a bit worse off.

Perhaps the more disputed question, then, is another raised by EY today: what might happen to interest rates once they peak? 

There is growing speculation that the Bank of England, which predicts the rate of inflation will fall below 4 per cent by the end of the year, might start bringing the base rate down as soon as it thinks it has the scope to do so. While EY expects one more interest rate hike when the Monetary Policy Committee next meets in May, taking the base rate to 4.5 per cent, the consultancy group also expects the BoE to ‘begin cutting interest rates at the turn of 2023 and 2024’.

It reasons that the Bank will soon turn its focus towards the impact rates are having on the cost of living crisis, as well as a looming drop in house prices. EY predicts house prices will fall by 10 per cent over the next two years, largely driven by the impact of rising rates on mortgages. 

EY’s predictions are not out of kilter with the market expectation, which thinks the base rate will peak around 4.5 per cent and then start falling, though perhaps at a slightly slower rate than EY suggests. Given the dovish nature of the Bank, which was so hesitant to raise rates even when inflation was soaring, no doubt there will be at least some support within the MPC to drop rates again.

But there are risks to this strategy, as Ross Clark has previously laid out here. In the past few months, the landmines created by ultra-low interest rates started to be uncovered, and the risk of creating such circumstances again should be part of the Bank’s decision-making. 

Then there is the question of credibility. There may be pressure to drop the base rate once the Bank is able to do so – but when exactly this moment comes is hard to say. The Bank lost so much of its credibility by failing to acknowledge inflation was surging back in 2021, and it’s not obvious yet that it has rebuilt its reputation. A drop in the base rate when inflation isn’t even back down to target would be a serious test of market confidence.

Furthermore, anyone who did want to make the case that rates should stay roughly where they are would have historical data to back it up. Today’s rate, while painfully high compared to the last decade, is only just creeping up to the very low end of a normal rate compared to previous decades.

Ushering back in a new era of cheap money is by no means a requirement, but would be a choice: a tempting one at that, given how addicted to mass spending everyone has become. But one that, as we’ve learned, has serious repercussions.