Keir Starmer is learning to love controversy

For a politician who has set much store by being pretty boring, Keir Starmer seems to be enjoying his current provocative spell. His desire to shake up the ‘nonsense’ bureaucracy in the NHS makes the Sunday Telegraph splash and was a key feature of his interview this morning with Laura Kuenssberg. He argued that ‘the reason I want to reform the NHS is I want to preserve it’ and ‘I think if we don’t reform the health service it will be in managed decline’. 

The Labour leader was insistent on the BBC that he didn’t want to touch the ‘founding principle of the NHS’, that it remained free at the point of use, but added that he had tasked his frontbenchers with coming up with ways the public services in their portfolios needed to be reformed. He said he disagreed with those who thought the NHS and other services should always stay the same – something he and his team know will annoy a certain section of the Labour party. He will also irritate a lot of people in the healthcare world by doubling down on Wes Streeting’s plan to reform the GP contract, which at one stage seemed to be the shadow health secretary freelancing rather than an official Labour policy. 

But it just so happens that Starmer is talking about something that the public has a greater appetite for than usual, given the state of the health service (he argued the NHS was at its worst in its entire history). So he’s not provoking the group he’s actually bothered about. That’s also the case for the number of things the Labour leader has promised and then backtracked on, which he was asked about extensively in the Kuenssberg interview. His arguments about why he had abandoned pledges on ending outsourcing in the NHS, on Brexit and tuition fees weren’t very strong. The Labour leader told Kuenssberg: ‘When I was running for leader, I made pledges that reflected my values. Since then, we’re now, what, three years on, a lot has changed.’

He leant heavily on Covid, the war in Ukraine and the ‘huge damage to our economy’ wrought by the Tory party. Incidentally, whenever the Tories use those excuses, Starmer and his top team ridicule them for dodging responsibility. It’s almost as though he’s not particularly worried about the public even noticing the disparity between leadership campaign Starmer and the one preparing for the next general election.  

Sunday shows round-up: Starmer challenged on whether voters can trust him

Keir Starmer – Ditched campaign promises ‘represented my values’

It was the Labour leader’s turn to face off against Laura Kuenssberg this morning. With Starmer currently in a commanding position, and the favourite to become the next prime minister, Kuenssberg looked back to the 2020 leadership contest to succeed Jeremy Corbyn. She asked him to explain why a significant number of campaign pledges had since fallen by the wayside:

16 is too young to change gender

Kuenssberg also inquired as to Starmer’s position on the thorny issue of gender self-identification. The Scottish Parliament has voted to remove almost all barriers to a person seeking to change their gender and to extend that right to 16 and 17 year olds:

NHS will suffer ‘managed decline’ without reform

Starmer also elaborated on his reasons for wanting to reform the National Health Service:

Mark Harper – ‘I hope there will be a deal’ with rail unions soon

The Transport Secretary also spoke to Kuenssberg amid ongoing industrial unrest on the railways. Kuenssberg asked Harper if reports of a possible agreement were true:

We condemn ‘brutal’ killing by Iranian government

Sophy Ridge also interviewed Harper and asked him about the case of Alireza Akbari, the British-Iranian dual national who has been executed by the Iranian government on charges of spying. Ridge asked him what the government was doing:

‘I don’t know’ what’s going on in Shapps’ photo

And finally, Ridge asked Harper about why the Business Secretary Grant Shapps had made a ‘Stalinesque’ alteration to an image on his social media:

Why Putin won’t take Hitler’s way out

The last time Europe fought a major war, there was no shortage of planning. We knew what peace meant. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt issued their Atlantic Charter in August 1941, before the Allied victory was anywhere close. This was followed by more meetings and conferences, including in Tehran in 1943 and later at Yalta, in Crimea, in 1945. The fighting never stopped, but there was a lot of thinking about the future of Germany, Europe and the new world order. 

This sort of thinking is less evident today with Ukraine. Maybe it’s because Russia’s war in Ukraine, as bad as it is, isn’t yet a world war. It is happening some place out there, in ruined towns that few have ever heard of, and fewer still really care about. People are dying, but they are not us. The West keeps increasing its military aid to Ukraine, and we rightly cheer at its every victory, but there is a disconnect between this effort and our broader thinking about the post-war world. We don’t have a clear idea of what peace looks like.

The reason we have failed to think about the post-war world should be clear to any observer of international politics. Russia is a nuclear power that can annihilate its enemies, even if that means the complete end of normal life on earth, and Russia’s own destruction. It is difficult to plan for Russia’s defeat because the outcome where the Fuhrer, in his bunker, ends it all, is improbable. If Hitler had a nuclear briefcase, would he not have used it before killing himself?

Instead, we indulge in fantasies about a coup d’état in Russia. In any moment, we’re told, Putin’s generals might throw him out. The obedient orcs of Mordor will rebel. There might even be a civil war, as historian Timothy Snyder helpfully prophesised, with different parts of the Putinist establishment fighting it out among themselves while a happily liberated Ukraine rebuilds and joins the West. These mental acrobatics help us plot the uncertain road from Russia’s defeat in Ukraine, which all agree is a good idea, to Russia’s final defeat. It keeps the war simple.

The biggest unknown, though, is Crimea. Ukraine has made it clear enough: liberation of Crimea, as well as the former self-proclaimed republics of DNR and LNR in the Donbas, remain its war aims. The fate of Russia, Europe, and the world order are philosophical issues that fade in importance before this very concrete, very practical agenda. Ukraine expects the West to support these ambitions.

In this best-case scenario, Putin, facing defeat, will simply vacate Ukraine and never dare to return. That would be the end of the war, but still at best a partial victory for the West and for Ukraine, since Putin would have escaped punishment. Russia would not have been vanquished like Germany was in 1945, because there is no scope in our world for the unconditional surrender of nuclear powers. Putin would still be around, resentful and dangerous, and even if he left the scene, Russia’s aggressive nationalism would not dissipate and could yet prove a menace to Europe.

Even the best-case scenario rests on a key assumption: that Putin thinks his regime will survive a defeat in Ukraine. Yet, the Russian President, an avid student of history, will know only too well that defeat in foreign wars can lead to unrest and even revolution at home. Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) very nearly toppled the monarchy, while Russia’s failures in world war one handsomely contributed to the chaos and revolution of 1917. Gorbachev’s ‘loss’ of East Germany in 1990 deepened his unpopularity with the Soviet military, helping precipitate the attempted coup of August 1991. So, Putin is not wrong to deem this war existential – if not for Russia, then certainly for his regime, and for him personally.

If Putin thinks that he cannot survive the humiliating loss of Crimea, why would he not opt for the last resort, the proverbial Plan B, and go nuclear? The West may get lucky, and Putin might capitulate. But luck is a poor basis for planning. The safest policy, perhaps, then, is to assume that Russia will launch a nuclear attack, at least in Ukraine, before we see the back of its forces in Crimea and the Donbas.

But if we assume that Russia will, in the end, nuke Ukraine, then we truly enter an unknown realm. Will the initial use of nuclear weapons be limited to Ukraine? Will the conflict escalate even further afterwards? And what sort of peace comes in the wake of this sort of catastrophe? Only God can plan for a world after a nuclear war.

This is why it’s difficult to play the long game like Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin did in Crimea in 1945. It’s easier to endorse Ukraine’s war objectives, and help Kyiv achieve them, knowing all the while that these objectives are yet nowhere near realisation. The difficult choices can be safely postponed until that happy day when Ukraine reclaims all territory lost to Russia since February 24.

In the meantime, we can indulge in the comforting thought that the fact that Putin has not yet used nuclear weapons in Ukraine means that he never will. Such positive thinking, though not based on any evidence, offers a way out of policy paralysis, which might result from overthinking the nuclear dilemma. It allows us to remain convinced that this war can and will be won by Ukraine and the collective West. 

Planning for peace requires a degree of mental clarity. During one of their private meetings at the Yalta conference, Roosevelt told Stalin just how shocked he was by the ‘meaningless and ruthless destruction’ inflicted by the Germans on Crimea. It made him feel ‘bloodthirsty’ towards the Germans, he said. The war still had three months to run, but the end was clearly near. Germany would pay for all the death and destruction. At Yalta, Stalin wanted the country completely dismembered. Roosevelt and Churchill were less keen on the idea. Still, they could do anything they wanted. Germany lay prostrate.

None of us know, however, how long Russia’s war with Ukraine will last. Months? Years, maybe? No one even knows whether victory, the way it was understood in 1945, is possible. Or something we want. Our idea of peace today is to give Putin the unpalatable choice between the gun and the bomb, while hoping with probably misplaced optimism that at last moment he dejectedly reaches for the gun.

Who will dare stand against Jeremy Corbyn in Islington?

Labour has announced whether its sitting MPs will step down or fight again at the next election in nearly every single constituency. By a weird coincidence, it stays silent about the one constituency Labour party members and the wider public are most interested in: Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North.

Sir Keir Starmer withdrew the whip from Corbyn because of the ex-leader’s response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on anti-Jewish racism in the Labour party. Rather than, for example, apologising for prejudice on his watch, Corbyn insisted that antisemitism had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’ by his opponents.

Starmer said in December that ‘he doesn’t see the circumstances’  in which Labour will allow its former leader to stand as its candidate.

If that were the end of it, ambitious politicians would be lining up to fight for the Islington North Labour nomination. However catastrophically he performed in the rest of the UK, Corbyn secured a personal majority of 26,188 at the 2019 election. Islington North is the safest of Labour constituencies. An unassailable stronghold and a job for life. 

No queue is forming, however. When I interviewed Labour figures in Islington, only one, Christian Wolmar, was willing to say in public that he wanted the nomination.

Wolmar is a transport journalist, author and a widely-praised authority on the failures of rail and bus privatisation. He’s a local candidate with deep experience of Labour politics, and a man of the left, who in his own words ‘will offer myself as Corbyn without the baggage’.

For now, he has the field to himself, and will carry on having the field to himself for a good while yet. If Corbyn stands as an independent, Labour people are frightened of running against him.

They’re not frightened of Jeremy Corbyn the man. They’re frightened of his followers, who would flood the constituency with Corbyn campaign workers in an election and flood his Labour opponent’s Twitter feed with abuse.

 One prominent local figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a Corbyn supporter had threatened that ‘I would deserve everything I got if I ran against Jeremy’. Their partner and children said they should not put them through it. The nastiness would not be over when the election was over: ‘We’d have to live in the constituency afterwards and there would be bitter recriminations.’

The local party is about 4,000-strong. Judging its mood is difficult because meetings remain on Zoom and informal chats to sound out opinions are hard to arrange. But internal party elections for constituency officers show strong support for pro-Corbyn candidates. In normal circumstances, the leader of Islington Council, Kaya Comer-Schwartz, might consider a run herself. For now, she describes Corbyn as a ‘fantastic local MP’ and backs the calls to allow him to stand for Labour again. 

Islington Labour could split into pro- and anti-Corbyn parties if Starmer forces Corbyn to stand as an independent. 

He will surely refuse to back down. Starmer knows that nothing would revive the prone body of this moribund government faster than readmitting Corbyn to the fold.

Most people in Islington Labour assume that the national party will wait until as late as possible before ruling Corbyn out and imposing a new candidate. His supporters will go wild, the thinking goes. But their protests will soon be lost in the noise of a general election campaign.

Interviewed by Robert Peston this week, Jeremy Corbyn refused to answer ‘hypothetical’ questions about whether he would stand as an independent. Obviously, he wants to be the Labour candidate, and not just because his victory would be guaranteed. 

‘I joined the Labour party since before the England men’s team won the World Cup.  I’ve spent my life in the Labour party. I’ve done every job there is in Labour.’

Deselect him and you deselect a 73-year old’s whole life and legacy.

Maybe even Corbyn does not know whether he will run as an independent. If he does, questions that resonate far beyond north London will be settled.

If there ever is to be a viable party to the left of Labour, Islington is where it could be born. The cliched media picture of the borough as a home to trendy lefties is decades out of date. A ribbon of gentrified housing runs from Highbury, near Arsenal’s stadium, through the centre of the borough to Clerkenwell and the City. When I moved there in the early 1990s, young middle-class people could afford to buy their first flat – ‘tell the young people of today that, and they won’t believe you,’ as Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen say. 

Now only the fortunate few, with family money or jobs in the City, move in. The second-hand bookshops and offices for worthy campaign groups have been replaced by Farrow & Ball paint shops and Ottolenghi restaurants. 

Out of sight, the rest of the borough has staggering levels of poverty. It is also hyper-diverse. Whatever you may think of his politics, Jeremy Corbyn is a hardworking constituency MP, and is at home in the deprived, multi-cultural streets of inner-London. Notice how naturally he referred to ‘the England men’s team’ winning in 1966. Not even Gary Lineker adapts to changing social mores as quickly and as easily as that.

I have no doubt that, if Labour were in charge today, and suffering the inevitable unpopularity power brings, he would beat the official Labour candidate at the next election – just as Ken Livingstone beat Frank Dobson, when he ran as an independent leftist for London mayor in 2000.

But today’s political circumstances could not be more different. The general election of 2024/25 could rank alongside 1906, 1945 and 1997: a moment when the country turns on the Conservatives as if they were an occupying army of a foreign power. In by-elections, you can see voters searching for creative ways to defeat them. If that means Labour and Green supporters voting Liberal Democrat, they will do it. If that means Lib Dems and Greens voting Labour, they will do that too. Nothing stands in the way of the aching imperative to chuck the Tories out. As far as most centre-left people are concerned, Starmer can do whatever it takes to remove the Conservatives from power.

If that feeling lasts, even an independent left candidate as famous as Jeremy Corbyn will have a hard time persuading his supporters to oppose Labour. 

Islington North usually declares between 2am and 3am on election night. If the official Labour candidate wins comfortably, you will know we are on course for a Labour majority – perhaps a Labour landslide. If Corbyn wins, you will know that the opposition vote is still splintering and reports of the Conservative party’s death are premature.

The problem with the BBC’s reporting on excess deaths

I recall the newsroom conversations during the dark days of the pandemic only too well. They were upsetting at the time. Now, as we see a disturbing rise in excess deaths across the country, the thought of them fills me with horror and outrage. 

‘You do realise these lockdowns and restrictions will end up killing people too, don’t you?’ I would say to senior editorial colleagues with something approaching desperation in my voice. ‘Sure, the virus is a serious threat to a small proportion of the population but the longer-term consequences of shutting the economy down and closing off the NHS will be deadly for huge numbers who were never at serious risk from the virus, people with years of life ahead of them. Shouldn’t we be reflecting that in our coverage? Shouldn’t we be considering the possibility that the government is going down the wrong path on this?’ 

The response of these colleagues would vary in tone, from patient but patronising good humour to open mockery. Many were influenced, I believe, by social media echo chambers (curated by pernicious algorithms). My colleagues had swallowed the myopic belief, adopted by people largely on the liberal left, that only lockdowns could ‘save lives’ and ‘protect the NHS’ from the devastation threatened by Covid-19. Anyone who demurred was, as far as they were concerned, clearly a right-wing lunatic. 

Now we can all see how well that is working out. Provisional figures released this week reveal that more than 650,000 deaths were registered in the UK in 2022 – 9 per cent more than 2019. This is one of the largest excess death levels outside the pandemic in 50 years. But despite many of the causes of this being obvious, the BBC is pretending the development has come as something of a shock. 

First to tackle the figures was the BBC’s Head of Statistics, who appeared on the news channel shortly after the stats were released in the morning. Astonishingly, during the entirety of this correspondent’s grim analysis, the word ‘lockdown’ wasn’t mentioned once. The term ‘pandemic hangover’ was used without mentioning ‘lockdown consequences’. This was perhaps no surprise given BBC News reporters continue to conflatethe impacts of Covid restrictions with the direct effects of the virus itself. Indeed, when a graph was displayed showing a large fall in new blood pressure prescriptions in early 2020, the correspondent failed to draw any attention to the fact that it coincided with the UK’s first national lockdown.  

‘A lot of people have been wandering around in the last two years not getting treated for things that could cause heart problems later on,’ he said. In this regard, he was only half right. People hadn’t been ‘wandering around’ at all during the pandemic – they’d been staying at home, too terrified to see their doctor after watching apocalyptic BBC News reports from Covid wards. The correspondent wasn’t finished though. The ‘most worrying’ statistic, he said, related to the previous two weeks – with deaths running at 20 per cent higher than usual, a trend he warned that could ‘keep on running throughout January and February’. The news anchor weighed in, saying there were ‘very big questions for the government and for NHS’ to answer. I was left wondering who would pose the ‘very big questions’ to the BBC about its role in all this. 

The BBC’s analysis didn’t just fall short because it failed to mention the L-word. In broad terms, it connected the excess deaths to a combination of missed treatments and an NHS already in crisis. Yet anyone working for BBC News knows full well that the NHS is in crisis every single winter. This knowledge didn’t stop BBC editors ignoring warnings that lockdowns would only exacerbate health service bottlenecks once restrictions were totally lifted.  

Despite leading on Covid countless times during the pandemic, the World at One on Radio 4 didn’t even mention excess deaths in its opening headlines. The news bulletin that followed WATO’s preamble, however, did lead on the story, with a report by a health and disinformation reporter. Again, there was no direct mention of lockdowns, or the fact that many people had warned that we would, in time, pay a terrible price for reaching for the blunt instrument of authoritarian Chinese-style restrictions. 

The fact that a reporter with a joint brief encompassing disinformation was covering this story tells you everything you need to know about the BBC’s muddled and compromised approach to Covid. It should go without saying that BBC health reporters must not present unsubstantiated assertions as facts in their reports. But throughout the pandemic they did just that. Exaggerated claims about the efficacy of masks and vaccines to stop transmission of the coronavirus were repeated without any meaningful interrogation. We now know, thanks to Isabel Oakeshott, that mask mandates were more to do with politics and messaging than science. Regrettably, as is the case with many liberal media outlets, the BBC’s ‘disinformation’ reporting has become a selective and somewhat political exercise in debunking claims that don’t chime with the worldviews of editors. 

The same health and disinformation reporter had already had a go at unpicking the excess deaths figures on the BBC News Channel shortly before midday. She was keen to point out that excess deaths during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 were much higher due to ‘very clear… direct Covid deaths’. I remember working in the BBC’s newsroom during those years and it was never ‘very clear’ how many people had died as a direct consequence of coronavirus. Deaths were reported ‘within 28 days of infection’ and any caveats about co-morbidities were jettisoned very early in the pandemic. 

The BBC says that ‘We have covered the newly released data on excess deaths with great care and in detail across our news output, which is what people expect of the BBC.’ But as the day wore on, the excess deaths story slipped down running orders. The Six O’Clock News, on BBC One, was 13 minutes in before it got around to reporting the figures. Who better than to shed light on the mystery than the BBC’s own Sir Chris Whitty stand-in, the BBC’s Health Editor, who was given little over a minute to talk about the statistics. His analysis could have passed unnoticed. But I jerked to attention when the L-word escaped, perhaps unbidden, from his lips. As he explained: ‘There’s more and more speculation and examination now of the fact that people didn’t get certain operations, treatments and appointments during lockdowns, and that contributed to their conditions getting worse, and that led to their deaths subsequently.’ Finally, I thought, a BBC journalist who wasn’t mincing his words. But my relief at hearing this bald statement turned to anger once again when I remembered predicting these exact outcomes and pleading with BBC editors who could have made a difference.

Three days later, BBC News provided more evidence that a lack of journalistic rigour marks much of its reporting on Covid, but in a way I couldn’t have predicted. In a vetting lapse (comparable to the occasion when Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, was interviewed, following the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell in December 2021), Dr Aseem Malhotra was invited onto the News Channel to talk about statins. Malhotra took advantage of a distracted presenter to espouse his controversial views on Covid-19 mRNA jabs. Adding to the embarrassing nature of this booking was the timing: the heart specialist was platformed only a couple of days after Andrew Bridgen was suspended as a Conservative MP for tweeting that he had spoken to a cardiologist who seemed to compare the vaccines to the Holocaust. Malhotra has firmly denied he was the cardiologist in question, but Bridgen was quick to tweet his praise for the consultant’s interview.

Malhotra’s appearance will, no doubt, result in an internal inquiry and a row on social media. Meanwhile, in the real world, people are continuing to die needlessly and, in part, because our publicly funded state broadcaster took sides, and hitched the BBC’s wagon to short-term measures, drawn up in a panic with no cost-benefit analysis, that were always going to turn out to be self-destructive and lethal in the longer-term. It will now be many years before the full casualty count is tallied. The day the BBC finally accepts responsibility for its role in this is also, without doubt, a long time in the future. 

Why has president Xi got my book about the Mediterranean?

A few days ago, an email arrived from someone I know in China: my book The Great Sea had been spotted on the bookshelves of president Xi when he delivered his beginning of the year address to China and the world. China watchers were expending plenty of energy identifying the other books on his shelves, and came up with 62 titles. The great majority were by Chinese authors, including famous classics: the history of ancient China by Sima Qian and the Full Collection of Tang Poems, not to mention works by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Admittedly there is a scattering of translations, including Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and the complete works of Shakespeare, for whom Xi apparently has a particular fondness. What could a book by me, subtitled A Human History of the Mediterranean, say to the president of China?

The clue lies in the fact that my Chinese correspondent had attended a seminar I gave at Nanjing University on seapower in 2019. This fascination with seapower in China is not unprecedented, but, in the long sweep of Chinese history, it is unusual.

In the twelfth century, the Song dynasty looked outwards, partly because the centre of power had been pushed southwards by enemies in the north; the capital was largely cut off from the land routes that had brought luxury goods across Eurasia along the so-called Silk Road. Until then, the main use of the compass, long known in China, had been to lay out buildings according to the rules of Feng Shui. Only now did its use at sea become obvious. When Song China was overwhelmed by the Mongol khan Kubilai in the thirteenth century ambitious overseas expeditions added conquest to trade, although attempts to conquer Japan (described by Marco Polo) ended in the destruction of the badly constructed Chinese fleet by the Kamikaze, or ‘divine wind’.

Chinese politicians as well as historians are particularly fascinated by the seven ‘Ming voyages’ at the start of the fifteenth century. The eunuch admiral Zheng He took charge of expeditions that reached as far as East Africa and even Mecca. In Chinese records, the size of the ships and armies sent into the Indian Ocean seems absolutely enormous, and it is questionable whether ships of that size would have been seaworthy. But even scaling these expeditions down, the reach of the Chinese at that time is very impressive. Debate rages about the purpose of the Ming voyages. But the best answer is that they were an attempt to show that, even if he did not rule every corner directly, the emperor of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ was master of the entire world.

After a long interval, China has returned once again to the sea: it is determined to demonstrate its economic and political power to the world. The Belt and Road initiative explicitly invokes the history of the Silk Roads, routes across and around Asia that particularly flourished in the early Middle Ages, and again in the era of Kubilai Khan. Although people tend to think of a continuous road across the Asian landmass, maritime links to western Asia, the ‘Silk Route of the Sea’, were always more important, whether the trade was conducted by the Chinese themselves or by Arabs, Malays, Tamils and other non-Chinese people.

Why, though, would Xi be interested in a book on the Mediterranean? As it happens, my subsequent book, a history of the oceans, is about to appear in Chinese translation as well, and is more obviously relevant to the Belt and Road initiative. There is a Chinese footprint in the Mediterranean – some years ago China began to invest in the port of Piraeus. But in China, Japan and Korea there is also a longstanding fascination with the history of the economic success of the West.

How did the European nations begin to generate prodigious economic growth, when during the Middle Ages China was arguably richer? This was the question that the Marxist historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, hoped to answer in his mammoth History of Science and Civilisation in China. How far back can one trace the great divergence between East and West?

None of this, of course, is evidence that president Xi has actually read my book. When I was being interviewed for admission to Cambridge I encountered a famous ancient historian in the college court and excitedly told him I had read his books. ‘There’s nothing in those books to harm a young mind like yours’, he said. I would say the same to all my readers, young and old.

The tragedy of selective abortion in Britain

Late last year, Heidi Crowter, a 27-year-old woman with Down syndrome, lost her court of appeal challenge over late-term abortions on grounds of serious foetal abnormalities. Abnormalities such as hers, that is. 

The law in England, Wales and Scotland makes an exception to the 24-week time limit for abortion, permitting abortion all the way up to birth if there is ‘a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped’. That includes unborn children who have Down syndrome. 

This rule, Heidi argued, ‘tells me that I am not valued and of much less value than a person without Down syndrome’. She’s right. Current legislation stigmatises those living with Down syndrome by sending out a message their lives are not worth living and less valuable than the lives of the able-bodied.

The judges at the court of appeal disagreed. The perception so hurtful to Heidi – one rule for her, another for her able-bodied peer – did not, the judges found, by itself contravene article eight rights (to private and family life, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights). 

Heidi is not finished. She has now lodged a permission with the Supreme Court (and in due course would pursue this matter to Strasbourg). But already her case has thrown into the spotlight the painful ambiguities and profound controversies surrounding a practice firmly embedded within twenty-first century British society: genetic screening and selective abortion. 

We are faced with the fact that pre-natal testing has become routine, as has the selective abortion which follows from it. In the UK 90 per cent of those diagnosed with Down’s syndrome are aborted. Before the advent of prenatal testing – whether via ultrasound technology (first employed for diagnostic use in 1956), or via amniocentesis (first introduced for Down’s syndrome in 1966), or via non-invasive pre-natal testing (available since 2012) – parents did not have to wrestle with the decision of whether to abort a child with physical or intellectual disabilities. Then, expecting parents of children with chromosomal deficiencies lived in blissful ignorance. Now, technology can place parents under an agonising burden – a fact which sufficiently impressed anthropologist Rayna Rapp in the 1980s to prompt her to confer the term ‘moral pioneers’ on such parents.

Take Joy Freeman’s experience. Halfway through her pregnancy Joy went in for a routine scan. She wasn’t expecting any problems. She wasn’t expecting a fright. No surprises please. So, the news her baby had spina bifida came as a shock. She wrote in the Guardian: ‘Diagnosis of an abnormality in your unborn baby propels you into a strange alternate universe where everyone around you seems callously happy. You are still outwardly pregnant, and people congratulate you, but you are living with the poisoned chalice of knowledge and choice’.

Parents of previous generations never had to live with this ‘poisoned chalice of knowledge and choice’. Yet even though the technology is new, the outlook which frequently informs decisions to selectively terminate is ancient. Late modernity may provide the means, but Greek tragedy still supplies the reason. 

Lyndsay Werking-Yip is another mother whose 20-week scan came as a bombshell. Again, everything had been looking good. ‘We watched in amazement and excitement as the tech showed us all the precious growing parts of our baby girl: her spine, left hand, right ankle, ten fingers, ten toes, lips…’ Even the technician chimed in, ‘She looks perfect’. Lyndsay adds: ‘My heart swelled with pride when [the technician] added: “Your baby is being nice. She isn’t moving too much.”’ Towards the end of the scan, however, the technician’s tone changed. ‘“I see something,” the tech said. “I’m not sure what it is. Come back tomorrow.”’ The alarm prompted ‘a few weeks of agony’, with amniocentesis, a foetal MRI and multiple ultrasounds eventually revealing a diagnosis of ‘severe brain abnormalities’. Instead of brain matter, in the frontal lobe there was a small empty space. In addition, the baby had agenesis of the corpus callosum: the middle structure joining left and right hemispheres of the brain hadn’t developed properly. Eventually, the uncertainty (‘we knew the diagnosis but we didn’t know what it would mean for our daughter’s daily life’) was too much. As Lyndsay relays in her article in the New York Times:

My husband and I chose to end our child’s life… Our child would not be given a life of pain and suffering… At 23 weeks and six days into my pregnancy, I had a “late term” abortion. When people ask, “How could you?” I reply that allowing her to live would have been a fate worse than death. Her diagnosis was not fatal, not incompatible with the bare mechanics of a living body. But it was incompatible with a fulfilling life.’

The idea that an unfulfilling life can prove a fate worse than death is deeply rooted in Western culture. W.B. Yeats concluded his poem, ‘A Man Young and Old’, with his own translation of some profoundly stark lines spoken by the Chorus in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus at Colonus:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; 
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have 
looked into the eye of day; 
The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

The contention here is that life can sometimes be a fate worse than death. 

In the great tragedians of fifth century Athens, the motifs are the same: ‘the shortness of heroic life’ and ‘the exposure of man to the murderousness and caprice of the inhuman’. The Gods are pitilessly indifferent; ‘we are punished far in excess of our guilt’; there is no consolation, no redemption, no restoration. 

It’s not only parental justifications of selective terminations which are rooted in an Ancient Greek outlook. It’s the reigning view in academia too. Within the desultory sub-discipline that is bioethics, absolute tragedy is considered a live possibility. For example, in an essay entitled ‘Future People, Disability and Screening’, British bioethicist Jonathan Glover argues that ‘if a child is brought into the world with a disastrous disability, that child will have a life that is worse than no life’. While American bioethicist Laura Purdy maintains abortion activists legitimately see selective abortion ‘as a way to prevent the development of persons who are more likely to live miserable lives’.

Lynn Murray is the founder of Don’t Screen Us Out, a British lobbying organisation comprising 17,000 people with Down syndrome, their families and supporters. ‘It’s as if they are handing down a death sentence…’ says Murray, of clinicians tasked with delivering to expecting mothers news of a Down’s syndrome diagnosis. ‘I’m sorry’, clinicians will begin, heads hung to the side, ‘you must be devastated’. The sociologist Gareth Thomas concurs:

‘Defining Down’s syndrome as a risk, in turn, carries negative connotations; if something is a risk, it is to be feared and avoided. This helps produce and uphold the status of Down’s syndrome as a negative pregnancy outcome, ensuring that familiar scripts of reproductive misfortune remain intact.’

This was certainly Máire Lea-Wilson’s experience, a London-based accountant I recently interviewed whose son Aidan was a co-claimant in Heidi Crowter’s case. Máire was at 34 weeks’ gestation with Aidan when an obstetrician, initially worried about high blood pressure, sent her for an ultrasound, revealing her child to have ‘double bubble’ or duodenal atresia (a condition where the first portion of the bowel is blocked) as well as short femurs and a hypoplastic nasal bone – all conditions associated with Down’s syndrome. ‘Did you have screening?’ was the brusque response of another obstetrician. ‘Why not? Did it not matter to you?’ 

But it wasn’t just the repeated offer of abortion which disconcerted Máire. The information she was given, so she tells me, ‘only highlighted the medical and negative social aspects of raising a child with Down’s syndrome’. A picture was painted which ‘made us feel incredibly scared and concerned for the future of our unborn son and for our older son’. The whole experience, Máire adds, ‘made us feel like Down’s syndrome must be very, very bad indeed and that perhaps bringing Aidan into the world would be unfair on him, unfair on our eldest son and unfair on us’.

How are we to evaluate the often-lethal application of the Greek tragic outlook to our contemporary encounter with disability? Well, it is, to use a fashionable term, ableist. ‘The canonical idea that some lives are not worth living results from the ableist conflation of disability with pain and suffering’, says the philosopher of disability Joel Michael Reynolds in a recent book. This conflation hinges upon a kind of ‘epistemic hubris’ – an unjustified assumption that the able-bodied can have sufficiently intimate knowledge of how men and women living with certain physical or intellectual disabilities experience the world to declare their lives to be fates worth than death. ‘We assume we know what suffering is’, writes American essayist Stanley Hauerwas, ‘because it is so common, but on analysis suffering turns out to be an extremely elusive subject’. And if this is true in general, how much more is it true of the particular experience of people with, say, intellectual disabilities?

Hauerwas continues: 

‘No doubt, like everyone, the [intellectually disabled] suffer. Like us, they have accidents. Like us, they have colds, sores, and cancer. Like, us they are subject to natural disasters. But the question is whether they suffer from being [intellectually disabled]. We assume they suffer because of their [intellectual disabilities]… Yet… it is possible that that they are in fact taught by us that they are decisively disabled, and thus learn to suffer?’

My cousin Jack was born with a rare chromosol disorder. As Jack grew up, he couldn’t support his own weight, sit or talk. He was doubly incontinent. My uncle and aunt had to put drinks to his lips. Jack couldn’t look at you or smile at you. He was probably unaware even of who his parents were. But, as my aunt now reflects upon it, it is simply untrue that his life was one of chronic pain. She knew when Jack was in pain because he would cry. But that wasn’t all the time. Not at all. It was typically only when he had ear infections, and he would often stop crying when held. Did he suffer? Sarah is not so sure: ‘He wasn’t aware of his condition in relation to ours’. Apart from his ear infections he had a ‘carefree existence’ until he tragically died of pneumonia at the age of four. So, I simply will not accept that my cousin’s life, as intensely challenging as it often was for my uncle and aunt, constituted a life not worth living. 

The German philosopher Josef Pieper gave a beautiful definition of love. Love, Pieper said, is turning to someone and saying, ‘It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in the world!’ Love, on that view, cannot be expressed any way you want. Love can never be compatible with killing. However merciful your motives, by aborting someone because they have Down syndrome you are doing the opposite of telling them that ‘it’s good that you exist’ or ‘I’m glad you’re here’.

Pieper’s definition of love is crucial too because it refuses to accept that even the most debilitating disability can ultimately cancel out the objective goodness of that person’s existence. And upon that basic thumbs-up to life our civilisation hangs. When we can’t as a society say ‘I’m glad you’re here’ to those with disabilities, even when they are in the womb, then we fail to live up to our promise as a people. 

Alireza Akbar’s execution is a tragedy

UK officials from the Prime Minister downwards have condemned the execution of Iran’s former deputy defence minister, a dual British-Iranian national, in the strongest of terms. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has described it as ‘a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime’. The chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia Kearns, said it was ‘another horrifying example of the Iranian regime… weaponising British nationals and industrialising hostage taking,’ And the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, warned of consequences, saying it would ‘not stand unchallenged’. There will doubtless be a lot more condemnation from London in the hours and days to come.

Alireza Akbari had been charged with spying for the UK, tried in secret and sentenced to death. He had adamantly denied the accusations, saying, in a final smuggled video obtained by the BBC’s Persian Service, that a filmed confession had been extracted only after many hours of torture. The Iranian judiciary’s news outlet confirmed his death by hanging on Saturday morning, without giving a date or a time.

On the face of it, Akbari’s execution looks like another defeat for the UK’s preferred softly-softly response to the arrests and kidnappings of British nationals overseas. His plight was only made public in what turned out to be his last days. His name had gone unmentioned as the names of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori featured in the headlines; it remained unmentioned after they were released. Both sides, it would appear, regarded the stakes as high.

Whatever the truth, much remains sketchy. Akbari was a deputy defence minister in Iran between for several years. Sometime (unspecified) he left the country and, on some also unspecified date, he obtained UK citizenship. What he did and what resources he lived off in those years is not clear. In 2019 he travelled back to Iran, on an invitation to advise government officials, only to be arrested in what appears to have been a classic trap. 

Throughout, there was government and media silence. Here was a former senior Iranian official, now a British national, languishing in an Iranian jail on spying charges, but until his family were invited last week to a parting meeting, his case was kept entirely under wraps.

Missing details, however, do not mean that there are not conclusions to be drawn. First, Akbari’s fate serves to highlight the dire state of UK-Iran relations, after the brief flicker of warming last March, when Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori were released. Their freedom followed the UK’s agreement to pay a long-standing debt – as Iran had demanded. But payment appears not have bought any lasting goodwill. Akbari’s execution shows that the UK’s leverage with Tehran is zero.

A second conclusion is the enduring suspicion that attends Iranian attitudes to the UK, and in particular its intelligence activities. This may be traced a lot further back than the UK-inspired plot to oust Iran’s elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953, but it is has not gone away. All westerners arouse suspicion, but British citizens especially so, and dual nationals – with what is assumed to be at best their dual allegiance – still more.

Which leads to a third conclusion. Akbari’s death, even after intensive last-minute appeals by the UK government, highlights the liabilities of dual citizenship and the difficulties for governments everywhere when dealing with dual nationals in trouble in their ‘other’ country. Some governments might protest more loudly than others but if – as with Akbari, Zaghari-Ratcliffe and others – someone travels to a country where they hold a passport, they will be treated as citizens, not as foreigners. They will not be entitled to visits from their second country’s diplomats, nor will appeals from that second country carry any official weight.

The advantages of dual citizenship, including ease of travel, are one thing. But for those who have sought refuge in another country, going ‘home’ could present risks. Given this, it seems astounding that someone with Akbari’s history and status risked a return to Iran. In some ways, it shows the pull of an original homeland and, as with Zaghari-Ratcliffe and so many others, of family ties.

Most of all, though, Akbari’s fate highlights the dilemma of families and governments when faced with a citizen held in a hostile country. Alistair Burt, a former minister for the Middle East and North Africa, admitted on BBC Newsnight that it was impossible to know whether confidentiality or publicity might be the more productive approach. It might also be added more generally that the UK’s official refusal to pay ransoms, ‘give in’ to hostage-takers, or ‘talk to terrorists’ can limit its options.  

One strand of thinking in relation to Akbari’s case is that this is the regime trying to send the message that a foreign hand is directing Iran’s current protests against Islamic rules. Another is that hardliners in Iran’s theocracy might have wanted to counter the impression of weakness in the face of the current unrest, and that Akbari’s death penalty sends a warning to more liberal elements in the leadership, given his past political allegiances.  

That may or may not be so. In the end, Alireza Akbar’s death has to be seen first and foremost as the tragedy that it is for his family. But it has also to be seen as an expression of the accumulated distrust and hostility that have so long marked relations between Tehran and London, and show no sign of fading soon.

Is the Princess of Wales right about talking therapy?

The Princess of Wales is in hot water for some remarks she made while visiting the Open Door charity in Birkenhead, which helps teenagers with their mental health problems through arts and dance. She is reported to have said: ‘Talking therapies don’t work for some people, they’re not for everybody. It’s so important to have a range of therapies.’ Her remarks have naturally been interpreted as being a veiled swipe at her estranged brother-in-law and his use of psychotherapists. I’m not sure whether it is more po-faced to do that or take her at face value, but she does have an interesting point if she’s not thinking about her privacy-loving family author.

As with all areas of mental illness treatment, talking therapies still don’t have enough research behind them to indicate which ones work best. They don’t also get enough funding for patients to access them. The most popular ones are part of the NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, which is aimed at anxiety and depression. The NHS isn’t meeting its targets on IAPT, with a shortfall of 474,790 people from the 2020–21 target of 1.6 million. But those therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, only work for certain conditions. It is much more difficult for anyone with conditions such as bipolar disorder to get the therapy they need, and for the length of time they need it. 

Then, there is the fact that the world of therapy is a nightmare to navigate, even when someone is in a good mental state. There is no statutory regulator of counselling in the UK, and instead there are a number of organisations to which therapists can be accredited – though of course that’s not a sign of quality. Therapy is intensely personal and even ‘good’ practitioners can find certain patients struggle to form a bond with them, and therefore don’t open up. In some cases, it might just be because the therapist and client don’t get on. In others, it’s because talking is really difficult for a person with a buried childhood trauma that might be manifesting itself in addiction, for instance. Some therapies, used on the wrong patient, can be deeply inappropriate and make dealing with their trauma much harder.

The ‘talking therapies don’t work for some people’ line came when the Princess asked one of the boys helped by the charity if the music workshop he was attending had ‘helped with your personal lives’. His response was: ‘Producing music and letting out what you’re feeling is better than saying it in a clinical atmosphere. I can put it into words. That was tough to explain.’

The problem at the moment is that clinicians don’t always know which therapy, talking or otherwise, might work best for each patient. There are protocols within the NHS for this and for antidepressants, but they are quite clunky. Some researchers are developing a model called the Personalised Advantage Index which will list the likely impact of treatment options for each patient using the data that already exists. That will allow a doctor to decide whether talking therapy is going to work for someone, and then what sort of talking therapy might be best.

Britain’s Ukraine strategy could reap dividends for Brexit

Ever since at least the French revolution it has been in Britain’s strategic interest to ensure no single power or group of powers dominates the continent of Europe. Britain’s motives were always military and, as an international trading nation, commercial. Today the Russian invasion of Ukraine presents the UK with a strategic opportunity to stymie Moscow’s aggression and to mollify the EU’s cussedness over the Brexit settlement.

Britain’s forward military stance on defending Ukraine against Russia is in the same vein as her defence of Belgium in 1914 or Poland in 1939. Britain was a pioneer, with the US, in training Ukrainian troops before 24 February 2022; in insisting that Moscow would invade, despite European scepticism; and in galvanising European support ever since. London’s fear that a successful invasion by Moscow would be the thin end of the wedge, with the Baltic states and perhaps the Balkans next, is now widely shared across Europe. Today the UK continues to make good on its pledge to block Russian aggression, remaining Ukraine’s second largest military contributor, well ahead of Paris and Berlin.

Getting the call right on Russian aggression presents London with the opportunity to reap a commercial benefit from the EU. Britain’s stock has risen amongst EU members, just as France and Germany’s has declined. Today one senses Britain’s Ukraine strategy and its post Brexit strategy aligning.

Britain’s lead role on Ukraine has won strongest plaudits from the likes of Poland and the Scandinavian and Baltic states, who are on the frontline of Russian aggression. Their own high per capita military aid to Kyiv reflects their deep anxiety. It has reiterated Britain’s military value to Europeans in a post-Brexit world. In turn London is sensing that internal EU solidarity – stalwart during the Brexit negotiations – and the EU Commission are now more amenable to practical solutions. In renegotiation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, London could expect Poland, the Baltics and Scandinavians to pressure Paris, Berlin and Brussels into greater concessions, as reward for the recent past and as insurance for the future. It is to be hoped that the Foreign Office, and Whitehall generally, are not only thinking in such terms but ready to follow through. Obstacles to a settlement of the Northern Ireland Protocol remain considerable, such as the role of the European Court of Justice. There is also the fact that since 2021, when Brexit came into force, according to Conservative party’s European Research Group, Northern Ireland has ‘absorbed more than 400 pieces of EU legislation’ which do not apply to the rest of the United Kingdom.

Similarly, the Franco-German axis that President Macron was so enthusiastic in instrumentalising over Brexit is under pressure. France and Germany have fallen out over EU energy policy and pricing, with Paris particularly upset at Germany’s previous anti-nuclear stance contributing to the running down of France’s civil nuclear assets.

The two have applied a sticking plaster to serious differences over the joint future combat aircraft (SCAF) and Paris remains livid at Germany’s intention to continue to buy American F-35s rather than French Rafale fighters. Meanwhile of late, the Elysée has been playing up France’s ties to the UK, and is congratulating itself on being the first overseas country to which King Charles III will make a state visit. Rishi Sunak will also visit Paris on 10 March for a Franco-British summit that will reiterate the importance of Franco-British defence and security cooperation, whose tenth anniversary in 2020 was postponed against a background of Brexit tension.

Although France’s military aid to Ukraine is not even one third of Britain’s, President Macron has seen which way the wind is blowing, has forsaken his ambivalent stance towards Putin, and stiffened his resolve with respect to Ukraine, stating publicly that France wished to see Kyiv’s ‘victory’ and publicly committing to sending French armoured vehicles to Ukraine.

The planets are aligned for London to reap the rewards of its Ukraine strategy. If executed astutely, Britain could emerge having finally tidied up the Brexit loose ends and with her international reputation firmly enhanced, and with even France as a suitor.

Can America rediscover what made it great?

What happens when progress stops? That’s an important question in a country whose self-understanding is deeply tied to the idea of progress — material, technological, political and social. America’s first three centuries were characterised by physically pushing its border across the continent, west to the Pacific and then across nearly 2,500 miles of open ocean. It would not have been obvious to early Americans that Hawaii, a tropical archipelago far away from the California coast, would become the nation’s fiftieth state, joined in a political union with the far-distant original states facing the Atlantic. While the country was expanding in size, rapid progress was made in many other areas: science and technology extended the average life span, elevated living standards and promoted social mobility and broad-based prosperity. Americans have come to expect upward movement to continue: GDP will keep rising and science will make us healthier and wealthier, while political and cultural movements will make us better, happier people.

But progress has slowed, stalled or even reversed in recent decades. Technology is still advancing, but primarily in the digital world. People get married later and have fewer children; life span stopped increasing and has actually declined in the past several years, even before the onset of Covid-19. It now takes two incomes to support a family of four in the middle class; one income was sufficient as recently as the 1980s. Self-reported levels of happiness have dropped. Social trust is diminishing and the social consensus is badly frayed. Distrust of gatekeepers is widespread. The institutions responsible for protecting and advancing the interests of the nation — political, cultural, academic — have failed in their core mission and have become self-interested to the point of sociopathy. In short, America has not been moving upward.

The uncomfortable fact is that civilisational progress doesn’t happen by some law of nature and is not guaranteed to continue indefinitely. Civilisations can rise, achieve greatness and then fade, leaving behind evidence of impressive ingenuity. To the modern mind, it is disorienting to realise that earlier civilisations could have been just as prosperous, secure and happy as our own — perhaps more so.

But the trajectory of civilisation is not somehow upward by definition. Decline and decay are just as possible as progress. In fact, decay is the default: it’s what happens when you just do nothing. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington famously argued, following a classic understanding of national cycles, that every nation is in either a state of development or decline. I would offer a modification that gets to the heart of the matter: there is an invisible force that drives development, which I call vitality.

The vitality of a nation can be judged in two ways: by the private life of its people and by its public life. In the private sphere, a nation is successful if the people are physically secure in their lives and their property; if families are being formed and are free, generally prosperous and self-sustaining; and if those families produce at least enough children to maintain a stable population. That sounds simple, because it describes the basic conditions for personal independence, physical security, social continuity and a general sense of wellbeing. Add to this a broadly shared worldview supported by religious piety and practice and one has the conditions for a vital civilisation. Rome and Athens had this. America used to have it too.

In the public sphere, civilisational vitality is shown in a capacity for collective action, which is rooted in what the fourteenth-century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya. This concept can be understood as social cohesion, national or civilisational purpose, a feeling of being in it together and for the same reasons. When asabiyya is high, societies grow prosperous because high social trust supports complex trade relationships along with specialisation and division of labour, allowing for innovation and the production of luxury goods.

Just as personal vitality grows from a strong sense of identity and purpose, civilisational vitality springs from a shared identity that unites people, legitimises the state and explains its place in the world, and inspires great societal achievements. America has undertaken big projects in the past, from taming the frontier to the early space programme, but our ability to accomplish great things as a nation has waned in recent decades. One reason is a fading sense of national identity and purpose.

When the frontier closed, American national identity was largely set, and the nation’s restless energy then went out into a global project — which now seems to have run its course. Will the engine that propelled this country simply burn out? The past few decades in America have been characterised by five major phenomena: globalisation, financialisation of the economy, science and tech stagnation (despite advances in digital technology), managerialism and risk aversion.

Taken together, these developments have brought us to a crossroads. Numerous indicators of societal health have been trending downward, often reinforcing each other. Some trends owe to factors outside our control, others resulted in part from earlier decisions that were made in good faith and would have seemed right to most smart, informed, well-intentioned people at the time. Now it’s time to reckon with those errors and correct our course.

Many one-time-only advances were made in an earlier era: discovering electricity, preventing polio and other communicable diseases, developing antibiotics. These singular advances brought great material improvements to people’s lives, and the benefits were widely distributed. Let’s look at the average American home in 1900: by the best estimate, only 1 per cent of homes had indoor plumbing. There was no electric light, no refrigerator, no telephone, no washing machine, no television, no car parked outside. All these things were standard in the average American home by 1960. The typical home of 2023 wouldn’t look greatly different: the TV is probably a large flatscreen with many more channels; there are multiple phones and maybe no land line; there’s a PC or some laptops and tablets with internet. But the differences aren’t as dramatic as those between 1900 and 1960.

Things were changing fast and for the better before 1960. America was growing, people were living longer and healthier lives, and living standards were rising. There was a lot of momentum behind American expansion, and when progress slowed down it wasn’t really noticeable for a while. But science has been advancing more slowly and at greater cost, resulting in slower development of new technology that improves living standards, a slower increase in productivity, and lower real economic growth.

This is what Tyler Cowen called ‘the Great Stagnation’ in his 2010 book. A decade later, few people seem willing to accept the idea. Acknowledging that we’re in a period of stagnation seems like a form of heresy, even if its effects are all around us: stagnant wages, a widening wealth gap, a shrinking middle class, endless cycles of debt that trap people in what economic anthropologist David Graeber called bullshit jobs —  ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.’ Obesity and chronic inflammatory diseases have become more widespread. Loneliness and alienation have been rising since before Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000. Social cohesion is weaker and political polarisation is sharper. Americans have even stopped having enough children to keep the population steady, let alone expand it, one consequence of which is that the median age of Americans has climbed from 28.1 in 1970 to 38.3 in 2020. As American society has grown older, it has also become more risk-averse, less willing to take on big challenges that could lead to a more prosperous future.

The main consequence of stagnation is a loss of social mobility: the promise of modern American liberalism has been that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will do better than your parents, and if you go to college, a secure place in the middle class should be a near certainty. Now each new generation is doing worse than the one before it; many find themselves running just to stand still. At every stage of life, Generation X has owned a smaller share of the national wealth than baby boomers did at the same median age, while millennials own even less.

It’s easy to see why millennials are sometimes characterised as a Lost Generation and why sociopathologies — including high rates of drug use, sexual dysfunction, depression and other mental health issues — are so much in evidence among them, along with radical politics. They are a large part of American society, but because they hold such a small share of national wealth relative to the preceding generations at their age, they are more alienated from the system and resentful of the status quo. As a result, they look for answers. They’re not just asking, ‘Why are things the way they are?’ but, ‘I’m an adult now, how do I get my rightful share?’ Since the political mainstream appears to have failed them, many are inclined to seek answers outside it. One way to understand the rise of bitcoin is as an end-run around the existing financial system, which remains disproportionately controlled by boomers. The millennials and zoomers who see little hope for success within it are building an alternative.

We’re seeing a pattern of downward mobility and a proletarianisation of the American people. There are declining prospects for individuals, increasing precarity, and more social dysfunction. There is more inequality and more polarisation, both contributing to institutional decay. These symptoms have been much remarked upon, but the underlying malady has gone undiagnosed. If we want to arrest the disintegrative trends, we need to start by recognising that the decay is further advanced and far deeper than either the left or the right will admit. It also cuts across the left/right political dialectic that has prevailed since the end of world war two.

As much as these things are discussed, their causes are often misunderstood. Adding to the slowdown in science, structural demographic forces combine to create an environment ripe for conflict. The symptoms of societal decay are typically seen through a narrowly ideological lens. Political liberals blame billionaires, greed and bigotry for growing inequality, and call for redistributing wealth from billionaires to everyone else — which would not solve the underlying problem. Some conservatives see insufficient devotion to the cause of liberty behind the country’s malaise, while others identify a spiritual crisis leading to cultural degradation. While I’m quite sympathetic to the idea that there is a spiritual deficit in America, it is only part of the problem I’m describing here.

Many of the problems facing America today can be seen throughout the developed world, but the solutions will need to be distinctly American. A prerequisite for recovering national vitality is to regain a national purpose and identity. In this age of heightened awareness of group identities, the national identity that binds us together is given short shrift when the very concept isn’t being decried as oppressive. When a people loses its sense of itself and its place and purpose in the world, it disintegrates from within.

After world war two, the Cold War played a similar role to the frontier. Now the postwar American hyperproject has run its course. The factories have been exported, and proletarianisation is trickling up from the American working class to the professional managerial class. Even the merely rich are being left behind by the superrich. Industrial agriculture has exacted a great cost on the family farm and the environment. American pop culture, while still a powerful global phenomenon, is increasingly rejected by people in central and eastern Europe, across Asia, in the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere in favour of homegrown culture that better reflects local sensibilities. Since 1941, the American military has never been completely at peace. After world war two came the Cold War and interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Africa, Colombia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq again, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and so on. Our military interventions have become a tragic farce that undermines our security, bleeds our young people and distracts attention from problems at home. The Great Power competition of the nineteenth century gave way to the ideological conflict of the twentieth century and is now being replaced by rivalries between civilisation-states, particularly China, India and Russia.

These are big changes in the way the world works, yet American elites still cling to a worldview born in the 1940s. It’s past time to rethink the national project and identity, and then move forward boldly.

One prerequisite for moving in a positive direction is to recognise the value of accepting risk. That may seem counterintuitive when any number of studies demonstrate that most people will choose security over freedom, justice, equality, or almost anything else. In fact, it’s difficult to accomplish normal things like raising a family when you have too much risk in your life, especially the wrong types of risk: there’s a big difference between the risk of taking Oxycontin and that of starting a homestead on the edge of civilisation.

The mitigation of risk is perfectly human and generally beneficial, but it also breeds complacency and a reluctance to take on big challenges that can move us forward. Looking back at the successes of the past several generations, it’s too easy to assume that progress is simply natural, when in fact it results from bold and courageous action.

Taking risks was a defining part of the American culture from the time the Pilgrims crossed an ocean to settle in a strange land, through the era of pioneers in covered wagons venturing into the wilderness, to the day that astronauts landed on the moon. Ironically, our society’s present risk aversion puts us in a very risky situation because it has caused stagnation, which increases social dysfunction and political conflict, and makes us less equipped to meet emerging global challenges. We need to recognise the danger we are in and be willing to take on risks to reverse the forces of decay. We can all have a part in restoring the national vitality that benefits all Americans.

This is an edited excerpt from America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay, which first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.

Is Prince Harry blackmailing his family?

For all of the noise that Prince Harry has made over the past few days (weeks, months, and years) about his loathing of the British media, he knows – or has been made aware by his publishers – of the necessity of sitting down with journalists in order to promote his book. And so it is that, yielding to the entreaties of publicity, he has been interviewed by the estimable Bryony Gordon for the Telegraph. It’s an interesting feature, full of colour and anecdote, and demonstrates, as if it needed to, that the rebellious prince remains a source of endless fascination to everyone in his former home country.

Yet the piece is dominated by one news line: Harry’s revelation that he has at least another book’s worth of considerably more scandalous material, which was dropped from his memoir for fear of causing irreconcilable offence, and his implicit threat that it could yet be published. In his words, ‘There are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know. Because I don’t think they would ever forgive me.’

The Duke is clearly having his cake and eating it here, despite his protestations of diplomacy. Anyone who has read Spare – a vast number of people, if the early sales are anything to go by – will have been told about scandalous and jaw-dropping revelations about physical fights with William, and some fairly unflattering presentations of the King as emotionally and personally detached. Yet if there are yet more details that have been censored, but are lurking in a figurative little black book, the suggestion is clear: dance to my tune, or they will emerge in a future volume. He also states that the media has ‘a shit tonne of dirt’ about his family; the implication is that he will corroborate this, if required.

This appears to be, of course, nothing less than blackmail. Given that there are still questions swirling about how accurate Spare is – never did the phrase ‘recollections may vary’ seem more appropriate – then it would be easy to describe yet more scandalous revelations emerging as an attempt on Harry’s part to continue to convey his feelings of anger at his family in as public a fashion as possible. It also seems clear that the suggestion of further damaging revelations means that he is uninterested in any kind of behind-the-scenes peace settlement. He will not meet ‘the Firm’ halfway, or agree to anything other than a formal summit and a public apology.

The risk that Harry faces is that the Royal Family will call his bluff, and then the 400 pages of deleted revelations and scandal that he alludes to are nothing more than scuttlebutt and filler. Given the ridicule that many of the more lurid stories in Spare has attracted, not least the now-viral anecdote about his applying Elizabeth Arden cream to his frostbitten ‘todger’, one would not bet against more of the same emerging, which would reduce him to a laughing stock. Yet given the apparently insatiable public appetite for gossip, however absurd, one would not bet against a follow-up volume – quite literally, sparing nobody – being just as great a sensation. Lest we forget, Harry has signed a multi-book deal. This particular saga looks as if it shows no signs of being concluded, amicably or otherwise.

The race to replace Mark Drakeford has already begun

In Britain it is rare for politicians to be able to decide how their career ends. But that’s not the case in Wales. Welsh Labour leaders enjoy such a tight grip over events that they can pick the exact moment they leave the damp stage at Cardiff Bay, even after a remarkably long time in power. Rhodri Morgan served as First Minister for close to ten years; Carwyn Jones was in the job for nine. Neither experienced serious challenges to their leadership. 

In the absence of parliamentary drama, electoral upsets and competent opposition, this slumberous pattern will continue. After four years, Mark Drakeford has indicated it will soon be time for him to go.  

As so often with the First Minister there has been little theatre when it comes to his departure. Unlike his predecessor Jones, who dramatically (and unexpectedly) announced his resignation at a party conference in 2018, Drakeford has been consistent about not wanting to be leader forever. Even when he ran to be First Minister in 2018, he proclaimed ‘no burning desire’ to be leader. 

In a recent interview the First Minister conceded he didn’t expect to be in the job beyond 2024. The time is right, he says, to elect ‘somebody who looks ahead to the next 25 years’ of devolution. What that means in reality is that another Labour politician will wear the crown of Welsh politics, after an internal leadership election concludes.

Becoming leader of Labour in Wales tends to mean an almost guaranteed decade in power. And there are two obvious candidates to take the helm. Jeremy Miles and Vaughan Gething are at the heart of the devolved government, holding briefs for education and the economy respectively. The only problem is that we have little idea about the kinds of government they would want to lead. 

As Health Minister during the pandemic, Gething is a more familiar face in Wales. He also has more ministerial experience, which will appeal to elected members’ craving for stability, and an understanding of the ins-and-outs of the leadership process after running against Drakeford last time.  

But it may well be his close links to the trade unions (Gething was the youngest leader of NUS Wales and the first black president of the country’s TUC) which seals the deal for him. He is already on carefully choreographed manoeuvres: last month he was in Qatar for the World Cup while banging the drum for investment in Wales. He has also begun in interviews to outline his economic vision for the country. 

Miles, meanwhile, has had a rapid rise through Welsh politics. After entering parliament in 2016 he was promoted the following year to the cabinet, eventually becoming minister for education in 2021. He is a fluent Cymraeg speaker, and has established clear ownership of the government’s Welsh language strategy to achieve one million speakers by 2050. The only problem is that the latest census figures show that the number of Welsh speakers has declined during the last decade. 

What separates the two men most clearly is their vision for the country and their relationship to the wider Labour party. Miles, rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be more closely aligned to the tradition established by Rhodri Morgan of ‘clear red water’ between Welsh and Westminster Labour. This counts for a lot in Welsh Labour. Gething’s recent appearance at UK Labour’s business conference, on the other hand, suggests he may be much closer to the party in Westminster. 

With any coronation comes uncertainty. Eventually, Welsh Labour’s ‘chosen one’ will have to face the electorate in the 2026 Senedd election. So far the country’s ailing economy, and falling standards in education and health, have not deterred voters from pledging their support for Welsh Labour. Missed policy targets now seem to be accepted by voters.  

But by 2026, a generation of Welsh Labour rule will have passed. As they always eventually do, voters may grow tired of Labour by this point – particularly if they are in charge at Westminster, too.

The prospect of Prime Minister Keir Starmer poses its own challenges for Welsh Labour. The party has demanded that further powers flow down the M4 from London to Cardiff Bay. But Gordon Brown’s constitutional commission, released last year, suggests that continued devolution won’t be as swift or sweeping as many would like in Wales. How the next First Minister manages that tension will continue to define internal Labour politics. Soon a row may burst out into the open. 

As First Minister, Drakeford has navigated these political waters skilfully. His electoral mandate, public profile and power base have made him an almost indestructible leader. His shadow over Labour and Welsh politics looms large. People often forget that Drakeford was an adviser to his mentor Rhodri Morgan in the first decade of devolution; in the second he became one of its chief ministers and eventual figurehead. But unlike other classicists in British politics, the legend of Cincinnatus tending to his plough will not dwell on Drakeford’s mind as he steps down.

Above all, Drakeford will be frustrated that speculation about his successor has already started. Soon he will become yesterday’s man. The race to succeed him has begun.  

How oligarchs use Brussels to launder their reputations

When the police raided the home of the former socialist MEP and lawyer Pier Antonio Panzeri and found €500,000 in cash as part of the most serious corruption case in the European Parliament in decades, nobody noticed one of his clients was an oligarch who is the subject of the biggest civil fraud case in British legal history.  

This tawdry scandal has focused on claims that Qatar funded an influence operation in the European parliament which resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of MEPs and a former vice-president. Over €1.5 million in cash has since been discovered stashed away in flats, offices, and hotel rooms across Brussels, France and Italy. The payments were allegedly part of a lobbying operation to bolster Qatar’s reputation and counter scrutiny during the World Cup of its human rights record. It is a devastating blow to the EU’s credibility. 

The investigation is focusing on the parliament’s human rights sub-committee which Panzeri was chairman of. Even though it is not a legislative body, the committee shines an influential spotlight on human rights abuses by countries outside the EU which makes it an ideal target for lobbying by international kleptocrats. 

And like Qatar, oligarchs have used Europe as a vehicle for rehabilitating their reputation and diverting attention away from allegations of criminality and controversy. A case in point is the Kazakh oligarch fugitive Mukhtar Ablyazov who last month was found guilty of a $218 million fraud in a US court and has been on the run from the UK courts since 2012. He was convicted in the UK of lying under oath about owning a London mansion, forging documents and contempt of court. He had been accused of embezzling $6 billion from Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank as chairman by channelling funds to thousands of offshore companies of which he was the beneficiary.  

Ablyazov fled to London, bought several properties and was sued by BTA bank for fraud. He lived a lavish lifestyle, living in a nine-bedroom mansion with an indoor swimming pool on Bishops Avenue, Hampstead, and a 100-acre estate on the edge of Windsor Great Park. But he declined to disclose details of his assets to the High Court and in 2012 was found guilty of contempt of court. ‘It is difficult to imagine a party to commercial litigation who has acted with more cynicism, opportunism and deviousness towards court orders than Mr Ablyazov’, declared Lord Justice Maurice Kay. 

An arrest warrant was issued against the oligarch who was sentenced to 22 months in jail for contempt of court. But just before the judgment was issued Ablyazov jumped out of a hotel room window, caught a coach from Victoria down to Dover and escaped to France by ferry. In his absence the High Court ordered Ablyazov to pay £1.02 billion and in 2019 issued a second arrest warrant. He was jailed in France but obtained political asylum. 

In exile the oligarch has assiduously courted European politicians to promote his defence that the fraud allegations are politically motivated because he was a vocal opponent of the Kazakhstan regime. One of his most diligent lawyers and active supporters was Panzeri who promoted Ablyazov’s agenda. Multiple parliamentary motions condemned the persecution of ‘dissidents’ and one even called for the protection of Ablyazov himself.   

Panzeri worked closely with NGOs like the Brussels-based Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF) which campaigns against human rights abuses. The MEP hosted events, made introductions and acted as a de facto lobbyist for Ablyazov. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Ablyazov, the NGO remains a staunch supporter of the oligarch. ‘ODF has included Ablyazov within our advocacy of defending thousands of victims of political persecution in Kazakhstan’, a spokesperson told me. ‘ODF defended Ablyazov, as well as his family members and associates between 2013 and 2016, at a time when Kazakhstan, through Russia and Ukraine, prosecuted dozens of people in politically motivated cases.’ 

The Kazakh oligarch claims the fraud and money laundering allegations are ‘the culmination of the campaign by former President Nazarbayev and his allies to wrest ownership and control of BTA bank from (Ablyazov)’. His lawyers stated he fled London because of ‘a death threat’ and was ‘constantly in fear of his life’ by Kazakh intelligence agents.  

Ablyazov remains in exile in France. But his luck appears to be running out. Last month he lost his appeal regarding his asylum status. Characteristically he appealed again and is allowed to stay in the country until the final ruling. ‘In the Judgement of CNDA (French Asylum court), Mr Ablyazov was recognised as a politically prosecuted person as part of his fight to bring democracy to Kazakhstan’, his lawyer Karim Beylouni told me. 

But the oligarch also potentially faces an ongoing criminal investigation in France for fraud. The prosecutors and BTA bank have filed an appeal with the Supreme Court after a court ruled the statute of limitation has expired. ‘Ablyazov bankrupted one of Kazakhstan’s biggest banks by committing one of the largest frauds in modern history, amounting to at least $7.5 billion’, Elena Fedorova, a BTA bank lawyer, told me. The appeal will be heard before June of this year. 

Today the claim against Ablyazov remains the biggest civil fraud case in British legal history. Despite his conviction for contempt of court and multiple offences, the prosecuting authorities have been remarkably complacent. The Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the evidence and refused to act. In 2019, after the second arrest warrant was issued, the UK National Crime Agency had access to all the files but declined to investigate because of ‘insufficient resources’. His extradition to face justice looks very unlikely.  

Meanwhile, Ablyazov’s cunning ploy of using political persecution as a diversionary tactic has been effective and the European parliament has been a willing accomplice. But his close relationship with one of the main suspects in this latest criminal investigation may return to haunt him.  

The ghastliness of Vivienne Westwood

Seeing the swathe of superlatives wheeled out about Vivienne Westwood after her death last year at the age of 81, it felt for a moment like Elizabeth the Great had died all over again. Acolytes from Victoria Beckham to Sadiq Khan delivered their fawning tributes – my favourite was from Bella Hadid, who lamented the loss of ‘the most epic human being that has walked this earth.’ But the two women, Queen Elizabeth and Westwood, were as different as chalk and cheesecloth. The designer was a graceless, grasping woman, with an opinion – always wrong – about everything. No matter how much she complained and explained, she never convinced me that she was anything more than a hyped-up hustler.

Westwood was a hypocrite. At her 2013-14 runway show the audience found her Climate Revolution manifesto printed on the back of the show’s production notes. ‘Capitalism is as corrupt as a rotten apple… U accept because u think there’s no alternative. But we have hope (war is fought 4 land + cheap labour). Change the economy – NO MAN’S LAND. Start by renting use of land, ocean + air – target: sustainability + peace.’

What a shame, then, that for a long time Westwood received the dubious honour of having the lowest rating possible for environmental sustainability on Rank A Brand, the non-profit foundation which compared the carbon footprint of leading fashion, food and homeware manufacturers, noting that her favouring of PVC, plastics, and petrol-based polymers was especially damaging – as well as the fact that many of her clothes were made in China, which is known for its sweat-shop labour. By the time Rank a Brand was incorporated into the similarly-intentioned Good On You – ‘Creating a world where it’s easy for anyone, anywhere to buy better’ – the Dame had been promoted to the status of ‘It’s a start’. But not much of one: ‘There is no evidence it ensures payment of a living wage in its supply chain.’ To be fair, Westwood seemed to partially comprehend her own duplicity: questioned by Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian about what Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune had written about her (‘How dare she send out a show laced with anarchist messages, announce that the spirit of her show is “the more you consume, the less you think” and then take the opportunity to launch her collection of punk safety pins in diamonds?’) she could only come up with ‘I don’t feel very comfortable defending my fashion except to say that people don’t have to buy it. You do have to consume. You have to live. If you’ve got the money to be able to afford it, then it’s really good to buy something from me’.

Being greedy and being stingy often go together; stinginess is the halitosis of the soul. A fashion insider told me ‘She was once offered corn-made packaging garments bags which dissolve naturally – and she declined as it was slightly more expensive than plastic packaging.’  (Mind you, Westwood didn’t love allplastics; an item on Popbitch recalls her overheard in a theatre chiding her husband as he returned from the bar ‘Really darling, do they not have glassware here? Or am I expected to drink wine from a plastic cup?’) I’ve heard so many clowns say ‘She was never interested in money’ which is like saying that I’m not interested in vodkatinis. Publication of company accounts in 2015 revealed that she was sending £2 million a year to an off-shore account in Luxembourg; a friend says ‘I remember a mate of mine years ago making her corsets in her bedsit that were sold at the time for several hundred pounds. She got £15 per corset.’ No wonder she left an estimated £150 million fortune.

But for me, the worst thing about her was her intern programme which meant – for all her blather about revolution – that only the children of the wealthy could work for her as she paid them nothing. Fashion to some extent runs on an ‘economy of hope’ with interns thinking ‘if I do this job for nothing and I do really well, maybe I’ll get noticed and actually put on the payroll at some point’. How cruel to exploit the dreams of the young – and to make it possible only for rich kids to get a start.

Westwood passed as clever only because fashion folk are so thick. I spent some time around them in my twenties when my new husband’s two best friends were the boyfriends of Katharine Hamnett and Isabella Blow and it was quite the eye-opener – or rather, eye-closer. I grew up in the less than intellectual world of rock music as a teenage reporter, but fashion people make pop stars seem like rocket scientists; hearing the Ramones attempt to converse was like being at the Algonquin Round Table in comparison. All my life I’ve loved the company of my fellow hacks, more than drink and drugs even, but I was amazed how the addition of the word ‘fashion’ in front of ‘journalist’ instantly transformed a potential fun new friend into an ocean-going ninny entirely capable of using words like ‘genius’ about a blouse. The way rag trade types talk about clothes ‘expressing your personality’ is a giveaway: most of us express our personalities through speech and action and a thing called wit. This sojourn led me to the conclusion that those who care about clothes really are the dullest people in the world, and this is why their elaborate window-dressing is so important to them.

Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months’. Westwood couldbe a good designer when she put aside any idea of being an artist, but like a lot of people who spent too long at art school she thought it shameful to be just a dressmaker. Her dresses weren’t made for the usual stick insects gay male designers tend to favour, which made women pathetically grateful to her. But all the ‘strong woman’ tributes ring somewhat hollow for a woman who at the start of her career made CAMBRIDGE RAPIST T-shirts and towards the end was Julian Assange’s chief groupie. John Lydon put it well, with characteristic insight, calling Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ‘a pair of shysters – they would sell anything to any trend that they could grab onto.’

Westwood was fashion’s sacred cow, but such gushing adulation as we witnessed on her death is just so un-punk,for want of a more elegant phrase. She wasn’t a rebel; rebels don’t accept OBEs, rebels don’t avoid tax, rebels don’t have interns work for free. Rather, she was a dull person’s idea of an interesting person. A message posted on her official Twitter page read ‘The world needs people like Vivienne to make a change for the better.’ No, we don’t. Because it wasn’t only when she went knicker-less to Buckingham Palace to accept her honour that this empress had no clothes.

Pasta bake: a recipe to cure the January blues

I love pasta bake more than is reasonable: I would struggle to name a dish that brings the same level of comfort even from first thought. From the moment I consider making one, I am already reassured: confident in the knowledge that it is a dish which will deliver everything that is required for culinary succour.

This isn’t your average student pasta bake: slow-cooked ragu, a topping cooked at a hot temperature until blackened in places and blistering; a time investment that means delayed gratification, but for the most part can be left to its own devices, to simmer, to bubble, to bake. Saucy and deeply savoury, hot and packed with carbs: it can’t fail to please.

This recipe has magical powers: it can quell hangovers, make you forget broken boilers, fix January blues and draw recalcitrant teenagers from their rooms.

I don’t pretend for one moment that this dish tends towards authenticity; this is the pasta bake of my 1990s childhood in Northern England, peered at through oven doors, the smell winding up staircases. But it is loosely based on the Greek pastitsio, a baked pasta dish made with minced lamb and topped with a dairy-based sauce.

The skin of a pasta bake is more fought over in my household than even that of a rice pudding or roasted chicken. Made here not with béchamel but with something closer to a savoury custard: Greek yoghurt bound with eggs and studded with mature cheddar and crumbled feta, that melt and meld together to produce a gently wibbling, luscious topping.

Makes Supper for 4

Takes 45 minutes

Bakes 30-45 minutes

What you need

2 tablespoons oil

1 carrot

2 ribs of celery

1 medium onion

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon tomato paste

400g lamb mince

200ml lamb stock

100ml red wine

1 bay leaf

400g tinned tomatoes

400g rigatoni

700ml Greek yoghurt

100g extra mature cheddar

100g feta

3 eggs

1. Heat one tablespoon of oil in a heavy-bottomed pan over a medium-high heat and add the lamb mince. Cook until the mince is browned, stirring to get an even colour all over. Set to one side.
2. Pour away any fat or liquid that has accumulated in the pan from the lamb. Add the second tablespoon of oil to the pan and turn the heat down low. Finely dice the onion, carrot and celery and cook until soft, but not coloured: about ten minutes. Mince the garlic, add to the pan and cook for another three minutes. Stir the tomato paste through the vegetables, return the meat to the pan and add the tinned tomatoes, red wine, bay leaf and lamb stock. Bring to a gentle boil, and leave to simmer for 45 minutes, until the liquid has reduced and thickened into a ragu consistency. Remove the bay leaves.
3. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions, and drain thoroughly. Stir the pasta through the lamb ragu, and spoon into a large, oven-safe dish.
4. Beat the eggs with a fork, and stir through the Greek yoghurt. Grate the cheddar and crumble the feta and stir through the yoghurt mixture. Spoon this on top of the pasta.
5. Place the dish in the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes until the top is burnished and glossy.

Scrapping university personal statements is a mistake

The decision to scrap personal statements shows up our university system for what it really is: the priority is no longer about educating students, or academic endeavour, but expansion for expansion’s sake.

Ucas (the Universities and College Admissions Service) plans to replace the current applicant essay with a survey. This will reportedly ask taxing questions such as why applicants are motivated to study a particular course, why they are ‘ready to succeed’ and any context for their academic achievements – or lack thereof – so far. The justification? That the status quo is unfair on those students without access to ‘high-quality advice and guidance’. Yet the decision to get rid of personal statements from the university application process will erode standards and only makes the case for total reform of the sector stronger.

It’s no surprise that pupils at leading private schools receive more application help than state school students from poorer homes. The private school I went to provided me with plenty of advice, and I wrote up seven or eight drafts of my personal statement before it was finalised. My Oxford contemporaries who got in without such help deserve more credit than me – even if being a public schoolboy at Oxford now looks to be an increasing disadvantage. 

But just because the current personal statement system can be unfair, it doesn’t mean replacing it is wise. More than eight in ten university applicants surveyed by Ucas found the current application process stressful; 79 per cent found it difficult to complete. This should be welcomed: stress and difficulty are natural parts of a process designed to test candidates’ ability to communicate subject aptitude. That Ucas wants to get by without them shows how little importance our universities now place on studying and academics. 

Tony Blair’s dream of more than 50 per cent of school leavers going to university has now been realised. That represents a tenfold increase in the number of people taking degrees since the 1980s. This is despite English 16–24-year-olds being less likely to be numerate and literate than their parents and grandparents. It’s not higher academic standards, though, that are responsible for these increased student numbers over the decades, but a broken business model. 

Rampant grade inflation at school has bedded in over a number of years. Even before the pandemic, A and A* grades almost doubled at A-level, and more pupils than ever were receiving top grades. This has fed through into universities. By last summer, four in ten graduates were receiving a first; in particular, the number doing so after achieving three Ds or lower at A-level had soared. This is hard to square with a generation struggling to read and write properly. Instead, it shows that what students learn at university has increasingly little bearing on the grades they are given. The so-called ‘graduate premium’ is increasingly meaningless in an over-saturated market. 

Who is responsible for the mess the university system finds itself in? Successive governments share the blame. Margaret Thatcher put universities on track to becoming businesses first and places of learning second. John Major renamed the polytechnics to create dozens more universities overnight; Tony Blair put numbers before standards. The coalition’s tuition fee hike meant more students racked up more debt doing courses of decreasing value. 

All this has done is create one big vicious cycle. An ever-expanding undergraduate population has forced universities to borrow money for increasing capacity years in advance. To attract students, they want to be as high up the league tables as possible. This incentivises them to provide the best grades possible – whatever the quality of work produced. The intellectual quality of students entering the system is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Who needs a personal statement when the logical outcome is that one day everyone will get firsts? 

This model cannot be sustained. Rising interest rates mean the university debt bubble will become harder to finance. With increasing numbers of graduates unlikely to ever pay off their tuition fee loans, this means a bigger burden on the taxpayer. By the 2040s, it has been predicted that this could cost the Treasury well above 10 per cent of GDP. This cost will only rise if undereducated graduates contribute less to the economy than government modellers expect. 

What, then, can be done about this? The university system has to be overhauled, grade inflation stamped out in school, underperforming universities closed. Personal statements should be retained and the application system made more rigorous. Undergraduate numbers must fall – draw a line: no university places for anyone receiving anything under a B or C. Those institutions that survive should be funded by central government, private donations or fees, rather than a debt mountain.

Neither the Conservative or Labour party wants to change the status quo. The Tories may rail against campus wokery, but they have no desire to reform a sector that provides one of the country’s few growing industries. A conveyer belt of arts graduates also conveniently provides Labour with a substantial chunk of their future voter base. 

This week’s announcement is the latest sorry symptom of a sick university system. Whether you believe a degree is worthwhile for its own sake, or just a necessary step towards a job, this constitutes a tragic waste of human potential. The university blob’s unwillingness to wake up to their delusion of a thriving university system means the problem of falling standards, meaningless grades and ballooning debts will only grow. It will be students – and the taxpayer – who pay the price.

Has Soledar fallen to the Russians?

Moscow this morning hailed the ‘liberation’ of Soledar, a strategic point in the battle for control of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Wednesday that his mercenaries – who are spearheading the offensive – were in control of the salt-mining town (or what remains of it). It was denied at the time, but the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has said it believes Russian forces have taken ‘most, if not all’ of the town.

Ukraine insists that the fighting is ongoing and that its soldiers ‘are bravely trying to hold the defence’, but the institute says this probably refers to positions around Soledar and that it now seems that Moscow has ‘pushed Ukrainian forces out of the western outskirts of the settlement’. The British Ministry of Defence also says Russia probably has control of ‘most of the settlement’. But in a video, a Ukrainian soldier asks people not to believe ‘Russian propaganda’ and says that ‘fierce battles’ for Soledar are still taking place.

Russia switched its main attacking efforts to Soledar at the end of December after months of failing to take Bakhmut, a city some 20 km to the south-east, which has been half-destroyed by the fighting. But tactically, taking Soledar might may be ‘at best a Russian Pyrrhic tactical victory’, says the ISW, as Moscow – stung by recent defeats – has committed significant resources into a battle that has been compared to ‘the Ypres or the Stalingrad of the 2020s’. Russia’s goal will be to encircle Bakhmut by cutting off supplies to the Ukrainian army using the Siversk-Bakhmut and Slovyansk-Bakhmut highways. Ukraine, however, retains stable defence of these roots – and is focused on preserving it, rather than going all-out defending Soledar. For this reason, British intelligence says Russia is ‘unlikely’ to move to surround Bakhmut.

But there is another goal too: money and propaganda. The Kremlin is claiming victory, telling Russian reporters ‘this is not the time to stop, this is not the time to rub your hands. The main work is still ahead’. The mines of Soledar and Bakhmut, both of which are rich in salt and gypsum, will be valuable to the likes of Prigozhin, a Kremlin oligarch. Europe’s largest salt production company, Artemsil, is located in Soledar. That may explain why the most professional units of the Wagner Group were sent to capture the town. There is also an ongoing conflict between Prigozhin, who is attempting to gain political influence in the Kremlin, and the Russian defence ministry. Prigozhin has criticised the ministry for its corruption and bad strategy and claims that it ‘constantly steals victory from (the) Wagner Group’.

The Ukrainian weather has been a problem for both sides – not because it’s freezing but because it’s too mild. Heavy equipment doesn’t travel well: tanks get stuck in swamps. Now, Russia is dispatching small assault groups of up to nine people to carry out the attacks, according to Colonel Vladislav Seleznyov of the Ukrainian armed forces. This strategy allows them to avoid the concentrated fire of Ukrainian artillery. ‘Battles are fought directly in the city, and this increases the risk of losses, because the most difficult type of battle is a battle in an urbanised area,’ he says.

Part of the fighting has been happening near the entrances to the tunnels of the salt mines. Theoretically, Russian troops could use these tunnels to attack the Ukrainian army from the rear. But it would be difficult: they would need to be sure not to get lost underground and would have to find a way to keep electricity for going down to a depth of 200 metres – and for coming back up. The Kremlin is instead using an easier strategy: to overwhelm Ukrainian soldiers with the amount of bodies. ‘The enemy advances literally on the corpses of their own soldiers, using artillery and multiple rocket launchers, covering even their own fighters with fire,’ saidAnna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister.

Victory in Soledar is crucial to sustain Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine. During the first wave of conscription, 300,000 Russians were drafted into the army. In the coming days, the Kremlin may call up another 500,000, according to Ukrainian intelligence. Rumours in Russia have confirmed it: three weeks ago the Moscow Times published an article saying that the authorities forbade the Russian mass media to report on the conscription for war in Ukraine. The capture of Soledar would be Russia’s first victory in many months, feeding the propaganda’s calls to join the army. Also, even in the destroyed town, Russian forces will be more protected than in the fields.

ISW analytics have found that the capture of Soledar – a small Cossack town – will be a relatively small advantage for Russian forces. The Wagner Group may have sent its best people, but even the mercenaries do not have a limitless supply of fighters. The heavy casualties will need to be replenished by a fresh conscription drive or by transferring Russian troops from other hotspots. This will be hard if (as Ukrainian command keeps hinting) a new offensive is coming. If tanks from Poland and Britain arrive as promised, Ukraine can win a significant advantage against Russian troops who are stuck using Soviet-era weapons (and are highly likely to be using convict labour to make more weapons).

If the Russian army has already captured Soledar, there are still reasons for Kyiv to deny it. Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting for every centimetre of that town while dozens of lives have been lost in the past weeks. And there is still hope that Russia can be pushed out of the city.

Some in Ukraine may see the loss of Soledar as a Ukrainian failure (after months of small victories) which may, in turn, weaken western support. A CBS/YouGov poll of 2,100 Americans (the first following Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to Washington), suggests a slim majority of Republican voters (52%) oppose sending more aid to Ukraine. But the fight for Soledar should reinforce Zelensky’s point: the battle is in a crucial phase, and more weapons are needed to repel the invader.

Svitlana Morenets writes a weekly email, Ukraine in Focus, for The Spectator. Sign up for free here

An LGBTQ+ conversion therapy ban is bound to backfire

Advertising and promoting conversion ‘therapy’ to under 18s could soon be banned if a group of MPs get their way. Alicia Kearns, the Tory MP and leader of the Foreign Affairs committee, has laid an amendment to the Online Safety Bill which says ‘content which advertises or promotes the practice of so-called conversion practices of LGBTQ+ individuals must be considered as harmful’. 

What’s wrong with that? On the surface, the amendment sounds both innocuous and sensible. Of course, we would hope and expect that all MPs would be against persecution. But this amendment will have consequences that go far beyond that noble aim – with serious and dangerous results. 

If this amendment is passed, professionals simply trying to do their jobs could be accused of practising conversion therapy – because the amendment fails to define what it entails. 

Children questioning their biological sex have the right to receive clinical investigation before they are told their only solution is to become transgender. The amendment risks seriously jeopardising the ground-breaking academic work of Dr Hilary Cass, who exposed the clinical failings of the UK’s gender identity service (GIDS). 

Discussion of the rights of different groups is vital for a functioning democracy where freedom of speech is valued. This amendment is a threat to that core principle. In trying to protect trans people from ‘conversion’ therapy, it risks entrapping professionals who are simply trying to do their job.

The amendment fails to define what LGBTQ+ means. It’s a broad umbrella term that includes a slew of identities. But who does it – and doesn’t it – include? 

The inconspicuous ‘+’ symbol is perhaps the most dangerous part of this acronym. ‘Queer theorists’ have created an alphabet of weird and wonderful identities that could become welcome under the ‘plus’. There is no symbol, word or sentence that should be beneath the legislator’s attention when it comes to the law. If passed, the lack of definitions within this amendment leaves the entire bill wide open to abuse. 

The Government’s recent Online Advertising Programme consultation dealt thoroughly with how children will be adequately safeguarded from harmful and inappropriate content. It made clear that the bill in question will require companies where children use their services to be accountable, both for minimising harmful content and protecting of freedom of expression. 

The controversy surrounding the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in Scotland, highlighted by Policy Exchange in a paper this week, has demonstrated the vital importance of scrupulous definition when it comes to legislation. 

When politicians can’t agree on what they’re talking about – particularly in controversial amendments such as Kearns’ – the fallout can be disastrous. Those who support this amendment should be wary of wading into a battle they will very likely find themselves on the losing side of.

Starmer is plotting mischief over the Northern Ireland Protocol

Speaking in Belfast this morning, Keir Starmer offered ‘political cover’ to the Prime Minister over any change to the Northern Ireland Protocol. A new deal with the EU is thought to be imminent – and Labour sees the chance for mischief.

Starmer said it is ‘time to put Northern Ireland above a Brexit purity cult’ and that ‘we can find ways to remove the majority of checks’ through new solutions, adding that ‘there are legitimate problems with the Protocol and these must be recognised in any negotiations’.

His comments are a recognition of the Protocol’s relevance over the next few months. Both the EU and the UK are hopeful of moving closer towards a settlement on post-Brexit trading arrangements, with a new data-sharing agreement this week being hailed by James Cleverly as a ‘positive step’. On Monday, Cleverly is due to meet Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, to discuss the sharing of customs data to reduce the number of checks on goods. Right now, about 20 per cent of all checks on the EU’s external border take place in Northern Ireland.

Starmer’s speech is well-timed. Officials in Downing Street are fearful about what Tory Brexiteers might do if the DUP does not endorse any new agreement. In publicly offering ‘political cover’ for such changes, Starmer is seeking to depict himself as a magnanimous statesman acting in the national interest – while blaming the political stalemate on Rishi Sunak and Conservative MPs.