The Battle for Britain | 17 December 2022

Will Hunt’s ‘Brexit freedoms’ kickstart Britain’s economy?

Rishi Sunak’s government is trying to strike a difficult balance when it comes to discussing economic growth. On the one hand, there is broad consensus that the Liz Truss days (literally… just days) had to be dismantled to regain trust with the markets and retain the UK’s ability to keep borrowing at a stable price. On the other hand, there is recognition among ministers that the only way out of this high-tax spiral is to spur on some economic growth. In other words: achieve Truss’s goal while avoiding the many mistakes she made in her attempts to get there.

It’s in this context that we should look at today’s major financial services overhaul, dubbed the ‘Edinburgh reforms’, which Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is laying out in the Commons today. Roughly 30 regulatory reforms are being billed as ‘Brexit freedoms’ aimed at making the UK ‘one of the most open, dynamic and competitive financial services hubs’ for business. 

Will the reforms deliver what’s being sold? It’s certainly a big exercise in cutting red tape and, perhaps more controversially, a nod to those who have been arguing that government over-corrected for the 2008 financial crash with punitive and anti-growth measures. As far as financial services reforms go, this is a big overhaul: the ‘repealing and replacing’ of Solvency II, a technical piece of insurance regulation, became a frequent talking point for Brexiteers, who used it as an example of what could be achieved outside of the European Union. This is now set to take place, and it’s a move that the Treasury expects will unlock ‘£100 billion of private investment’ which could be reinvested into UK infrastructure projects: a way to get building and to spur on growth through private sector investment, rather than more taxpayer funds.

The government is notably energised about pushing these reforms. With relatively little in the Autumn Statement for the pro-growth lot, today’s tape-cutting exercise is perhaps the biggest indication yet that Sunak’s No. 10 and Hunt’s Treasury are not solely focused on balancing the books, but boosting the numbers within them, too. ‘These reforms are a real set of opportunities to make use of our Brexit freedoms and to improve top line growth,’ the economic secretary to the Treasury, Andrew Griffith, tells The Spectator. 

But this is not only about the specific reforms being announced today. It’s also about seeking a ‘cultural change from the regulators,’ says Griffith, to prioritise ‘speed and efficiency’ in the way businesses and banks in the UK are regulated. Britain, of course, saw the benefits of having a fast and nimble regulator when it came to vaccine sign-off and rollout during the pandemic. Sunak’s government has clearly clocked this – and is increasingly motivated to apply that kind of operation to other sectors of the economy.

One of the many ironies of the leadership election this summer is that, while Sunak was characterised as being on the ‘left’ of the party, he was in fact the Brexit-voting MP on the ballot and the far more fiscally hawkish of the two candidates. Today’s changes reflect the kind of Brexit and economy he supports: one in which technical changes can go a long way to unlocking investment and cash, and one where ‘going for growth’ does not necessarily require the government to rack up significantly more debt. With key growth areas such as housing and healthcare politically toxic to touch at the moment, his government has opted to shake up the financial sector instead. No doubt there will still be demands for a more detailed growth agenda. But when these accusations are levied, ministers will now have something to say.

Penny Mordaunt makes her Christmas appeal

To 2 Lord North Street, SW1, home of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Once it was the likes of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng that were feted here, but last night there was a new queen in town. Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House, swept in with all her magnificent curls, to be the star turn at this year’s IEA Christmas shindig. To much applause from her ‘pen pals’ in the audience, Mordaunt regaled the crowd with a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life.

In the world envisaged by Mordaunt, Ed Miliband won the 2015 election to be succeeded by prime minister Corbyn and all the horrors that would have entailed. In such a parallel world, ‘levelling up’ is merely the name of a nightclub in Camden and Boris is still mayor of London, arming the capital with water cannons aplenty. Mordaunt ended on a rousing note, declaring:

‘I remember Labour’s record – that is why I’m sticking around, to fight the next election…Enjoy your Christmas, get some rest and sharpen your pens because we are not done.’

And Steerpike’s night certainly wasn’t done as he hotfooted it over to the palatial splendour of the May Fair hotel. It was Conservative Home‘s inaugural Christmas party where the keynote speaker was none other than…Penny Mordaunt, who opted to recycle all the jokes she had just made half-an-hour earlier. Clearly the spirit of Cop26 isn’t dead just yet. Still, the crowd seemed to like it and the message was clear: whatever Mordaunt’s ups and downs of this year, she’s ready for the challenges of the next.

Perhaps the ‘Penny reign’ shouldn’t be written off just yet…

The Viktor Bout hostage swap is a victory for the Kremlin

After a quiet swap in the United Arab Emirates, the American basketball star Brittney Griner is out of a Russian prison while the Russian arms dealer and presumed intelligence asset Viktor Bout is out of a US one. A little glimmer of humanity amidst Cold War 2.0, or a dangerous hostage exchange with Moscow getting the best of the deal? Sadly, this is more the latter.

Viktor Bout, a former Soviet army officer and alleged military intelligence asset, emerged as both an arms dealer and a gonzo cargo agent in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. His fleet of ex-Soviet aircraft and pilots were notorious for their willingness and ability to fly anything anywhere. Sometimes, this meant shipping guns into war zones – Bout was reportedly the inspiration for the Nicholas Cage film Lord of War. Occasionally, it might mean delivering aid to Rwanda and Afghanistan when others dared not.

In 2008 though, the US Drug Enforcement Agency caught the so-called ‘Merchant of Death’ in a sting operation in Thailand, where he thought he was negotiating selling weapons to the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. When told that the anti-aircraft missiles he was offering would be used to shoot down US pilots, he reportedly replied ‘we have the same enemy.’

Moscow tried everything it could to stop it, but eventually he was extradited to the USA in 2010, where he was tried and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Any hopes that he would be willing to spill the beans on his underworld contacts and intelligence activities in the world’s hotspots were in vain, though. Bout maintained his innocence and kept quiet.

After all, today’s Russian intelligence community has inherited a strong tradition from the Soviet KGB: a commitment to getting its own back home, however long it takes. In part, this is to reassure agents working in the field, and in part to encourage those who are caught to endure in silence.

To this end, Moscow has been ceaseless in its efforts to repatriate Bout.

In 2018, Paul Whelan was arrested in Moscow, charged with espionage and given a 16-year prison sentence. A Canadian-born former US Marine with US, UK and Irish citizenship, a job as a corporate security director and a presence on Russian language social media website Vkontakte, Whelan may have genuinely been considered a spy by the Russians. Either way, they began suggesting he be swapped for Bout. But Washington wasn’t willing to deal.

Then in February, star basketball player Griner was detained on entering Russia. She was discovered with cannabis-derived vape cartridges in her luggage. Griner didn’t deny the claim, simply saying that said she had not meant to bring them with her. They are illegal in Russia, but the nine-year sentence she received was clearly at the extreme end of any sentencing scale.

And the haggling began again. This time, though, Moscow had a much higher value card to play, as Griner had a powerful and vociferous fan base clamouring for her release. In July, President Biden had suggested he would support swapping Griner and Whelan for Bout, but Moscow was going to force a hard bargain. First it tried to have Vadim Krasikov included in the deal. A contract killer turned state assassin, Krasikov is serving a life term in Germany for killing a Chechen rebel organiser, but Berlin was reportedly uncomfortable with letting him go free.

As it was, the drawn-out negotiation appears to have come to an end in the past fortnight. Poor Whelan, with no strong lobby behind him, remains in prison camp IK-17 in Mordovia, while Griner is now free.

It is almost impossible not to see this as a case of state hostage-taking. To be sure, Griner gave Moscow the perfect opportunity, but what in other circumstances would have been handled by a fine, deportation, or a short sentence at most was elevated into a serious case to give the Kremlin leverage. And it worked. Other westerners take note (especially, perhaps, if they are German) – if you are still going to go to Russia, do at the very least stay squeaky clean.

Bout has no more real value to the Russians as a source or asset: his contacts are long-blown, his insights dated, his capacity to travel nil. He may get some sinecure lecturing agents or simply be allowed to disappear into comfortable retirement. However, he now will become a symbol of Moscow’s commitment to its own, and its capacity – even in the current environment of confrontation – to get what it wants, by fair means or foul.

It is hard to begrudge Griner’s wife, family and fans the delight they must feel at her release, but it is equally hard not to feel that the Kremlin got a good deal. It has few things to be happy about these days, but this will be one.

Can Rishi Sunak really take on the unions?

Rishi Sunak is getting tough. Goaded by Labour’s systematic painting of him as ‘weak’, the Prime Minister has threatened ‘unreasonable union leaders’ that if they do not call off their Christmas strikes, he will introduce new restrictions on their ability to take industrial action.

The desire to be ‘tough’ with trade unions is one of the few issues which unites the Tory party – apart from cutting taxes and reducing the size of the state, which Sunak feels unable to deliver at the moment. This is a Conservatism shaped by Margaret Thatcher as she destroyed the post-war consensus, one of the central features of which was the incorporation of the unions into managing the economy, something she saw as tantamount to appeasement.

Thatcher’s ghost still stalks the corridors of Conservative Campaign Headquarters and Sunak’s mooted legislation has inevitably invited comparisons to her implacable approach to industrial relations. But, in fact, Sunak’s position more accurately evokes that of Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan who replaced Thatcher in May 1979.

When Thatcher took on the unions, she did so with overwhelming public backing and only fought battles she had carefully prepared for. The various Employment Acts she introduced – which made sympathy strikes illegal and reduced the scope of picketing and other limitations – were introduced in the shadow of the 1978-9 ‘winter of discontent’. This saw 12 million working days lost and came after a decade of consistent industrial unrest. The public were fed up, and in her first year as Prime Minister 72 per cent thought unions had too much power. When the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill called a national strike in 1984 Thatcher was well-prepared: she had ensured coal stocks were high so the country could survive a prolonged shutdown. Scargill’s defeat was almost inevitable.

Sunak enjoys no such advantages. Largely thanks to Thatcher the trade union movement is no longer regarded as much of a menace. When asked in 2017 only 36 per cent believed the unions were too powerful. The present strike wave comes after over 30 years of union quiescence. Even if all the threatened December strikes happen the number of days lost will still be less than 10 per cent of that which occurred during the winter of discontent. And while during the autumn there has been a slight uptick in those who believe unions play a negative role in Britain it is equalled by those who think they play a positive one. Just now the unions have more of the public on their side than against them: as YouGov has found, exactly half of Britons support paramedics and ambulance workers going on strike while 48 per cent oppose Sunak’s threatened legislation. Maybe these numbers will shift in the government’s favour when the strikes hit but the public is much more positive about the unions than it ever was during Thatcher’s early years as Prime Minister.

Even more worryingly for Sunak, there is no equivalent of accumulated coal stocks to see the country through these multifarious disputes. When members of the RMT strike, trains stop immediately; when nurses walk out, waiting lists right away get longer; and when border staff stay at home, queues at airports in an instant become intolerable. His proposed legislation can do nothing to address these disruptions: if he is lucky, it will become law by Easter 2023 – not Christmas 2022.

All of which leaves the Prime Minister looking weak. He is currently unwilling to concede to the unions’ demands but is also unable to alleviate the impact of the strikes either. Even the army seems unwilling to take the absent workers’ place.

If any comparison is apt, therefore, it is less with the all-conquering Thatcher and more like the helpless Callaghan. Wanting to keep inflation pegged, in the autumn of 1978 the Labour Prime Minister said that public sector workers should only expect a 5 per cent pay rise. The resulting strike wave ended any hopes he had of retaining power because the piling bags of rotting rubbish revealed his government’s incapacity to govern. That is the danger for Sunak: talking tough might please his backbenchers but Britons will want solutions and will turn to the party which looks best able to manage the situation – if they haven’t already.

What Rowan Williams gets wrong about democracy

Rowan Williams used his Reith lecture on religious liberty to make a plea to religious believers: don’t be afraid of being an awkward misfit. The former Archbishop of Canterbury called on believers to challenge the social consensus – even on contentious issues like gay marriage.

His view is that religion is not a private affair, but impinges on public life. It does so, he said this week, in ways that the liberal order will find annoying, even disruptive. Believers appeal to transcendent truths beyond the ‘prevailing social consensus’, according to Williams. As a result, he said, they are rightly wary of an order whose only basis is human law, which is defined by majority opinion. But, he added, religious has a key role to play in standing against ‘the absolutism of the status quo’, and against majoritarianism, whether secular or religious. It is through such dissent that great moral advances are made, Williams suggested; it takes a minority with a profound conviction to challenge the prevailing consensus of the day.

In short, Williams wants to embolden religious believers to speak up on prevailing views, whether these are secular, liberal or a mix of religious and nationalist. But of course the message is mainly directed to people living in liberal societies. So perhaps the main message of Williams’s lecture is this: don’t be cowed by the seeming authority of liberal democracy; it is just another human system, and its rhetoric of toleration is a subtle form of intolerance, or ‘repressive tolerance’, for it delegitimises the otherness of religion, its appeal to an authority beyond the rational consensus.

Williams makes a valid point, but at the cost of neglecting a wider issue. He is right to say that any sort of political consensus is open to criticism, and to say valid criticism might come from religion, with its rationally unjustifiable absoluteness. But he is wrong to paint liberal democracy as just another form of political order, and a particularly subtle threat to religion. The bigger picture is that liberal democracies are far better at protecting people’s liberty than other political systems. Why shouldn’t Christian thinkers sometimes celebrate this? And why not point out the deep Christian roots of liberal democracy?

Instead of reflecting on the deep affinity between Christianity and liberal values, Williams and other ‘post-liberals’ are anxious to show how critical they are of liberal hubris. There is a role for such criticism. But it should be part of a nuanced approach, in which the basic goodness of the liberal state is affirmed. Indeed it should be seen as God’s gift to modernity. For decades now, theology has been dominated by a one-sided critique of liberalism. It’s a dated perspective, rooted in the postmodern post-Marxist thought of the 80s and 90s. Time for a pendulum swing.

Why the French don’t all love Mbappé like Macron

Emmanuel Macron is confident France will beat England in Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final. In an interview with a radio station, the president of the Republic declared that he doesn’t ‘really have any doubts about the fact that we’re going to win’. Macron is not known for his lack of self-belief but for once his bravado is justified: France are the reigning world champions, and in Kylian Mbappé they have the best player in the world.  

The Parisian is a phenomenon, the scorer of five goals in four games so far at this tournament, and in netting twice in the last 16 win over Poland Mbappé surpassed the great Pele for the number of goals scored in World Cups by a 23-year-old. He scored four in 2018 as he inspired France to the title.

Macron and Mbappé are old acquaintances. The president said at the start of this World Cup – as some of Europe’s more virtue-signalling countries made a song and dance about Qatar hosting the tournament – that sport and politics are incompatible. But they are when it suits Macron.  

At other times sport has provided the president with some useful PR, particularly Mbappé, whom he regards as an ideal role model for the 21^st Century Republic. Like Macron, the Paris Saint Germain (PSG) striker burst onto the scene in 2017, making his first appearance for France on March 25, a few weeks before Macron was elected president. That summer Mbappé moved from Monaco – whom he helped win the French league title – to PSG, despite strong interest from Manchester City.  

He and Macron are neighbours, the PSG stadium being only four miles from the Élysée Palace, and Mbappé was invited to the lunch in 2018. Also present was the former footballer turned Liberian president, George Weah, and as they ate they discussed how football could boost the African economy.

Despite Macron’s attempt to become Mbappé Best Friend Forever, the PSG star seems reluctant to get too close to the president. In April this year 50 prominent figures from the world of French sport put their names to a declaration calling for people to vote for Macron and not Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election; Mbappé’s name was not on the list, an omission that caused some comment in the media. 

Perhaps it was an astute decision on the part of Mbappé. He hails from the suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis, the most impoverished department in France, where neither Macron nor Le Pen is popular.  

In the first round of the presidential election 49 per cent of the electorate in the area cast their ballot for the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon, dwarfing the 20 per cent who opted for the incumbent; in the parliamentary elections that followed his NUPE coalition crushed Macron’s ruling party.

Had Mbappé endorsed Macron it would not have been looked on favourably. As it is, he is not as popular as some of the other French players.  

My ex-wife is a teacher in a state school four miles from Bondy FC, Mbappé’s childhood club. I asked her what her teenage pupils – almost exclusively of African origin – think of Mbappé? They prefer Paul Pogba and Karim Benzema, both of whom missed the World Cup with injury. The pair are controversial figures, often in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. But they’re seen by the kids as rebels, men who cock a snook at the establishment. Mbappé, on the other hand, is seen by the kids as ‘too clean’.

But his squeaky clean image goes down well elsewhere in France. In the second round of April’s presidential election, Mbappe received ten ballots in the village of Doubs in central France, as the 298 voters despaired at the choice of Macron and Le Pen. 

The month after the election Mbappé signed a new deal with PSG, one which will reportedly net him £650,000 a week over three years. His parents, who split a couple of years ago, are credited with instilling in their son a fierce work ethic (his father was a youth coach at Bondy FC for many years) and are part of his management team. They play a large role in ensuring their son remains grounded despite being one of the most famous faces on the planet.  

In an interview with the New York Times in September, Mbappé described the foundation he has started to help children from the Paris region. Apparently he has been in contact with one of the England players he’ll face on Saturday, Marcus Rashford, to congratulate him on his initiative to provide free school meals to children. 

The French media flocked to Mbappé’s home town in 2018 after the World Cup victory, venturing into an area few had ever before been. The journalists’ first stop was Bondy FC, and among those they spoke to was 15-year-old Malik, who praised Mbappé, not just for his part in the World Cup but because he ‘brought the spotlight to our town’. 

The then mayor of Bondy, the Socialist Sylvine Thomassin, said: ‘Kylian illustrates the success of a positive state of mind, which youngsters need to expand their world. They have to stop thinking that their future is only in Bondy.’

The mayor also took the opportunity to call for more state subsidies to help the depressed department and its inhabitants. That hasn’t been forthcoming. A report in 2020 revealed that 280,000 people in Seine-Saint-Denis – 17.5 per cent – live below the poverty line, and were mired in despair and hopelessness. Thomassin was ousted as mayor that year and when she attempted a political comeback this year her car was vandalised and obscene graffiti directed at her and Mbappé sprayed on a mural of the player in Bondy.  

Lockdown widened the gulf in France between the haves and the have-nots. A year after Covid struck, a journalist from Le Monde visited Bondy and described ‘a spiral of social and human disasters’, particularly for the young, many of whom had dropped out of school during lockdown and never returned.   

If Mbappé keeps scoring the goals that take France to a second consecutive title – a feat last achieved by Brazil in 1958 and 1962 – the media will likely rush back to Bondy in search of fresh quotes. They’ll find that life hasn’t improved.  

The remaking of Margate

The faded splendour of 1980s Margate is the backdrop for Sam Mendes’s new film Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. Coming to UK cinemas on 9 January, it’s about a romance in the north Kent seaside town and the revival of a striking 1930s cinema with a distinctive brick ‘fin’ tower.

Renamed briefly as the Empire Cinema during filming in the spring, Margate’s Grade II-listed Dreamland Cinema takes a starring role. In reality it’s part of the Dreamland amusement park complex that’s had 102 years of rollercoaster fortunes. The park underwent a £25 million makeover in 2017, and its relaunch contributed to the reinvention of Margate into an artistic and creative hub – driven by the opening of the Turner Contemporary gallery and Tracey Emin’s purchase of a large waterfront complex to create a museum and artists’ studios.

With its eclectic mix of hip new additions, tracts of gentrification and down-at-heel edges, Margate remains a Marmite choice for visitors and home-buyers, despite the culture-led regeneration. You either think it’s cool or you don’t.

Kate Harrison, who arrived in Margate from East London 12 years ago, says: ‘It’s an entrepreneurial, diverse town where anything goes. It’s not (gentrified) Whitstable and there are issues it still struggles with’ – a reference to the fact that Thanet has some of the highest poverty and drug-related crime levels in Kent.

Kate is managing the new Margate branch of Selina, the co-working hotel brand that aims to persuade digital nomad millennials and Gen Z-ers to swap city life for desk space with sea views (free until the end of the year), Pilates classes, beach yoga or an upcycling workshop run by local artists.

The town has been inducing Londoners to visit since the 1730s when flat-bottomed boats called hoys took up to three days to carry sea bathers to the burgeoning resort. Now it can take as little as an hour and 20 minutes to reach by train from the capital, and a steady stream of creative and space-seeking Down from Londoners (especially East Londoners) have been helping to push up property prices in the town.

In the past three years average prices have increased a chunky 30 per cent, with the proportion of properties sold at over £500,000 this year double that of 2019, according to Hamptons using Land Registry data. The average house – now £353,730 – has increased in value by 117 per cent over the past decade; flats, now averaging £167,950, by 91 per cent.

A one-bed period flat will cost nearer £200,000, while a Victorian four-bedroom house in a decent condition will be £550,000-plus, says Chris Sandford, branch manager of Mann Margate. ‘It’s less expensive than Broadstairs but has overtaken Ramsgate now, with all the interest from Londoners to move here, or to open restaurants,’ he says.

At the top end of the market a stylishly renovated five-bedroom terraced townhouse overlooking the beach is for sale at £800,000 (through Your Move); or a two-bedroom flat in the old town is on at £265,000 with Miles & Barr.

Sandford says interest has ‘slowed down’ among Airbnb investors, who might face some void periods in the tough weeks ahead as well as dealing with recent interest rate rises. The number of short-term rental properties listed has increased by 57 per cent since 2019, according to market analyst AirDNA. Demand is up on last year but hasn’t kept pace with the growth in the number of listings, they report. 

But Airbnbs aside, there are plenty of tempting boutique hotels for weekenders. Along with the Libertines’ art-filled Albion Rooms (complete with a recording studio for hire), there’s the new Fort Road Hotel, created by Matthew Slotover and Tom Gidley, co-founders of the Frieze contemporary art magazine and fairs, along with developer Gabriel Chipperfield.

Filled with artworks by Emin, Gidley and more, the restaurant’s menu is inspired by late 19th century and early 20th century food writers such as Mrs Beeton and Elizabeth David. Margate’s culinary scene continues to evolve, too, with current highlights including the Michelin-starred Angela’s and its sister restaurant, Dory’s – a great seafood bar by the beach – and the Rose in June pub.

The old town is now full of independent businesses, yet Londoner Francesca Wilkins saw that among the galleries and restaurants there was no bookshop. After four years seeking the right premises she found a small Georgian property on Market Place to open the Margate Bookshop in 2019. It has become a hub of events and socialising.

‘There’s a real sense of people giving things a go here,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t want to open a pocket of London – the Shoreditch-on-Sea thing has been but gone. I wanted to create an inclusive place for everyone – this area has low levels of literacy. I love the strong sense of community and optimism.’

How ‘iconic’ became anything but

Though I love words, I don’t generally get on other people’s cases about them as I don’t expect everyone to have my almost parasexual attachment to the English language. I’ve suffered silently through the flagrant misuse of ‘epic’ and ‘awesome‘ and numerous moronic reference to food as ‘orgasmic’ and ‘artisanal’ featuring ‘curated table-scapes’. If you’re older than five and say ‘nom’ (in any multiple) then frankly, I believe that you should have your voting rights taken away – it’s called Universal Adult Franchise for a reason.

However, I’m going to make an exception for ‘iconic’, the overuse of which has mildly irritated me for quite some time. I reached tipping point last week when I heard the Mayor of Leicester, Peter Soulsby, use it on Radio 4, referring to Ugandan Asian immigration to Britain in the 1970s. This was a good thing, yes – but iconic?

How I yearn for the days when iconic was a niche word, used only to describe religious artwork. Now the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as meaning ‘very famous or popular’ before giving the following examples: ‘John Lennon gained iconic status following his death’, ‘The gunfight is the single most iconic image of the Wild West’ and ‘The film Casablanca won three Academy Awards and its characters, dialogue and music have become iconic’.

If lexical prolapse had stopped here – awarding iconic status to specific cultural moments which have endured the test of time – I might have held my tongue. But everything’s ‘iconic’ now – Google shows 1,450,000,000 results for the word (which to put into context compares with only 549,000 for my name). Type ‘iconic’ in and then follow it with the most outlandish noun you can think of – about 50 per cent of the time you’ll get a result; my favourites were ‘Iconic Window Cleaning’ – ‘We can clean your windows to an extremely high standard’ – and Victorian Plumbing’s ‘Iconic Combined Two-In-One Wash Basin + Toilet (inc. Tap & Waste)’. This Japanese knotweed of words is found in pretty much every social class and price bracket, from new Chelsea Riverside apartments with ‘iconic proportions’ to Greggs hiking the price of their ‘iconic sausage rolls’ due to supply chain troubles. When Virgin was still running the Euston to Liverpool line, a friend heard the onboard hospitality manager on the tannoy apologising to everyone in first-class that ‘due to supply issues beyond our control, we have run out of Virgin’s iconic complimentary snack box’.

It’s fitting that Mr Virgin started out in showbiz; in a world where people spend a lot of time speaking other people’s words and giving more attention to visuals and verbals, the word ‘i’ – in common with the upper-case ‘I’ – crops up like a recurring case of herpes passed around on location. Catherine Zeta-Jones, speaking of her role in the Netflix show Wednesday, enjoyed playing Morticia Addams so much that she used it twice: ‘Morticia is such an iconic female figure, but I put my own twist on her… we didn’t want to put Morticia in trousers just to contemporise her; we wanted to do the iconic look.’ The pricey Charlotte Tilbury cosmetic range has ‘the British beauty icon Twiggy’ promoting Tilbury’s ‘iconic’ lip colours ‘alongside my divine, iconic, supermodel friends Kate Moss and Jourdan Dunn’. Ant and Dec’s many alleged ‘iconic moments’ can be enjoyed on TikTok. And as it’s the season to hate Love Actually, I was tickled to find out that Alan Rickman was driven ‘insane’ by the ‘iconic scene’ in the film where Rowan Atkinson as a shop assistant takes too long gift-wrapping a present.

There are a few dissenters who find the concept hackneyed and dreary; Boy George appeared on I’m A Celebrity… because ‘I am bored of being iconic in the corner’. I hesitate to ‘share’ this, but I’ve been called iconic by three charming strangers myself this year alone. Before Brexit, it was ‘national treasure’ – though it made me feel my age, I quite liked it, as I’m conceited. But ‘iconic’ just makes me feel as though pigeons might soon be doing their business on me; it’s such an inanimate word.

So let’s agree that Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal are icons; Mickey Mouse’s ears, Elvis’s sneer and Marilyn Monroe’s white dress/air-vent combo might get a mention. But otherwise, let us only use the word during civilised debates of the kind such as to whether or not Our Lady of Kazan – the Theotokos – is probably the most iconic icon of all time. Because all this blather about icons where they do not exist makes us look woefully like a confused post-Christian ship of fools who as G.K. Chesterton said ‘do not believe in nothing, [but] become capable of believing in anything’. Let 2023 be the year when the wafer-thin ‘iconic’ is put away – and when hard-headed iconoclasm makes a comeback.

The best cookbooks to give this Christmas

I love a good cookbook. In an age where endless variations on any recipe are no more than a few clicks away on the internet, there is still a certain magic to buying, or receiving, a physical, curated collection. 

Cookbooks can teach you something in a way that individual online recipes can’t. Whether exploring a new cuisine or trying a new technique, cooking from a cookbook means you can build up a whole repertoire of dishes and hone new skills. I love that you can annotate the pages, and it doesn’t matter if they get mucky (I find you can always tell the best recipes in a book by how dog-eared and food-splattered the pages are). 

Cookbooks impart culinary knowledge in a satisfyingly old-school way. You can learn which flavour combinations work and which don’t. You can discover all manner of tips and tricks – whether it’s the best way to prove dough for the perfect pizza or what ingredients make the best pickling liquid for a ceviche. There’s nothing quite like getting your newest acquisition down from the bookshelf and trudging off to the kitchen to put it to the test. It’s a rush I must confess I’m slightly addicted to. 

But that isn’t the only reason cookbooks make excellent presents; the nicest are often visually beautiful too, with hi-res imagery and stylish, almost coffee table-worthy covers. So without further ado, here are some of 2022’s best and most delicious cookbooks, to satisfy any home cook at Christmas.

Borough Market: The Knowledge, £27

Borough Market: The Knowledge by Angela Clutton does exactly what the title suggests, bringing together the expertise of the traders of London’s Borough Market alongside more than 80 recipes. The cookbook is divided according to the different types of produce you’d find among the market’s stalls (butcher, fishmonger, dairy and so on) and includes pages of tips on how to source and choose the best ingredients. Each section contains drinks pairings and useful how-to guides, including instructions for jointing a chicken, filleting a fish and preparing a brown crab. The recipes are elegant, sophisticated and suited to a range of abilities. The roasted cod’s head with clams and seaweed transports you straight to the coast, while the venison steak with samphire is the perfect dinner party dish. The scallop and bacon bap is delicious in its simplicity. While shopping for ingredients at the market is great fun, to use this book it’s by no means a necessity: most recipes can be created using ingredients bought at your local butcher, grocer or even (as I did) from the supermarket. A must-have for any gourmet wanting to learn more.

Big Mamma Cucina Popolare, £27.95

Created by the minds behind the hugely popular restaurant group that includes Gloria in Shoreditch and and Circolo Popolare in Fitzrovia, Big Mamma Cucina Popolare is an encyclopaedic collection of more than 130 Italian recipes. The book is split into eight sections, with a whole chapter devoted to pizza and aperitivi in each. The recipes range from the simple (‘the real tomato sauce’) to the complex (rabbit-stuffed casoncelli with artichokes and fennel cream). Big Mamma Cucina Popolare is the perfect vehicle for getting to grips with the ins and outs of Italian cooking, with tips on technique and sourcing ingredients at the end of every entry. I can report that its recipe for Neapolitan pizza really does work in a bog-standard kitchen oven, producing delicious pizza with a crispy, charred crust. A recipe for a version of the restaurant group’s famous spaghetti carbonara (served in a wheel of pecorino cheese if you’re feeling fancy) also makes an appearance.

Mob Fresh, £20

The brainchild of innovative online cookery platform Mob, Mob Fresh is the perfect book for those wanting a healthier start to 2023. In recent years Mob has moved away from its origins as a recipe platform for students, broadening its appeal and elevating its dishes. Focusing on lighter, more balanced meals than its previous cookbooks, Mob has created a cheerful book that will appeal to younger home cooks and will see you right through the year. The book divides more than 100 recipes into eight sections, ranging from ‘brunch’ to ‘sharing’ to ‘summery’. The cavolo nero and wild mushroom risotto is to die for, while the baked miso chicken schnitzel with kimchi mayo is a genius fusion dish of perfection, light but nonetheless moreish.

Mezcla, £26

Mezcla, by Ixta Belfrage (co-author of Ottolenghi Flavour), is one of the hottest cookbooks of the year. Taking inspiration from Belfrage’s Italian, Mexican and Brazilian upbringing, flavours such as lime and chilli feature heavily, alongside plenty of spices. Many of the recipes call for a large amount of oil, but that only adds to their luxuriousness. The dishes Belfrage has created are vibrant and, as befitting fusion cuisine, exciting and inventive. The tomato and lime galette with crunchy spelt chipotle pastry is exquisite, zingy and fresh but nowhere near as tricky as it looks to make. The curried prawn and jalapeño croquettes with scotch bonnet salsa are the sort of thing you can gorge endlessly on, even when your mouth is on fire.

Bake It, Slice It, Eat It, £15

Bake It, Slice It, Eat It by Tom Oxford and Oliver Coysh is the perfect gift for anyone who loves baking. The concept is a straightforward one: more than 90 cake recipes all adapted to be baked in the same sheet pan. Ideal for home cooks who want to expand their repertoire without having to buy a load of fancy equipment, the recipes are roughly divided by level of ability – from ‘basic bakes’, including a raspberry and white chocolate bakewell, to ‘boss level’ and ‘technical’. There is a whole section devoted to flourless bakes, and a chapter on brownies featuring 19 different recipes. The flourless almond brownie is out of this world and an easy crowd-pleaser, while the intricate seabuckthorn cheesecake is a true showstopper.

The Little Book of Aperitifs, £10

Ideal for anyone wanting to learn a bit of mixology over the Christmas period, The Little Book of Aperitifs by Kate Hawkings is a great entry level guide. Complete with colourful, informative pictures of each drink, it contains 50 cocktail recipes, ranging from classics such as the negroni and bellini to elegant concoctions such as the gin and sparkling wine-based French 75. The sloe gin-based Charlie Chaplin looks like it would make the perfect festive tipple. The book’s size and price point makes it a perfect stocking filler or Secret Santa gift too.

Tava, £27

Irina Georgescu’s latest cookbook, Tava, is a great choice for any fans of afternoon tea keen to try something different. Bringing together more than 80 cake, pastry and dessert recipes, Tava is a deep dive into the sweet dishes that make up Romanian cuisine. With influences from Armenia, Hungary, Saxony and Swabia to name just a few, the recipes in the book combine the familiar with the unfamiliar: bakes you will recognise with ingredients and flavour combinations you might not. Each recipe has a charming introduction, providing a window into its history and heritage. The crumble cake with grape jam is a straightforward but delicious bake, perfect with a cup of tea. Meanwhile, the noodles in walnut and vanilla soup are as intriguing as they sound – a little pernickety, but the result is rich and comforting.

The political polyvalency of modernism

The late Sir Roger Scruton often pronounced in a harsh manner on modern architecture and modern music, perceiving in various work an assault on bourgeois culture and a break with tradition. Back in the 1950s, music critic and CIA agent Henry Pleasants (a station chief in Bonn) delivered if anything a more scathing view of the ‘agony’ of modern music, arguing that it had severed its connection with the idioms bequeathed by the human voice.

It might seem natural that opposition to the iconoclasm of artistic modernism would go hand-in-hand with a relatively conservative politics. Furthermore, knowledge of Nazi attacks on Entartete Kunst suggests a clear disjunction between far right politics and modernist art. Yet the reality is considerably more complex, and in an era in which promoters, curators, critics, academics and others are obsessed with eliciting and judging the underlying politics of all types of art, it is worth rethinking the association.

Modernism came to fruition in Europe at the same time as the advent of mass education and literacy, democratising tendencies in Western societies, expanded industrialisation and the growth of major cities, as well the new imperialism associated with subjugation of parts of Africa and Asia. The term also gained currency due to its employment within Catholicism, whereby it was used primarily to denigrate aspects of urbanity, sophistication, cosmopolitanism and the adoption of technological and industrial life, leading to a denunciation by Pope Pius X in 1907.

Early modernists reacted to the new world in a variety of manners. Many adopted an ambivalent view towards a society that forced artists to be outsiders. Some retreated into a neo-aristocratic sensibility or denounced the ‘crowd’. Critics have argued that a range of modernists were especially hostile to the growth of ‘mass culture’ (in the form of popular music or theatre, newspapers, undemanding romantic novels, etc.), not least because of what these betokened in terms of a perceived new ‘feminisation’ of society. Some of this outlook is anticipated in the work of Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Their critique of bourgeois society was, according to some, fuelled as much by antipathy towards the new status, prominence, and consuming power of women and members of the lower classes as by any critique of the reign of capital. In response they cultivated various forms of highly demanding, sometimes esoteric, art forms, rejecting earlier nineteenth-century manifestations of subjectivity which might be associated with vulnerability or sentimentality – qualities constructed as feminine – in favour of bold and ‘objective’ new art forms.

Those modern artists who explicitly supported or advocated the politics of the fascist right, including writers Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Yukio Mishima, artists Filippo Marinetti, Mario Sironi and Emil Nolde, or composers Igor Stravinsky and Anton von Webern, are not so many in number. Nonetheless, in many of these cases the connection between aesthetics and politics ran deep. Pound viewed Mussolini as a contemporary equivalent of 15^th century nobleman, military leader and artistic patron Sigismondo Malatesta, and it has been plausibly argued that his view of Italian fascism was that it would ‘conquer modernity in the name of order’. Stravinsky, meanwhile, who met Mussolini and expressed his great admiration (‘I told him that I felt like a fascist myself’) found a similar sympathy with his own authoritarian world-view, tied to cults of primitivism and a disdain for modern manifestations of individual subjectivity. Marinetti’s futurism was predicated upon a cult of hyper-masculinity, explicitly glorifying war and displaying a ‘contempt for women’.  

Other artists demonstrated varying degrees of complicity or complacency as fascism engulfed Europe. Architect Mies van der Rohe attempted to gain Nazi support for the Bauhaus, for essentially opportunist reasons which were ultimately unsuccessful, while composer Carl Orff attempted to have his Schulmusik adopted by the Hitlerjugend. There is no evidence of any ideological commitment to Nazism on the part of either, but nor did their artistic agenda lead to any particular form of opposition or resistance. While many prominent Nazis were pathologically opposed to many types of modernism (associating it with the despised Weimar Republic and opposition to German nationalism), the situation was less clear-cut in other fascist countries, above all Italy.

Artist Giorgio de Chirico acidly declared that Italian fascists were ‘modernists enamoured of Paris’; their model was the city state of ancient Rome, and they certainly championed certain forms of modernism in painting, architecture, music, and theatre that adhered to a monumentalist, ritualised and/or technocratic bent. In Germany not all shared the communitarian and anti-urban tendencies of Hitler or Alfred Rosenberg; the likes of Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer or Reichsmusikkammer director Peter Raabe were by no means uniformly hostile to modernity, the city, and new means of artistic expressionism. Goebbels, together with Hermann Goering, was part of a committee which organised an exhibition in Berlin in late 1937 (just a few months after opening the first Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich) of Italian art from 1800 to the present, including a range of work embodying distortion of vision, caricature, abstraction, sexuality and unsettling subject matter, but this incurred the wrath of Hitler and was described as a ‘fiasco’ by Mussolini after he read a report. Raabe, when a conductor in Aachen in the 1920s, had conducted works of Schoenberg, Hindemith and Scriabin, been impressed by Berg’s Wozzeck, and in a book on Music in the Third Reich was by no means wholly hostile to musical modernism.

Many on the left took to modernism much more thoroughly and deeply. For a short period, the Proletkult movement in the early Soviet Union viewed new artistic means as necessary to the creation of a new ‘proletarian art’, creating a climate which nurtured the likes of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, composer Nikolai Roslavets or film director Sergei Eisenstein. Surrealist painters and writers, especially movement founder André Breton, linked their aesthetic manifesto to communist politics. Artists in Weimar Germany, traumatised by the First World War and the failure of the attempted communist revolution in November 1918, pursued an art which presented distorted and unattractive images of mutilation and commercialised sexuality as a means not so much simply of reflecting the world as reflecting critically back upon that same world. Intense debates occurred among a range of Germanic and Hungarian thinkers, including Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and György Lukács as to the meaning or relevance of plural aesthetic movements as a response to a perceived advanced capitalist world in crisis.

Furthermore, the work of many of the non-leftist artists mentioned above – who we now know to have exhibited questionable allegiances and sometimes dangerous ideologies – has continued to exert a fascination upon later generations who in no sense shared such politics, as witnessed for example in the profound interest of American poet Jackson Mac Low in the work of Pound. These earlier artists’ works may have been informed in part by such politics, the work may even embody aspects of it, but cannot usually be contained by it.

Following the dual traumas of fascism and Stalinism, a good deal of Western art for several decades after the Second World War showed little attachment to wider programmes for social transformation, nor to explicit political causes, instead embodying a more abstracted world-view, somewhat alone and isolated in the manner of the earlier modernists and romantics, but without the same will to change. Examples of such artists would include writers Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke, Charles Olsen and Lorine Niedecker, composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Elliott Carter, film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders, or dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. The work often epitomised deeply internal responses to the world, the elaboration of private mythologies, and sometimes thwarted searches for meaning, none of which could easily be tagged to a specific political agenda.

Nonetheless, such work stood in profound distinction to the demands placed on artists in the Soviet Bloc following the Zhdanov decrees of the late 1940s that censured ‘formalism’. The publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948) did stimulate a debate on the value of arte impegnata (committed art) among those with communist sympathies, culminating in a short period in which some artists adopted a Zhdanovite rejection of modernism, while others including composer Luigi Nono or director Jean-Luc Godard found means of reconciling modernist techniques with subject matter relating to radical politics. But during the Cold War era one could find pronounced antipathy to the left on the part of composer Milton Babbitt (who is once alleged to have described himself privately as ‘to the right of Marie Antoinette’), while film director David Lynch openly supported Ronald Reagan, and dystopian novelist J.G. Ballard declared his admiration for Margaret Thatcher. In the West today, aesthetic debates have taken a back seat to those about issues of diversity, inclusivity, identity, ideology, and ‘relevance’, coupled to attempts to link art to contemporary issues.

The meaning of modernism outside of the Western world is equally variable. The study of ‘global modernism’, exploring not only extensions of a Western movement into the wider world, but ways in which modernism can be said to have global cultural roots, is a relatively recent but energetic branch of scholarship. As early as the 1880s writers such as the Cuban Ramón Perés or Nicaraguan Rubén Dario were developing their own use of the term modernismo in part in opposition to the culture of the former colonial power of Spain. Some of the most avant-garde art and architecture from various regions of Africa draws as much upon indigenous traditions as Western ideas, as can equally be said of many varieties of East Asian modern art, literature, theatre and dance, some of which had a profound influence upon Western modernists. But in some traditionalist or censorious societies, there is less of a place for the flourishing of an avant-garde that is sometimes viewed as representing a colonising force.

Modernist art has been linked to politics across the spectrum throughout its history. But the strength of such art lies not in its commitment but in its polyvalency, its potential for provoking a plurality of meanings, perspectives, emotions, thoughts. To reduce such work to a particular politics is to force it into a narrow box. Such attempts to contain and judge ultimately deny that open exploration and generation of forms of experience which add something new to the world which is so characteristic of modernism viewed most broadly

Iran steps up the war against its people

Iran has announced the first execution of the current crop of protestors. Mohsen Shekari, who was just 23, was hanged earlier today after having been found guilty by a revolutionary tribunal of moharebeh, a crime which means ‘enmity against God’. 

Other protestors have been charged and convicted of crimes like fasad-fel-arz (‘corruption on Earth’) and baghy, which means ‘armed rebellion’. Both of those carry the death penalty, so it seems likely that more executions will soon follow. Shekari’s killing is intended to frighten those who face these charges and to dissuade demonstrators from taking to the streets at all. But will it work, as the tide of anti-government feeling continues to swell in Iran?

Shekari was accused of being a ‘rioter’. It was said he blockaded a main road in the capital Tehran in September and that he wounded a member of a paramilitary force – the Basij – with a machete. These allegations are almost certainly fabricated. It is widely known that the Iranian state uses courts and punishments more as a way of sending messages of terror than justice.  

When it has executed people in the past, like the former wrestler Navid Afkari, it has done so for transparently political reasons. Afkari protested against the government in 2018, but he did not murder a security guard as he was later accused of doing. His execution in 2020 was completely out of the blue and unjustified. The purpose was to put the fear of God into those who were demonstrating against the government at that time. 

Something similar appears to be happening in the case of Shekari. But while it is clear Iran is trying to send a message with this execution, much of the coverage of what is unfolding on the streets of the Islamic republic is misconstrued. 

Take the vote in the Iranian parliament to sentence protestors currently in custody to death. Because there were 15,000 demonstrators estimated to be in jail, this was widely reported – and widely condemned – as 15,000 death sentences having gone out, ready to be enacted. That was not true. Iran is a lawless theocracy: the votes in its parliament indicate the barbarism and bloodlust of the regime, but they have no legal weight.  

But another misapprehension is also circulating: this holds that Iran is on the threshold of giving in to the demonstrators. Just last week, it was reported that Iran was dissolving the Guidance Patrol – the so-called ’morality police’ – who beat 22-year-old Mahsa Amini to death earlier this year, and in so doing began this wave of demonstrations. Iran, it was said, was even reconsidering its law forcing women to wear the hijab: the cause of Amini’s initial arrest and killing. Unfortunately for those hoping that Iran was turning over a new leaf, this was false, as this week’s execution shows. 

The ‘morality police’, who are essentially paid by the state to rough women up, will perhaps have the name of their organisation altered, but they are going nowhere. The mobs of paramilitaries currently killing protestors might distance themselves a little from the state, but little else will change.  

A state, such as Iran, that has shown itself prepared to kill hundreds of demonstrators in defence of its theocratic laws will not change those laws without a fight. The thousands of Iranians currently locked up in jail have not been, and will not be (at least en masse), sentenced to death. But that does not mean all is well.  

Exact figures are impossible to find through the haze of Iranian state media and physical distance, but a good handful of protestors other than Shekari have been sentenced to death already. Many more doubtless will be.  

Shekari’s death is simply a warning and a token of what is to come. The Iranian state does not follow process or adhere to western ideas of law and justice: it kills people when it likes on whatever charge it can fabricate.  

Many of those executed from the Green Revolution of 2009, to the beginning of the protests this year, were innocent of all charges. It’s possible they had protested. Maybe they were wholly unconnected to whatever the state was trying to punish. Either way, it counted for little in the eyes of the Ayatollahs.

Iran has also made a specialty of kidnapping, or luring back, journalists and critics so they can be executed in Iran on spurious grounds. Ruhollah Zam, a journalist who returned from exile in France, was one. But his execution in 2020 resulted in a muted reaction from overseas. Tragically, it seems likely that the latest killing carried out by the Iranian regime will also fail to generate much outrage abroad.

For now, at least 300 people have been killed in demonstrations. Many more like them will die before the protests end. Innocent Iranians, like Shekari, are meeting their deaths by bullet and baton regardless of the law and the courts. Iran’s brutal regime continues to wage war against its own people.

A very good place to start if you want to understand China: Mark Kitto’s Chinese Boxing reviewed

In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory is still raw.

The most mutually traumatic episode in this history is probably the Boxer Rebellion, when thousands of foreign delegates were besieged in Beijing by Chinese rebels for 55 days. The siege eventually ended with an allied rescued mission which sacked the city, the soldiers raping and killing the Beijingers who were left. This episode is the subject of a new one-man play by a veteran China hand. Mark Kitto manages to deliver an intelligent and humorous show despite the rather violent subject matter. He plays a British diplomat, then a Qing general and finally a Welsh foot soldier of the relieving forces. 

It’s a play full of political astuteness for those interested in China’s relations with the West today. ‘China is sick, infested with foreign bodies’, Rong Lu, Kitto’s Manchurian official, observes, sounding not so different to his political successors in the CCP. And yet, ‘in my opinion we – Britain and the “West”, as it is coming to be known – have got China wrong’, impresses Sir Claude MacDonald, Britain’s man in Beijing during the siege and Kitto’s first character. Plus ça change.

Could this play help us better understand China? It’s certainly a good start.

For one, Chinese Boxing doesn’t shy away from the reasons why later Chinese call that period ‘the century of humiliation’. From the parcelling out of the country to the violent put down of the Boxers, the show describes the events that today feed China’s righteous anger. ‘What will you take this time? How many more ports? What will you burn in Beijing? How much more of your religion do we have to swallow, your drugs, your rules, your stupid clothes, your damned railways, your stinking food?’, Rong Lu questions the audience. It’s no surprise that this is the part of history that I, as a schoolchild in China, learned most about. The so-called ‘Eight Nation Alliance’, which broke the siege, was a bogeyman, the very epitome of foreign bullying.

Of course China has not always rebuffed foreigners. Even during those decades of chaos, students chanted for ‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democracy’, inspired by the western political systems they were coming into contact with. It was Japan that sheltered exiled Chinese republicans who later formed the Kuomintang and it was in the foreign concessions of Shanghai that a free Chinese press bolstered the early ideas of Chinese Communism. Modern China is built on positive foreign influence more than its nationalist leaders like to admit.

Kitto knows first hand just how contradictory Chinese attitudes towards the foreign can be. He first visited China in 1986, one of the first westerners to enter the country after the doors were shut with the Communist takeover. He moved there in 1996, married a Chinese woman, set up a magazine aimed at other foreigners in China, and then a guesthouse in the mountains outside Hangzhou. But by 2012, he was thoroughly disillusioned with modern China and returned to the UK. His publication had been appropriated by the state, a fate which may also befall his guesthouse at the pound of one official stamp, and he was concerned that his children do not grow up under Communist propaganda. Rong Lu seems to chastise Kitto’s younger self: ‘There are foreigners in the Legation who speak Chinese so well they could pass for a Chinese. Imagine that. A foreigner pretending to be Chinese. Shabi [stupid idiot]’.

But as this self-written play shows, something of the country remained in his bloodstream. Kitto’s bilingualism offers some playful opportunities: upon seeing the audience, Rong Lu calls us yangguizi (foreign devils) which he translates to ‘honoured foreign guests’. And refreshingly, Kitto doesn’t shy away from the language of the time: ‘We’d take shots at [the Chinese] but jolly hard to hit such a small target’, Sir Claude explains. Neither is this political incorrectness all reserved for the natives: ‘No plan survives first contact with the French, and that’s when they’re on your side too’, Kitto’s Welsh sergeant opines. The white-haired members of the Army and Navy Club, where I saw the play, enjoyed it immensely.

More than a century on, China is closing to the world again. And in many ways the West doesn’t understand it any better than it did at the turn of the 20th century. A good way to dispel some of this ignorance is to drop in on Mark Kitto’s Chinese Boxing.

Illuminating and depressing: Fiasco – The AIDS Crisis reviewed

Fiasco is a podcast series on Audible that dives deeply into episodes in recent American history. It takes listeners through the smaller moments. Often those that, within the larger epoch-defining events, have been lost to history. In the first season, for example, which centred on the Bush v. Gore election, the opening episode is devoted entirely to the international custody imbroglio of Cuban-born Elian Gonzalez. This case – which saw President Clinton allow Gonzalez to be removed from his relatives in Florida and sent back to his father in Cuba – contributed to Al Gore’s loss of the Latino vote in Florida and thereby cost him the presidential election. Other seasons have been devoted to the Benghazi scandal, the movement to desegregate Boston’s public schools, and Iran-Contra. (At Slate’s Slow Burn, Neyfakh has also produced seasons about Watergate and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.)

The podcast weaves new interviews from the events’ major players with archival news recordings and other sources from the era, which both allows for a greater understanding of history as it unfolded, but also has the added benefit of unintentionally letting the listener feel a bit smug, a bit wiser than we really are; getting to hear important people say things that we, with the benefit of hindsight, know smacks of hubris.

Of course, the things that Neyfakh and his team usually choose to highlight have resonances in the present day. They made a season of Slow Burn that was ‘about Nixon but actually about Trump’, Neyfakh wrote on Twitter, and another ‘that was about Clinton/Lewinsky but was actually about #MeToo.’

Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening of this season on the AIDS epidemic in America, which begins with a quote from Marcus Conant, one of the first doctors to diagnose and treat AIDS in 1981. ‘It’s well documented from the time of the Black Death in 1348… [that] people respond to epidemics in exactly the same, predictable ways,’ Conant explained. ‘The first thing they do is they deny it even occurred. Then they want to blame someone for having caused it as if that will make it go away. They then start losing faith in the institutions that are supposed to protect them.’

It’s no coincidence that Neyfakh chose to devote this season of his podcast to the AIDS epidemic. ‘Living through Covid-19,’ Neyfakh says on the podcast, ‘I wanted to know what it was like the last time American society was transformed by a deadly virus. I wasn’t expecting easy parallels, I just wanted to know how it felt to live through it – the early years in particular.’

Set against AIDS, it would appear the Covid crisis was handled brilliantly. Politicians may have bungled major decisions, but it took most countries only a few months to take the disease seriously and institute lockdowns­ – it wasn’t until four years after AIDS was discovered, and nearly 10,000 people had died, that President Reagan publicly mentioned it for the first time. It took just over a year for scientists to discover a vaccine for Covid-19, as every financial and political resource was poured into research, while it took years of activism, largely from people with AIDS, to bring the disease to the attention of most doctors in the US. This is the real triumph of the podcast: the story it tells of early AIDS activism, the way that gay men organised to protect themselves and each other.

Fiasco also does a thorough – and incredibly depressing – job of showing just how devastating the early years of AIDS crisis were. Almost every episode includes interviews with survivors, with people who have lost their partners, best friends, and often, their entire community. One man interviewed said that watching all of his friends die wasn’t the only painful thing, it was living in San Francisco and feeling like everyone was disappearing – losing the mailman with the great legs, the cute bartenders, all your neighbours.

But the podcast also illuminates the complexities of the early AIDS era. Before listening to Fiasco I had taken for granted just how recently anti-sodomy laws in the US were repealed before AIDS emerged, and the tightrope those who wanted to stop the spread of the disease had to walk in order not to stoke homophobic sentiment. In one episode the director of public health for San Francisco debates shuttering the city’s gay bathhouses which were crucial spaces for gay liberation, but simultaneously hotbeds for spreading the virus. He chooses not to close the bathhouses because the political message was too great: he was afraid of the message it would send to the rest of America, that the nation’s most gay-friendly city closed down a gay space.

The podcast also shows how AIDS devastated other communities. A life-saving treatment for haemophilia requires thousands of different donations of plasma, and in the 1980s, thousands of these doses were made with at least one donation of blood from people infected with HIV. Disturbingly, Fiasco shows how blood companies were unwilling to destroy contaminated doses or to test plasma-donor blood because of expense. As a result, thousands of people – half of the haemophiliacs in the US – died.

AIDS is, however, far from a historical phenomenon in need of a modern parallel. Though there is now an effective treatment for AIDS, 650,000 people died of the disease in 2021 alone. As with Covid-19, which is fast becoming a memory for those in developed countries, it is important we remember that these epidemics have long afterlives, especially as we brace ourselves for new ones.

Britain should embrace new coal mining

For those of us who remember the miners’ strike in the 1980s it takes some getting used to the journey made by coal miners over the past 40 years: from working class heroes to climate ‘criminals’. To hear today’s reaction to the news that Michael Gove has granted permission to build Britain’s first deep coal mine for a generation is to step through the looking glass into a bizarre world where a Conservative government is considered evil for helping to create mining jobs in a de-industrialised region – and the ‘enlightened’ position is to eradicate the very last traces of the coal industry.

Lord Deben, chair of the government’s Climate Change Committee, thinks Gove’s decision to be ‘indefensible’. COP president Alok Sharma thinks it will damage the UK’s reputation. Former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron likens the mine to Betamax (the long-redundant video format) and thinks it will become a ‘stranded asset’. If so, what’s he worried about? It won’t be his or the taxpayers’ problem, only that of the private company which is going to be doing the digging.

‘Stranded assets’ have been a talking point in the fossil fuel industry for years. But one of the best investments you could have made over the past year is Thungela Resources – a company created from a demerger of Anglo American’s coal operations last year – whose share price has soared more than sixfold as demand for coal has sharply increased in reaction to the energy crisis. 

Coal is, of course, a filthy fuel, which is why Margaret Thatcher’s government was right to promote using cleaner, natural gas as the mainstay of the UK’s electricity industry. But none of the Cumbrian coal will find its way into power stations. It will exclusively be producing coking coal for the steel industry – a detail which for months critics of the project didn’t like to acknowledge. Much as we might wish otherwise, it is not yet possible to produce steel commercially without using coal, or another fossil fuel, as a reducing agent. Those who have argued that we don’t need coal because we can use electric arc furnaces don’t understand steel-making: an electric arc furnace will help you turn pig iron or scrap steel into new steel; it will not help you with the first stage of the steel-making process, which involves removing oxygen from the iron oxides in iron ore to leave raw, or ‘pig’, iron behind.     

In future, commercial steel plants might be able to use hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are two demonstration projects – one in Sweden, one in Spain – working on this at present. We don’t know how these will turn out, but under present technology, according to an analysis by Columbia University, it looks as if it will be twice as expensive to produce ‘green’ steel from hydrogen as it is to produce steel from coking coal. To decarbonise steel-making, the production of the hydrogen, too, will have to be zero-carbon – a very expensive and energy-intensive business.

In the short- to medium-term, the alternative to using Cumbrian coal to power steel-making plants in Britain and the rest of Europe is to import coking coal, possibly from Russia as we have been doing for years, or to close down our steel industry for good and import the metal from elsewhere (with no net benefit to the planet because we would effectively be offshoring our carbon emissions). We certainly can’t do without steel – not without all the wind turbines and solar farms the government wants to build.

Sadly, opponents of the Cumbrian mine can’t seem to see this. In the minds of Deben, Sharma and others, only one thing seems to matter: lowering Britain’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. All other considerations, such as jobs and national prosperity, seem to go out of the window.

Five lowlights from Harry and Meghan’s Netflix flop

Is that it? For months now much ink has been spilled about the ‘explosive’ revelations promised in Harry and Meghan’s multi-million pound Netflix bonanza, a ‘tell all’ sensationalist documentary replete with truth bombs to tear the curtain back on the whole squalid royal cabal. And yet, having digested all three soporific hours of the first edition this morning, Mr S was left rubbing his eyelids and wondering what all the fuss was really about.

Of course, there was innuendo aplenty; the ritual breast-beating and eyes watering. There was the full English of Hollywood tricks: dramatic music, sympathetic lighting, dramatic cuts and a smorgasbord of stylistic shenanigans. But in terms of actual revelations, unknown stuff that a Windsor-weary public was yet to learn, there was precious little. Netflix must be left wondering what all those oodles of dollars went on, if not the full warts-and-all story of the Sussexes’ tale of woe.

Below are five of the worst ‘highlights’ from Harry and Meghan’s blockbuster bore…

Racist royals?

In March 2021, the couple told Oprah Winfrey that they had faced racism within the royal family, with Harry noticeably declining the chance to name the senior royal who had allegedly questioned his son’s skin colour. Here, 18 months on, was a chance to actually name the supposed offender and detail such bigotry in detail.

Yet, once again, we were treated to insinuation without evidence. Harry told the cameras that his own family has ‘unconscious bias’, and is ‘part of the problem’ when it comes to racism in Britain. But he ducked the chance to give any examples: instead it was left to academics Afua Hirsch and David Olusoga to claim that British tradition is ‘filled with racist imagery’.

Will the second part of the series go any further?

Di another day

The spectre of Diana looms over this whole charade, with the viewer treated to multiple montages of the late Princess of Wales. At one point Mr S wondered whether this series was really about Prince Harry or actually his (rather more interesting) mother.

Notably the Netflix series also chose to use footage of Diana’s Panorama interview, which Prince William has asked broadcasters to stop using. How must he feel now that Harry has used the footage in his new show?

Surely the endless shots of Diana weren’t merely a cynical attempt to conflate her press critics with the much more sympathetic treatment that H&M received 30 years later…

Social media shenanigans

How did Harry and Meghan meet? The dilettante Duke told the BBC in 2017 that it was on a blind date saying: ‘It was definitely a set-up — it was a blind date. It was a blind date for sure.’

Now it transpires, er, that wasn’t completely true. Instead Harry came across her on Instagram –and the love just bloomed from there…

Decline to comment?

Episode one begins with a pointed attack on Buckingham Palace, proclaiming proudly that: ‘Members of the Royal Family declined to comment on the content within this series’.

Yet already royal officials in London have disputed this, insisting that they were never asked to comment at all. A Buckingham Palace source has already rejected the Sussexes’ claims that the royals had refused to co-operate with their six-part series, according to Mail Online.

‘Recollections may vary’, as the Queen once (reportedly) said…

Meghxit was about, er, Brexit

Probably the most amusing part of the series is the insinuation that somehow the vote to leave the EU in 2016 was linked to criticism of the couple. A grim-faced Harry says the series is not ‘just about our story’, adding: ‘This has always been much bigger than us’.

Academic David Olusoga then says, unchallenged, that the ‘fairy tale’ of Harry and Meghan was ’embedding itself in a nation that is having a pretty toxic debate about the European Union.’ He continues that ‘immigration was at the absolute centre’ of that debate, and that ‘immigration is very often in this country a cipher for race’, followed by a series of clips of Brits making racist comments.

Talk about having a high opinion of themselves. Perhaps the real story is how much Netflix paid for all this…?

Pete Wishart’s resignation letter is damning for the SNP

No matter how heavily it snows today nothing will be as frosty as Pete Wishart’s resignation letter. The senior SNP MP has exited the front bench following the coup that replaced Ian Blackford with relative newcomer Stephen Flynn. 

Blackford is an ally of Nicola Sturgeon and discontent had grown in the party’s Westminster group of MPs about his perceived lack of independence from the leadership in Scotland. Flynn, who at 34 only entered Parliament in 2019, is expected to put distance between his Westminster group and the SNP government in Edinburgh. As MP for Aberdeen South he is seen as less hostile to the North Sea oil and gas industry than Sturgeon, a recent convert to the climate cause. 

This outbreak of heterodoxy is unprecedented in the modern SNP. This is a party where discipline is so iron-tight that the Scottish government suffered its first backbench rebellion last month — after 15 years in power. There has been an attempt to put a brave face on the Flynn coup but Wishart, a 21-year veteran of the SNP Commons contingent, has put paid to that. 

In a missive so icy that you need antifreeze to read it, he quits as environment spokesperson, telling Flynn:

‘I remain bemused as to the reasons why you felt it was necessary to seek a change in our leadership, particularly when we see yesterday’s opinion poll, which shows support for independence at a near all-time high and support for the SNP at Westminster at an unprecedented 51%. Usually change of this significance accompanies failure, whereas we are looking only at sustained and growing success as a movement and party.’

Here is where the tone goes sub-zero:

‘I am sure that this is something that will become apparent to me during the course of your leadership. I also look forward to learning at first-hand what you hope to do differently in the day-to-day management of the group.’

Wishart, who is also chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee, says Flynn has his ‘full support’. It sounds like it.

Joining Wishart on the back benches is Stewart McDonald, who has also quit as the SNP’s defence spokesman. His resignation statement is less snarky but this departure is more significant. While McDonald is close to Sturgeon, at 36 he belongs to the same generation as Flynn, making it harder to dismiss discontent as the old order bemoaning uppity Young Turks. 

McDonald has also been pivotal in building the SNP’s reputation at Westminster as a serious party, particularly in the area of defence, where he has taken the lead since 2017. The SNP came out early and squarely in support of Ukraine and has been raising the alarm over Russian aggression for several years now. McDonald has involved the party in various international forums and events where it could sharpen its policies and positions and make rigorous, substantive contributions to Westminster debates on defence capabilities, procurement and national security. 

As anyone familiar with the SNP will know, this evolution in the party’s position stands in contrast to both the pre-2015 SNP and a significant segment of the grassroots. What little time the old SNP spent on defence or international affairs was seldom spent well, and saw it oppose Nato and the independent nuclear deterrent. It was reflexively hostile to whatever happened to be the position of the UK or the United States and tended to be strident when it came to Israel. Notoriously, it opposed Nato’s intervention to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians, calling the aerial campaign ‘unpardonable folly’. Some of those views remain — not least opposition to Trident — but they have been afforded less emphasis of late. 

In his statement, McDonald argues that the Nationalists ‘are at our best when we collaborate as a united party and sell a modern vision of what Scotland can still achieve’. That is the dilemma the SNP now faces. It has never been in a better position in the polls, but can it fend off disunity between the factions and soothe the impatience of its membership? The only people who can hurt the SNP right now are the SNP, and some of them are determined to give it a go. 

Harry and Meghan’s Netflix show is a tedious, narcissistic wallow

The opening scenes of the eagerly anticipated – or keenly dreaded – Netflix series Harry & Meghan set out the couple’s stall.

‘This is a first-hand account of Harry & Meghan’s story, and told with never before seen personal archive… all interviews were completed by August 2022.’

This hint – that nothing was affected by the Queen’s death – is then compounded by the next statement. ‘Members of the Royal Family declined to comment on the content within this series.’ The promise is clear; this is going to be explosive.

Well, it isn’t. Not so far, anyway. Instead, over a near-interminable first three hours, the viewer endures a mixture of the same biographical material that we’ve all seen a thousand times before. We see hagiographic treatment of the apparently saintly Harry and Meghan, angry attacks on the media coverage and racist harassment directed towards Meghan and, eventually, what viewers have been hoping for: direct criticism of the Royal Family, albeit less full-frontal, in these opening episodes, than might have been anticipated from the explosive and provocative – to say nothing of misleading – trailers.

Meghan describes how William and Kate’s formality ‘on the outside carried through on the inside… that formality carries through on both sides, and that was surprising to me.’

There are some unexpected angles, albeit exclusively from a left-leaning, American perspective. The commentators Afua Hirsch and David Olusoga are featured prominently, rather than the usual rent-a-quote royal commentators and historians, which is a new approach.

Olusoga offers context about racial issues, particularly British involvement in slavery, and there is a pervasive anger towards British society, high and low; from footage of Princess Diana angrily remonstrating with paparazzi while her children were small to seeing angry and abusive tweets directed towards the Duchess on screen, calling her ‘a publicity-seeking c***’ and the like.

Brexit is blamed for much of the racism that erupted in Britain from 2016 onwards, coincidentally the same year that the Harry and Meghan romance began; Olusoga describes it as ‘an inauspicious moment for Britain to be trying to live out this fairytale story of this fairytale princess and this diverse modernising country.’ The clips of Meghan in Suits remind us that global activism’s gain has not necessarily been acting’s loss. And there’s the odd laugh, whether intentional or not, from the arch self-deprecation of Meghan’s description of her self-conscious first curtsey to the Queen, to Harry saying that his family refused to believe that ‘a ginger’ could be dating such a beautiful woman. We also discover that Meghan learnt the National Anthem by Googling it.

Yet the greatest surprise, from the first three hours of Harry and Meghan, is how much of what we might have expected is absent. Looking for overt criticism of King Charles or Camilla? You won’t find it so far, save a cryptic reference to how Harry was ‘brought up in Africa’. Anything about the racism endemic within the wider Royal Family? Harry talks of ‘unconscious bias’, suggesting ‘in this family, you are sometimes part of the problem rather than part of the solution’, and there is a mention of Princess Michael’s so-called ‘blackamoor’ brooch, but there is a good deal less so far than might have been anticipated. (Harry’s 2005 Nazi costume is mentioned but not dwelt on after an expression of regret.)

The viewer might have expected a lacerating, full-frontal assault on Harry and Meghan’s nemeses and detractors. Instead, we get a strange mixture of earnest history lesson, self-consciously goofy romantic comedy and a salutary reminder of how awful the British press is. 

There are still – God help us – three hour-long episodes left to go, which may or may not be more illuminating. There may even be a Harry and Meghan-sceptical voice allowed to speak, although I doubt it somehow. (There is a hint that her relationship with her half-sister Samantha is more complicated than the simple estrangement Meghan has presented it as.) But so far, this is a well-filmed, comprehensive and deeply tedious wallow in narcissism. The kindest thing that you can say is that the couple seem very much in love, although the levels of artifice involved here make such a judgement tricky. Yet I doubt that it will change anyone’s opinion at this stage.

The first and third episodes feature an archive clip of the Queen on her 21^st birthday, broadcasting to the Commonwealth and declaring that her whole life, ‘whether it be long or short’, will be offered to public service. She was proved correct. Alas, the only thing that her grandson has done instead is to sell his birth right to Netflix for the sake of telling ‘his truth’. How times have changed.

The troubling truth about Germany’s failed coup

Germany is one of the world’s most successful liberal democracies. It is an unlikely place for a coup. Yet attempts to seize power – such as the far-right plot exposed by the country’s security services, that resulted in the arrest of 25 people this week – are more common in Europe than we might like to admit.

Those held in custody in Germany are accused of plotting a putsch to overthrow the German government and replace it with a hereditary monarchy headed by an obscure prince. Three thousand police officers were involved in rounding up the suspects in this plot. Usually when such a swoop is mounted in Germany – and they are more frequent than we might like to suppose – the targets are Hitler-worshipping neo-Nazis, often with worrying links to the armed forces or police. So the news that the current suspects belong to an ultra-conservative movement called ‘Reich Citizens’ bent on returning lands lost to the Fatherland after World War Two and re-drawing Germany’s post-war frontiers, is a change to the usual pattern.

What is most extraordinary and disturbing, however, is not the Ruritanian nature of this particular plot – but the fact Germany is far from alone in Europe in facing such threats.

Take France, where military intervention in politics is not unknown. Today’s Fifth Republic was founded by General De Gaulle in 1958 when he was summoned to power by despairing politicians to end the war in Algeria. When De Gaulle failed to keep Algeria French, he only just survived a coup launched by a quartet of disgruntled Generals in 1961. An (unsuccessful) assassination attempt was also mounted against De Gaulle the following year.

In more recent times, the threat of a military takeover in France has also loomed large. In April last year, no fewer than 25 retired French generals signed a letter to a right-wing magazine suggesting a coup d’etat might be necessary to stop ‘civil war’ in France.

Spain and Portugal were both ruled by right-wing dictatorships dating from the 1930s into the 1970s. Portugal’s ruling rightist regime was overthrown by a leftist military coup in 1974, and Spain’s durable military dictator General Franco died the following year. 

Franco’s supporters attempted to oust the democracy that followed the old General when they briefly seized control of Spain’s Parliament, the Cortes, in 1981 in a military coup that was only thwarted by the personal intervention of the (since disgraced) King Juan Carlos. More recently, Spain’s armed forces have issued dark warnings that they would intervene to keep Spain together if the Catalan provinces attempted to break away and declare independence.

Greece was also ruled into the 1970s by a military junta – the Colonels – who seized power in 1967, overthrowing King Constantine that December when he tried to oust them with a botched coup of his own.

Italy’s recently elected prime minister Giorgia Meloni heads a party, the Brothers of Italy, which traces its roots back to Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Italy was wracked by a near civil war when terrorists of the far left and extreme right fought with bombings, shootings, kidnaps and murders – including that of Aldo Moro, a former prime minister. Its fragile democracy was often menaced by the threat of a neo-fascist coup.

What this unhappy litany underlines is the yawning gap between the political cultures of many countries in continental Europe and Britain, which has seen no such threats in recent times. This country has, thankfully, experienced a history of evolving Parliamentary democracy unbroken since the downfall of our only unhappy experience of military dictatorship – the rule of Oliver Cromwell and his generals in the 1650s.

Why is this? The answer is simple. Any suggestion of a putsch or coup would be hard to imagine in Britain, where our armed forces swear an oath to the King and to him alone. Having such a figurehead, who sits outside of politics, makes it difficult for would-be coup plotters to find a suitable leader. For retired colonels in Tunbridge Wells to write to the Times threatening a coup is as unlikely as for officers of the Met’s anti-terror squad to actually plot one.

Are NHS failures making us poorer?

The NHS has a crisis every winter, but this year’s is on a different scale. Before a wave of strikes puts patients and care at risk, stats released by NHS England this morning show a health service already on the brink.

Last month, the number of 12-hour waits in A&E departments in England exceeded 37,800, having hit almost 44,000 the month before: a decrease, but a worrying number still. Waiting lists for consultant-led treatment have grown by 74,000 cases and now stand at 7.2 million. Ambulance waiting times are still far higher than they should be too: now at 48 minutes. All of this before the going really gets tough.

Here’s what this morning’s monthly NHS statistical release tells us:

1. Hospital waiting lists continue to grow

Hospital waiting lists in England currently stand at 7.2 million and they’re likely to get worse – already they are up nearly 74,000 in a single month. Modelling leaked to The Spectator in February suggests they could hit nine million by the next election. Of course, we don’t know how many of the 7.2  million are individual people. Someone might be on the waiting list for multiple cases. If the NHS has that figure, they should publish it.

2. The number of one-year waits has climbed too

The number of those waiting more than a year for treatment is shooting up too: it is now more than 410,000 patients. These are levels not seen since last March, during the third lockdown. The waiting list keeps growing – it’s already some 276,000 longer than where worst-case NHS modelling expected it to be.

3. Ambulance waits

Ambulance response times for Category 2 calls – emergencies including heart attacks and strokes – have improved slightly to 48 minutes, having been more than an hour the month before. The target is 18 minutes. The most serious Category 1 calls are now at 9.4 minutes.

4. Thousands of patients are waiting more than 12 hours in A&E

Almost 38,000 patients waited longer than 12 hours for admission to emergency departments – better than last month’s record of 44,000, but still far higher than pre-pandemic levels. Remember that the target is to see 95 per cent of those turning up at A&E within four hours. Last month they only achieved a success rate of 69 per cent. However, A&E doctors dealt with more attendances – 2,166,710 – than any previous November on record.

5. Delayed discharges

More patients are going into hospitals than coming out: less than half of fit patients were discharged on time last month. More than 13,000 patients spent more time in hospital than needed every single day – the equivalent of around one in ten beds over the month were taken up because of this.

6. Cancer targets not met again

Separate NHS targets exist for cancer diagnoses: 75 per cent of patients must either have their cancer confirmed or get the all-clear within 28 days. The actual figure is now at 69 per cent – a slight improvement on last month’s figures. This 28-day cancer diagnosis target hasn’t been met for the sixteenth month running.

The consequences of a spluttering NHS couldn’t be higher. When the Office for Budget Responsibility scored Rishi Sunak’s Autumn Statement they hinted that its failures were hurting the economy. They expect the disability benefits caseloads to rise ‘by 1.1 million in 2026-27: ‘This revision’, they say, ‘echoes the rise in health-related labour market inactivity, suggesting they may share a common cause.’ In a footnote the OBR announced they will be investigating ‘the possibility of causal links between successive waves of Covid infections, the prevalence of long Covid, and the implications of the rising NHS waiting list, for the labour market and benefits’, before their next forecast.

Some four million Britons say that poor health limits their daily lives ‘a lot’. Yesterday, analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that in summer last year 15,000 working-age people started a new disability benefits claim every month: an average figure unchanged for years. But this year it doubled to 30,000 (it tripled for teenagers). The IFS were at pains to state that their analysis does not consider whether NHS backlogs have contributed to this. But boy does it seem likely.