Starmer’s partygate hypocrisy

Awarding themselves the unearned prize for moral superiority and assuming that the electorate will do so too is a crippling fault of the modern Labour party. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has just outed himself as a severe sufferer of the syndrome via the wounded tone he has taken over being questioned about the events of so-called ‘beergate Friday’ in April 2021. 

In Starmer’s eyes, the venal Boris Johnson and his lackeys mock a nation by gorging on cake but when he and his entourage gather for beer and pizza in an indoor space it is merely a ‘pause for food’ and to suggest anything else amounts to ‘Tory mudslinging’. The lawyer Starmer’s distinction depends on the fact that the Prime Minister was slapped with a fixed penalty notice, while Durham Police decided that what he did was OK.

But a more acute political intelligence would see at once that this will not wash in the court of public opinion. Quite obviously Johnson and Rishi Sunak, who really was ‘ambushed by cake’, have been held to a far harsher legal standard than has been applied to Starmer. The electorate can see that.

Yet Starmer called for both Johnson and Sunak to quit over their fixed penalty notices despite knowing that the full truth about his own campaign-trail gathering had not come out. 

For starters, Labour said its deputy leader Angela Rayner was not at the event when she was. This according to Starmer was a simple ‘mistake’ made in good faith. But has he ever conceded Johnson could have made simple mistakes in good faith about what constituted unlawful gatherings? Of course not.

Instead, he pushed the idea that the furore was highly revealing about the Prime Minister’s character, telling the Commons on the day of the original Sue Gray report: 

Rather than come clean, every step of the way he has insulted the public’s intelligence… Just as he has done throughout his life, he has damaged everyone and everything around him along the way.

Can Starmer be said to have ‘come clean’ about his own lockdown socialising? Hardly. He is still being evasive now about what exactly the ‘work’ was that his team supposedly returned to after beer and pizza had been consumed around 10 p.m. on a Friday night.

‘His colleagues have spent weeks defending the indefensible, touring the TV studios, parroting his absurd denials, degrading themselves,’ Starmer also told Johnson on Sue Gray day. Anyone who has seen the likes of David Lammy struggling recently to fend off perfectly reasonable questions about beergate would need the proverbial heart of stone not to find this funny in retrospect.

When Starmer was first questioned about beergate, back in January, he told the BBC’s Sophie Raworth: ‘If you’re trying to persuade anyone that stopping to have some food when you’re in the office all day working is a breach of the rules, it’s just not going to wash.’ Yet hasn’t such thinking been at the heart of his own relentless attacks on Johnson?

Starmer the lawyer may think he has winning answers to these questions. Were he a better politician, he would see immediately that he does not. He has been hoisted by his own petard and may soon crash land against some particularly unforgiving ramparts.

The nanny state is making us poorer

As household budgets face their worst squeeze for decades, one wonders whether the public health establishment feels any remorse for their role in driving up the cost of living. The kinds of taxes – on food, alcohol, tobacco, and soft drinks – that nanny statists have dedicated entire careers toward delivering are proven to have taken a greater share of income from the poor than the rich. An average family that indulges in drinking and tobacco will now spend £891 in cigarette levies and £216 in alcohol duty every year.

Advocates for sin taxes argue that their tactics are progressive if they improve the health of the poor more than the rich. Others may suggest that government revenues from these taxes can be used to cover the harms caused by smoking, drinking and obesity. The former argument ignores the economic hardship these policies create. The latter is not clear-cut: bear in mind, for instance, that the costs to the government of treating smoking-attributable diseases are covered more than four times over by early death savings and tobacco duty revenue.

Against this backdrop, it was revealed on Sunday that minimum unit pricing in Scotland had cost Scottish consumers £270 million over four years – the equivalent to over £70 per drinker. The policy, which sets a floor price on a unit of alcohol to prevent the sale of ‘cheap’ drinks, was introduced in Scotland in May 2018 because the Scottish government lacked the power to raise alcohol duty itself.

This means that the cost to consumers, paid through higher prices, is not collected as a tax but instead increases the revenues (and presumably profits) of alcohol suppliers. (I have no issue with businesses making profits, but it seems an odd response from officials who seem to have different attitudes towards the industry.)

There is little evidence to suggest a decline in crime, A&E attendances, or in alcohol-related hospital admissions. In 2021, alcohol-related deaths hit a 10-year high. And yet minimum prices had been presented as the ‘single most effective’ means of tackling alcohol-related harm by the Scottish government. Researchers at the University of Sheffield predicted that, in the first year alone, there would be a 3.5 per cent drop in alcohol consumption, 58 fewer alcohol-related deaths, and 1,299 fewer hospital admissions.

It is true that alcohol consumption has fallen in Scotland over four years, but this doesn’t mean that harmful drinking has been reduced. And a recent study from Public Health Scotland found that 3 per cent of people have travelled to another part of the UK solely to buy alcohol. If a 3.5 per cent drop in alcohol consumption was significant enough to justify the policy, then 130,000 people going on ‘booze cruises’ to England is surely enough to make us question it.

Yet it seems unlikely, especially now that Wales and Ireland have followed Scotland in introducing minimum unit prices, that any policymakers will question it. Minimum unit prices can simply be added to the pile of paternalistic, regressive and seemingly ineffective measures introduced on the basis of dubious assumptions and peddled by those who believe others too irrational to make sensible decisions.

Public health overreach has extended to such a degree that it scarcely relates to ‘public health’ anymore. The term used to mean vaccinations, sanitation, education – all measures designed to combat communicable diseases. But in the lead up to the outbreak of Covid-19, the World Health Organization was busy campaigning for universal healthcare, taxation, gender equality and housing. Public Health England, which performed so poorly during the pandemic that it was abolished, spent more time endorsing minimum pricing for alcohol than PPE provision.

Yet the experience of the pandemic has done little to dampen the public health establishment’s zeal. In the past few months alone, academics from the University of Stirling have suggested prominent health warnings on alcohol products would make drinking ‘unappealing’ and ‘socially unacceptable’ to young adult drinkers. Health warnings are designed to give consumers important information, not socially engineer. A group of NGOs has attacked supermarkets for ‘bombarding’ shoppers with offers of cheap meat, by which they mean ‘making available at a reasonable price’. Academics at Bath University have called for a price cap on cigarettes, meaning the government would be setting tobacco prices.

The plan to ban buy-one-get-one-free on ‘junk food’ is still slated to take effect this autumn, right when the cost of living crisis is expected to peak. It’s part of a raft of measures designed to narrow our waistlines, though even the government’s own impact assessment predicts this will reduce food intake by a paltry three calories per day. Instead of crying crocodile tears over the costs of living, the government needs to do something about it, and row back the pointless nannying.

All talk and no trousers: is Oxford really to blame for Brexit?

Attacks on British elitism usually talk about Oxbridge, but Simon Kuper argues that it is specifically Oxford that is the problem, which has provided 11 (out of 15) prime ministers since the war. So what’s the explanation? Kuper thinks it’s all the fault of the Oxford Union, which fosters chaps who are clever at debating without particularly caring which side they are on. As a result, they acquire enough rhetorical skills to enable them to beat opponents who rely on thoughtful, fact-based arguments. Such arguments are ‘boring’, and being boring in the Oxford Union is the worst crime you can commit.

This wouldn’t matter if it were confined to undergraduates but, Kuper argues, the Union is often the rehearsal for, and gateway to, a Westminster career. So you end up with politicians and top civil servants who are good at debate but have no deeply held beliefs and little or no experience of the real world. Their skill is bluffing their way through tutorials, not getting things done. They chatter brilliantly but they don’t deliver.

I find this argument convincing but also familiar. Dominic Cummings has been saying it for yonks. For instance, in 2014: ‘We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as a spin doctor.’ Of course Cummings went to Oxford too, so does that make him part of what Kuper calls ‘the Chumocracy’? I don’t think so. But Kuper seems to believe in some sort of conspiracy because Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne and Jacob Rees-Mogg were all at Oxford in the 1980s.

As was he. He arrived on the same day as Rees-Mogg. But Kuper says he was never a Chum, because he was middle class and grew up mainly in the Netherlands. He read History and German rather than Classics or PPE, and only visited the Union as a Cherwell reporter. Nowadays he’s a brilliant Financial Times contributor and says: ‘I too learned at Oxford how to write and speak for a living without much knowledge.’

The Oxford he arrived at in 1988 was ‘still a very British and quite amateurish university, shot through with sexual harassment, dilettantism and sherry’. Everyone had watched Brideshead Revisited on telly and was keen to be Sebastian Flyte. There were only six Afro-Caribbean students in the entire university. And American Rhodes scholars such as Bill Clinton, who might have added some seriousness, were too busy still discussing the Vietnam war to pay attention to Oxford politics. They thought of Britain as a country in palpable decline.

Boris at Oxford was ‘king of all he surveyed’ and had a claque of devoted stooges, including Gove and Toby Young. When he left, he wrote disparagingly of the Union, that it was ‘nothing but a massage parlour for the egos of the assorted twits, twerps, toffs and misfits that inhabit it’. Nevertheless, he was downcast not to be elected president of the Union the first time he tried and very happy to succeed the second time, though as Kuper sharply observes: ‘Boris’s gift was for winning office, not doing anything with it.’

Cameron played no part in the Union, but then entered the Conservative Research Department with a recommendation from Buckingham Palace (I wish Kuper had said who from). Other Oxford Tories went into journalism – Gove to the Telegraph and then the Times, Johnson vice versa. When he was sacked from the Times for making up a quote, Boris was then ushered to the Telegraph leader writers’ desk. Osborne failed to get into journalism until much later (when Evgeny Lebedev made him editor of the Evening Standard), but joined Cameron at the Conservative Research Department. Kuper went to the FT, but soon developed the slacker’s habit of leaving his jacket on the back of his chair to suggest that he was in the building when he wasn’t: ‘I didn’t have much to prove. I was already a white Oxford male.’

The Oxford Tories belonged in journalism because ‘opinion writing was exactly what their education had prepared them for’. When Boris became editor of The Spectator in 1999, the Doughty Street office ‘became their clubhouse’. And journalism, Kuper sharply remarks, was a perfect prelude to a political career, because ex-journalists have the advantage of never having run anything, so they have no record that can be attacked.

Kuper remembers interviewing Cameron for the FT in 2005 when he was a candidate for the Tory leadership, and says

they each clocked at a glance, as only Britons can, ‘He’s upper-class!’ ‘He’s middle-class!’ For almost all the 30-minute interview, Cameron dished up pre-cooked, content-free clichés. The fact that he was obviously intelligent only made it more insulting.

Yet he was elected leader, since ‘it turned out the Conservative party wasn’t looking for a leader with policies anyway’. Boris was irked, since Cameron had been below him at school and at Oxford, so he got himself chosen as Mayor of London instead. Kuper wrote in the FT that Cameron could never win a general election because ‘he is too blatantly posh’ and surrounded himself with other Etonians; but the electorate disagreed. And somehow this gang of Oxford Chums ended up producing Brexit.

Kuper says that Oxford has changed: it’s now more professional and money-driven, with many more foreign students. And undergraduates are expected to work an average of 40 hours a week, which was almost unheard of in his time. ‘Most tutors today don’t tolerate articulate bluffers’; one told him that ‘someone like Boris now just would not get into Oxford’.

Actually the section of the book I found most interesting had no particular relevance to its thesis. Kuper points out that all British prime ministers from 1940 to 1963 had served in combat, which gave them a seriousness of purpose that modern politicians lack. And war throws classes together, so, having been officers, they had some concept of looking after their men. They wanted to ameliorate, not exacerbate, the social divide. ‘Then Bertie Wooster rose from the dead.’

I’m still not sure what this book is about, unless it’s just Kuper asking himself how a bunch of people he dismissed as clowns at Oxford ended up running the country. In his closing chapter, he comes up with some suggestions for how Oxford could be reformed. He thinks one idea might be to stop teaching undergraduates and concentrate on ‘doing research, teaching grad students, spawning tech companies and making even more money from corporate conferences and executive education’. This sounds depressing. As does his final sentence: ‘Alternatively, we could preserve Oxford unchanged, and just accept elite self-perpetuation as the intended outcome of British life.’ So this sparkling firework of a book ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Tories braced for ‘Blue Wall meltdown’

Just 48 hours out from polling day and in Tory circles the expectations are that the local election results will be OK in some places and disastrous in others; there are predictions of ‘carnage in Surrey and Oxfordshire’. ‘Things are particularly bad in Scotland, bad in London, not great in the South West, but in the Red Wall marginals the mood is not that bad’ is how one Johnson ministerial loyalist sums up the mood.

One cabinet minister predicts headlines about a ‘Blue Wall meltdown’, saying that the ‘the Libs are now detoxified post coalition’ and have, once again, become seen as a safe repository for a protest vote.

If the results do turn out like this, then it will reinforce current divisions in the Tory parliamentary party – with MPs in Lib Dem facing marginals particularly anxious about the prospect of Johnson continuing as leader. One of Johnson’s closest supporters says that after the locals that ‘the MPs we thought we had a problem with, we’ll have more of a problem with’.

But at the moment, it seems like the locals won’t be a trigger for a no-confidence vote in Johnson. One well-connected minister predicts that the Tories are ‘entering a phase of it’s not great but let’s see where things are in six months.’ Interestingly, one Johnson confidant is far more worried about the privileges committee investigation, not expected to be done until the autumn, into whether Johnson misled parliament than the Gray report.

The Supreme Court’s abortion bombshell

Abortion is a nuclear bomb of an issue, planted at the core of American liberalism. And it just went off. That’s why police in Washington, DC have put up barriers around the Supreme Court, following the extraordinary leak of a draft opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade. Everybody now expects protests outside the court and all over the world.

The leak itself is an extraordinary story. A draft opinion from a Supreme Court Justice has never leaked before. The fact that it has suggests a serious controversy within the institution. Politico broke the story, and says it obtained the document from a person familiar with the court’s deliberations. Whoever gave Politico the story clearly wanted to cause a lot of trouble.

The majority draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is a clear rejection of the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling as well as a subsequent 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision. Alito wholeheartedly refutes the most common defence of abortion under US law – which is to argue that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy accords with the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, which rules that individual states cannot enforce laws that ‘abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.’

The Alito draft opinion argues unambiguously that the US Constitution does not enshrine any right to abortion on such grounds. ‘We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,’ the Justice writes. ‘It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.’

‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.’

Alito declares, with finality, ‘the inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions’.

A majority draft ‘opinion of the court’ is not the same as a Supreme Court verdict. It is not finalised and could yet change if any of the justices change their mind – which could happen in the coming days. According to Politico, four other Justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito, meaning that a majority on the court supports the decision.

If it stands, the ruling would mark a triumph for the conservative ‘pro-life movement’ in the US, which has spent decades trying to bring down the legal structures that upheld the idea of a federal right to abortion in the United States. The Federalist Society, for instance, was intimately involved in moves to pressure the Republican Party to appoint conservative Justices to the Supreme Court, to counteract what it perceived as a left-liberal bias on the court. Their efforts bore fruit during the presidency of Donald Trump, as Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how significant this news could be. The term ‘culture wars’ today is applied to almost everything, from trans rights to free speech to mask mandates to Putin and cancel culture. But the ‘culture war’ as we know it in many ways began with the debate over abortion, a subject that still divides America very sharply. By returning the issue of a ‘woman’s right to choose’ to America’s elected representatives, and perhaps back to states’ rights, the Supreme Court could be about to trigger a political firestorm that will define the Biden presidency.

Read the full Supreme Court document here. 

Full text: leaked Roe v Wade draft ruling

The leak of a Supreme Court Justice’s draft opinion that would overturn the constitutional right to an abortion has reignited perhaps the most divisive American cultural issue of the last 50 years. Justice Samuel Alito has laid out the case for reversing Roe v Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that enshrined the right of American women to seek a termination of their pregnancy. Alito writes in the leaked document: 

It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.

Below is an edited extract; the full document is here.

Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply-conflicting views. Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality. Still others in a third group think that abortion should be allowed under some but not all circumstances, and those within this group hold a variety of views about the particular restrictions that should be imposed.

For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each State was permitted to address this issue in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then in 1973, this Court decided Roe vs Wade. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one. It did not claim that American law or the common law had ever recognized such a right, and its survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant (e.g. its discussion of abortion in antiquity) to the plainly incorrect (e.g, its assertion that abortion was probably never a crime under the common law). After cataloguing a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by a legislature.

Under this scheme, each trimester of pregnancy was regulated differently, but the most critical line was drawn at roughly the end of the second trimester, which, at the time, corresponded to the point at which a foetus was thought to achieve ‘viability,’ ie, the ability to survive outside the womb. Although the Court acknowledged that States had a legitimate interest in protecting ‘potential life,’ it found that this interest could not justify any restriction on pre-viability abortions. The Court did not explain the basis for this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning. One prominent constitutional scholar wrote that he ‘would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court ended up drafting’ if he were ‘a legislator’, but his assessment of Roe was memorable and brutal: Roe was ‘not constitutional law’ at all and gave ‘almost no sense of an obligation to try to be’. At the time of Roe, 30 States still prohibited abortion at all stages. In the years prior to that decision, about a third of the States had liberalised their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State.

As Justice Byron White aptly put it in his dissent, the decision represented the ‘exercise of raw judicial power,’ and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half-century. Eventually, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. vs Casey (1992), the Court revisited Roe, but the members of the Court split three ways. Two Justices expressed no desire to change Roe in any way. Four others wanted to overrule the decision in its entirety. And the three remaining Justices, who jointly signed the controlling opinion, took a third position. Their opinion did not endorse Roe’s reasoning, and it even hinted that one or more of its authors might have ‘reservations’ about whether the Constitution protects a right to abortion. But the opinion concluded that stare decisis, which calls for prior decisions to be followed in most instances, required adherence to what it called Roe’s ‘central holding’ – that a State may not constitutionally protect foetal life before ‘viability’ – even if that holding was wrong. Anything less, the opinion claimed, would undermine respect for this Court and the rule of law. Paradoxically, the judgement in Casey did a fair amount of overruling. Several important abortion decisions were overruled in toto, and Roe itself was overruled in part.

Casey threw out Roe’s trimester scheme and substituted a new rule of uncertain origin underwhich States were forbidden to adopt any regulation that imposed an ‘undue burden’ on a woman’s right to have an abortion. The decision provided no clear guidance about the difference between a ‘due’ and an ‘undue’ burden. But the three Justices who authored the controlling opinion ‘Called the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division’ by treating the Court’s decision as the final settlement of the question of the constitutional right to abortion.

As has become increasingly apparent in the intervening years, Casey did not achieve that goal. Americans continue to hold passionate and widely divergent views on abortion – and state legislatures have acted accordingly. Some have recently-enacted laws allowing abortion, with few restrictions, at all stages of pregnancy. Others have tightly restricted abortion beginning well before viability.

And in this case, 26 States have expressly asked this Court to overrule Roe and Casey and allow the States to regulate or prohibit pre-viability abortions. Before us now is one such state law.

The State of Mississippi asks us to uphold the constitutionality of a law that generally prohibits an abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy – several weeks before the point at which a fetus is now regarded as ‘viable’ outside the womb. In defending this law, the States primary argument is that we should reconsider and overrule Roe and Casey and once again allow each State to regulate abortion as its citizens wish. On the other side, respondents and the Solicitor General ask us to reaffirm Roe and Casey, and they contend that the Mississippi law cannot stand if we do so.

Allowing Mississippi to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, they argue, ‘would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe entirely.’ They contend that “no half measures” are available and that we must either reaffirm or overrule Roe and Casey .‘

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision – including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely: the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” The right to abortion docs not fall within this category.

Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. Indeed, when the 14th Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime – at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the 14th Amendment’s protection of ‘liberty.’ Roe’s defenders characterise the abortion right as similar to the rights recognised in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us describes as an ‘unborn human being’.

Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. ‘The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.’ That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.

The law at issue in this case – Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, contains this central provision: ‘Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen weeks.’

To support this Act, the [Mississippi] legislature made a series of factual findings. It began by noting that, at the time of enactment, only six countries besides the United States ‘permitted non therapeutic or elective abortion-on-demand after the 20th week of gestation.’ The legislature then found that

• at 5 or 6 weeks’ gestational age an ‘unborn human beings heart begins beating
• at 8 weeks the ‘unborn human being begins to move in the womb’
• at 9 weeks ‘all basic physiological functions are present;’
• at 10 weeks ‘vital organs begin to function,’ and ‘[hair, fingernails, and toenails begin to form;’ at eleven weeks ‘an unborn human beings diaphragm is developing,’ and he or she ‘may move about freely in the womb;’
• At 12 weeks the ‘unborn human being’ has ‘taken on the human form in all relevant respects.

It found that most abortions after 15 weeks employ ‘dilation and evacuation procedures which involve the useof surgical instruments to crush and tear the unborn child,’ and it concluded that the ‘intentional commitment of such acts for nontherapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the medical profession.’ Respondents are: an abortion clinic. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and one of its doctors.

On the day the Gestational Age Act was enacted, respondents filed suit in federal district court against various Mississippi officials, alleging that the Act violated this Court’s precedents establishing a constitutional right to abortion. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of respondents and permanently enjoined enforcement of the Act, reasoning that ‘viability marks the earliest point at which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions ‘and that fifteen weeks’ gestational age is ‘prior to viability.’

We granted certiorari to resolve the question whether ‘all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.’ Petitioners’ primary defence of the Mississippi Gestational Age Act is that Roe and Casey ‘were wrongly decided and that ‘the Act is constitutional because it satisfies rational-basis review.’ Respondents answer that allowing Mississippi to ban pre-viability abortions ‘would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe entirely.’ They tell us that ‘no half measures’ are available: we must either reaffirm or overrule Roe and Casey.

We begin by considering the critical question whether the Constitution, properly understood, confers a right to obtain an abortion. Skipping over that question, the controlling opinion in Casey reaffirmed Roe’s ‘central holding’ based solely on the doctrine of stare decisis but – as we will explain – ‘proper application of stare decisis required an assessment of the strength of the grounds on which Roe was based.

We therefore turn to the question that the Casey plurality did not consider, and we address that question in three steps.

• First, we explain the standard that our cases have used in determining whether the 14th Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty’ protects a particular right.
• Second, we examine whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition and whether it is an essential component of what we have described as ‘ordered liberty.’
• Finally, we consider whether a right to obtain an abortion is supported by other precedents.

Constitutional analysis must begin with ‘the language of the instrument’, which offers a ‘fixed standard’ for ascertaining what our founding document means. The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text. Roe, however, was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned. And that privacy right, Roe observed, had been found to spring from no fewer than five different constitutional provisions – the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and 14th Amendments.

The Court’s discussion left open at least three ways in which some combination of these provisions could protect the abortion right.

• One possibility was that the right was ‘founded… in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people.’
• Another was that the right was rooted in the First, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment, or in some combination of those provisions, and that this right had been ‘incorporated’ into the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment just as many other Bill of Rights provisions had by then been incorporated.
• A third path was that the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments played no role – and that the right was simply a component of the ‘liberty’ protected by the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
  

Roe expressed the ‘feeling’ that the 14th Amendment was the provision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Constitution and that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance. The Casey Court did not defend this unfocused analysis and instead grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the ‘liberty’ protected by the 14th Amendment’s Duc Process Clause.

We discuss this theory in depth below, but before doing, we briefly address one additional constitutional provision that some of respondents’ amici have now offered as yet another potential home for the abortion right: the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Neither Roe nor Casey saw fit to invoke this theory, and it is squarely foreclosed by our precedents, which establish that a States’ regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the ‘heightened scrutiny’ that applies to such classifications.’

The regulation of a medical procedure that only one sex can undergo does not trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny unless the regulation is a ‘mere pretext designed to effect an invidious discrimination against members of one sex or the other.’ Geduldig vs Aiello (1974). And, as the Court has stated (1993), the ‘goal of preventing abortion’ does not constitute ‘invidiously discriminatory animus against women.’ 

Accordingly, laws regulating or prohibiting abortion are not subject to heightened scrutiny. Rather, they are governed by the same standard of review as other health and safety measures. With this new theory addressed, we turn to Casey’s bold assertion that the abortion right is an aspect of the ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Is the right to abortion rooted in American history and tradition?

The underlying theory on which this argument rests – that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for ‘liberty’ – has long been controversial. But our decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights. The first consists of rights guaranteed by the first eight amendments.

Those amendments originally applied only to the federal government. But this Court has held that the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment ‘incorporates’ the great majority of those rights and thus makes them equally applicable to the States.

The second category – which is the one in question here – comprises a select list of fundamental rights that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. In deciding whether a right falls into either of these categories, the Court has long asked whether the right is ‘deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition’ and whether it is essential to our Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered Liberty.’

And in conducting this inquiry, we have engaged in a careful analysis of the history of the right at issue. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the Court in Timbs vs Indiana, is a recent example. In concluding that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against excessive fines is ‘fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty’ and ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,’ Her opinion traced the right back to Magna Carta, Blackstone’s Commentaries, and 35 of the 37 state constitutions in effect at the ratification of the 14th Amendment. A similar inquiry was undertaken in McDonald, supra, which held that the 14th Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. The lead opinion surveyed the origins of the Second Amendment, the debates in Congress about the adoption of the 14th Amendment, the state constitutions in effect when that Amendment was ratified (at least 22 of the 37 States protected the right to keep and bear arms), federal laws enacted during the same period, and other relevant historical evidence.

Only then did the opinion conclude that ‘the Framers and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.’ Timbs and McDonald concerned the question whether the 14th Amendment protects rights that are expressly set out in the Bill of Rights, and it would be anomalous if similar historical support were not required when a putative right is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Thus, in Glucksberg, which held that the Due Process Clause does not confer a right to assisted suicide, the Court surveyed more than 700 years of ‘Anglo-American common law tradition,’ and made clear that a fundamental right must be ‘objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’

Historical inquiries of this nature are essential whenever we are asked to recognise a new component of the ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause because the term ‘liberty’ alone provides little guidance. ‘Liberty’ is a capacious term. As Lincoln once said: ‘We all declare for Liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing’ In a well-known essay, Isaiah Berlin reported that ‘historians of ideas’ had catalogued more than 200 different senses in which the terms had been used.

In interpreting what is meant by the 14th Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty,’ we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. That is why the Court has long been ‘reluctant’ to recognise rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution.’Substantive due process has at times been a treacherous field for this Court, and it has sometimes led the Court to usurp authority that the Constitution entrusts to the people’s elected representatives.

As the Court cautioned in Glucksberg, 

‘we must… exercise the utmost care whenever we are asked to break new ground in this field, lest the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause be subtly transformed into the policy preferences of the Members of this Court.’ 

On occasion, when the Court has ignored the ‘appropriate limits’ imposed by ‘respect for the teachings of history,’ it has fallen into the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterised discredited decisions such as Lochner vs New York. The Court must not fall prey to such an unprincipled approach. Instead, guided by the history and tradition that ‘map the essential components of our Nation’s concept ordered liberty, we must ask what the 14th Amendment means by the term liberty.’ When we engage in that inquiry in the present case, the clear answer is that the 14th Amendment does not protect the right to an abortion.

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None. No state constitutional provision had recognised such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognised such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise of which we are aware. And although law review articles are not reticent about advocating new rights, the earliest article proposing a constitutional right to abortion that has come to our attention was published only a few years before Roe.

Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe – but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow. Roe either ignored or mis-stated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe faulty historical analysis. It is therefore important to set the record straight.

Common law and abortion

We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after ‘quickening’—i.e., the first movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.

The eminent common-law authorities all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has ‘struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the fetus be already formed and animated – and particularly if it be animated – he commits homicide.’

Sir Edward Coke’s 17th-century treatise likewise asserted that abortion of a quick child was ‘murder’ of the ‘childe be born alive’ and a ‘great misprision’ if the ‘childe dieth in her body.’ Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale likewise described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision.’ And writing near the time of the adoption of our Constitution, Blackstone explained that abortion of a ‘quick’ child was ‘by the ancient law homicide or manslaughter’ (citing Bracton), and at least ‘a very heinous misdemeanour’ (citing Coke).’

English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime. In 1732, for example, Eleanor Beare was convicted of ‘destroying the fetus in the Womb’ of another woman and ‘there-by causing her to miscarry.’ For that crime and another ‘misdemeanour,’ Beare was sentenced to two days in the pillory and three years’ imprisonment.

Although a pre-quickening abortion was not itself considered homicide, it does not follow that abortion was permissible at common law – much less that abortion was a legal right. Quite to the contrary, in the 1732 case mentioned above, the judge said of the charge of abortion (with no mention of quickening) that he had never met with a case ‘so barbarous and unnatural’.

Similarly, an indictment from 1602, which did not distinguish between a pre-quickening and post-quickening abortion, described abortion as ‘pernicious’ and ‘against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity.’ That the common law did not condone even pre-quickening abortions is confirmed by what one might call a proto-felony murder rule. Hale and Blackstone explained a way in which pre-quickening abortion could rise to the level of a homicide.

Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman ‘with child’ a ‘potion’ to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was ‘murder’ because the potion was given ‘unlawfully to destroy her child within her.’ As Blackstone explained, to be ‘murder’ a killing had to be done with ‘malice aforethough, either express or implied.’ In the case of an abortionist, Blackstone wrote, ‘the law will imply malice’ for the same reason that it would imply malice if a person who intended to kill one person accidentally killed a different person: ‘If one shoots at A and misses him, but kills B, this is murder; because of the previous felonious intent, which the law transfers from one to the other. The same is the case, where one lays poison for A, and B, against whom the prisoner had no malicious intent, takes it, and it kills him; this is likewise murder. So also, if one gives a woman with child a medicine to procure abortion, and it operates so violently as to kill the woman, this is murder in the person who gave it.

Notably, Blackstone – like Hale – did not state that this proto-felony murder rule required that the woman be ‘with quick child’ – only that she be ‘with child’ and it is revealing that Hale and Blackstone treated abortionists differently from other physicians or surgeons who caused the death of a patient ‘without any intent of doing [the patient] any bodily hurt.’ These other physicians – even if ‘unlicensed’ – would not be ‘guilty of murder or manslaughter.’ But a physician performing an abortion would, precisely because his aim was an ‘unlawful’ one. In sum, although common law authorities differed on the severity of punishment for abortions committed at different points in pregnancy, none endorsed the practice. Moreover, we are aware of no common law case or authority, and the parties have not pointed to any, that remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

In this Country, the historical record is similar. The ‘most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries,’ reported Blackstone’s statement that abortion of a quick child was at least ‘a heinous misdemeanour,’ and that edition also included Blackstone’s discussion of the proto-felony-murder rule. Manuals for justices of the peace printed in colonies in the 18th century typically restated the common law rule on abortion, and some manuals repeated Hale’s and Blackstone’s statements that anyone who prescribed medication ‘unlawfully to destroy the child’ would be guilty of murder (if the woman died).

The few cases available from the early colonial period corroborate that abortion was a crime. In Maryland in 1652, for example, an indictment charged that a man ‘Murderously endeavoured to destroy or Mother the Child by him begotten in the Womb.’ And by the 19th century, courts frequently explained that the common law made abortion of a quick child a crime.

The original ground for drawing a distinction between pre- and post-quickening abortions is not entirely clear, but some have attributed the rule to the difficulty of proving that a pre-quickening fetus was alive. At that time, there were no scientific methods for detecting pregnancy in its early stages, and thus, as one court put it in 1872: ‘Until the period of quickening there is no evidence of life; and whatever may be said of the fetus, the law has fixed upon this period of gestation as the time when the child is endowed with life’ because ‘fetal movements are the first clearly marked and well defined evidences of life’. ‘The Solicitor General offers a different explanation of the basis for the quickening rule, namely, that before quickening the common law did not regard a fetus ‘as having a ‘separate and independent existence.’ But the case on which the Solicitor General relies for this proposition also suggested that the criminal law’s quickening rule was out of step with the treatment of prenatal life in other areas of law, noting that ‘to many purposes, in reference to civil rights, an infant en ventre sa mere is regarded as a person in being.’

At any rate, the original ground for the quickening rule is of little importance for present purposes because the rule was abandoned in the 19th century. During that period, treatise writers and commentators criticised the quickening distinction as ‘neither in accordance with the result of ‘medical experience, nor with the principles of the common law.’ In 1803, the British Parliament made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy and authorised the imposition of severe punishment. One scholar has suggested that Parliament’s decision ‘may partly have been attributable to the medical man’s concern that fetal life should be protected by the law at all stages of gestation.’

By 1919, every single State had criminalised abortion

In this country during the 19th century, the vast majority of the States enacted statutes criminalising abortion at all stages of pregnancy. By 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, three-quarters of the States – 28 out of 37 – had enacted statutes making abortion a crime, even if it was performed before quickening. Of the nine States that had not yet criminalised abortion at all stages, all but one had done so by 1910. The trend in the territories that would become the last 13 States was similar: all of them criminalised abortion at all stages of pregnancy between 1850 (the Kingdom of Hawaii) and 1919 (New Mexico).

By the end of the 1950s, according to the Roe Court’s own count, statutes in all but four States and the District of Columbia prohibited abortion ‘however and whenever performed, unless done to save or preserve the life of the mother’. This overwhelming consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. At that time, also by the Roe Court’s own count, a substantial majority – 30 States – still prohibited abortion at all stages except to save the life of the mother. And though Roe discerned a ‘trend toward liberalization’ in about ‘one-third of the States,’ those States still criminalised some abortions and regulated them more stringently than Roe would allow. In short, the ‘Court’s opinion in Roe itself convincingly refutes the notion that the abortion Liberty is deeply rooted in the history or tradition of our people.’

The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973. The Court in Roe could have said of abortion exactly what Glucksberg said of assisted suicide: ‘Attitudes toward [abortion] have changed since Bracton, but our laws have consistently condemned, and continue to prohibit, [that practice].’

Respondents and their amici have no persuasive answer to this historical evidence. Neither respondents nor the Solicitor General disputes. the fact that by 1868 the vast majority of States criminalised abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Instead, respondents are forced to argue that it ‘does not matter that some States prohibited abortion at the time Roe was decided or when the 14th Amendment was adopted.’ But that argument flies in the face of the standard we have applied in determining whether an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution is nevertheless protected by the 14th Amendment.

Not only are respondents  to show that a constitutional right to abortion was established when the 14th Amendment was adopted, but they have found no support for the existence of an abortion right that predates the latter part of the 20th century—no state constitutional provision, no statute, no judicial decision, no learned treatise. The earliest sources called to our attention are a few district court and state court decisions decided shortly before Roe and a small number of law review articles from the same time period.

A few of respondents’ amici muster historical arguments, but they are very weak. The Solicitor General repeats Roe’s claim that it is ‘doubtful abortion was ever firmly established as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus. But as we have seen, great common-law authorities like Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime and a serious one at that, Moreover, Hale and Blackstone (and many other authorities following them) asserted that even a pre-quickening abortion was ‘unlawful’ and that, as a result, an abortionist was guilty of murder if the woman died from the attempt.

Instead of following these authorities, Roe relied largely on two articles by a pro-abortion advocate who claimed that Coke had intentionally misstated the common law because of his strong anti-abortion views.’ These articles have been discredited, and it has come to light that even members of Jane Roe’s legal team did not regard them as serious scholarship.

An internal memorandum characterised this author’s work as donning ‘the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals. Continued reliance on such scholarship is unsupportable. ‘The Solicitor General next suggests that history supports an abortion right because the common law’s failure to criminalise abortion before quickening means that ‘at the Founding and for decades there after, women generally could terminate a pregnancy, at least in its early stages.’

But the insistence on quickening was not universal, and, regardless, the fact that many States in the late 18th and early 19th century did not criminalise pre-quickening abortions does not mean that anyone thought the States lacked the authority to do so. When legislatures began to exercise that authority as the century wore on, no one, as far as we are aware, argued that the laws they enacted violated a fundamental right. That is not surprising since common-law authorities had repeatedly condemned abortion and described it as an ‘unlawful’ act without regard to whether it occurred before or after quickening. 

Were there illegitimate moves behind the abortion bans?

Another amicus brief relied upon by the respondents tries to dismiss the significance of the state criminal statutes that were in effect when the 14th Amendment was adopted by suggesting that they were enacted for illegitimate reasons. According to this account, which is based almost entirely on statements ‘made by one prominent proponent, important motives for the laws were the fear that Catholic immigrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading white Protestant women to ‘shirk their maternal duties.’

Resort to this argument is a testament to the lack of any real historical support for the right that Roe and Casey recognised. This Court has long disfavoured arguments based on alleged legislative motives. ‘The Court has recognised that inquiries into legislative motives ‘are a hazardous matter.’

Even when an argument about legislative motive is backed by statements made by legislators who voted for a law, we have been reluctant to attribute those motives to the legislative body as a whole. ‘What motivates one legislator to make a speech about a statute is not necessarily what motivates scores of others to enact it.’ Here, the argument about legislative motive is not even based on statements by legislators, but on statements made by a few supporters of the new 19th century abortion laws, and it is quite a leap to attribute these motives to all the legislators whose votes were responsible for the enactment of those laws.

Recall that at the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment, over three quarters of the States had adopted statutes criminalising abortion (usually at all stages of pregnancy), and that from the early 20th century until the day Roe was handed down, every single State had such a law on its books. Are we to believe that the hundreds of lawmakers whose votes were needed to enact these laws were motivated by hostility to Catholics and women? There is ample evidence that the passage of these laws was instead spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a human being. Many judicial decisions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries made that point.

One may disagree with this belief (and our decision is not based on any view about when a State should regard prenatal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests), but even Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents. ‘Men and women of good conscience can disagree… about the profound moral and spiritual implications of terminating a pregnancy even in its earliest stage.’ And we see no reason to discount the significance of the state laws in question based on these amici’s suggestions about legislative motive.

Is abortion an integral part of the right to privacy (as per Roe) or freedom (Casey)? 

Instead of seriously pressing the argument that the abortion right itself has deep roots, supporters of Roe and Casey contend that the abortion right is an integral part of a broader entrenched right. Roe termed this a right to privacy, and Casey described it as the freedom to make ‘intimate and personal choices’ that are ‘central to personal dignity and autonomy’. Casey elaborated: ‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.’ The Court did not claim that this broadly framed right is absolute, and no such claim would be plausible. While individuals are certainly free to think and to say what they wish about ‘existence’, ‘meaning,’ the ‘universe,’ and ‘the mystery of human life,’ they are not always free to act in accordance with those thoughts. Licence to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of ‘liberty’, but it is certainly not ‘ordered liberty.’

Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests. Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interests of what they termed ‘potential life.’ But the people of the various States may evaluate those interests differently. In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be more even more extensive than the right that Roe and Casey recognised. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an ‘unborn human being’.

Our Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated. Nor does the right to obtain an abortion have a sound basis in precedent. Casey relied on cases involving the right to marry a person of a different race; the right to marry while in prison; the right to obtain contraceptives; the right to reside with relatives; the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children; the right not to be sterilised without consent; and the right in certain circumstances not to undergo involuntary surgery, forced administration of drugs, or other substantially similar procedures.

Respondents and the Solicitor General also rely on post-Casey decisions like Lawrence vs Texas and Obergefell vs Hodges. These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could licence fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.

None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history. What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognised in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an ‘unborn human being.’

None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.

In drawing this critical distinction between the abortion right and other rights, it is not necessary to dispute Casey’s claim (which we accept for the sake of argument) that ‘the specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment’ do not ‘mark the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the 14th Amendment protects.’ 

Abortion is nothing new. It has been addressed by lawmakers for centuries, and the fundamental moral question that it poses is ageless. Defenders of Roe and Casey do not claim that any new scientific learning calls for a different answer to the underlying moral question, but they do contend that changes in society require the recognition of a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Without the availability of abortion, they maintain, people will be inhibited from exercising their freedom to choose the types of relationships they desire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors. Americans who believe that abortion should be restricted press countervailing arguments about modern developments. They note that attitudes about the pregnancy of unmarried women have changed drastically; that federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, that leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases, that the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance; that States have increasingly adopted ‘safe haven laws, which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously; and that a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason that the baby will not find a suitable home.

They also claim that many people now have a new appreciation of fetal life and that when prospective parents who want to have a child view a sonogram, they typically have no doubt that what they see is their daughter or son. Both sides make important policy arguments, but supporters of Roe and Casey must show that this Court has the authority to weigh those arguments and decide how abortion may be regulated in the States. They have failed to make that showing, and we thus return the power to weigh those arguments to the people and their elected representatives.

We next consider whether the doctrine of stare decisis counsels continued acceptance of Roe and Casey. Stare decisis plays an important role in our case law, and we have explained that its serves many valuable ends.

• It protects the interests of those who have taken action in reliance on a past decision.
• It ‘reduces incentives for challenging settled precedents, saving parties and courts the expense of endless relitigation.’
• It fosters ‘evenhanded’ decision making by requiring that like cases be decided in a like manner.
• It ‘contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process.’
• it restrains judicial hubris and reminds us to respect the judgement of those who grappled with important questions in the past.

‘Precedent is a way of accumulating and passing down the learning of past generations, a font of established wisdom richer than what can be found in any single judge or panel of judges.’ Gorsuch, A Republic If You Can Keep It (2019).

We have long recognised, however, that stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command’, and it ‘is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution’. It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue ‘be settled than that it be settled right.’ But when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution – the ‘great charter of our liberties,’ which was meant ‘to endure through a long lapse of ages’, we place a high value on having the matter ‘settled right.’ In addition, when one of our constitutional decisions goes astray, the country is usually stuck with the bad decision unless we correct our own mistake. An erroneous constitutional decision can be fixed by amending the Constitution, but our Constitution is notoriously hard to amend.

Therefore, in appropriate circumstances we must be willing to reconsider and if necessary overrule constitutional decisions. ‘Some of our most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents. We mention three. In Brown vs Board of Education, the Court repudiated the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, which had allowed States to maintain racially segregated schools and other facilities. In so doing, the Court overruled the infamous decision in Plessy vs Ferguson, along with six other Supreme Court precedents that had applied the separate-but-equal rule.

In West Coast Hotel Co. vs Parrish, the Court overruled Adkins vs Children’s Hospital of DC, which had held that a law setting minimum wages for women violated the ‘liberty’ protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. West Coast Hotel signalled the demise of an entire line of important precedents that had protected an individual liberty right against state and federal health and welfare legislation.

Conclusion

We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.‘The judgement of the Fifth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is ordered.

[The full of the document can be read below]

Starmer squirms on beergate

Schadenfreude is a funny thing. Once it was Labour laughing at Boris Johnson dodging questions about food and drink: now it’s their turn to face them too. Sir Keir Starmer had a somewhat excruciating appearance on this morning’s Today programme when he was asked repeatedly about his attendance at a work event in April 2021, at which the Labour leader was photographed holding a beer. Four times the Labour leader was asked by Martha Kearney about whether Durham Police had been in touch with him about the gathering; four times he dodged the question.

Starmer claimed that the picture was taken before 10 p.m and that thereafter he and other Labour campaigners resumed their campaigning efforts. What exactly were they doing that late – stuffing letters perhaps? Starmer wouldn’t say. Below is a transcript of the interview between the Labour leader and Kearney on Radio 4 this morning.

MK: ‘It’s a long-running issue about whether you broke the rules during lockdown. I just wondered if you could clear up something for us. Has there been any contact with you or your office from Durham Police since Conservative MPs called for inquiries to be reopened?’

KS: ‘We were working in the office, it was just before elections, we were busy, we paused for food. No party, no rules were broken, that is the long and the short of it. All that’s happened in the last week is that with local elections on the horizon, Conservative MPs have chosen to chuck mud and you can see why they’re doing it–

MK: ‘Well they may well but if you could shed some light on it. I mean you’re someone known for your questioning of Boris John in the House of Commons about these kind of issues and I note that you haven’t answered my question which is about contact with Durham Police. Has there been any contact with you or the office in recent weeks?’

KS: ‘The police looked at this months ago and came to a clear conclusion which is that no rules were broken. And that’s because no rules were broken.’

MK: ‘Not quite what I asked – I just wondered if they had been back in touch since the local MP has been raising questions about it.’

KS: ‘Well look they’ve already concluded their investigation, no rules were broken and this is simply being whipped up as mud-slinging by the Tories…’

MK: ‘Well you must remember if the police rang up your office?’

KS: ‘If the Conservative Party put as much effort into answering the question “How are you going to help people with their energy bills?” as they’re putting into this mudslinging, they’d actually do a service for millions of people who are really worried about their energy bills, this is–’

MK: ‘But by not answering questions like mine, are you not adding to the clouds of doubt around this?’

KS: ‘Well there’s just – we were working, we stopped for food, no party, no rules were broken. I don’t know what I can add to that.’

MK: ‘And you went back to work, did you, after the beer?’

KS: ‘Yes, and the idea that nobody works after 10 o’clock at night is absurd.’

How curious that Starmer repeatedly refused to be drawn on whether Durham Police have contacted his office again – if they haven’t then he’s just given the story new legs for no reason whatsoever.

Roe v Wade and RBG’s legacy

There are tears aplenty across America this morning as millions awake to the news that the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v Wade. The initial majority draft was leaked overnight, suggesting that the country’s highest court will strike down the landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationwide. With Republican legislatures passing restrictive measures across America, the decision is expected to allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. At least it’ll give the Democrats something to run on in 2024.

Already the rhetoric is ramping up across the country, with accusations flying as to who is to blame. Senator Bernie Sanders has already demanded that Congress pass legislation to codify Roe v Wade as the law of the land; Hillary Clinton calls it ‘an utter disgrace’ and ‘a direct assault on the dignity, rights, and lives of women.’ One name though ought to loom large in discussions about the Supreme Court decisions: the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the celebrated justice whose refusal to retire under a Democrat president has clearly backfired so spectacularly. 

Her death in post in 2020 caused a vacancy which Donald Trump duly filled with Amy Coney Barrett, giving the Supreme Court a clear pro-life, anti-abortion majority for the first time in modern history. Those supporters of Ginsburg who are mourning today might wish to reflect on how their heroine’s stubbornness led to this decision. The irony was clearly lost on some of her fans, who, during the court’s deliberations, queued up at one of Washington’s museums, to purchase branded merchandise with her face on.

She may well be remembered as ‘the notorious RBG’ but Ginsburg’s notoriety might ultimately owe more to her role in this judgement than any of her previous achievements.

Putin has corrupted Russia’s ‘Victory Day’

The Victory Day celebrations on 9 May have been, under Vladimir Putin, through a dramatic mutation. In my childhood, in the late eighties and early nineties, it was, apart from the New Year, by far the best holiday of the year. You normally spent it outside, in excellent May weather with lilac blooming all over and war songs – like ‘Victory Day’ or ‘Katyusha’ – booming out from loudspeakers in the streets. We children presented flowers to the veterans, whose chests were sparkling with medals and decorations.

This day connected three generations: the veterans, their kids (our parents) and the grandkids – us. We regarded our grandparents as the ultimate heroes, demigods even, whose self-sacrifice and courage had laid the groundwork for our very existence. The guiding emotion of the event was ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,’ and of course ‘Never again.’ No aggressive international agenda was ever promoted: surviving veterans would probably never allow it. A good part of the Soviet government were veterans themselves. They knew what a real war was like from actual experience, not from state-funded movies or propaganda cartoons.

But since Putin’s 2007 speech in Munich when he excoriated the US for its ‘hyper-use of force’ and Nato for expanding into Eastern Europe, everything has changed. The following Victory Day, for the first time since 1990, there was not sober remembrance but pulverising military might. The parade in Red Square was awash with military hardware: tanks, rocket launchers, jet fighters and strategic bombers – the gamut of modern murder machinery. This year, despite the calamitous war in Ukraine, will be no different: 11,000 servicemen and women plus 62 airplanes and 15 helicopters will take part. 9 May has become cult-of-war day, glorifying the nation as Ultimate Victors, while hinting at forthcoming revenge for the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as issuing dark threats to unnamed enemies (now, in 2022, they are no longer mere threats, the enemies no longer unnamed).

It’s clear Putin was planning this return to militarism for a long time. High school study of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, just four hours per year under Boris Yeltsin, was amplified under Putin to 8-12 hours. Money was pumped into producing films and television series on WW2, often with a queasily patriotic atmosphere in which Russia again and again is seen as alone and surrounded by enemies. A typical film is White Tiger (2012), in which Adolf Hitler, in the closing scenes, remarks that the collective West had always wanted to rid itself of Russia: he’d merely made their fantasies come true.

In this new quasi-religion – primarily one of ‘us’ against ‘them’, victory at all costs is the central value, war a sacred duty, and the iconography of the Great Patriotic War up for grabs in the present day. Georgian ribbons – associated with valour in the first and second world wars – have now been pinned to Russian expansion in Crimea. Victory Day slogans have become increasingly bellicose – ‘1941-1945: We can do it again!’ or ‘1941-1945: The Russians are Coming!’ The Victors did it once in other words: it is now for their descendants to do the same. Or as a 1941 song much-played on Victory Day, ‘This Sacred War’, puts it:

Arise, vast country,

Arise for a fight to the death

Against the dark fascist force!

…This is the people’s war,

A Sacred War!

We shall drive a bullet

Into the forehead of the rotten fascist filth…

This militarism – a Putinian fetish right from the start – has been intimately tied up with our president’s survival. After the riots that greeted his anti-constitutional third term as president in 2011, things only intensified. It became obvious to the Kremlin that unless society were mobilised, an ignominious loss of power was coming. Putin’s first two terms had been governed by the national idea of ‘competitiveness and economic growth’. Now, he said, there could be no ‘other unifying idea for Russia but patriotism.’

That ‘patriotism’ was Putin’s response to those 2011 protestors, with their middle class ‘Western’ values of individual freedom and enfranchisement. The word ‘Unity’ became, increasingly, suffocatingly ubiquitous: a counterweight to democratic values like freedom of discussion or a democratic (‘chaotic’ in Putin speak) handover of power. Here again the lesson of the Great Patriotic War is hammered home to the government’s benefit. The war showed us, said the head of the security council Nikolay Patrushev that ‘success at the front was only possible due to the consolidation of society and the unity of army and people…a necessary condition for ensuring national security at all times.’ If you want to be a good citizen, in other words, stick with the Great Leader.

Because what is the alternative? Along with talk of ‘Unity’ goes a siege-mentality approaching paranoia. Russia is surrounded on all sides by its enemies, goes the narrative, be they Nato, the West or Ukraine. Just as with the Great Patriotic War, in this ‘us’ and ‘them’ conflict, the latter are invariably ‘Nazis’ – a term suspiciously undefined by official propaganda, and that can be adjusted to fit to anyone in conflict with Government Policy.

In the case of Ukraine – the ‘Nazis’ of choice right now – the label is bitterly ironic. One of the greatest threats to the Russian regime has been a democratic Ukraine – with protests, civil society and free elections – steadily evolving on Russia’s borders. As Putin lost both hair and sleep over his upstart neighbour, the ‘Nazi’ label has proved instrumental. Like the word ‘liberal’, it can mean anything you want it to, and its reality-clouding effect is intense. Over a decade of solid war propaganda has given the word an almost Pavlovian force for some Russian citizens. Indeed, Putin has spent the last decade training them, like attack dogs, to respond to it.

Just as elastic is the 2014 law Putin introduced against the ‘public distribution of lies about the activities of the Soviet Union in World War II’ – for ‘lies’, like ‘Nazis’, rely on government definitions. One imagines the old war stories of many veterans, now mostly deceased, would fall under this category. In 2016, a blogger from Perm was fined merely for reposting an article which stated that both Stalin and Hitler had invaded Poland in 1939, even though the joint-occupation of Poland is well known and indeed, part of the school curriculum.

Nor is it stressed in Russian myth that the Soviet Union won the war as part of an international coalition. About two-thirds of Russians are convinced the USSR could have won the war on its own, with 95 per cent believing that the contribution of the allies was trivial set beside that of the Soviets. As a pipe-smoking nationalist colleague declared, seeing a tobacco pipe stamped ‘1942, London’, ‘Those bastards were sitting around chiselling pipes when we were out dying for them.’

In such retellings, Russia stands alone in a hostile, uncaring universe – assailed, bruised and bleeding but through sheer will and yes, ‘unity’, seeing off all its attackers. Such misremembrances are a gift to Putin’s propaganda in 2022 as Russia makes its much-opposed war against Ukraine. This is a catastrophe, because now more than ever we need those old slogans back again: ‘Nothing is forgotten, no one is forgotten.’ And, more urgently still, ‘Never again!’

Boris Johnson’s Red Wall blunder

Oh dear. It seems that Boris Johnson’s passionate electioneering doesn’t extend to, er, knowing where he actually is. The Prime Minister has been out and about on the campaign trail, touring the country to drum up support for his party’s flagging fortunes, three days before voters cast their verdict on his government’s recent woes.

Posting a photo of himself eating an ice cream in Whitley Bay, Johnson tweeted that it was a ‘fantastic day to be out campaigning in Teesside, where we’re delivering a massive programme of investment as part of our plan to level up the whole of the UK.’ Unfortunately, Whitley Bay is actually in Tyneside, not Teesside, prompting opposition parties to accuse the PM of paying little attention to the area outside of election periods. The offending tweet was, inevitably, swiftly deleted thereafter and replaced with a milquetoast substitute which claimed it ‘was a fantastic day to be out campaigning in the North East.’ Whoops!

Of course, the real story here isn’t Boris not knowing where in the Red Wall he is but rather his preference for touring the north of England over the south. Given the Tories’ anticipated election pasting on Thursday in many of their traditional shire heartlands, keeping the Prime Minister out of the limelight there might well prove to be good advice.

The dos and don’ts of school tours

There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking around a primary school for our four-year-old-son. Mindlessly staring at wall displays of woodland animals, you’re racking your brains as to how you will finish work at 3pm for pick up come September and scramble enough childcare for a six-week summer holiday. Goodbye 52-week-a year nursery. 

But book yourself enough tours at enough schools, and you swiftly find yourself in the swing of things. There are those that can only be described as a bad Tinder date: a headmaster with a limp handshake, peeling wallpaper and sweaty lunches under plastic lids that leave you wanting to bolt after the first drink (or classroom), but you know you have three courses (a whole other wing and the forest school) to endure. Or the tour of the wildly expensive prep school – the fees of which would rely entirely on the sudden death of an unknown (rich) relation and serves only as some cruel apple of temptation. But mainly, with more visits, comes the confidence to ask what you really want to know. 

A tour on a normal working day appears to be the gold-plated solution, whether it’s for primary or secondary. But less personal open days shouldn’t be overlooked, says Charles Bonas, director of Bonas MacFarlane which prepares for and places children into leading schools and universities. Here is a chance to get an impression about the other people applying (telling) and leeway to go off-piste, quietly tagging along at the back to look at notice boards or chat to lingering pupils.

Letting a teenager take the lead with a prospective parent seems a strangely perilous strategy (‘If you were trying to sell a £200,000-plus car, which is what it nearly now costs [for five years of public school], you probably wouldn’t get a 16-year-old to do it,’ says Bonas.) But asking pupils to do tours is also a savvy marketing tool. As former prep school headmaster and education consultant at Ivy Education Peter Clare-Hunt says: ‘the lovely rogues’ are very often the best ambassadors of all (presumably if you spy something a little rogue in your own child). And while a head might reflect the ethos of the school, you can count on students to tell it like it is.

Approaching the whole thing like a house viewing is not a bad tack to take: don’t be fooled by the showpiece bedroom in the boarding house (instead knock on the boy’s room next door who hasn’t been given orders to tidy up); make multiple visits in different seasons if that’s what you need to make a decision; and just like you might suss out the neighbours of a potential new house, try to get a glimpse of the bigger picture: the students in the wild. Bonas was won over by Thomas’s in London for his own son when a group of the school’s children outside the gates struck up conversation with him, his wife and their late dog.

Navigating PR spiel can be more hazardous. Visits to the oldest public schools can fall into the trap of becoming gimmicky historic tours, better suited to a tourist than a prospective parent. And amidst an arms race of facilities, there is, says Bonas, generally too little emphasis placed on seeing how the children are taught. On a tour by Toby Young of his West London Free School, Young didn’t have showy facilities to prioritise, even if he had felt the need to, so rather than poking their heads around doors they actually sat in on lessons and looked at the books.

The chance to sit down for lunch is a fast-track way to get under the skin of the place, and defensive answers to tricky questions can be dodged with ‘how’ questions (‘how do you deal with your drugs problem?’, rather than ‘do you have one?’). There is a lengthy tick list that canny parents should come armed with, says Clare-Hunt at Ivy Education (pastoral support, monitoring academic progress, reporting, pupil safety, class sizes, homework policies, how students are prepared for senior school or university entrance, what goes on outside the classroom, staff turnover…). But what this is really about is a gut feeling. ‘I think as a prospective parent you will instinctively gauge in a very short period of time whether that school is going to be right for your child,’ he says. 

And for some it’s enviably straightforward. There’s the tale of the Chinese restaurateur who is said to have not understood a word of his tour around St Mary’s Calne in rural Wiltshire but judged it in the same way he would the restaurants he ran: it was clean, and it was purposeful. You quickly realise that buzz word talk of outdoor learning or sport for all becomes white noise, because what you’re really wondering as you’re marched through the corridors, past squealing children or loping teenagers is not just can I see my child fitting in here, but do I want them to turn out like these ones?

London’s best al fresco drinking spots

Being a city with tightly-packed buildings and frankly aggressive weather, London doesn’t immediately announce itself as a place to grab an alfresco drink. However, a renewed love of the great outdoors – something to do with being inside a lot recently, I imagine – has seen Londoners flock to the city’s terraces at the first rumour of spring. The good news is that among our optimistic outdoor drinking spaces there are some real gems, from rooftop bars to manicured terraces. These are some of the best.

Roof Garden at Pantechnicon – Belgravia

Head mixologist Gento Torigata – seen lately at Gibson Bar in Singapore – has put together a seriously impressive cocktail menu that unites Pantechnicon’s Japanese and Scandinavian influences. Caraway scented akavit and birch sap wine sit on the list alongside oysters, kombu, and shochu. The clever part, is that these novel ingredients are passed across the bar in familiar forms that bely the innovative flavour combinations.

The Margarita made with Tequila, wasabi vodka, apple eau-de-vie, smoked chilli, and lime is an excellent riff on the classic formula that dials up the herbaceous notes in the Tequila to 11. This is deft work by a bartender at the top of their game and well-worth a climb to the fifth floor. Another great order if you’re feeling flush, is the show-stopper of an Old Fashioned made with 12-year-old Yamazaki single malt and black sugar from Okinawa – perfectly realised and yours for £30 a throw.

There’s a full menu of food courtesy of the restaurants on the floors below – Sachi and Eldr – making Roof Garden a great option for a long lunch. However, you’d be perfectly happy posting up on the terrace and washing down small plates with an after-work cocktail or three. The arctic char sashimi dressed in zippy sea buckthorn and oysters painted with tomato and wasabi would be particularly good for the purpose.

There’s not much of a view to be had but the space is pretty and stacked with greenery so you’ll not miss it. A retractable roof offers insurance against the unpredictable British climate so this is a good bet even if the skies look suspicious.

Forza Wine – Peckham

The original Forza Win was a fixture of Peckham’s Copeland Park for years, serving unfussy and intensely lovable Italian food in a former warehouse. While the restaurant moves to new digs in Camberwell, the spinoff bar five stories above Rye Lane has you covered for aperitivo, wine, small plates, and a great view of London.

It’s not the loftiest rooftop in town but from this vantage in Zone 2 you get a pretty spectacular slice of skyline to enjoy while you’re knocking down cocktails. The list covers all your favourite Italian café drinks – your Spritzes, your Negronis – with a strong offering of house serves to back them up. The Negroni sour made with gin, sweet vermouth and Campari shaken with lemon juice and egg white is a particular masterstroke. Silky, bittersweet and bracing, it’s Just the thing to sharpen up your appetite before you order some food.

The menu changes regularly, but always comes with a healthy selection of seasonal veg running through it. Just lately they’ve had the first of this year’s Asparagus with parmesan and hazelnuts – burrata with courgettes, capers and parsley – and braised pork belly with chickpeas and bay. This is the sort of fun, confident Italian cooking that made Forza Win a hit and it’s great to see it translated seamlessly into bar food. The real move here is to roll up with three friends and order the whole menu for a flat £120. Which nets you 12-or-so dishes including a couple of snacky bits and some soft serve ice cream to close out.

Natural and low-intervention wine features heavily, including lots of cloudy, funky, delicious stuff your dad would hate. There are lots of great options around £30 a bottle and a wonderful time to be had working your way through them. Booking is recommended as the place fills up when the weather gets warm.

Dalloway Terrace – Bloomsbury

The extravagantly floral Dalloway Terrace sits just off the Bloomsbury hotel’s Coral Room. It’s styled as a sort of hyper-real English country garden tailor-made for instagramming boozy lunchers but the effect is lovely nonetheless. You’ll be just a just a short skip from Oxford Street when you’re there, but sitting among the exactly manicured flower arrangements on a sunny day will make the bustle feel much further away.

There’s menu of tasty, dependable bistro-ish fare and a pretty classic wine list with an extensive arsenal of fizz. But the cocktails and the setting are the real reason to stop by. The excellent bar staff supply a repertoire of classics on request but until the end of May they’re also serving a takeover menu from pronunciation-defying whisky distillery Bruichladdich.

Top of your hit-list should be The Scotsman, made with the brand’s flagship single malt the Classic Laddie, Belle De Brillet – a Cognac-based pear liqueur – jasmine syrup, and limoncello. The sweeter ingredients play up the orchard fruit and vanilla in the whisky, offering assurance that west coast malt isn’t all about smoke and salt. It would be a shame to leave without also ordering the Islay Martini which reinforces the fresh, herbal profile of The Botanist dry gin with citrus and rosemary oils. A class act.

Kerb at the Understudy – Southbank

While London is undeniably one of the world’s great cities, you’d be hard pressed to say it was the prettiest. That said, the big smoke does have its angles. One such vantage can be found in the concreted shade of the National Theatre where you have a nice view of the river and some open sky from the tree-lined Southbank.

The Understudy bar there is good fun whatever the weather but its outside seating really comes into its own when the sun is out. The prospect of boozing by one of London’s great pieces of architecture is enticing in itself. But this summer the adjacent space will also host street food megalith Kerb with all the attendant tacos and friend chicken that come with it. London isn’t short of places that fit this bill but what you have here is a particularly good version of the formula.

Bethnal Green distillers East London Liquor company are on hand with cocktails featuring their own gin, rum and whisky while brews are supplied by craft outfit Gipsy Hill. The great and good of local craft all present and correct.

This is not the ritziest terrace on the list, or the most expensive, but it’s nonetheless a great bet for an after-work drink and a bite. Come for the National theatre’s impressive grey visage, stay for a pint, stay even longer for a naan wrapped lamb kebab from Baba Dhaba. They also do shows inside, apparently – that could be worth checking that out as well.

The American Bar at the Stafford – Mayfair

One of the original American bars that sprung up in the early 20^th century to serve cocktails to London’s transatlantic visitors. These venues are an important part of Britain’s bar culture, but they do tend to be clubby drinking dens rather than spots in which to spend a spring afternoon. Not so at the Stafford, where the American Bar spills out onto a nicely appointed courtyard – a little cobbled oasis just off Piccadilly.

The drinks are spot on, as you’d hope from a venue of this pedigree, and it’s fitting to order something American Bar-ish like a French 75 or a White Lady on arrival. But delve a little deeper and you’ll discover some very smart variations on classic forms. Several negroni riffs populate a page toward to back of the list offering ideal pre-dinner sharpeners (I know, more Negronis – what can I say? Italy looms almost as large in our cocktail bars as America does).

There’s a particularly impressive example comprising Ginepraio gin, Campari, and a house blend of vermouths aged on site in a clay amphora. The piece of ancestral winemaking kit smooths the edges of the Negroni, leaving it soft and slightly earthy. It’s a neat drink that shows this old dog is more than capable of pulling a few new tricks.

As spring marches on the cocktail list is set to change, accompanying regular barbecues and a new food menu by Lisa Goodwin-Allen, executive chef at Michelin starred Northcote in Lancashire. All of which promises to be similarly impressive.

The Culpeper – Spitalfields

This pub with rooms on Commercial Street is slightly too perfect to be an authentic East End Boozer. The décor is too chic, the food is too good and the exceptionally photogenic terrace upstairs doesn’t fit the template at all. With all of that said, the roof garden is definitely the most inviting in the area and should become part of your regular rotation if you live within ten miles.

The tables and chairs up there jostle for space the among herbs and vegetables, merrily growing away before they’re sent to the kitchen downstairs. There’s something inherently calming about being among all these plants that just puts you in a good mood. In many ways, it’s the inverse of the professionally primped foliage at Dalloway Terrace.

Some of the produce will wind up in a very reasonable set lunch menu (£35 with three courses and a few nibbles) that showcases head chef Pawel Ojdowski’s meticulous approach to sourcing produce. Grilled oysters with gremolata, Lamb shoulder with Romanesco and a veggie shish of asparagus, onion and courgette are all well-judged and generally delightful.

For post 5pm drinks, the bar carries a nice selection of well-kept – if punchily priced – ales, wines, and a few classic cocktails. The garden is walk in only for drinkers, but if you time it right you can order a bottle or a couple of pints and head up there to watch the sun set over the city. A real treat.

Progressives are right about our rotten prisons

When we talk about ‘under-served communities’, we typically think in terms of an absent or neglectful state. Yet one of the most under-served groups of all is one for whom the state is never absent: prisoners. Justice secretary Dominic Raab is in the headlines after he sent prison and probation staff a style guide instructing them to avoid ‘woke’ terminology such as ‘service-user’ and ‘room’ and stick to ‘inmate’ and ‘cell’. On the face of it, Raab’s orders are another salvo in the culture wars and a bit of positioning by an ambitious deputy prime minister, but the Lord Chancellor might be onto something, if perhaps inadvertently.

Progressives love linguistic activism but changing terminology doesn’t always change outcomes. The situation in Scotland’s prisons is instructive. Scotland is steadily, if unevenly, becoming the most progressive part of the UK when it comes to criminal justice. As I’ve written about previously on Coffee House, there is an ongoing revolution in criminal justice policy under the SNP, with the Scottish government advocating an ‘effective, modern person-centred’ justice system in which ‘people should only be held in custody where they present a risk of serious harm’. To some, this might sound like wishy-washy, soft-on-crime liberalism. In fact, it’s gradual but encouraging, smart-on-crime liberalism, and what’s more, it works.

Yet, for all its progressive buzzwords and some substantively enlightened policy, Scotland’s penal system is still getting a lot of things wrong. One of them is mental health. A new report from the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland underscores just how serious the problem is. Based on a series of visits to all 15 Scottish prisons, and building on similar research conducted a decade ago, Mental Health Support in Scotland’s Prisons 2021 documents severe and widespread need, inadequate and under-resourced services, and acute concern among prison staff.

Three-quarters of prisoners interviewed had a history of mental ill-health; six in ten were undergoing treatment before entering the criminal justice system. Three-quarters also reported an addiction to alcohol or drugs. Almost eight in ten prison officers expressed concerns about mental health services within their institution and nearly nine in ten wanted more training in dealing with prisoners’ mental health.

Julie Paterson, chief executive of the Mental Welfare Commission, says that ‘little has changed’ since the 2011 report, and that mental health provision in prisons is ‘inconsistent and lacks cohesion’. ‘Seriously and acutely mentally ill’ prisoners are ‘still not being transferred to hospital care without delay’. Paterson concludes that, despite ‘pockets of good practice and a committed workforce’, ‘the overall experience of mental health service provision in prisons continues to be in need of significant improvement’. The Commission’s new report finds prisoners and staff ‘under-served and under-resourced’ and determines that the ‘key messages’ of the 2011 report ‘have not been realised’ and that ‘anticipated improvements of health care responsibilities being transferred to NHS Scotland have not materialised’.

Instead, the Commission observed ‘inconsistency and reliance on small numbers of specialist staff’, ‘no overarching strategic approach’ to treating prisoners’ mental health needs, and the absence of ‘any correlation between resources, size of the prison and the specific needs of the particular prison’s population’. Covid-19 is a running theme in the report, with the pandemic said to have ‘exposed the fragility of the mental health resources’. (Last year I wrote about prisoners’ greater vulnerability to coronavirus.) The Commission further notes ‘significant concerns that no consideration has been given to proactive post-pandemic planning and additional resource to support both prisoners and staff’. There are also specific problems in relation to severely mentally-ill inmates, the use of segregation and a failure to engage with prisoners’ families.

The Commission has issued ten recommendations, covering collaborative workforce planning and training between the Scottish Prison Service and the NHS, improvements to mental health screening, and an audit of segregation policies. There are larger issues raised by the report, not least the failure to make meaningful improvements in the course of the past decade, the appropriateness of prison for mentally ill people and the scale of change needed across the carceral estate.

There are four points worth making. First, empty rhetoric is the marshalling of language to create an impression without making a change. Much was said in response to the Commission’s 2011 report but nowhere near enough was done, either through a lack of institutional or political will or because of a paucity of resources, or a combination of all these factors. Talking about a more progressive criminal justice system is no substitute for doing it.

Second, as the Commission states: ‘prison is not the place for seriously and acutely mentally ill prisoners.’ To the greatest extent possible, it should not be the place for mentally ill offenders in general. Even so, among the mentally ill inmates interviewed by the Commission, ‘some of their reported experience was akin to punishment for breaking rules e.g. being kept in a cell without right to open air or alternative setting, removal of privileges’. Society may have a legitimate interest in punishing offenders who happen to suffer from mental illness, but to treat them in a way that appears to punish them for that illness or which superadds to their suffering, even inadvertently, cannot be in the public interest and can have no penological justification. It is unnervingly proximate to torture.

As a matter of policy, offenders suffering mental ill-health should, where detention is required, be placed in secure therapeutic settings in which they may receive the same quality of healthcare as they would on the outside. Public policy and public attitudes are slow-moving, however, and this kind of change would have to be carried out gradually, beginning with the lowest-risk prisoners and working up to the hard cases. Until then, and acknowledging that prison may ultimately still be necessary for some of the hard cases, there should be significant improvements made to mental health provision; greater investment in recruiting clinical and support staff and in mental health training for prison officers; and a reduction in the use of segregation, with mandatory care plans and upgrades to facilities where segregation is necessary ‘to protect the health or welfare of the prisoner or any other prisoners’.

Finally, a prison system in which 76 per cent of inmates arrive with a background of mental ill-health is one being used as a dumping ground for wider societal problems. That is not to excuse criminal behaviour; it is simply to recognise a correlation between the prison population and mental health problems. Reducing one may require reducing the other. There are many proposed benefits to giving parity to mental and physical wellbeing in health policy and to them we might be able to add reduced offending and greater public safety.

The political circumstances in England are such that these kinds of reforms are non-starters but there is another opportunity for Scotland to lead the way, as it did with its Violence Reduction Unit and prisoner voting, and demonstrate that a truly progressive justice system is one that makes changes rather than just talking about it.

Will Scotland’s census extension ruin the results?

The debacle over Scotland’s census will not, it seems, have a happy ending. Nearly a quarter of households (some 604,000) are yet to complete their return, and had been facing £1,000 fines from today. It could have been a prosecution of unprecedented scale, but the deadline has been extended to the end of May. Sir Tom Devine, perhaps Scotland’s best-known historian, has said he thinks all is lost. ‘Such is the scale of the disaster the authorities have had little choice but to offer a new deadline,’ he said. ‘Will the extension work? It is very doubtful.’ The SNP has not admitted to any fault, but instead blamed (you guessed it) the media, ‘anxiety’ caused by ‘recent world events’, the cost of living crisis and Covid. All of these things faced the English, who returned the census at a rate of 97 per cent. In Scotland, it’s 77 per cent.

It’s hard to govern a country if you’re not sure who’s in it, what they do and how they live – which is why countries large and small put so much work into their census. It matters because people matter. But if a quarter of the population is missing, then, as academics are starting to point out, the exercise could be rendered ‘useless’. There are concerns too about the extension. The census is meant to provide a snapshot of life in the country on a specific day (20 March) within a specific window. Researchers say now though that a widened collection period could damage data quality for future studies that use the census as its core.

Scotland has always had its own census, with its history tracing back to 1790. It’s not something that’s devolved or reserved. But aligning the census across the UK has proved invaluable to researchers – so much so that in recent years the NRS, ONS and Northern Ireland’s stats body (NISRA) have worked together to ensure comparable results. An aim agreed between the four nations reads: ‘The 2021 Census outputs should constitute consistent, coherent and accessible statistics for the UK, individual countries and geographic areas within each country.’ Northern Ireland even uses the same computer systems as the ONS, meaning they benefit from using an English system that would be costly to purchase themselves. Could Scotland’s census problems have been avoided if Scotland shared systems too?

Extension doesn’t come cheap. The original delay added nearly £30 million to the costs, and some £10 million has been committed for the month-long reprieve. In total, Scotland’s census is looking to cost the taxpayer almost twice as much per head as it did in England and Wales (£27 vs £15). The government says every pound invested in the census generates between £5 and £6 of ‘economic benefit’. Does that rule still apply when the outcomes are botched?

Why the original delay? Audit Scotland produced a detailed report into the decision. Mistake one was to estimate that 3,500 people would be needed to knock on doors, half the number mobilised in 2011. Officials say higher numbers were impossible because of Covid restrictions. Back then Scots were required to stay within their council area. England was more open. For most of March and April last year Scotland had higher Covid rates. In the end only 1,250 ‘field staff’ were hired in Scotland.

Other small countries (that the SNP are so keen to compare themselves to) take the census very seriously. In 2019, New Zealand’s Government Statistician resigned after the census had a return rate of 83 per cent. The rate among the Māori population was particularly low, with nearly a third failing to return the census. A review found ‘less than optimal outcomes’ and Stats NZ said the failure led to ‘significant data gap’ due to ‘[placing] too much emphasis on the online census’.

The online survey software in Scotland has been beset with problems, and some 68,000 have started the form but are yet to hit the submit button. The wording of questions have irritated government critics, but It’s not just unionists and gender critical feminists who have taken issue. A committed nationalist, involved in Scotland’s’ folk community, told the Spectator how the wording of Gaelic language questions were too binary and will only capture fluent Gaels: ‘It’s just frustrating as the Gaelic speaking community do so much on trying to encourage people to use any Gaelic they have and then none of it counts.’

It’s hard to escape the idea that this census is perhaps irreparably damaged. Comparisons with the rest of the UK’s data were always going to be questioned after the delay was announced. But now Scotland’s own figures will perhaps be questioned in their own right. Statisticians are trained with how to deal with this – using estimates and extrapolations to fill gaps – but the error margins can be wide. Ministers will no doubt apologise, laugh this off and find a way to lay the blame at Westminster’s door, but the potential damage this fiasco has caused could be felt for years to come. This could be, in a hotly-contested category, Holyrood’s greatest failure yet.

Right-to-buy won’t fix Britain’s housing crisis

The biggest long-term threat to the Conservatives is neither partygate nor even the cost of living crisis – but declining rates of home ownership. As Mrs Thatcher understood, when people are able to afford their own home, they become more conservative in outlook. They put down roots in their local area and they gain a vested interest in capitalism – just look how Mrs Thatcher won and held on to aspirational areas such as the new towns. That the rate of home ownership plunged from 70.9 per cent to 62.6 per cent between 2003 and 2017 (it has since recovered slightly) goes quite a long way to explaining why Jeremy Corbyn became such an attraction for young people in the general election of that year.

But Boris Johnson’s plan to instigate a right-to-buy for housing association tenants is not the way to fix this. While right-to-buy might have been a good policy in the 1980s, the problems it created have become very apparent since. The supply of social housing in many areas plunged as social homes became private housing. Receipts from council house sales were supposed to fund new social housing, but how, as a council, are you supposed to fund a new home when you have just been forced to part with a property at a 70 per cent discount to its normal market value?

The right-to-buy classes have tended to cherry pick the best council housing, too – standalone houses with large gardens, for example – taking out sites where development could have been intensified. This is no more than a reheated version of the promise made by David Cameron in his 2015 manifesto, but which was quietly dropped when Theresa May became PM.

With prices in London and many other places now so high, the right-to-buy has become a handout to a very particular group: people who shouldn’t really be in social housing at all. If you are on a low income and living in a central London council property, even a 70 percent discount is not enough to help you exercise your right to buy. If, on the other hand, you are earning £100,000 a year and occupy a council home by virtue of inheriting the tenancy, then you are presented with an extraordinary opportunity to enrich yourself.

Rather than flog off housing association homes, what the government should be doing is ending these mega-developments built almost exclusively for oversea investors in the likes of Battersea. Rather than allow the land to be used for the promotion of London property as a global asset class, local authorities should be granting planning permission for homes which can only be sold to owner-occupiers.

It would be straightforward to do this. There are plenty of properties around the country which have restrictive covenants limiting their use to holiday purposes – banning them from being used as main homes. So why can’t we have new homes in London and other expensive areas which have covenants preventing them being used as rental – or worse buy-to-leave – investments? Then prices would have to come down to the level that owner occupiers could afford.

The right-to-buy is only ever going to be a marginal contribution. What the Conservatives need is a decisive step back in favour of mass home ownership. That can be achieved by pushing back against the mega buy-to-let developers.

Why Channel crossings are starting again

For a week and a half no migrants at all crossed the Channel in dinghies. A theory began to take hold that the mere prospect of migrants being transferred on to Rwanda – a plan unveiled by Home Secretary Priti Patel in mid-April – was already acting as an overwhelming deterrent to people in camps around Calais.

A few rash souls broadcast this theory directly. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, for example, boldly declared a few days back: ‘Priti’s migrant policy is working already. No illegal migrant crossing for a week and no income for people traffickers.’

Others of a more cautious frame of mind chose to add caveats, but still allowed for the possibility of success before actual implementation of the plan. After a week of zero crossings, I declared on my own Twitter feed: ‘This will be glorious if borne out over the coming weeks, esp for all of us who have advocated offshoring. But worth noting wind direction across England is still north-easterly atm.’

Then there was that man of parts Nigel Farage, a keen deep-sea angler and Kentish Man with long experience of pootling around the Channel off Dover, who told us: ‘There are some saying Rwanda is working because virtually no migrants have come now for the last six or seven days. Believe you me, I know this subject. That is nothing to do with the prospect of being shipped off to Rwanda. It’s because there has been a persistent, strong, north-easterly wind in the English Channel. When it gets calm again, the boats will continue to come.’

And lo, today it can be declared with confidence that Nigel was right. On Sunday the wind dropped, the sea grew calm and the boats resumed. More than 200 migrants were picked up and escorted to shore. With tranquil conditions forecast for the week ahead ministers are said to be braced for more ‘difficult days’, though the Government is also briefing that it now has the right policies in place to deter the crossings.

In which case it should get a move on with implementing them. For no apparent reason, the Home Office has already assured pro-migration campaigners that no transfers to Rwanda will take place until 10 May at the earliest. Though the Nationality & Borders Bill – which contained provisions to facilitate offshoring – has now received Royal Assent, legal challenges to the policy are already in the pipeline. The charity Freedom from Torture has instructed solicitors to seek a judicial review, saying it has ‘serious concerns about the lawfulness of the policy’.

Given the known reluctance of some civil servants within the Home Office to implement the policy, it would not come as a huge surprise were the date and venue of the first deportation flight to become known to left-wing activists in time for them to attempt to stop it.

Now that we know that the mere advertising of the policy is not sufficient to deter crossings, it is obvious that video footage of some actual transfers to Rwanda will be required – perhaps involving large numbers of Channel-hoppers – to test the policy’s deterrent potential.

So, a rather mundane question has become very important: is the Home Office sufficiently competent to have prepared robust deportation arrangements to come into force on 10 May or whenever it is that the first flight to Kigali is envisaged to take off?

Given its track record on multiple issues, especially those concerning migration, the jury must be out on that. Way back in 2006, John Reid, the incumbent Labour home secretary, declared the department’s immigration directorate ‘not fit for purpose’. We are about to find out whether it has improved.

How Eurosceptics seized power over the French left

In Britain it was the Tories who tore themselves apart over Europe, but in France it is the left for whom Brussels has long been a battleground.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the de facto leader of the French left following his impressive performance in last month’s presidential election, is an unabashed Eurosceptic, as are most in his La France Insoumise (LFI). The Socialist Party, on the other hand, share Emmanuel Macron’s view that Europe is the future and if France must sacrifice some of its sovereignty in the pursuit of closer integration then so be it.

The former Socialist president François Hollande embodies the Europhile left and he is aghast at the prospect of any kind of coalition between his party and Mélenchon’s ahead of next month’s parliamentary elections. In an interview last week, Hollande described the prospect of any alliance with LFI as ‘unacceptable’, explaining that ‘it would mean that the next government would call into question European treaties’.

Equally opposed to a coalition is Hollande’s former agriculture minister, Stéphane Le Foll, now the mayor of Le Mans. He is also a staunch Europhile and, like his erstwhile boss, he adopted a hard line towards Britain post-Brexit. ‘You cannot say when exiting the EU you will keep all the advantages but leave behind anything that doesn’t suit you,’ said Le Foll in October 2016 during a visit to London.

For Le Foll and for Hollande, the EU is sacrosanct and Mélenchon’s lack of faith in Brussels makes him an apostate. Hollande’s zealotry is so visceral that he can’t grasp how his party’s worship of the EU has alienated millions of voters, particularly the working class, who feel that Brussels has done little to improve their lives this century.

It is also why he and Mélenchon are mortal enemies. The pair were allies when François Mitterrand presided over France between 1981 and 1995, but the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic harboured doubts about what German reunification would mean for Europe; he advocated closer economic integration but wished to retain far greater political autonomy.

Mélenchon was even more cautious than Mitterrand over Europe, and when France held a referendum on the EU Constitution in 2005, he was a vociferous supporter of the winning ‘Non’ campaign. He was in tune with left-wing voters – the most Eurosceptic of the French electorate – but he was not singing from the same hymn sheet as most prominent Socialist politicians. Hollande and his then wife, Ségolène Royal (the Socialist candidate at the 2007 presidential election), were in favour of the Constitution, which was deviously ratified by the French parliament in 2008 in its new guise as the Lisbon Treaty.

Mélenchon quit the Socialist Party the same year, accusing it of becoming too bourgeois and too beholden to Europe, and it was Hollande whom he singled out for particular criticism, describing him as a ‘pedal boat captain’.

Hollande is now the voice of a dwindling band of centrist Socialists, whose politics are indistinguishable from Emmanuel Macron’s – hence the fact that their candidate in this year’s presidential election, Anne Hidalgo, polled less than two per cent of the vote.

Mélenchon says that he is the authentic left and his ambition of assembling a coalition to contest June’s parliamentary elections is going to plan. On Sunday evening, it was announced that the Greens and LFI had formed the ‘New Popular Ecology and Social Union’, and the Communists and Socialists are expected to join in the next 24 hours.

In explaining their decision to form a coalition, the Greens’ communique said there were a ‘great many points of convergence’ with LFI, including a pledge to scrap nuclear energy, the raising of the minimum wage and the lowering of the retirement age from 62 to 60. And on the question of Europe, the most contentious issue, the Greens reaffirmed their commitment to the EU but said they were now prepared to ‘disobey’ treaties.

This is a similar position on Europe to the Socialists, who began negotiations with LFI last Wednesday. In a statement two days later, the Party said they would be prepared ‘not to respect certain rules’ emanating from Brussels. Their justification was ‘the need for a break in the liberal direction of the European construction, [and] for a new project in the ecological and social transformation’.

In an address on Sunday, May Day, always a date when the left flexes its muscles in France, Mélenchon reassured the Socialists that Frexit was not on his agenda; he simply wants to take back some degree of control from Brussels.

This is heresy for Hollande for whom the EU is omnipotent. Indeed, there are rumours circulating in the French media that he is contemplating a return to politics, to restore the honour of the Socialist Party in time for the parliamentary elections. Mélenchon won’t be worried. He called Hollande a ‘has been’ at the weekend, and with good reason. It is Mélenchon who is now the face of the French left.

Googling Neil Parish, I came across a porn website

It really is quite easy to click on internet pornography by accident.

There’s a persuasive argument that the whole of the modern world, as shaped by the internet, is an accidental by-product of the insatiable global market for new, easier, cheaper, faster and more private ways of looking at bare boobies.

The clean and useful bit of the web is, in this account of it, but an apologetic cluster of barnacles hitching a ride on a great grizzled baleen whale of filth.

Far and away the most plausible thing about Neil Parish’s account of himself, then, was his claim that he’d arrived on a pornographic website by mistake. There is the mortifying ring of truth about his claim that, in fact, he came a cropper while shopping for tractors on the internet: ‘I did get into another website that had a very similar name and I watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done.’

Funnily enough, this very story – in a sort of brain-frying postmodern mise-en-abyme – caused me to navigate to a pornographic website myself. I’d seen mention on social media of an MP caught watching smutty stuff in the Commons, so of course I instantly Googled ‘porn MP’ to find out what was what (the situation was made worse by my typing ‘MO’ instead of ‘MP’ the first time, and autocomplete thinking I meant ‘mommy’ – which, gosh). But we’ve all been there or thereabouts. I look back on partygate (‘BJ punishment’) and the Libor scandal (‘rate pegging’) with a shudder.

So, sympathies to him there. And, I guess, some sympathy with the ‘moment of madness’ he confessed to subsequently – when he navigated to ‘Tractor Mommy’, or whatever it was called, for a second time deliberately. When you chance on a bit of filth by accident, the content does tend to be what I believe those in the business like to call ‘sticky’.

Clearly, a remotely sensible and responsible person, even if that first glimpse had his eyes bouncing around like deely boppers, would have waited for a private moment to return to the scene; rather than, say, logging back on a quiet corner of the Commons while waiting for a vote.

Yet one way and another, this incident has led to a good deal of editorial bloviating about the ‘culture of misogyny’ in the House of Commons, and a wider fusillade of tut-tutting about pornography itself. Is pornography an evil? Does it encourage the objectification of women or participate in their exploitation? Does it degrade the moral character to look at it? The answer to these questions, if you ask me, is: sort of, almost certainly, most of the time, search me, and thank goodness for private browsing mode.

But these questions, worthwhile and serious though they undoubtedly are, seem to me gigantically beside the point in this case. This poor booby, who has reached the front pages for the first time in the most humiliating way possible, offered an excuse that rivalled Ron Davies’s badger-watching (remember that?) for sheer Pooterishness – and which also, surely, missed the point. Though the fact he was looking at porn undoubtedly makes his transgression more embarrassing, that is not the substance of it. The substance of his transgression, to put it simply, is that he was dicking around on his phone when he was supposed to be helping make the laws of the country.

He was on the clock. What possesses him to think – and hence to offer as an excuse – that shopping for tractors while he’s supposed to be attending a Commons debate would have been absolutely fine, while shopping for MILFs is a resigning matter? That, if you ask me, is the only wider question in this whole sorry saga. Is there any good reason that MPs should be allowed to have their smartphones in the Chamber of the House of Commons at all? We pay these people to pay attention to the details of legislation. The basic principle of representative democracy, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, is: they listen to each other drone on so we don’t have to. We certainly don’t pay them to sit playing Candy Crush or catching up on Slow Horses, to tweak their Sainsbury’s shop, check their follower count on Twitter or drool covetously over the vital statistics of the new season’s Massey Fergusons.

As for the porn aspect of it, incidentally, it seems a bit rum that the people in charge of the WiFi in the Palace of Westminster have yet to tumble to a technology that every family with an eleven-year-old has long known about – that is, Sky Broadband Shield. It’s the matter of a moment to set the router of any major broadband provider to block adult content.

In our house, we know that children, no matter how piously they promise to be good, can’t be trusted to keep the web browsers of their smartphones on the straight and narrow; and certainly can’t be trusted to have Minecraft within arm’s reach when they’re supposed to be doing their homework. That’s why we remove the temptation from them at source. Middle-aged MPs have considerably more sense of entitlement and far poorer impulse control than most eleven-year-olds, so should be treated accordingly by the grown-ups in the building. Let’s turn SafeSearch firmly on – and have everyone hand his phone in for safekeeping before he’s allowed to sit in the Chamber.

Alastair Campbell rides to Labour’s rescue (again)

Milestones are always a time for reflection. So the 25th anniversary of New Labour’s election triumph this weekend has prompted an outpouring of dewy-eyed reminiscences from commentators of a certain vintage about how great it all was. 

Cool Britannia, the minimum wage, PFI deals and the Millennium Dome. Truly, a golden age: things really could only get better. To mark this auspicious occasion, a familiar face from those halcyon days has re-emerged to remind voters about the best that New Labour had to offer. 

Alastair Campbell, the king of spin, has popped up with a new report by Labour in Communications urging Sir Keir Starmer to revamp his approach to PR ahead of the next election. Campbell has written the foreword to Lessons from a Landslide which outlines ‘how best it [Labour] can learn from the successful formula used by the party in 1997.’ 

According to the report, there are six lessons to draw from Labour’s past successes including ‘neutralise your opponent’s attack line,’ making Labour ‘the patriotic party of Britain again’ and offering a ‘simplicity and consistency of message and style’ – something which the party certainly needs.

But Mr S isn’t sure whether Campbell is best placed to champion some of the report’s other recommendations too. For Lessons from a Landslide suggests Starmer ‘reflect the mood of the press’ and ‘engage with the right-wing press more actively.’ Would that be the right-wing press Campbell has spent the past six years denouncing, such as, er, last week when he likened the Daily Mail to the virulently antisemitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer? 

And, if, as the report suggests, Starmer’s success rests upon him neutralising claims that he is part of the ‘London Remainer elite’ then should the Labour leader be listening to the editor-at-large of the New European newspaper?

The report, welcomed by Campbell, suggests Starmer ‘offer a new approach to politics’ and ‘address the Hung Parliament question,’ outlining Labour’s position on a deal with the SNP well ahead of any election. Yet both of these are something which the party has repeatedly failed to do in successive elections. 

Campbell may be best known for his work on the 1997, 2001 and 2005 Labour triumphs but less remembered are his work on the party’s 2010 and 2015 campaigns: the last of which saw Ed Miliband depicted as being in Alex Sturgeon’s pocket.

Given the failures of some more recent initiatives like the disastrous People’s Vote campaign, perhaps it ought to be Campbell reading, rather than writing, about lessons learned from past setbacks.

New York has become the city that never eats

Is there anything more extraordinary than dining in New York City? Whether you’re sitting down for the Michelin star experience of a lifetime at Le Bernardin or squeezing in at the counter of Vanessa’s Dumpling House on the Lower East Side ($1 a pop), the New York restaurant combines atmosphere with quality food in a way that few other cities around the world can match.

Every cuisine is on offer, 24 hours a day: and if you’re willing to do a little research beforehand, you can all but guarantee yourself a meal worth every penny. Under normal circumstances, cuisine competition between London and New York isn’t really a contest at all. Of course, London has its staples. And options have dramatically expanded in recent years; but from old classics — like the American Bar nestled in the Savoy Hotel — to new barbeque joints (like SMOKESTAK, out east past Shoreditch), many of its dining highlights have been inspired by — or lifted from — New York.

But if the Big Smoke’s restaurants have vastly improved in recent decades, they’ve still got nothing on the Big Apple’s — or, at least, they didn’t. Until Covid-19 came along.

Every major city saw its restaurant industry collapse during the pandemic. Dining out, particularly indoors, was, in both London and New York, one of the last things to return. While neither city’s dining scene has recovered fully, London’s comeback has been far quicker.

According to data from OpenTable leading up to the end of March, restaurant reservations in London sat 13 per cent below their pre-pandemic levels. In New York, reservations are nearly 40 per cent below the 2019 baseline.

Just as it’s impossible to ignore how full and bustling London’s hospitality scene feels once again, it’s impossible not to notice how much quieter New York feels. The Omicron surge didn’t help things: New York City dwellers rushed out of the city in droves, dropping the city’s number of seated diners down to 70 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.

But even on a visit in mid-February, the buzz (and the people) were still missing. From bistros around Grand Central Station to dimly-lit French restaurants in Brooklyn, the tables were empty and the ambiance slightly eerie. It’s a strange feeling, to miss the strangers that used to be crammed into tables and booths next to you. But their absence is acutely felt. Compare this to London, where people are back to spilling out of the pub into the streets.

Where tables are sparse, it’s not due to lack of customer demand, but a lack of staff. The labour crunch is a shared problem in both cities, created by the shutdown of economies and the outflow of service industry workers that has put further strain on the hospitality sector. For customers, this means longer wait times and slower service, but for restaurant owners, it means finding the extra cash for wage boosts to entice workers back: in New York especially, these costs threaten to make or break establishments. According to Eater New York, an online dining guide for the city, some 1,000 restaurants have already folded in New York since the pandemic first hit, with estimates that the unofficial figure will run far higher.

The staggering difference between London’s bounce-back and New York’s freefall can, in part, be explained by how the respective governments responded to the plight of hospitality at the height of the pandemic. Neither New York State or the federal government offered anything like Britain’s furlough scheme, which allowed restaurants in the UK to hibernate their employees and spring back as soon as restrictions were lifted.

But perhaps the biggest difference wasn’t what either city’s officials did at the start of the crisis, but the decisions that came after.

When vaccine passports were being debated last summer in Britain, groups like UK Hospitality came out against them, citing not just the bureaucratic hurdles restaurant owners would need to jump — like implementing checks at the door — but how vaccine certification might usher in a change in consumer behaviour, turning people off the restaurant scene altogether.

In London, the debate was won, and vaccine passports were never brought in for dining. But New York became the case study of what happens when you do introduce them — and how badly wrong it can go.

Proof of vaccination for dining inside was brought in last summer and became more onerous as months went on. By Christmas this year, all children over the age of five needed at least one Covid vaccine dose to be allowed inside at a restaurant. Fines were threatened if restaurants didn’t comply, so checks were taken seriously. Not thinking twice about it, I brought my proof of vaccine along to a downtown restaurant right before New Year’s, but was asked to show a photo ID as well as my certificate. Having left it back at the hotel, I managed to get away with it — just — by matching my credit card details to my proof of vaccination.

After a string of lawsuit threats and restaurant closures, Mayor Eric Adams scrapped New York’s scheme at the beginning of March, a great relief to the thousands of restaurants just trying to survive. With the Omicron wave having settled, and onerous restrictions lifting, its residents are hoping the city can enjoy a new lease on life. ‘My Covid-worried friends made a reservation for us to sit inside our favourite Italian joint,’ one New Yorker tells me. ‘It’ll be the first time in over two years.’

When I last wandered around the city I tried to stop by one of my favourite spots, Bar Sardine, in the West Village: not much on the outside, but some of the best cocktails and tostadas around. To my horror, but not surprise, it had closed. One of the many restaurant casualties of the past few years.

Still, I’m not ready to hand the food title over to London just yet. As restrictions lift, and life finally returns to normal, the best parts of New York City are bound to return. And they must: it’s the city that never sleeps, not the city that doesn’t eat.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2022 World edition.