In defence of Beyonce

People complaining about supposedly offensive pop lyrics is hardly anything new. It’s as old as the form itself; never-ending proof that everyone is offended by something and that every era has its own set of taboos. But the speed with which music stars appear to be acquiescing to other people’s hurt feelings today is surely something new.

Take Beyonce. She’s one of the biggest stars in the world. A genuine living legend. And yet because a handful of disabled charities and irked right-on tweeters have complained about one word in one of the songs on her new album Renaissance, her ‘team’ has almost immediately promised to scrub and re-record the offending lyric as soon as possible.

The word that has caused so much offence? ‘Spaz’, which Beyonce uttered a couple of times on the track ‘Heated’, which was co-written with Canadian rap star Drake. You might have struggled to work that out from some of the coverage however, given many news reports – including the BBC’s – have confusingly omitted the word itself, such is its apparently thermonuclear nature.

So, here’s the offending line in full: ‘Spazzing on that ass, spaz on that ass.’ It might not look amazing on paper but in context it works perfectly well. As many people have pointed out, Beyonce is clearly using it in the slangy American sense – meaning to lose control, go crazy or fight. The song is not some sick diatribe against those with spastic cerebral palsy. 

Naturally, disabled charities don’t see it that way. Warren Kirwan, media manager at Scope, has called it ‘appalling that one of the world’s biggest stars has chosen to include this deeply offensive term’. 

‘Words matter because they reinforce the negative attitudes disabled people face every day and which impact on every aspect of disabled people’s lives’, he added.

Now, Beyonce is hugely popular and influential. Renaissance racked up more than 43 million streams on Spotify on release day alone. But the idea that one lyric, clearly not intended as an ‘ableist’ slur, could unleash untold furies against disabled people is absurd. So-called media-effects theory has been widely discredited. And yet that hasn’t stemmed the tide of censorship, which is now reaching popular music. 

Beyonce’s run-in comes just weeks after singer Lizzo was hauled over the coals by enraged tweeters for uttering the new s-word on one of her own tracks. She issued a grovelling apology and also promised to rewrite the song.

Perhaps Twitter deserves a co-writing credit on these tracks once they’re re-released. Rather than kindly push back against such shrill claims about their lyrics and demands that they be immediately changed, today’s pop stars readily concede that the scolds have the moral high ground. In the process, artistic freedom is imperilled for everyone else.

Today’s mini Mary Whitehouses may have managed to pass themselves off as progressive. They may be younger, more hip. They may have swapped the blue rinse for the blue dip-dye. They may be offended by various alleged ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ rather than sex, drugs and violence. But they are just as stiff and annoying and censorious as their pearl-clutching forebears.

And yet, our supposedly daring pop stars give in to them – over and over again. So much for the spirit of pop rebellion.

Nancy Pelosi knows how much Taiwan matters

In the coming hours, Nancy Pelosi is expected to arrive in Taiwan. The plane that is thought to be carrying her is approaching the island from the east to avoid the Taiwan Strait and any attempt by the Chinese to fly close to her. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, she will be the most senior US figure to visit Taipei this century.

Beijing is furious about Pelosi’s decision to go. It has warned that its military ‘won’t sit idly by’ if she does touch down and is planning various displays of military strength. While no one expects the Chinese to actually attack the island, there is talk of buzzing the Taiwanese air defence zone and other intimidatory acts.

Taiwan is of huge importance. Its strategic location and the fact it is a natural fortress means that taking control of the island goes a long way to determining the balance of power in the region. It is also a vital part of the world economy as it is, by far, the leading manufacturer of the most advanced semiconductor chips. If those were cut off by a Chinese blockade, the economic effects would dwarf those of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But perhaps the way in which Taiwan is most significant is as a barometer of Chinese-US competition. Xi Jinping has been explicit about his desire to bring Taiwan back into the fold. After the collapse of one country, two systems in Hong Kong, it is impossible to imagine that this can be done peacefully. The US has long tried to maintain strategic ambiguity on whether it would defend Taiwan if attacked. But if Taiwan were to fall to China, it would be seen in Asia as a symbol of a shift in the balance of power in the region. Countries would feel that they had little choice but to reach an understanding with Beijing and to accept Chinese regional hegemony. For this reason, I have long thought that the US would have to come to Taiwan’s aid in these circumstances.

Why Liz Truss u-turned over public sector pay

That was quick. Less than 15 hours after pledging a robust reform of public sector pay, Liz Truss has performed a u-turn on plans to bring national pay bargaining to an end. It comes after criticism mounted that slashing pay for new frontline staff was not the most obvious way to handle an escalating cost-of-living crisis.

In a sense, it’s a crime of poor timing rather than poor policy. National pay bargaining has long been questioned as a fair way to compensate staff on the government payroll. In part it’s due to the reasons laid out by Truss: there are obvious differences in the cost-of-living throughout the country, which might justify a rethink (housing being a key factor). But there are far more sympathetic reasons too: areas lacking in specific staff could gain the ability to offer more pay, to recruit those skills and services for locals. Furthermore, more focus on performance-related pay would help retain and reward the top public sector performers while making efficiencies across the board.

But this is not the time to have that argument. Even during economic downturns, public sector pay can often be up for discussion because of the job security that comes with the roles (whereas private sector workers tend to be more at risk of losing their jobs). But in this extremely tight labour market, it’s hard to make the case that public sector workers have significantly more security. Furthermore, the average worker is looking at a below-inflation pay rise, with many starting to question how they’ll make good on their bills this winter. If one had to pick the most politically tricky moment to make this argument, this would be it.

It speaks to a bigger concern about Truss’s economic campaign. An overhaul of the public sector and the tax code is long-overdue. But ushering this in at the wrong time, even by a few months, could have unintended consequences – and make a lasting impression on the public that the reforms were inherently the problem. If Truss makes good on her pledge to cut £30 billion – £55 billion worth of tax overnight (depending on who you ask), it will use up the fiscal headroom that might have provided more support packages this autumn. The fear is that this necessary reduction of the tax burden is less likely to be met with praise, but rather serious disgruntlement from households who can’t meet their energy bill payments.

Perhaps this is dawning on the Truss campaign and helps explain the pay bargaining proposal in the first place. The announcement from Team Truss said the reforms were estimated to save almost £9 billion a year — which would cover a meaningful portion of what she has pledged in tax cuts. Team Truss still insists that the money can be borrowed — and she has plenty of economists now defending her deficit-financed tax cuts — but this could be an early hint that Truss is looking for cash down the back of the sofa, as costs this winter are bound to add up.

A Sunak ally gets in touch: ‘This wasn’t a mistake. Liz wanted this in 2018 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The lady is for turning.’ Indeed, Truss’s flirtation with national pay bargaining reform is nothing new and has been on her radar for years. Confirmation from Team Truss this afternoon that there ‘will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers’ seems very much like a reaction to criticism rather than a change of heart. It’s a warning, too, of what can happen when the right ideas are proposed at the worst time.

Al-Zawahiri’s killing exposes the US’s shame in Afghanistan

Sherpur District, to the north of central Kabul, where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed, lies at the western end of a huge former military base where British forces were besieged in the winter of 1879, during the second Anglo-Afghan war.

The parade ground, still a wide open area until 2001, was quickly built over by warlords allied to the U.S. when the Taliban were pushed out of power after the attacks of 9/11. I went there with a military commander who was transformed overnight into a building contractor as the plots were parcelled out and garish concrete villas rose out of the dust. Built by one set of warlords after 9/11, those Sherpur villas were seized by other warlords last August when the Taliban took power again.

It was on the balcony of one of those villas that al-Zawahiri stepped outside and was targeted by a CIA drone strike, as America demonstrated its ability to carry out ‘over the horizon’ attacks, despite not having overt assets on the ground. But that does nothing to excuse the Biden administration for its betrayal of Afghanistan and its people.

The discovery that the Emir of al-Qaeda, and previously Osama bin Laden’s deputy — a key player in the string of attacks on American targets in the late 1990s as well as 9/11 itself — was living almost openly in the centre of Kabul, exposes the hollowness at the heart of America’s withdrawal deal.

The deal, signed in Doha at the end of February 2020, just before Covid closed down the world, was never peace with honour. It was a surrender in which the U.S. agreed to withdraw its troops on timetable, demanding in return only that the Taliban would ‘not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.’ The weakness was that the Taliban did not promise to prevent al-Qaeda members from living in Afghanistan.

America also demanded that the Afghan government release thousands of Taliban prisoners with next to nothing in return, and secret annexes to the deal effectively gave the Taliban carte blanche to take over most of the Afghan countryside: America’s rules of engagement meant that the Taliban would not be attacked if they did not threaten provincial capitals or main lines of communication. At the same time, Afghan commanders were told by their American advisers that they should slow down offensives, and ‘give peace a chance.’ The consequence was that the country fell into the hands of the Taliban as the final American troops left last year.

The Taliban have not honoured even the weak terms of the Doha deal. A recent report by the UN sanctions committee on terrorist groups in Afghanistan says that al-Qaeda’s ‘leadership reportedly plays an advisory role with the Taliban, and the groups remain close.’ With a safe haven and the ability to move and communicate easily, al-Qaeda have increased their propaganda capability. This is crucial for winning new recruits. The UN see Al-Qaeda as now better able to compete with the Islamic State ‘as the key actor in inspiring the international threat environment, and it may ultimately become a greater source of directed threat.’ It says al-Qaeda is now so well positioned that they could return to centre stage and be ‘recognised again as the leader of global jihad.’

Al-Qaeda always had more intellectual coherence than the nihilist fantasies of Islamic State, and al-Zawahiri was the driving force behind that. Who takes over will determine whether that can be continued. One potential successor inside Afghanistan is al Zawahiri’s son-in-law Abdal-Rahman al-Maghrebi. As ‘general manager’ for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has been responsible for the recent improvement in al-Qaeda’s propaganda profile. He was in the cross hairs of an Afghan counterterrorist operation in 2016 led by General Sami Sadat, but escaped and has a $7 million (£5.7 million) bounty on his head. Another potential successor is Sayf al-Adel, with $10 million (£8 million) on his head, who is closely linked to Iran.

The Taliban have inevitably condemned the attack, claiming it to be a violation of the Doha deal. But the presence of the head of al-Qaeda in Kabul makes international recognition of their regime even less likely. The New York Times is reporting that the villa where al-Zawahiri was killed with a Hellfire missile is now owned by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister of the Taliban. He is also a man with a price on his head for carrying out large-scale terrorist attacks on Kabul. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are joined at the hip

The UN has concluded that al-Qaeda lacked ‘external operational capability,’ and they did not ‘currently wish to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment’ by carrying out international attacks from Afghanistan.

But the important word is ‘currently.’ None of al-Qaeda’s rhetoric has changed. They want to fight against the ‘near enemy,’ the kingdoms of the Gulf States, and the ‘far enemy,’ the U.S. and its allies. And America’s chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 made it more likely that they will have the capability to once again use Afghanistan as a launch pad: not this time from a cave in the mountains, but a downtown mansion in Kabul.

Truss’s Sturgeon jibe is bound to backfire

If the first rule of leadership is, as Barack Obama once said, ‘don’t do stupid shit’ then this Tory leadership contest offers ample reasons for thinking neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss is remotely capable of being prime minister.

Having advertised himself as the only adult in the race, the only candidate prepared to tell the truth, the former Chancellor has proceeded to set ablaze the rationale for his own campaign. Sunak’s imbecilities on the green belt and farming, to say nothing of his fantastical pledges on income tax, are the mark of a man spooked by the discovery that pandering to the worst instincts of the Conservative party membership is the only way to make progress in a race to the bottom. The only consolation to be found is that, if he wins, he will have little choice but to break many of the absurd promises he has hitherto made. This is not an encouraging prospectus for leadership.

Still, at least Sunak has not – or at least not yet – gone half-way towards suggesting much of the United Kingdom is a tiresome encumbrance that would be much better to simply ignore.

Liz Truss’s comments in Exeter last night that Nicola Sturgeon is merely an ‘attention seeker’ who should be ‘ignored’, rather as one might suggest a stroppy child should ideally be neither seen nor heard, were excruciating. Naturally, the SNP are outraged by this but plenty of Unionist Scots are also irked by Truss’s comments. For this was a desperately foolish thing to say.

Of course some of the nationalist hump-taking is performative. No one ever lost money underestimating the Scotch appetite for sanctimony. Nevertheless, it is also a gift to the SNP. Not just because it riles – which is to say, it deeply pleases – the party’s own supporters but because it is the sort of thing which irritates plenty of Scots who do not necessarily approve of Sturgeon or her party themselves.

For, on one level, almost all Scottish voters are nationalists to at least some degree. Unionism has almost always been an idea wrapped in nationalist clothing. When John Buchan, hardly a radical, suggested every Scot should be a nationalist he was not endorsing any idea of independence. Indeed he was more reiterating a long-established idea: Scottish sensibilities and Scottish perquisites must be protected, even from those ostensibly posing as their chums.

As then, so now. The tone in which Scotland, and the Union more generally, are discussed matters much more than many English Tories appear to recognise. Truss’s comments were gauche enough; the audience’s whooping and hollering in response was just as galling. These people have little idea of the United Kingdom’s realities and they are not afraid to show it.

And while candidates for the leadership may think they are only speaking to Tory members, they might from time to time remember that other folk have eyes and ears too. You can be heard and you are seen.

The SNP’s habit of conflating party and country is irksome in the extreme but it does Unionism no good when senior Conservative figures make the same mistake. Like it or not – and while there is no need to like it, it does not alter reality – plenty of Scots hearing an English audience cheering the idea that Scotland’s first minister is just an ‘attention-seeker’ who should be ‘ignored’ think that what this actually means is that Scotland should be ‘ignored’ too.

So while the tone is regrettable – which is to say it is deeply stupid – the actual content of Truss’s remarks is equally bone-headed. It is precisely the sort of thing the SNP would like the next prime minister to say. As Jacob Rees-Mogg says, Nicola Sturgeon may indeed be ‘always moaning’ but he lacks the standing to point this out in any politically useful fashion. As such, a period of silence on his part – and that of English Tories who agree with him – is as welcome as it is long overdue.

Since another leadership rule is ‘don’t give your opponents what they crave’, Truss’s comments are indefensible as a purely political matter. There may be much to be said for ignoring SNP provocations but this should be done quietly, not out loud. It is wearisome that this must be explained yet again. The SNP thrives on grievance and ‘disrespect’; talking in a fashion that offers them precisely this is stupid almost beyond belief.

The SNP’s mandate to govern Scotland – on matters of devolved responsibility – is incontestable. The relationship between Westminster and Holyrood should be clear on reserved issues but elsewhere be courteous, constructive and, perhaps above all, conducted in good faith. The SNP may not reciprocate but a prime minister’s first responsibility in these matters lies in not driving ambivalent or open-minded Scottish voters towards the SNP.

Like so much else, this is a case of mood and sensibility just as much as of actual policy. It should not be difficult to avoid adhering to the political equivalent of the Hippocratic oath to first do no harm. Yet, grimly, it seems to be beyond Truss.

The SNP would love nothing more than the chance to fight the next general election as some kind of Scotland vs England battle. At present, we may rely upon the Conservative party to give them every opportunity of doing so. It is entirely possible this may help the Tory cause in England but only at the cost of terrible damage in Scotland and – one day, perhaps – to the United Kingdom itself.

Is it really asking too much to ask senior Tories to note they are members of the Conservative and Unionist party and to dwell upon the meaning and implications of their own party’s name? Once again, dispiritingly, it seems this is a question destined to be answered in the affirmative.

And, yet again, Scottish Unionists can be forgiven for thinking that with notional friends like these, the SNP are the least of their problems.

Northern Tories savage Truss’s ‘war on waste’

Oh dear. It seems that Liz Truss’s winning run has come to an end. After a week of riding high, the Foreign Secretary’s campaign for leader has hit a bit of a bump in the road. Her campaign last night sent out a press release declaring: ‘Truss: I’ll wage a war on Whitehall waste to save taxpayers £11 billion.’ It promised that diversity and inclusion posts in the civil service will be scrapped and that taxpayer-funded trade union facility time will be curbed too. So far, so good.

But it was the pledge that ‘a Truss government will introduce Regional Pay Boards so pay accurately reflects where civil servants work’ that has got alarm bells ringing across the country. Her campaign claimed that the government ‘could save billions a year’ by doing this to ‘make it easier to adjust officials’ pay’ and ‘stop the crowding out of local businesses that can not compete with public sector pay.’

Interestingly, the accompanying note to editors is somewhat more cautious, claiming this will apply only to new contracts rolled out over a number of years and ‘we would only move to extend this policy if it can be shown to deliver.’ Nevertheless, the campaign concludes it could ‘save up to £8.8 billion per year’ if all public sector workers adopted this – a big if, and one that would mean teachers and nurses being included too.

Unsurprisingly, those northern Tories who are backing Rishi Sunak have seized on this announcement as proof that Truss would abandon the ‘levelling up’ agenda which they believe is crucial to holding the Red Wall in 2024. Ben Houchen, the mayor of Tees Valley declared himself ‘actually speechless’ at the plan, declaring that ‘there is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.’ Team Sunak claims that dividing Truss’s £8.8 billion savings by the number of public sector workers having their pay cut would mean £1,500 less for 5.7 million public sector works.

Richard Holden, MP for North West Durham, argued it would mean pay cuts for everyone from ‘Cornwall to Cambridgeshire to the Cotswolds to County Durham’ adding it would ‘kill levelling up’. Chris Clarkson, MP for Heywood and Middleton remarked that ‘I’m not sure a promise to cut people’s pay based on where they live will survive first contact with focus groups, let alone reality.’ It’s not just northern Tories too: Simon Hoare of North Dorset declared it ‘drives a coach and horses through the levelling-up agenda’ while Steve Double of Cornwall added ‘the billions saved would be coming straight out of rural economies.’

All these Tories are supporting Sunak of course but it’s noticeable how silent Truss’s supporters have been on this announcement. Shades of the dementia tax, anyone?

After Tavistock, will Mermaids be next?

‘Mermaids must fall next.’ That was the response of Professor Kathleen Stock to the news that last week that the NHS was closing its Tavistock gender identity clinic for children. Stock, who quit Sussex University over what she called a trans rights ‘witch-hunt’, added that it was now time for ‘a no-holds barred journalistic dive’ into Mermaids, the British charity which supports ‘gender variant and transgender youth.’ Their methods of doing this have come under much scrutiny, such as by promoting breast binding at an event last year.

Mermaids is also involved in lobbying and has provided training in public sector bodies. In May this year, the TaxPayers’ Alliance revealed that Mermaids had received £20,483 in taxpayer funding between 2018 and 2021. And now, Freedom of Information requests have confirmed that officials at the Cabinet Office held three meetings with the charity between 2019 and 2022: in October 2020, in February 2021 and January 2022.

The latter two meetings were confirmed by the Cabinet Office as pertaining to the issue of whether to ban conversion therapy but the minutes of these meetings were withheld. However, the minutes of the October 2020 meeting were released, which confirmed the charity acknowledged that 50 per cent of its resources are used for ‘advocacy’, that Mermaids had started work on trans inclusion in sport and that there had been a large increase in people engagement. Separately, the Department for International Trade also confirmed that it held information on meetings between ministers and Mermaids; however it blocked it on the grounds of Section 35 which relates to the ‘formulation or development of government policy.’

Helping formulate and develop government policy? Looks like if Mermaids’ critics want the charity out of government, they’ve got a long way to go in Whitehall.

Truss u-turns on regional pay

The sound of screeching gears could be heard across Westminster this morning as Team Truss executed a dramatic U-turn from their headquarters in Lord North Street. A midday press statement confirmed that the Foreign Secretary has now dropped her policy adopted, er, just last night, to introduce regional pay boards. The move would have seen salary reductions for public sector workers – including teachers and nurses –  outside of London and the South East on future contracts.

Naturally this went down like a cup of cold sick in every area except London and the South East, with MPs queuing up from Cornwall to County Durham to lambast the move. Team Sunak were delighted at their first break in this leadership race and certainly made the most of it, sending a smorgasbord of MPs over the top to castigate the Truss campaign for abandoning ‘levelling up.’ One of those was Simon Hart, the former Welsh secretary, who claimed that had such proposals been adopted then ‘Wales is worst hit, with 430,000 workers facing a near £3000 pay cut.’ Good thing then that the next Tory party hustings is in… Cardiff.

In a jibe at her supposed Thatcherite credentials, one pro-Sunak source said of Truss: ‘the lady is for turning.’ Or, to borrow a line from another female Tory premier ‘nothing has changed, nothing has changed.’

Oliver Cromwell was a liberal pioneer ahead of his time

Was Oliver Cromwell a religious fanatic who loved banning stuff, or a pioneer of liberal values? Sunday’s Observer reported that a group of historians have dredged up some documents that suggest that he was seriously committed to religious freedom. 

Despite his reputation for brutally suppressing Irish Catholics, it emerges that Cromwell was open to them practicing their faith, so long as they no longer posed a political threat by supporting royalists. Another document confirms his enthusiasm for readmitting Jews to England and his willingness to offer them religious freedom. The article quotes one of these historians, John Morrill, emeritus professor of British and Irish history at Cambridge University: ‘Cromwell’s commitment to religious freedom and religious equality is much more radical than a lot of historians have thought.’

The curious thing is that this view of Cromwell should seem surprising. There has always been plenty of evidence for Cromwell’s pioneering commitment to toleration – but historians have tended to downplay it, to endorse the conservative caricature. To the average middlebrow Tory, this Puritan strongman is the embodiment of narrow reformist zeal, the precursor of Robespierre and Lenin.

I suppose it is unsurprising that this man should make us flustered. He puts our whole political tradition in doubt. For it is based on the idea that true liberal values are compatible with the high conservatism of monarchy and an established Church. And this narrative is not helped by the fact that the key pioneer of the liberal state was opposed to bishops and kings.

Before Cromwell, it was assumed that a nation needed a high degree of religious unity, and that toleration should be kept to a minimum. This was also taken for granted by the vast majority of the Puritans during the civil war. Calvinism was not big on toleration. But Cromwell and his fellow Independents did not want to replace one form of theocracy with another. They had a new idea of the state: that it should protect religious liberty as far as possible. Rather miraculously, this new idea won the day – for a while. Of course there could not be toleration for Catholics and conservative Anglicans, as they posed a direct political threat to the new regime, but the ideal of religious freedom was nevertheless central. According to the historian Alec Ryrie, he ‘became the first Protestant ruler anywhere to support religious toleration as a matter of principle’.

This republican experiment was the first draft of the liberal state. A few decades later, England embarked on a different liberal journey, a far more gradualist one, and it became convenient to dismiss Cromwell as a marginal zealot. The truth is more interesting: he was a liberal pioneer, a key architect of the liberal state – and clear proof of its Christian roots.

Does Stonewall have no shame?

Watching people brazening it out can be tremendous fun. The higher the stakes, the more extreme the disparity between reality and what we now call ‘cope’, the greater the cheer.

We remember the brass neck of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister dubbed ‘Comical Ali’, still denying the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. Or the final balcony address given by Nicolae Ceaușescu on his pet TV station as his regime was toppling.

We associate this kind of thing with despotic regimes, but in the democratic world we get the occasional glimpse of it: a public figure refusing to acknowledge openly the import of a reverse or a loss. Theresa May’s frankly terrifying croak of ‘nothing has changed’ after the 2017 election that changed everything; or Jeremy Corbyn assuring his disciples he had ‘won the argument’ after leading Labour to its most crushing defeat for eighty years.

In his favour, Boris Johnson was visibly squirming throughout his recent travails, and seems to have regained some of his oafish charm since he resigned. It looks like a giant weight off him.

To acknowledge that a bad thing has happened is regarded as a sign of weakness. But this is not a good strategy. Accepting the truth of a reverse – with a smile or with a call for justice – can galvanise support for you. It’s a jolt to remember how, not so long ago, John Major was regarded as the exemplar of the gracious loser. His genial acceptance of defeat in 1997 now looks like something from a vanished world.

A few recent incidents have gone way beyond this normal level of fronting out, and have brought the flavour of the cornered emperor in his palace into the Western twenty first century. There’s a point at which brazening turns from silly to sinister, not merely downplaying something but a refusal to acknowledge that it has happened at all.

The Biden administration has escaped from recession simply by changing the definition of recession, with Big Tech in the shape of Wikipedia rewriting its definition to suit. This is something you might expect to find in one of Evelyn Waugh’s travelogues of failed states of the 1930s.

Closer to home, it was announced last week that the Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic of the Tavistock Trust is to close after a review found that it had failed vulnerable under-18s. Dr Hilary Cass, a paediatrician who led a review of GIDS, found that the Tavistock clinic was ‘not a safe or viable long-term option’. Her damning report found that:

‘The evidence base on which it prescribed major hormonal interventions such as puberty blockers was close to non-existent, and many clinicians had expressed concerns about poor diagnosis and record-keeping, and a culture of shutting down criticism.’

You might expect that the Tavistock would respond with the customary boilerplate – ‘we welcome and accept the findings, etc, etc’. But no. ‘The Trust supports the need to establish a more sustainable model for the care of this group of patients given the marked growth in referrals,’ they stated. ‘The expertise that resides within the current GIDS service will be critical to the successful formation of these early adopter services and providing continuity in patient care.’ No response – not even bare recognition – of the unprecedented criticism, the ‘shut it down ASAP!’ closure.

The gender charity Mermaids reacted similarly. ‘We welcome the news that NHS England plan to provide a more resilient and robust gender identity service in 2023 by expanding provision,’ it said, spinning as good news what had happened.

Elsewhere on the gender beat, Stonewall reacted to Allison Bailey’s win for damages against Garden Court Chambers – after it had signed up to Stonewall’s ‘diversity champions’ scheme – with the gobsmacking: ‘Leaders within organisations are responsible for the organisational culture and the behaviour of their employees and workers. Stonewall’s resources, support and guidance is just one set of inputs they use’.

Even Trump and Remain didn’t go this far. It’s not so much rewriting the past but rewriting the present.

You have to take your hat off to the audaciousness. These people have made the calculation that not enough people care about the issue for them to worry about it, and that they can probably still get away with what they’ve been up to, at least on the quiet.

All you need is to have no shame.

The curious rhythm of life in Spain’s Santiago de Compostela

Surely no other city can claim to have so many backpacks and walking sticks on its narrow cobbled streets. In Spain’s Santiago de Compostela it always looks like there is a giant hiking convention going on. These aren’t your average ramblers, though. They are pilgrims, as the city marks the end of the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.

The Camino, or the Way of St James, is most associated with the 500-mile route from the base of the French Pyrenees westward though Pamplona, Burgos and Leon. More accurately, the Camino is the collective name for the multitude of pilgrimage routes laid across Europe that, like a river’s tributaries, finally converge at Santiago de Compostela’s magnificent baroque cathedral, in whose basement it is believed the remains of St James the apostle lie.

Last week the city’s streets were even more rammed with backpacks and walking sticks than usual, as 25 July marked the feast day of St James that all Spain still celebrates. Felipe VI, the king of Spain, was in town to attend mass and watch the mighty Botafumeiro in action. Suspended from the cathedral’s ceiling, the world’s largest thurible swings through the cavernous interior spewing clouds of incense over the awestruck congregation.

I was there, too, after attempting to put my previous Camino experiences (not to mention a year of officer training at the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst) to good use and guide a group of ten patient pilgrims on an inaugural week-long mini-Camino organised by the Catholic Herald magazine. Every day my estimate of our hike’s length seemed a few kilometres short of the final toll: expectation management is crucial, I learned, if you want to keep your pilgrims happy. I was consoled by our accompanying priest – unexpectedly ex-military too (though a lovely man, there is nothing worse when you are trying to leverage your ex-military credentials than to have someone else there with far superior ex-military credentials) – that it was all part of the pilgrim’s penitential experience and would do their souls good.

With that and some serious theological discussions, my brain was in meltdown as we hiked into the city and waded through throngs of other pilgrims clogging the narrow streets before converging in the grand Plaza del Obradoiro in front of the cathedral. It was described by the writer Jan Morris in her book Spain as one of the most beguiling in the world.

There is a strange but uplifting Groundhog Day rhythm to the city’s life due to its pilgrimage destination status. In the early hours, the narrow granite streets around the cathedral are deserted aside from vans making deliveries. Crates of Estrella Galicia beer are deposited along with trays of fish and bags of oyster shells; sweating men wheel great stacks of loo roll, bottled water and soft drinks to the restaurants, hotels and hostels catering to the pilgrims yet to arrive.

As the morning proceeds, the rucksacks and walking sticks enter the picture as the pilgrims emerge. By around 11 a.m. there are hordes of them filling the plaza, having entered the city at its outskirts. Groups are splayed out on the ground using their rucksacks as head rests from which to gaze up at the cathedral’s stunning facade and their final destination (with hiking boots off, there are some stunning tan lines above the ankles). Those who set off from the French interior will have walked more than a thousand miles. A lovely dreadlocked Swiss couple I encountered started in Geneva.

The day we arrived, there seemed to be endless packs of French boy scouts being marshalled with military precision by their leaders. In the plaza I was asked to take a photo of what I assumed was a Spanish school group and their teachers in front of the cathedral. It turned out to be two brothers with their offspring – together with a total of 42 cousins. One of the cousins carried a Spanish flag with the Sacred Heart of Jesus emblazoned in the centre.

The Spanish take the Camino and St James very seriously (the constant supply of hungry and thirsty pilgrims who need a bed for the night is an economic lifeline for villages and towns along the routes). Legend has it that in the 8th century the body of St James was brought to the remote region of Galicia, which remains a bit of a Spanish hidden gem. The word Compostela is derived from the Latin Campus Stellae, which means ‘field of the star’ – the light of which is meant to have guided a shepherd watching his flock at night to where the saint was buried. The shepherd’s lucky find was embraced by the Catholic faithful to fuel support for northern Spain as a Christian stronghold during the crusades against the Moors to the south, and the growth and development of the city duly followed.

After heading into the cathedral’s basement to pay their respects to St James in a silver treasure-chest-like urn (suitably resplendent and mysterious, it looks straight out of an Indiana Jones film), pilgrims embrace the Spanish mantra of ‘From temple to tavern’. Everyone piles into the bars and restaurants serving the Galician speciality of pulpo – octopus – and other gifts of its coastline: scallops, oysters and calamari, along with all manner of colourful tapas. It’s washed down with copious cañas of beer, the local Albariño white wine – renowned for its strong floral and citrus undertones – and fantastic Rioja and Ribera del Duero reds.

After celebrating into the early hours (our night finished with watching a bunch of cape-wearing, guitar-strumming troubadours in the street being cheered to the rafters by a particularly boisterous group of Spanish teenage girls), many a pilgrim wakes up with a sore head and a backpack that feels much heavier. Some set off for the airport. Others keep on walking to Finisterre on Galicia’s western coast, once visited by pagan pilgrims as the end of the known world. The departures make way for the latest batch of pilgrims arriving after the next round of deliveries to restore weary bodies and fuel the quotidian celebrations.

Only one tax cut can save Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak’s promises on tax are lacklustre. He’s announced a fiddly one-off tax break on energy that will last for just a year which hardly anyone will notice due to inflation. There’s also income tax cuts up to seven years in the future, even though he is hardly likely to be Prime Minister by then (and he seldom keeps any promises on taxation for more than a few hours anyway). 

Sunak’s promises and u-turns on taxes are making him look inconsistent at best, and a cynical opportunist at worst. The Tory members are right to regard his words with suspicion. But there is one tax cut that could still win the membership over: abolishing inheritance tax. 

Inheritance tax is such an obvious target for abolition that it’s astonishing that none of the Tory leadership candidates have seized on it yet. 

The levy is incredibly unpopular with the largely elderly property-owners that make up the bulk of the Conservative party membership, most of whom spend far more time than they would like to working out clever wheezes for passing on their homes to their families without having to hand over 40 per cent of their worth to HMRC. 

Inheritance tax is also hitting more and more people. The number of estates paying it, driven by rising property prices, rose by another 14 per cent last year, and keeps on rising. Far from being a tax on the super-rich, it is hitting ordinary middle-class families. So it is perfectly plausible to make a case for reform that doesn’t just look like cynical vote-grabbing (even if it is). 

Finally, it is not even terribly expensive. The total amount raised is only a relatively modest £6.1 billion annually. Measured by votes won per billion in tax giveaways, a key metric for this campaign, it is unbeatable value for money. It is hard to see the former banker in Sunak not appreciating that. 

Promising to abolish inheritance tax worked for George Osborne back in 2008 when he was shadow chancellor. It can surely work its magic again. 

In reality, Sunak is probably doomed at this stage. He has too much ground to make up, and nothing he says sounds very convincing. But if he wanted a bold move that would at least get himself back in the game, only abolishing inheritance tax will work.

Why now is the time to be spontaneous

I am not naturally a spontaneous person. I relish neatly laying out projects and plans in my Moleskine diary. It was out of character, then, when on the second Monday of the Wimbledon fortnight I decided on the spur of the moment to head to the All England Club and join the queue for a day ticket. If I didn’t get in, I reasoned, I could always have a nice meal in a nearby restaurant and watch the action on a big screen, content in the knowledge that I was at least sharing the air of the SW19 postcode.

My back-up plan wasn’t needed. When I joined the ‘queue’, I was the only person in it. I was ushered straight into the grounds to enjoy six glorious hours of sun-drenched tennis. Perhaps there was something in this spontaneity lark after all.

In truth, I had taken a calculated gamble. During the first week of the tournament, there had been much discussion of how attendance was lower than expected in this first ‘proper’ year post-Covid, and television coverage showed the normally packed alleyways between courts to be considerably less jammed than usual. This chimed neatly with what I had experienced in other areas, most notably the arts, where almost all theatres, in the West End and elsewhere in the country, are struggling to attract punters in the numbers they would like. Same-day tickets, as well as discounts, are there for the taking, even for shows that in other years would almost certainly be posting smug ‘House full’ notices outside. Fancy seeing the musical Mary Poppins tomorrow? Or what about going to the Proms? Step right up.

What is going on here? I believe that we are experiencing a recalibration, as we try to reconcile our pre- and post-Covid selves. Before the pandemic, it is generally agreed, our lives, especially for those in big metropolitan centres, were excessively planned and regimented, with diaries filling up weeks if not months in advance. Everything, even so-called ‘free’ time, was scheduled down to the last half-hour, leaving precious little opportunity to, in the words of that corny-but-true W.H. Davies poem, ‘stand and stare’. If we wanted to watch ‘squirrels hide their nuts in grass’, we would have to pencil it in for two weeks on Thursday. Someone crying off an arrangement last minute and giving us an unexpected free evening was a source of barely concealed delight. 

And then everything changed. The world stopped, at least for those of us not on the front line of the pandemic. Time suddenly unfurled endlessly before us and no plans could be made, because almost everything was shut and the rules kept changing anyway. Watching squirrels on a nut-hiding mission was suddenly the highlight of the week and we either revelled in this unexpected superabundance of time, vowing never to return to our formerly frenzied selves, or tore our hair out in sheer frustration. Either way, not a lot of ticket-booking was done.

As we emerge at last from the clutches of Covid, we are tentatively starting to believe that the lost art of planning ahead is possible. But not very far ahead, mind, as what with strikes, heatwaves, collapsing governments and the ever-escalating cost of living, it is almost certainly tempting fate to look too distantly into the future. There is also the not inconsiderable matter, a source of much anxiety in cultural institutions up and down the country, that many former punters have lost the habit of going out to see and do the things they did previously, preferring instead to stay at home with their feet up and a world of streamed entertainment available at the click of a remote control. This is dire news for these arts companies’ cash-flows, based as they always are upon advance ticket sales, but a bonanza for the spectator who fancies trying to make a booking for something tomorrow. Additionally, in a valiant effort to reassure the nervous, many venues are offering ‘Covid flexibility’ with ticket purchases. Just please do not adopt the bad habit of a colleague of mine, who wields the excuse of Covid to swap theatre tickets whenever a better social offer comes along.

Here in the summer of 2022, we are living in a golden moment for doing things on a whim. How about a trip to Cornwall this school holiday? There is still an abundance of availability due to folk havering over foreign travel. Yet like all golden moments, this one will not last. Autumn’s heavyweight cultural offerings and sporting fixtures will soon tempt punters into greater feats of forward planning which, combined with the general momentum back towards office working, will once again put the pressure of demand upon the most popular events. The government will settle, the heat will drop and greater clarity will, presumably, become available. Until then, however, there are delights aplenty on offer today – and almost no queues.

Is Liz Truss too comfortable?

After England scored their first goal last night, the team visibly relaxed and had a spell of playing happily until Germany equalised. Liz Truss was in the crowd and saw that sudden surge in confidence up close. Tonight we saw the same from the frontrunner. She enjoyed the latest hustings in Exeter, making jokes about how all the popular misconceptions of her were true. At times it seemed as though the interviewer (Seb Payne, formerly of this parish) and the audience were trying to find out more about what she’d do when she was in No. 10, not if. By contrast, the questions to Rishi Sunak were more about why members should give him a hearing when he had been disloyal to Boris Johnson and had put up their taxes.

Truss was in a particularly buoyant mood because her former rival Penny Mordaunt came out not just to endorse her but to introduce her to the audience. This is a real coup for Truss’s campaign given Mordaunt and her allies were seething about what they saw as dirty tricks and personal attacks during the parliamentary stages of the contest. It gives the impression that Truss is the candidate who can unite the party after this torrid time. At its most basic level it gives Truss authority because Mordaunt, Nadhim Zahawi, Tom Tugendhat and the others who’ve backed her in the past few days are part of a tide of Tories who think the result is now sufficiently unquestionable for them to start thinking about their own positions within a Truss government. Sunak by contrast had Liam Fox: someone who is well-loved by many Tory members who’ve been wearing down their shoe leather for the party for years, but who is also not exactly a fresh face.

That’s not to say that Truss trounced Sunak: these hustings aren’t head-to-head anyway. The former chancellor had to play in a more defensive position, at one point referring to ‘the orthodoxy I’m accused of’, but he stood his ground when being attacked by members for his corporation tax policy, and when being asked why people should trust him given he wasn’t loyal to Johnson. But he was also relaxed. This contest was just getting started, he insisted, even though the ballots go out this week.

The problem with being the one who feels more comfortable is that it can lead you to say things that aren’t well-judged. It’s easy in a room where people obviously like you to come out with memorable lines such as ‘Nicola Sturgeon is an attention-seeker’ who it is best to ignore. But is it best to ignore Nicola Sturgeon? It might seem tempting to many Devon Conservatives who feel the attention in Westminster is far too often turned towards Scotland, not the south west of England. But this leadership contest has suggested that neither candidate has spent enough time thinking about how to hold the UK together. Ignoring Nicola Sturgeon won’t mean Scottish nationalism disappears. In fact, it will more likely make it even easier for her to argue that the Westminster government doesn’t even want to listen to Scotland. With a Times poll putting Sunak just five points behind Truss among members tonight, could there still be a chance of a change in the game again, just as people are getting comfortable?

Penny Mordaunt endorses Liz Truss

If a week is a long time in politics, then a fortnight is an eternity. Two weeks ago, Penny Mordaunt was the bookies’ favourite to be our next Prime Minister, riding high in the polls and second among MPs. Now, after a bruising campaign, the vanquished candidate has opted to back the woman who defeated her to the runner-up spot behind Rishi Sunak: Liz Truss.

It’s a somewhat awkward endorsement, given how many of Truss’s prominent backers were sent out to attack Mordaunt on the airwaves. No less than three of the Foreign Secretary’s onetime Cabinet colleagues – Lord Frost, Simon Clarke and Anne-Marie Trevelyan – took aim at Mordaunt’s credentials over the course of the campaign. Frost claimed ‘she did not master the detail that was necessary’ in EU negotiations, Clarke piled in to suggest our ‘country needs a leader who is tested and ready’ while Trevelyan added ‘there have been a number of times when she hasn’t been available.’ Ouch.

Still, now all four are singing from the same hymn-sheet: that’s politics for you. It’s a reflection too of the speed with which Truss has become the frontrunner in this contest. Ten days ago she scraped through to the final two but this past week she’s become the firm favourite. That’s reflected in the number of high-profile endorsements she’s collecting too: in the past five days, four big names have come out for her from Ben Wallace on Thursday, Tom Tugendhat on Friday, Nadhim Zahawi on Sunday and now Mordaunt too.

Mordaunt will introduce Truss to tonight’s membership hustings in Exeter. Maybe the latter should arrive to some walk on music: The Winner Takes It All, perhaps?

Team Sunak gear up for ground war

With most signs pointing to a Liz Truss triumph, team Sunak have been pulling out all the stops in a bid to make up lost ground. Tory membership ballots go out this week and although the rules technically allow members to vote a second time online if they change their mind, neither camp expects this to play a big factor. This means the next few days will be critical to the final result, announced on 5 September. And now that the ‘air war’ of TV debates and initial hustings has concluded, it means that the ‘ground game’ of face-to-face meetings with members matters all the more.

Rishi Sunak has therefore been out pressing the flesh with the grassroots all weekend, to try to win as many over in-person as possible. Staff were told at campaign HQ this morning that he met 2,000 members face to face this weekend in constituencies where 10,000 Tory members are based. It’s part of a constituency blitz that will see him tour the north, south west, south east, west Midlands, Wales, Scotland and be back in London for the Sky hustings, all in the space of just a week. Backbencher Richard Holden, who worked on Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 leadership bid, has now been drafted in to help with such visits as part of a ‘crack team’ which boasts Olivia Leechman, formerly of the Treasury.

One source suggested to Mr S that it ‘definitely feels like something is happening at the grassroots which isn’t showing in the polls yet. Rishi respects the members: he’s happy to be scrutinised, he’s putting the hours in to talk to them and not stage managing every visit.’ Another contrasted yesterday’s European Championship final: Liz Truss took time out of the campaign to attend the game at Wembley while Sunak watched it in a pub between meeting members.

The south west in particular is hoped to be potentially fruitful ground for Sunak, given the high number of Tory-held, Lib Dem facing seats where Sir Ed Davey’s party is the nearest competition. Supporters suggest Sunak stands a better chance of retaining these at the next election than Liz Truss. They point to the number of MPs in such seats who are backing the former Chancellor with Richard Graham and Alex Chalk among the half-a-dozen MPs who welcomed Sunak to the Cotswalds yesterday.

The Lib Dem threat isn’t just contained to the south west of course, as perhaps evidenced by the endorsements of MPs elsewhere in the south of the country like Bim Afolami in Hertfordshire and Angela Richardson in Surrey. Similarly Fay Jones and Craig Williams in Wales both sit for former Lib Dem seats in Wales while Peter Fleet, who came second to the Lib Dems at last year’s Chesham and Amersham by-election, is also backing Rishi.

Sunak supporters trumpet their man winning the most endorsements from MPs: given that their first instinct is self-preservation, surely they know their local patches best and which candidate is most likely to save their seats next time around? If councillors and local members share such concerns, the thinking goes, then they too will back Sunak. Naturally, team Truss dispute this and highlight their candidate overtaking Sunak in recent polls: proof, they say, that she too can win an election against Sir Keir Starmer.

Electability is a contentious subject but there’s no real debate as to the issues on which this contest is being fought. Between 20 and 25 July, the Conservative Women’s Organisation ran a survey of its members and more than 500 replied, with one in four declaring themselves undecided on their preferred candidate. But what was clear was the issues most important to them: 87 per cent said economy and jobs with 81 per cent going for cost of living and fuel duty. Defence and foreign policy were next most important, followed by crime, policing education and health.

Plenty to discuss then for both candidates as they shake hands and make small talk over the next few crucial weeks…

What will China do if Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent sanctions, are roiling European energy markets and threatening a continent-wide recession. But we live in an age of multiple crises, and tensions over Taiwan are bound to flare in the coming days.

There are reports that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, will visit tomorrow. She would be the most senior US figure to visit this century. The Chinese have said that their military ‘won’t sit idly by’ if she does go there. Now to be clear, this almost certainly means military exercises rather than anything else. But it is worth noting that Joe Biden has said the US military do not consider it ‘a good idea right now’.

The economic consequences of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, as Sam Olsen wrote recently, would dwarf those of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Such actions may still be a way off. But the US and its allies need to think more about how to prevent this and how to reduce their dependence on China.

Piers Morgan sanctioned by Russia

It’s time for another round of crackpot Russian sanctions. Still smarting from the latest package of western measures, Moscow has retaliated by hitting us where it hurts: banning our best and brightest from visiting Vlad’s kleptocratic empire. In April it was Nadine Dorries and Grant Shapps: this month it’s Huw Edwards and Robert Peston. Bemused hacks on the 39-name list include the Telegraph’s James Crisp who expressed his surprise but remarked ‘It’s always nice to have been read.’

Still, at least the Russians got some villains right. Piers Morgan —  or, as the Russians call him, Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan — comes in 38th on the list, presumably for all his angry tweets and TV rants against Putin and his cabal. But just to add insult to injury, the Russians managed to get his broadcast channel wrong, incorrectly referring to him as a presenter on ‘IT-Vi’ rather than TalkTV, for which he’s paid millions. Looks like even the FSB in Moscow aren’t watching it either…

Others to feature on the list include former Prime Minister David Cameron, onetime head of NATO Lord Robertson and, er, Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens. Talk about a cast of titans. Liam Fox proves he still has relevance by having his name included (who needs a leadership run anyhow?) while Sir Ed Davey will probably be gutted to not be in a list which included parliamentary luminaries like Ian Blackford, David Lammy and Wendy Morton.

Given the prominence which such status confers on those targeted, Steerpike wonders how long it will be before he too is sanctioned by the tinpot tyrant.

The real difference between Sunak and Truss’s tax policies

The Tory leadership race is becoming a test of patience. Today Rishi Sunak has laid out his plan to slash tax: not in a matter of days or weeks, as Liz Truss has pledged to do, but by the end of the next parliament. He’s promised to reduce the base rate of income tax by 20 per cent, by taking 1p off income tax in 2024 (as already pledged) and an additional 3p over the next parliament.

As Fraser Nelson notes on Coffee House, the timing of this announcement is working against him: it’s easily characterised as a u-turn on tax cuts, when in truth the former Chancellor is far more interested in reducing the tax burden than perhaps his time in the Treasury conveyed. Team Sunak was always planning to hold back his bigger policy announcements for later in the campaign. Having won the confidence of MPs early on, the strategy was to save the eye-catching pledges for the grassroots. But Liz Truss stormed ahead quicker than most anticipated.

As Sunak tries to catch up on the campaign trail, it is increasingly clear that the biggest distinction between the two candidates is not a desire to cut taxes, but the time frame in which they’ll do it. Truss’s selling point is simple: Tory members who want to see their payments to HMRC reduced quickly should cast their vote for her. It’s a compelling offer, made more enticing by the rising costs of just about everything – food, energy, transport, clothing. With inflation running rampant, and much of it out of Whitehall’s control, a pledge from Truss to reduce tax essentially overnight has obvious appeal.

But Sunak continues to bet on the multifaceted concerns of the Tory grassroots, including the state of the public finances. By breaking the tax cuts down into increments – each pence off the pound amounts to roughly £6 billion in revenue – he’s hoping to win over the voters who want tax cuts, but also want the confidence that the cuts are sustainable. Sunak’s tax proposals are based on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth forecasts, which are rather measly – 2.1, 1.7, then 1.7 per cent again for 2024-25, 2025-26 and 2026-27 respectively. If Sunak can convince Tory members that his plans for growth will improve these figures, but in the worst-case scenario the tax cuts are still costed, he might start to turn the tax narrative in his favour.

Still, if a voter’s top priority is the tax burden, Truss’s campaign is likely to appeal more. But it also requires one to assume that the £30 billion of fiscal headroom is going to be ready and available to go on tax cuts when Truss would enter No. 10. That is becoming a harder sell by the day, as inflation continues to rise and as speculation grows over Ofgem’s next energy price cap hike. 

It’s near impossible to see a scenario where the next government doesn’t provide another support package to get households, especially the most vulnerable, through the autumn and winter. Assuming it will reflect or go above and beyond the packages so far, the support could amount to half the current headroom – or more.

But whether tax promises and fiscal reality stack up may not be seriously queried until after a new leader takes up the post. It’s what Sunak is trying to draw attention to in this race. He must succeed at doing so, if his campaign is going to catch up to Truss.

The police crackdown on social media has gone too far

Last week, I spent a night in a police cell. My ‘crime’? To intervene after I witnessed an ex-soldier being arrested over a social media post.

Is what someone posts on Facebook – even if it is a distasteful image of a transgender pride flag in the shape of a swastika – really a matter for the police? I don’t think so – and in this instance, the law appears to be on my side. Yet Hampshire Police saw things differently.

‘Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. And that is why you’re being arrested,’ a PC told the ex-army veteran as he stood outside his home in handcuffs, surrounded by officers. The backlash to the arrest has been swift: Hampshire police and crime commissioner Donna Jones has even stepped in to criticise officers.

‘I am concerned about both the proportionality and necessity of the police’s response to this incident,’ she said. ‘When incidents on social media receive…two visits from police officers but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong’.

Hampshire Police have since said that no further action will be taken against a man who was arrested on suspicion of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter. I remain under investigation on suspicion of ‘obstructing a constable in execution of duty’.

But the truth is that, whatever happens now, incidents like this will keep occurring. The College of Policing’s latest hate crime guidance, published last month, was intended to address the most egregious examples of police overreach. It has failed: the updated guidance still runs the risk of turning sarcastic expressions of dissent into something much more dangerous. ‘Ill-will’, ‘ill-feeling’, ‘antagonism’ and ‘dislike’ remain defining factors in the CPS’s definition of hate. This is wrong.

There’s also another issue in the legal system that this case has exposed: the use of summary justice. The officers told the man who made the social media post that he could attend a community resolution course and that this would also cost him £60, or he could face prosecution. Hand over the money and sign a confession and they would call off the dogs, seems to be the logic at work here.

The veteran, who has three tours of duty and a chest of medals, explained that he was not about to seek permission every time he wanted to post on Facebook and therefore declined their generous invitation. This led the officers to make the decision to arrest him. The veteran asked what the charge might be. No answer was forthcoming.

‘You just conducted an illegal shakedown,’ I said, as I emerged to confront officers. We attempted to resolve the situation peacefully by handing the officers a letter before action addressed to their chief constable. ‘Take it yourself,’ they said. ‘We’re not postmen.’

The officers then made their arrest. I immediately placed myself as a barrier between the war veteran and the officers. ‘To arrest this man, you will have to go through me,’ I warned. It may turn out to be the proudest moment of my life.