Gary Lineker quits the BBC amid antisemitism storm

Good riddance, Gary Lineker. The ex-England striker has now quit the Beeb in a huff, having presented his final Match of the Day show on Sunday. It comes after Lineker shared a social-media post featuring an ‘anti-Semitic’ rat emoji and declared that Israel’s response to the October 7 terrorist attacks was ‘beyond depraved’. Lineker – the Corporation’s highest-paid ‘star’ – had been due to host the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 World Cup but has now ended his contract early. Talk about an early bath…

The Sun got the scoop on his departure, reporting that ‘Gary agreed to leave the BBC for good after meeting bosses last week’, having realised that ‘his position was untenable.’ The paper quotes a source as saying: ‘It is a heartbreaking end to an extraordinary broadcasting career… He remains absolutely devastated by the recent turn of events and is deeply regretful about how his post was interpreted. His last Match of the Day will air on Sunday now and he won’t be back.’ Heartbreaking? Look on the bright side: that’s £1.3 million saved off the Beeb’s salary bill.

Back of the net!

Joe Biden diagnosed with prostate cancer

Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer, according to a statement released by his office on Sunday. Biden, 82, was diagnosed on Friday, after he saw a doctor last week for urinary symptoms. The former US president and his family are now reviewing treatment options, with the cancer cells now having spread to the bone.

Prostate cancers are ranked on a ‘Gleason score’ that measures, on a scale of one to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was nine, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive. Metastasised cancer is much harder to treat than localised cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumours and completely root out the disease.

However, the former president’s office says that ‘the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management.’ Biden, of course, has dealt with cancer before. Prior to being inaugurated in January 2021, he had several non-melanoma skin cancers surgically removed, and he had a cancerous lesion removed from his chest in February 2023. He notably made cancer a priority of his administration, declaring in 2022 that he wanted to halve the death rate within 25 years.

The news of Biden’s condition follows a Democrat war-of-words over his so-called ‘redemption tour.’ In recent weeks, the ex-President has given his first interviews since leaving office. The octogenarian has tried to defend his legacy, amid a wave of damning accounts on his mental decline in office. Now, all that will be brought to a halt by the news of his latest diagnosis.

A Dad’s Army won’t save Britain

Eighty-five years ago, on 14 May 1940, Anthony Eden, newly-appointed secretary of war in Winston Churchill’s government, went on the radio to appeal for volunteers to join a newly formed defence militia to guard against a German invasion. Originally called the Local Defence Volunteers, this force later became the Home Guard, immortalised on our TV screens as ‘Dad’s Army’.

As things turned out, the Battle of Britain ensured that Operation Sealion, the Nazi invasion plan, never took place, but the Home Guard remained in being, and while never tested in combat, they were a morale-boosting reminder that Britons old and young were ready to do their bit in defending the country. According to the Sunday Times, the idea of reviving the wartime Home Guard forms a central part of the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review of Britain’s military response to a menacing new world order.

The job of guarding our nuclear installations rests with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, a specially trained and armed branch of the police who have for more than 50 years carried out their job with exemplary efficiency. It is far from clear why they should need the assistance of a scratch force of untrained and inexperienced civilian weekend volunteers to carry out their work.

In the event of a terrorist assault or cyber attack, either the professional army is on hand or the expert advice of IT experts can be called upon – or is the government admitting that we just don’t have enough trained soldiers to do the job?

The still unexplained breakdown in an electricity generating sub-station that caused the closure of Heathrow Airport earlier this year illustrates just how vulnerable our complex network of power and energy supply is, but it is hard to see how an untrained force of well-meaning amateurs can make that shaky situation more stable.

Starmer’s unconvincing portrayal of himself in a military flak jacket may raise the odd mocking snigger, but for a genuine belly laugh we should watch a re-run of Dad’s Army, rather than endure this weak imitation of the real thing.

Let Gary Lineker host Eurovision

So, the foreigners still hate us then. That was the first lesson to take away from the Eurovision Song Contest as our benighted entry, ‘What The Hell Just Happened’ by Remember Monday received not a single vote from the public, after being nestled in the top half via the jury vote. Mind you, it was an object lesson into how not to write a song: a reasonably interesting chorus spavined by a dull verse and inappropriate changes in time signature, which robbed it of all momentum. A lazily written song. So maybe the public was right – although throughout the voting there was the usual evidence of national enmities and friendships.

I don’t believe anybody seriously thought the Israeli dirge was remotely listenable, for example – it came second because people who like Israel voted for it, which is at least a signal to Hamas that they do not enjoy a monopoly of support among the European public. The winner, an Austrian castrati who could sing but had not been given anything resembling a song to perform, came first. In truth, there was not a single memorable tune the entire evening – Italy, I think, came closest.

I wonder if Eurovision has passed its peak popularity, having been embraced by the gay community who now seem to be tiring of it. There was evidence in some of the songs last night – the various chunky caterwauling blonde hags, the stupid novelty song from Sweden – that the contest is settling back to what it was pre the 1990s: a demonstration that mass popular culture is truly awful, with almost no redeeming features. And once again Graham Norton failed to say anything funny and was wildly wrong with his predictions. Give the gig to Lineker.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: ‘We won’t go back to freedom of movement’

The government is currently in the final hours of negotiations with the EU over a new deal that Keir Starmer has said will create a ‘strengthened partnership’ with the bloc. The specifics of the deal are not yet revealed, but it is thought that a youth mobility scheme is on the table. On the BBC this morning, Laura Kuenssberg told Minister for European Relations Nick Thomas-Symonds that some people might feel betrayed by the new deal. Thomas-Symonds told Kuenssberg that it would include a ‘smart and controlled scheme’ and that going back to freedom of movement was a ‘red line’ the government would not cross. The minister claimed the new deal would be ‘absolutely consistent’ with the government’s goal of bringing net migration down, and suggested they wouldn’t discount students in immigration statistics to meet their targets.

Thomas-Symonds: ‘It’s about making Brexit work’

Over on GB News, Camilla Tominey pointed out to Thomas-Symonds that himself and Starmer had previously campaigned for a second Brexit referendum, and asked if he really knew ‘what’s in the national interest’. Thomas-Symonds argued that it is Starmer who has delivered on the promise of a post-Brexit independent trade policy, in achieving deals with India and the US. Tominey suggested that the imminent EU deal might go too far, and that the country will be ‘rule takers and not rule makers’. Thomas-Symonds said the government had ‘moved on from the debates of the past’, and were acting on a ‘hard-headed assessment’ of the UK’s interests. The minister claimed the UK would not be providing troops for an ‘EU army’, but said it was in our national interest to be working closely with the EU at a time of war.

Alex Burghart: ‘We’re on the brink of this big capitulation’

Also on GB News, Conservative MP and shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Alex Burghart criticised Labour’s deal, telling Camilla Tominey that the government is agreeing to ‘dynamic alignment’ with the EU, meaning the UK will ‘have to follow the EU’s rules on a whole host of regulations’. Burghart argued that the British public had voted for ‘independence and sovereignty’ in 2016, and described the negotiations as a ‘roll over’. Tominey pointed out that the Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal had led to issues at the border, and had reduced exports and imports. Burghart said that since Brexit, the UK’s trade with the rest of the world has increased significantly, and described the ‘remainer’ argument that Brexit would kill UK trade as ‘total rubbish’. 

Sir Elton John: ‘The government are just absolute losers’

Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Elton John described government plans to allow AI tech firms to use copyrighted creative work without permission as ‘a criminal offence’. This week, the House of Lords backed an amendment to the data bill which would force AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material was used in the training of their models, but the government invoked ‘financial privilege’ to block the amendment. Elton John said he was ‘very angry’ about the government’s position, and told Kuenssberg that AI would rob young artists of their ‘legacy and their income’.

Centrica CEO Chris O’Shea: ‘Inevitably… this asset will be decommissioned’

Centrica, the company which owns British Gas, has asked the government for help in order to invest in its Rough storage facility. On the BBC, CEO Chris O’Shea told Laura Kuenssberg that the site would lose £100 million this year, and that without a plan to expand it, Rough would eventually be decommissioned. Kuenssberg asked why taxpayers and the government should step in, when Centrica is a ‘huge business’. O’Shea said the company wasn’t asking for government money, but they needed help to create the ‘conditions which will unlock £2bn of investment’. Rough represents around half of the UK’s gas storage capacity, and O’Shea claimed that if gas prices stay the same, the facility would become unsustainable and the country would lose energy resilience.

Elton John: Labour are ‘absolute losers’

From Runcorn to Durham, Labour is losing their core vote everywhere. Now, even the luvvies are turning on them. It was less than a year ago that Elton John headlined a celebrity rally, held in the final week of the general election campaign. ‘Let’s get behind Labour to win on July 4!’ the singer declared. But, nine months on, it seems that the Tiny Dancer star has now changed his tune…

Appearing on the BBC’s flagship politics show this morning, John launched a savage attack at ministers over its plans to regulate AI. Describing the government as ‘absolute losers’, he said he felt ‘incredibly betrayed’ over plans to exempt technology firms from copyright laws. He told Laura Kuenssberg that if Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, goes ahead with plans to allow AI firms to use artists’ content without paying then he would be enabling ‘theft, thievery on a high scale.’

It comes after ministers this week rejected an amendment to the Data Bill to force companies to notify copyright holders if their work is used to train generative AI models. Sir Elton warned that the government is on course to ‘rob young people of their legacy and their income’, telling Kuenssberg that the Prime Minister needed to ‘wise up’, with Kyle singled out as ‘a bit of a moron’.

Talk about giving them a rocket, man…

Why Reeves should be wary of changing cash ISAs

Shrewd parents extol upon their children the importance of stashing away some cash. Unfortunately, they rarely offer much guidance on what to actually do with that money. As a result, much of it gets squirrelled away in pink, ceramic pigs where inflation eats it up.

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Many adults make the same mistake as these young savers. The more savvy ones opt to invest, perhaps in an Individual Savings Account (or ISAs), which are tax free savings accounts that let you save up to £20,000 every year, usually in the form of cash or stocks and shares. But it’s widely reported that the Treasury is considering a radical shake up of the market by lowering the amount savers are allowed to deposit in cash.

We Brits tend to opt for the cash ISA. Some 31 per cent of us have one – a whole lot more than the 16 per cent who use the stocks and shares variant – and we commit a lot of money to them. In March alone, £4.2 billion was stashed away, up 31 per cent from the year before.

The problem with this is that it’s widely believed we’d mostly be better off opting for the alternative. Leave the money long enough and stocks and shares generate a better return by riding out the bad times into the good, whereas cash rises at a fixed and predictable rate but fails to benefit from any magic the market brings.

It’s also believed that if the government is going to spend £8-9 billion a year subsidising tax free savings, it might be more worthwhile if more of that money went into British companies rather than being ported over to other parts of the world that generate better returns. Indeed, all this appears to be believed so strongly that the government is actually set to do something about it.

Plans currently being put forward include anything from merging all the different ISAs into one, to sharply reducing the amount of money you can keep in cash to just £5,000 in the hopes that the rest of it will be put into stocks and shares.

The important question of course is will it actually work?

Some of the large fund managers certainly seem to think so. They argue that re-orienting ISAs towards UK equities will encourage an investment culture while also giving our ailing equity markets a much-needed boost.

But should we be so sure? Others are rightly more pessimistic. AJ Bell points out that only one in five people would invest more in the UK stock market if the cash ISA allowance was reduced or abolished. Fear not, however, because fortuitously another idea doing the rounds is simply to require them to by also limiting the amount that could be invested in overseas stocks and shares.

But what if savers simply won’t partake? The whole reason many consumers opt for their Cash ISA is because they either don’t consider themselves to be competent investors – accounting for some 22 per cent of Cash ISA users according to the Investment Association – or approaching old age means the time horizons they’re operating on result in fear about losing money.

Restricting the ability to access tax free savings seems entirely unlikely to win over the over 50 per cent of Boomers who hold Cash ISAs – but no other investment product – who feel that no amount of savings would make them feel comfortable investing. Instead, it’s entirely possible that this money stacks up in easy access savings account earning derisory rates that may as well be zero.

So, if the everyday saver might not win, who could? The Treasury, probably. If people across the country put less money into ISAs because they don’t wish to brave the stock market, then those savvy enough to get good rates will be obliged to pay tax on their savings as the personal savings allowance – the amount of money you can earn in interest before paying tax – gets increasingly inflated away. Already tens of thousands face hefty HMRC fines as higher interest rates push them over the personal tax allowance and the automated tax process doesn’t work because the government can’t match about one in five bank accounts with a taxpayer record.  Of course, the Treasury would also save money on subsidising ISAs in the first place.

Banks would probably also be in line for a boost as people leave cash in easy access savers or worse their current accounts.

In any event, it seems like we’ll find out in due course. Whatever the government decides to do with the results of its forthcoming consultation, the increasing momentum behind calls for change means we’ll likely get some and it will probably be announced at the Autumn Budget. Undoubtedly, given the popularity of Britain’s beloved Cash ISA, someone at the Treasury will anxiously scrutinise whatever comes in knowing full well the ire of savers that awaits them if they get it wrong.

Second man arrested over Starmer fires

Counterterrorism forces have arrested a second man in connection with arson attacks on two homes and a vehicle associated with Keir Starmer. The Metropolitan Police arrested a 26-year-old man – whose nationality remains unknown – at Luton airport on Saturday afternoon on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life.

In a statement the Met said: ‘The arrest was made by counterterrorism officers from the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit. The man has been taken to custody in London.’

The latest arrest follows that of a 21-year-old man who was charged with arson with intent to endanger life over attacks at properties linked to the Prime Minister. Roman Lavrynovych, a Ukrainian national living in Sydenham, London, is accused of starting fires outside two properties and burning a vehicle in north London. He has been charged with three counts of arson with intent to endanger life and appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court on Friday. Prosecutors said Lavrynovych had denied arson when interviewed by police. 

It comes after the London Fire Brigade and the police had attended the property shortly after 1:30 a.m. on Monday. While the door to the four-bedroom home was damaged, no one was hurt. Later in the evening it emerged that counterterrorism officers were also investigating a blaze at a second property linked to Starmer as well as a vehicle fire. The vehicle fire occurred just before 3 a.m. last Thursday and it was on the same street as Starmer’s home.

Starmer is letting out the house, thought to be worth £2 million, to his wife’s sister after he and his family moved to Downing Street following Labour’s election win last summer. It is not clear if the prime minister’s sister-in-law was at the property at the time of the attack.

Why are today’s MPs so incredibly drab?

Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting better candidates off. It was also down to the identity-driven shortlists all three main parties have embraced in the past few decades.

‘They began to select on identity rather than merit,’ Widdecombe pointed out – adding that if you do that ‘for a quarter-century odd, then it’s going to have an impact on the quality of people in parliament.’

As a new political play, the ‘Gang of Three’, opens at the King’s Head theatre in London, about the relationship between Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland – three Labour MPs from the past who were anything but dull – the gap between now and then seems painfully wide.

The trio, taken together, make an interesting study. All had served in the war, all known each other at Oxford, and all had intense cultural interests – what Edna Healey, Denis’s wife, called ‘hinterland.’

Healey, when he wasn’t serving as a reforming Defence Secretary or beleaguered Chancellor in a time of sterling crises and rampant industrial unrest, had numerous interests to keep him going. As a teenager he loved film, paintings, music and photography, and was a voracious (and serious) reader. At the age of 19, he cycled across Europe merely to see a production of Faust at the Salzburg Festival, and at Oxford (where he took a double-first) organised exhibitions of Picasso and the Surrealists.

‘Even my family,’ Healey wrote, ‘would not have been sufficient to reconcile me to a life in politics if I had not also been able to refresh myself with music, poetry, painting.’

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Later in life, surrounded by his library of 16,000 books and over a thousand films, he would produce, alongside his acclaimed autobiography, two volumes of travel photos (Healey’s Eye and Healey’s World). He would also publish My Secret Planet, an anthology of his favourite writers, of which Edward Pearce wrote that it should be circulated among ‘the entire fourteen-year-old nation, and the next generation will grasp not one man’s hinterland, but the purpose of books.’

Keir Starmer, a man reported as having no particular favourite novel or poem, and who chose as his special book on Desert Island Discs ‘a big atlas, with real details,’ should perhaps take note.

Meanwhile Roy Jenkins, son of a Welsh miner, was known for his grandiloquent skills as parliamentarian and a love of fine dining, good claret and continental travel. Yet he also wrote heavyweight biographies of Gladstone, Churchill and Roosevelt, and his numerous liberal reforms as home secretary largely created the world we live in today.

The third of the trio, Tony Crosland – ‘the most exciting friend of my life,’ Jenkins said – was perhaps best known for his drawling, donnish air, his bohemian parties of film stars and literati, for reckless womanising and his determination, as education secretary, ‘to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England.’

Yet he also wrote The Future of Socialism, probably the most influential post-war book on Labour thinking, in which he rhapsodised over ‘the cultivation of leisure, beauty, grace, gaiety, excitement, and of all the proper pursuits, whether elevated, vulgar, or eccentric, which contribute to the varied fabric of a full private and family life…We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses…better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes….’

As biographer and fellow MP Giles Radice said of the trio, ‘They were big men, larger-than-life personalities who could light up a room or gathering by their presence. And their extensive “hinterlands” serve as a valuable reminder to the present generation of politicians that there is more to human affairs than politics.’

Nor was this confined to the Labour party. Tory PM Edward Heath had his championship yachting, his organ-playing and conducting. Anthony Eden was a specialist in Persian and Arabic studies and – irony of ironies – able to converse with arch-enemy Nasser, Egyptian Premier during the Suez Crisis, in the latter’s own language. A professor of Greek at 25, fellow MP Enoch Powell would campaign in his constituency in English, French, Italian, German, modern Greek and Urdu, all of which he spoke. ‘No other politician,’ said Lord Annan of Powell, ‘had the ability to translate the law book of a medieval Welsh king, edit Greek texts with a dryness that made Housman look gushing, master the intricacies of the medieval House of Lords, and reinterpret the New Testament.’

Are these things important? These politicians’ private interests gave them a separate world to retreat to – the cultural equivalent, you might argue, of f***-you money when the going got rough. As Harold Macmillan, famous for ‘going to bed with a Trollope’, put it: ‘You should read Jane Austen… then when they come in with some awful crisis, having read about Pride and Prejudice and so on, you’ll feel better.’

Without an appreciation of such things, it’s arguably all too easy for ministers to forget what a strong economy, a robust education system, or a love of free speech are actually for. You may disagree with Jim Callaghan’s 1971 reluctance to join the EEC, but still have admiration for his reasoning. Fearing French would be the dominant language, Callaghan remarked: ‘Millions of people in Britain must have been very surprised to hear that the language of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and of Milton must in future be regarded as an undesirable American import from which we have to protect ourselves if we are to build a new Europe…I will say it in French in order to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup.’

It is not an argument one can imagine a politician like Rishi Sunak, with his fabled emphasis on STEM subjects and hostility to degrees that do not ‘grow our economy,’ ever making.

As for the Starmer administration, with their apparent dearth of private passions, it can take heart from perhaps one thing: the Gang of Three’s erudition did not often translate into effective government. The Wilson and Callaghan cabinets in which they served were fractious, knotty things, slipping and sliding through crisis after crisis, riven not least by the clashing egos of these three men.

‘With hindsight,’ Healey later reflected of Jenkins, ‘I regret that, though we often worked closely together, an element of mutual jealousy prevented us from co-operating more effectively.’ Nor, when Michael Foot took over the party, did things improve. Foot may have been brimming over with interests – penning excellent biographies of Byron, Bevan and H.G. Wells – but made a woeful opposition leader, taking Labour down to one of its worst election results in history. Yet without these men, the political landscape of the past fifty years would be a much poorer place.

For politics is not just in the here and now, but in the legacy of inspiring ideas, breadth of vision, and juicy personalities it leaves behind it. The sense that the ‘boiled rabbits’ of the Starmer government, like Tory governments immediately before it, seem to lack anything resembling a hinterland should depress us all. As journalist Finn McRedmond put it in the New Statesman last year, ‘Politics needs complex ideas and ambition to work beyond the short term; without it, we risk managing our own decline through the fear of intellectual imagination.’ As the summer recess in parliament approaches, there is ample chance for MPs to do some holiday reading. A trip to the local branch of Waterstones (or even to the King’s Head Theatre) would seem to be in order for them all.

Don’t mourn the death of cash

‘Cash is king,’ grinned the bartender as he handed me two pints of dry cider at a music festival I attended several summers ago. Since I’d paid in cold, hard cash, he’d agreed to a discount suspiciously in line with VAT. With nearby food vendors struggling to connect their payment terminals to the internet and fellow festival-goers queuing for cash, I gladly handed over the tenner and glugged down the goods.

Such a bargain is not uncommon. I’ve seen the odd hospitality worker offer a cash discount so they can pocket the takings themselves. After a removal quote once went awry, a surly van man demanded extra cash to shift my piano. Newsagents, meanwhile, tend to set a minimum card payment lest they get scalped on fee charges.

It’s such transactions – minus, I suppose, the tax dodging and petty theft – that the Treasury Committee is hoping to encourage. Only last month, the committee warned that Keir Starmer risks creating another ‘two-tier society’, this one divided between those who qualify for an Amex card and those who exchange coppers for the morning coffee. As the committee chair, Dame Meg Hillier MP, argued:

A sizeable minority depend on being able to use cash and they must not be forgotten by Whitehall. As a society, we must avoid sleepwalking into a situation where cash is no longer widely accepted.

The report was coaxed out of the committee by advocacy groups increasingly hostile to the presence of cashless businesses on British high streets. The Payment Choice Alliance has been especially vociferous, throwing a hissy fit over the Treasury Committee’s reluctance to recommend that businesses be forced to take cash.

‘For the Treasury Committee to basically simply ask HM Treasury to report annually on how bad cash acceptance has become is patently unacceptable and clearly against the interests of the British public,’ the alliance fumed. It added that many neighbouring governments have intervened – though Europe is not known as the world’s regulator for nothing.

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For all the fury, the alliance’s summary of the committee report is not unfair. The top-line conclusion is a masterclass in official inactivity: ‘The government must act to manage the decline in cash acceptance.’ Institutions as storied as the Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England will sit and take notes while cash fades into obscurity, at which point the Treasury Committee might finally recommend that something be done.

This would suit the government, which has already announced that it has ‘no plans to regulate businesses, big or small, to compel them to accept cash‘. In March it also revealed that it would be folding the official payment systems regulator into the FCA in an attempt to reduce regulatory burdens.

When you consider who Labour will be courting in 2029, one can understand why the cash splashers aren’t a priority. The most devout adherents to the ‘cash is king’ mantra tend to be libertarians. Deeply suspicious of fiat currencies, they like cash because it prevents the government from monitoring their purchases.

To be fair to the libertarians, banking services have proven vulnerable to political tampering of late. Only three years ago Canada’s government froze the bank accounts of truckers who had joined the anti-lockdown Freedom Convoy, affecting $8 million (£4.3 million) across 200 accounts. The year after in Britain, Nigel Farage lost his Coutts account because his politics didn’t align with the alleged values of the bank for the super-rich. Perhaps that’s one reason why he was photographed with a ‘cash is king’ shop sign last year.

Labour doesn’t care about such people, of course. But it will be more sympathetic to the vulnerable groups that the Treasury Committee warns are being excluded as cash recedes from view: the poor, elderly and disabled who are unable or unwilling to take up Mastercard, Apple Pay or Bitcoin.

Some of these people argue that physical cash is better for budgeting. As the report notes, it is easier to teach children about the limited supply of money when they can see it disappearing into a till. You can understand why a pensioner can’t be bothered to embrace the exciting world of contactless mobile phone payments.

But we should not be humouring these luddites. Carrying cash is a pain, the breaking of each note a shard in the soul, your pockets weighed down until you empty the contents down the back of your sofa. Shops must employ men in motorbike helmets to ferry it around town, and write signs to thieves assuring them that none is kept on site overnight. It is only convenient as a choking hazard for over-inquisitive toddlers.

For related reasons, nobody knows how much cash they have. In any British household the amount may stretch from the value of one Freddo to a night at a Premier Inn on the outskirts of Slough. This is in an era where you can look at charts on your monthly spending habits from the comfort of the bog before you return to scrolling TikTok clips.

Indeed, the pairing of payment cards with smartphones means that debit cards accounted for 51 per cent of the country’s transactions in 2023, according to UK Finance, with credit cards accounting for 10 per cent. Cash was used in only 12 per cent of transactions, with the industry body predicting this would halve by 2033. The government was sufficiently confident in this trend that it declined to order new coins in 2024, a historical first.

Far from reversing the trend of declining cash use, the government should be accelerating it. As the Treasury Committee recommends, somebody should be keeping an eye on Mastercard and Visa’s opaque processing fees, the subject of many a class action in the US. IT infrastructure must continue to be strengthened, not least because of the kind of outages that can prevent thirsty festival-goers from acquiring West Country cider on a hot summer’s day.

As for cash, like the British monarchy, it could still enjoy a ceremonial function. The Royal Mint can continue to issue commemorative coins, enjoyed for a moment before being consigned to the back of a drawer. The cash king is dead; long live the plastic king.

Cricket has become irrelevant

Apparently, the cricket season has begun. More than that, it’s in full swing and is already six weeks old. But to the casual sports fan, there’s little sign of this. It’s hardly on terrestrial TV. I last saw children playing it in a backyard about a decade ago. I’ve no idea who England are up against this summer. The newspapers relegate it to the inside pages. Many people who once cared no longer do. Newcomers to our shores would have no clue we’re a cricketing nation. What on earth happened?

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, as I did, cricket was ubiquitous. Ian Botham and Geoffrey Boycott were as famous as their footballing counterparts such as Kevin Keegan and Gary Lineker. The BBC held the rights, of course, and broadcast not just the international stuff but county matches too. You didn’t have to be a fan to recognise Richie Benaud and Jim Laker commentating on the telly, and Brian Johnston and John Arlott on the radio. Their voices were the sounds of the summer, along with lawn mowers and seagulls at the beach.

And now? I reckon Joe Root could walk down the high street completely unrecognised. Freddie Flintoff is more famous for presenting Top Gear than beating the Aussies. Ask your average person to name the England men’s captain (Ben Stokes for Tests, injuries permitting) and I reckon nine out of ten wouldn’t have a clue. Then ask a typical teenager whether they’d care if England won the Ashes, and they’d probably wonder what on earth you were on about.

And why should they care, given the dramatic decline of school cricket? The number of state schools entering competitions has, I’m told, dropped by a third in 20 years. Those that do play cricket are often pretty half-hearted, rotating it with other sports, so youngsters might get just 12 hours playing time a year.

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We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that according to Warwickshire CCC researcher Tom Brown, looking at all England’s Test batsmen between 2011-22, ‘you were 13 times more likely if you’re white and privately educated to be selected as a professional cricketer than if you’re white and state educated.’ If that’s the shrinking pool we’re drawing on, I can’t see England winning much. The women’s team has just been thumped in Australia, and the men will no doubt go Down Under next winter as big underdogs.

There is clearly a long-term investment issue, and people still talk about Thatcher’s government selling off sports fields. Last year, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced a £3.5 million investment in school coaching and £26 million for facilities. It’s laudable, but frankly a drop in the ocean.

Because the bigger issue is simply that cricket is no longer part of our national conversation. The trouble really started when summer Tests were sold off to the highest TV bidder, requiring viewers to pay. The 2005 Ashes were marvellous for England, and I watched avidly, but that’s the last summer series shown free-to-air.

Getting broadcasters to pay top dollar might make short-term economic sense for the game’s administrators, and, yes, BBC Radio’s Test Match Special remains utterly wonderful and free. But there’s nothing like seeing the game, and because few of us can do so without money, time, patience and effort, cricket is pretty invisible. The football World Cup and Euros are always on terrestrial TV. So too the Rugby World Cup. But the cricket one? The tournament was last broadcast free to all in 1987.

If anybody doubts the importance of this, remember that burst of excitement when England’s World Cup victory of 2019 was shown on Channel 4 for one day. It’s the only time in many years I’ve heard children in my street enthusing about the game, with one pretending ‘to smash it like Stokes’.

Some will say that if I want to see cricket, The Hundred is great fun and a Sky subscription is good value. You can even see the IPL live from India and watch all those sixes flying into the stands like baseball hits. Well, that’s fine for the enthusiast who has a bob or two. But your average punter, time poor and counting the pennies, won’t do it.

So, whereas not so long ago cricket was to summer what turkey is to Christmas, it’s now about as niche as volleyball, and the top stars are less famous than snooker players.

The solution? Ideally, we’d travel back a few decades and correct the egregious errors that led to the money flowing but the game shrinking from sight. Failing that, let’s start by having a minimum of one Test shown live on terrestrial every summer. At least then we’ll get to see what Joe Root looks like. And we’ll know the season has actually begun.

How to fight back against Lily Phillips

Why is the pornification of our culture so difficult to oppose? Partly because it takes subtly different forms. There used to be prostitutes and pornographers. Now, there are online influencers like Lily Phillips, subject of the documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day. These influencers sometimes talk like feminist activists, too.

There are also TV shows that are not quite porn, but are not quite not. A few years ago, I attacked the Channel 4 reality show Open House, which features first-time swingers. It doesn’t just document their adventures; it arranges them. I hoped that my attack would finish it off, but it is back for a new season.

Of course it is ‘reality porn’ – titillating entertainment involving real people. But it feels the need to present itself as therapeutically virtuous – it provides counsellors who help these couples to express themselves, to follow their liberated hearts. This makes it uglier than mere porn. To justify its existence, it has to push a message, that this approach to sex is brave and valid.

This sort of thing is different from Lily Phillips. But we need to recognise the common ground, if we are to take a stand against pornification. In both cases, a hedonistic view of sex is promoted and the idea that sex belongs in committed relationships is rubbished.

The fact is that the vast majority of people are pretty old-fashioned about sex, and dislike being told that anything goes. But somehow we seem to lack the language to say so.

In fact, I feel a bit grateful to Lily Phillips. So disgusting and offensive are her antics that she is waking us up, forcing us into articulacy. What she did in sleeping with dozens of men in the space of a few hours is clearly wrong. But why? We must learn to say why.

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The problem is that critics of porn are split. Old-fashioned moral conservatism, perhaps rooted in religion, still very much exists but is rather shy of piping up. The feminist critique of porn is less shy, or rather it has more credibility in our media.

It is time for these two forms of critique to work together. Porn has divided and conquered its opponents. A united front is needed.

On its own, the feminist response is inadequate. It is too reliant on the language of rights. As soon as a woman says that she finds selling her body liberating, it gets confused. A woman is not meant to find that liberating, it says, so surely she has been brainwashed by the patriarchal porn industry. But this feels flimsy. The whole discourse of rights, and being free to do what does not harm others, is unable to deal with the wrongness of porn.

A feminist response also has the aura of a minority response, even if the vast majority agrees with most of it. And the task is to articulate the majority common-sense view. We need a new articulation of why sex should not be cheapened, demeaned, hedonised, treated as entertainment. What is the positive principle behind such opposition?

Most people probably want to say something like this: sex belongs in committed relationships, it is bad for society to be flippant or trivial or hedonistic about it. But this is too weak. Our cultural gate-keepers reply, ‘That’s a very valid opinion, now let’s hear from the edgy pornographers again.’

How can the opinion of the vast majority be strengthened? It’s no good claiming to be offended. This only works for minorities. Also, in this case the complaint is far too vague. Mary Whitehouse was too broadly offended – by sex-scenes in dramas, and representations of homosexuality, for instance. We need to be more precise about what offends us. What offends us, I suggest, is the promotion of casual and hedonistic sex as equally valid.

But why does this offend us? We must learn to articulate the positive principle behind our offense. Surely it is this: we greatly value the idea that sex belongs in faithful committed relationships. And the language of ‘greatly valuing’ has to be stepped up. We have to say something like this: ‘We see sacred significance in faithful committed relationships’. Only the language of sacredness can really get across the fact that pornification feels like a threat to what we hold dear. The language of rational liberalism can’t really express this: it is too easily appropriated by the pornographers trumpeting their rights.

I invite other critics of pornification to sign up to this. We’ve been divided and weak too long. Let’s come together.

The US and China are in more than a trade war

Headlines on the current discord between the United States and China speak only of ‘trade war’. Negotiations in Geneva have led to a 90 day ‘truce’. If only the war were that limited. If only agreement on solving trade hostilities would return things to normal. But what is normal?

Sadly, trade is just one aspect of a much broader war, in which neither side is contemplating a truce. The head of China’s BGI group, a former high ranking official, understands the reality better: ‘Many people talk about financial and trade wars, but the deadliest battle is the technology war. The technology war will ultimately determine the fate of both sides. Whether the US can defeat China or whether China can rise from adversity will depend on the technology war.’

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But it is a broader war than finance, trade and technology. It is a war between systems, both economic and political, a war also between values, those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and those of America (Trumpian values are a different matter). That makes it an ideological war. And it is a geopolitical war, a propaganda war (or public opinion war, as the Party’s press put it last month). Heaven forfend that it becomes a kinetic war, perhaps as a result of clashes in the South China Sea.

The CCP has been clear about this for over a decade. It uses vocabulary which in Chinese is strong: ‘struggle’ against ‘hostile foreign forces’. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping continually repeats a theme which he set out in his very first politburo meeting: ‘We must diligently prepare for a long period of cooperation and of conflict between these two social systems in each of these domains (economic, technological, and military)… Western anti-China forces… will continue to point the spearhead of westernising, splitting, and ‘Colour Revolutions’ at China.’ The infamously leaked ‘document no. 9’ excoriated all the values upon which western systems are built. And recently the People’s Daily – a more accurate title would be the Party’s Daily – reiterated that the US has all along been attempting to contain and suppress the rise of China.

When it comes to politics, America is more of a black box than China. Long books on ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ may be dull, but they are wide-ranging and consistent. ‘Donald Trump Thought’ is disseminated in short tweets. Its coherence is less easy to absorb. Yet there is very considerable overlap between the policies of the US towards China since 2016. Bipartisan agreement on the aims is real, even if methods for achieving them might differ. No administration wants to see the CCP realising the ‘2^nd Centennial Goal’, whose translation from Partyspeak would be: ‘China as the world’s superpower, and global governance supporting China’s interests and values.’

Huawei best illustrates that the issues are far wider than trade. The US had no 5G contender and it resented going in to bat for Erikson and Nokia. But it saw the technological and geopolitical threat of the CCP sitting astride western telecommunications.

If science and technology are the main weapons in this geopolitical and ideological struggle, the battlefield is the Global South, a concept wherein the CCP, bending geography and economics to propaganda imperatives, locates itself. The CCP is right to say that its political system cannot take root in countries with different cultures and conditions.

But the CCP is exporting elements of its systems and its values. Xi is explicit in attacking westernisation as the path for development. ‘Chinese modernisation has broken the myth of “modernisation equals westernisation”… expanding the path choices for developing countries to move towards modernisation.’ As for values, the October 2024 politburo study session on Chinese socialist culture declared that it ‘has strong ideological leadership, spiritual cohesion, value appeal, and international influence.’ If exporting its systems and values was not a major pre-occupation of the CCP, why does it spend billions on its external propaganda and united front work departments?

For third countries, neutrality in this war may not be an option. In February the White House published an ‘America First Investment Policy’. Two little noticed paragraphs talk of restrictions on foreign investors’ access being linked to ‘verifiable distance and independence from the predatory investment and technology-acquisition practices of the PRC’, as well as ‘requirements that the specified foreign investors avoid partnering with United States foreign adversaries.’ In April, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr said that Europe would have to choose between America and China. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent was more graphic: a move towards China ‘would be cutting your own throat’ – although he probably meant ‘assisted dying’.

It only takes one not to tango. But in this case neither the CCP nor America is keen to dance. The CCP has been decoupling for over a decade with its policies of self-reliance, ‘Made in China 2025’ and ‘dual circulation’ (domestic wherever possible, foreign only if necessary). America under President Trump is now more open and urgent about following suit. There are limits set by unbreakable interdependencies, but the trend is clear. It is wider than a trade war. Perhaps we should use a term such as ‘decoupling war’.

Other countries’ governments will come under increasing pressure to choose sides. They may postpone matters by doing as the UK’s government is doing: saying as little as possible about China and trying to dance with both sides. But, as often, the inventor of history, Thucydides, has lessons for us. Not the so-called ‘Thucydides claptrap’ that rising and existing powers will inevitably come to blows, but from the Melian dialogue. Big powers force small powers to choose: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

Help! I’m trapped in a hi-tech hotel

Raffles Doha is one of the world’s weirdest, most improbable buildings. That’s it in the picture – a five-star hotel incorporated in one prong of the incomplete circle that is the 40-storey Katara Towers in Lusail City (the Fairmont Doha is in the other prong), on land reclaimed from both desert and sea. It’s an architect’s/despot’s fantasy turned reality. The bonkers design is meant to echo Qatar’s national emblem of crossed scimitars, and I’d love to see the back of the envelope upon which it was first sketched.

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It’s far, far beyond my miserable hack’s pay grade, but invited as a guest I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t resist. The tone was set at Doha’s Hamad International Airport (Skytrax Airport of the Year 2021, 2022, 2024), where I was met by a chauffeur-driven gold Bentley. I’d never set foot in a Bentley before, let alone a gold one, but in Doha, it seems, it’s the only way to travel.

There’s nothing so banal as a check-in desk at Raffles Doha, and nothing so banal as individual bedrooms. It’s suites only, of which there are 132, and I was ushered direct to mine on the 27th floor, with formalities conducted over a glass of champagne. Comprising a vast living room (with sofas, armchairs, desk, six-seater dining table, balcony and cinema screen TV), bedroom, walk-in wardrobe, private mirror-lined bar, enormous bathroom and floor to ceiling windows all round, my new home was larger than the entire ground floor at 22 Old Queen Street and with better views. Oh, and at roughly £850 a night, my Gulf Signature Suite came with my own butler, Nerissa.

It took Nerissa almost an hour to explain the ‘room management and multisensory system via in-suite tablet’, the scent diffuser with its choice of five different aromas, the iPad and surround-sound music system, the tea and coffee machines, the bar, the four-jet shower, the loo with heated, self-raising seat and that gargantuan TV which somehow connected to my phone. I tried to follow instructions but failed. Not because I couldn’t work out how to use anything (I couldn’t), but because I couldn’t work out what half the things were meant to do.

Nerissa gave up after I opened the blinds in the bathroom for the third time while trying to turn the lights off in the bar and made the loo flush while resetting the water temperature. I later had to page her to come to escort me downstairs as I couldn’t make the lift work. There was just too much impenetrable tech.

The world’s largest kaleidoscope with its 974 winking screens (Qatar’s dialling code is 974) towers over the grand marble lobby and, despite the hotel being nearly full, I barely saw another person. I had a cracking dinner at the hotel’s Italian restaurant, Alba, decent breakfasts at l’Artisan and a jolly cuppa in the Malaki tea lounge. My favourite spot, though, was the Blue Cigar library bar with its 6,500 books and its ‘book sommelier’, who came and read to me as I necked a couple of cocktails and puffed on a fine cigar.

I glimpsed a couple of Qataris who, notoriously, are a minority in their own country, comprising barely 10 per cent of the population. All the staff are foreign. Nerissa is South African, and I met a Ugandan sommelier, a Nepalese chef, a Moroccan deputy manager, a Romanian bartender, a Kenyan doorman, a Sri Lankan chauffeur, a Bangladeshi waiter, a Rwandan waitress and a Spanish maître d’. There are 82 different nationalities on the staff.

There was a spa, a 44-seater cinema, a kids’ club, a pool and much else besides. Ridiculously luxurious and lacking in nothing, Raffles Doha’s pampering embrace was hard to escape (not least given my difficulties with the lift) – but I felt I owed it to myself to get out and explore.

I had a whistlestop tour of Doha Old Port, the fish market and the restored but still atmospheric Souq Waqif, with its spice merchants, jewellery stalls, carpet sellers, food stands and, famously, its falcon shop and falcon hospital. I even made it to the desert and the fabled Inland Sea, rode a knackered old camel, flew a falcon and sand-boarded down a dune. Well, halfway down before I fell off.

What will bring me back to Doha, though, is neither desert nor Raffles. It’s the majestic Museum of Islamic Art. That alone was worth the trip. Designed by I.M. Pei – he of Louvre Pyramid fame – it sits on a specially created peninsula off Doha’s Corniche, and, from a distance, its Cubist exterior is said to look like the head of a woman wearing a niqab. With books, jewellery, glass, pottery, tiles, carpets, armour, swords and silks from the 7th to the 21st centuries, all beautifully laid out and explained, there is so much to feast on and learn and I was utterly entranced. It’s one of the great museums of the world and I can’t wait to go back.

Sadly, cost and technophobia mean a return to Raffles Doha, gloriously, seductively, self-indulgently swish though it is, is a tad less likely.

Scotland has no idea what to do about Reform

Reform continues to rise in Scotland and the Scottish political and media class continue either to ignore it or hold panicked summits on countering the ‘far right’. Thursday’s council by-election for Clydebank Waterfront, in West Dunbartonshire, saw Reform come second despite never having contested this ward before. The SNP proved the eventual victor in the seventh round of counting – Scottish local elections are conducted using single transferrable vote – but Reform narrowly beat Labour into third place. They used to weigh the votes for Labour in Clydebank, a town once synonymous with the socialist radicalism of Red Clydeside. Like manners and Saturday night telly, the Scottish Labour party ain’t what it used to be, but it’s remarkable that the people’s party is now being outpolled by an Essex Man tribute act in the heartland of the deindustrialised west of Scotland. 

There is now plainly a trend in place, one I pointed out last November following three Glasgow council by-elections in which Reform came out of nowhere to claim third place. Nigel Farage’s party is not just a threat to the Tories in Scotland, but to Labour too. A Survation poll earlier this month put Reform comfortably in second place in Scottish voting intentions for the next general election, with the party polling three times as much support as it secured in last year’s vote. Downing Street might tell itself it has enough time to reposition itself vis-a-vis Reform and claw back many of its 2024 voters, but it doesn’t have enough time in Scotland. The next Scottish Parliament election is 12 months away.

Although Scotland has never been especially fertile ground for Farage – we have our own rabble-rousing nationalists, thank you very much – its parliament presents real opportunities for an insurgent outfit like Reform. Roughly 40 per cent of seats at Holyrood are elected using the additional member system, a closed party-list method intended to increase proportionality and which has transformed the fortunes of the Scottish Greens. The same Survation poll puts Reform on 20 per cent on the list vote, which would likely make them the main opposition at Holyrood.

Reform has managed this despite, and perhaps because, it has publicised no policies on devolved affairs. Voters are thoroughly scunnered with the alternatives, seeing Keir Starmer as untrustworthy (scrapping winter fuel payments to pensioners) and the Tories as even less reliable, having squandered their 14 years in office with little to show for it. Among opponents of Scottish independence, Reform seems to be the natural choice. It is a means of venting frustration without voting for anything specific. Specifics can make populist parties considerably less appealing. 

The trouble for the mainstream parties is that it’s hard to fight an amorphous howl of rage. They don’t understand the voters they’re losing to Reform, don’t know why exactly that party appeals to an electorate it has hitherto neglected, and don’t know how to prise them away. Reform’s momentum is building and its opponents can only look on in confusion and despair. 

Starmer’s immigration ‘crackdown’ is a triumph for the quangos

Keir Starmer appeared to be making all the right noises when he unveiled his immigration crackdown this week. The white paper, released to coincide with the Prime Minister’s speech on Monday, saw the government finally concede a basic economic fact we all know to be true: ‘Despite the significant increases in long-term migration over recent years, economic growth and living standards have stagnated.’

However, on close inspection the paper is not all that it seems. Fundamentally, it simply lacks detail. It fails to set any targets, either in terms of net migration numbers or visas, and offers little clarity on what would be deemed the right amount of migration.

This is no accidental omission. These plans make clear that the solution to Britain’s immigration crises will not be resolved by ministers or directly by the Home Office, but by Keir Starmer’s favourite answer to any public issue: the quango.

Quangos are threaded through every page of this paper. The problem of data is being handed off to the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), alongside the Office for National Statistics and the Office for Budget Responsibility. This is the very same ONS which is undergoing a controversy surrounding poor data collection practices.

The MAC will be tasked with undertaking ‘a thorough review of salary requirements to ensure that international recruitment is never a cheap alternative to fair pay’. It will also ultimately decide the criteria for which occupations will feature on the ‘Temporary Short List’ – a decision which will directly influence the numbers of people arriving.

While the final decision over immigration policies will, in theory, lie with the Home Secretary, the MAC has had significant influence over the country’s immigration policies. To be named so consistently in this paper as the primary agent in setting thresholds and measurements reveals the continued, and indeed heightened, centrality of the MAC in this new migration plan. This is the same body that advocated keeping the Graduate Visa route in its current form only a year ago, a route that was well-known for being open to abuse, and the path through which large numbers of dependents were arriving in the country.

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The crowning glory of the paper is the creation of yet another quango, in the form of the Labour Market Evidence (LME) Group – a super quango combining MAC, the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council, and Skills England. They will be tasked with producing ‘a workforce strategy’ for relevant employers.

This ‘workforce strategy’ is intended to fill the missing data on the domestic labour market, to identify the key industries that are ‘central to industrial strategy’ and are significantly reliant on foreign labour. It has been the lack of a ‘workforce strategy’ which has seen the UK produce lots of unemployable graduates year after year, while relying on international care workers due to a complete lack of domestic supply.

To hand over such a pivotal aspect of our migration strategy to an unelected and unaccountable quango reveals Labour’s fundamental disinterest in solving this problem. With Reform beating the drum in polling, by-elections, and locals, Starmer is keen to sound like he has the answers, but when it comes to solving problems is it the ‘lanyard classes’ he turns to once again.

This ‘workforce strategy’, bereft of any wider goal in terms of numbers or visas, could be used to rubber-stamp massive numbers of foreign workers, if the ‘economically inactive domestic labour force’ is not sufficiently activated. 

The details of this paper, where there are any, are less around substantive changes to the immigration system in Britain, and more around moving the furniture so that more decision-making is handed to unelected bodies that can’t be held to account. Next time a minister is asked in the Commons why the numbers are so high, they can simply answer ‘well that’s a matter for the LME / MAC’, etc.

Mass migration, contravening the stated interests of the public, has historically been driven by quangos that nobody has ever heard of. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, for example, a quango that enforces the Equality Act (2010) and supports legal cases in equalities matters, has often criticised legislation that attempts to reduce immigration, invoking international obligations or human rights. Quangos have been almost universally out of step with the public’s feeling on immigration. So why are they being handed such an important job, which should be in the hands of elected ministers?

The government had a chance here to fundamentally restructure the country’s immigration policies, and it missed spectacularly; not just because this paper is absent of serious policy, but because there has been no effort to touch the quangocratic architecture of our governing system that removes ministerial control and democratic accountability. In fact, it’s only been strengthened.

Will Labour’s uniform cap hit pupil performance?

It is the perennial question of British politics: who is next in the ministerial sack race? For a while, it seemed, the answer was Bridget Phillipson – the minister waging a one-woman-war on the Tories’ school reforms. But today, the Times suggests that the Education Secretary has been told her job is safe, citing private text messages from Keir Starmer. That means she can press on with her Schools Bill which includes, among other measures, plans to limit the number of branded uniforms items schools can insist on.

This cap is being hailed as a way of keeping costs down – but Mr S wants to know if it will affect pupil performance. After all, as the Bill’s own impact assessment proudly boasts:

The Bill includes two measures that deliver manifesto commitments on free breakfast clubs and limiting the number of branded uniform items that schools can require. This is to support the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity by supporting children to arrive at school ready to learn.

Yet, in a recent response to a Freedom of Information request, the Department for Education (DfE) admitted that it made no assessment on how the cap would impact social cohesion in schools, student performance or behaviour in classrooms. Asked for ‘assessments made’ by DfE on how the change would affect each of the aforementioned areas, an FOI officer replied meekly:

Following a search of the Department’s paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by this Department.

Sub-optimal to say the least. Asked for comment, a DfE spokesman said that ‘“Our Plan for Change is removing barriers to opportunity, with limits on branded items of school uniform just one of the steps we’re taking to put money back into parents’ pockets and break the link between background and success.’ Hmm. Let’s hope the other steps have more rigour eh?

Reform UK plots new wave of student societies

They say that the children are our future. So what better way for a party to demonstrate its potential than by winning support among the nation’s yoof? Britain’s universities are often depicted as hotbeds of leftism, incubators for the kind of avocado-eating, chai latte-drinking wokerati that sends Jonathan Gullis into a tizzy. But now Mr S hears that a new wave of Reform UK student societies could change all that – with branches expected to launch in the forthcoming academic year.

Currently, there are three universities branches across the country with Reform societies at Durham, East Anglia and York. These were all established when the party had less than 70,000 members. But now, with numbers above 233,000 – including a healthy contingent of those under-25 – senior Reform figures are expecting to see more branches popping up in September. These will not by initiated by party headquarters but the top brass is happy for them to be set up. Let’s hope there’s not any Tory boy style scandals eh? One insider told Mr S:

The polling doesn’t lie, we are surging with young people across the country and there is a real appetite for Reform on campus as the Tories slowly wilt away. Richard Tice spoke at York Uni last year and I’m sure more trips by our MPs will happen in the coming academic term.

Of course, more voters aged 30 and under backed Reform than the Conservatives at the general election in July. Sounds like those numbers are only going to rise…

Will Gibraltar get in the way of Starmer’s EU reset?

For years, the UK, Spain, Gibraltar and the European Union have been negotiating, on and off, to resolve the complex issue of Gibraltar’s post-Brexit land border with Spain. Now, ahead of next week’s meeting in London when Keir Starmer welcomes EU leaders to discuss a ‘reset’ in UK-EU relations, Spain’s Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has brought ‘the Gibraltar issue’ firmly back into the spotlight. 

Referring to the planned reset, which covers a wide range of issues including defence and security, fishing and British exports, Albares told the BBC’s Newsnight programme, ‘There are many, many things we need to talk [about], Gibraltar included.’ Emphasising that the relationship between the UK and the EU must be ‘comprehensive’ and ‘global’, he added: ‘We have to resolve the Gibraltar issue in order to have a full EU-UK relationship.’ 

There are signs that agreement on ‘the Gibraltar issue’ may, finally, be imminent. Not for the first time Gibraltar’s chief minister, Fabian Picardo, has expressed optimism: ‘We’re 99 per cent of the way there… we’re within kissing distance.’ The anticipated plan reportedly involves Gibraltar becoming an associate member of the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone, allowing 15,000 workers from one of Spain’s poorest regions to enter Gibraltar every day, and Gibraltarians to regain the freedom of movement that ‘we used to enjoy as European citizens’. In the 2016 referendum, 96 per cent of Gibraltarians, who rely on imports of food, medicine and other supplies from Spain, voted to remain in the EU. 

Under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Spain ceded sovereignty over Gibraltar to Britain ‘in perpetuity’. Since it wasn’t even part of the Crown of Castile until 1462, Gibraltar has now been British longer than it was Spanish. A spokesman for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: ‘We have been clear that we will only agree a deal that maintains British sovereignty over Gibraltar and has the full backing of Gibraltar’s chief minister, Fabian Picardo.’ The chief minister has repeatedly emphasised the Rock’s ‘sacrosanct’ British sovereignty.

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However, any such deal will provoke fierce opposition from Vox, the most right-wing of Spain’s mainstream parties. Vox wants to end British occupancy of what it considers ‘Spanish soil’ and has already accused Spain’s socialist government of ‘cowardice’ for ‘not lifting a finger’ to seize what it regards as the golden opportunity offered by Brexit to recover Gibraltar. 

Vox’s unwavering determination to recover sovereignty resonates with many Spaniards for whom Gibraltar, often described as ‘the stone in Spain’s shoe’, is a constant source of irritation. Many like to recall how in 2016, Javier Ortega, a senior Vox official, swam three kilometres across open sea from the Spanish town of La Línea to Gibraltar, where he rendezvoused with supporters on a secluded beach, scaled the steep rocky slopes, and fixed an enormous Spanish flag high above ‘the colony’. With Gibraltar’s security forces closing in, Ortega escaped arrest by running back down the hillside, plunging into the sea again and swimming back to Spain.

Nor did Vox’s manifesto for Spain’s 2023 general election leave much room for doubt. It promised to

Dismantle the networks of piracy, drug trafficking, smuggling and money laundering that emanate from Gibraltar and apply all the international pressure necessary to recover the occupied territory. 

It may not be long before Vox gets an opportunity to act on those words. Although Spain’s next general election isn’t due until 2027 and socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has repeatedly vowed to serve the full term, his fragile minority coalition government, mired in multiple corruption scandals, struggles to secure parliamentary support for routine legislation. There is widespread speculation that a general election will be held sooner – indeed Spain’s right-wing opposition seem to think that it could come as soon as this autumn. 

Whenever the election takes place, there’s no possibility of Vox winning outright. The party does, however, stand an excellent chance of becoming an influential junior partner in a coalition government led by the Partido Popular, the main right-wing party. With the Partido Popular almost certainly depending on its support to govern, Vox would be well placed to make demands – recovering Gibraltar might be high on the list.

There seems no way, however, of reconciling Vox’s demands with the wishes of an overwhelming majority of the 34,000 Gibraltarians: they want to remain British. Regardless, then, of the outcome of next week’s discussions in London, if, as seems likely, Vox forms part of the next Spanish government, it will soon become clear that ‘the Gibraltar issue’ is far from ‘resolved’.

Why I changed my mind about multiculturalism

When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing ‘free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims’, you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You’re damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur’an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a liberal society, people should be free to blaspheme against any and all religions, even pretendy ones like Anglicanism.

You should be free to tell Catholics they’ve built an entire church around one woman’s genius excuse for getting knocked up by someone other than her husband. Free to tell Jews that when a solicitor gives you the title deed to a piece of land it’s called conveyancing but when a voice in the sky does it it’s called schizophrenia. Free to take the mick out of whoever it is that worships that broad with all the arms. (Imagine her manicure bills.)

Few things unite secular leftists, right-wing Tories, liberal proceduralists and Anglo-futurists like a Muslim seemingly questioning the permissibility of blasphemy. Progressives who ackshually away appeals to British values at any other time now proffer them as principles fundamental and inviolable. Reactionaries who ordinarily decry the coarsening effect of crudity and profanity jostle to devise the most obscene insults against Islam. Freedom of expression, all sides agree, is too intrinsic to Britain’s national story to surrender it to men like Adnan Hussain.

But is it intrinsic? It’s impossible to divorce the history of England from the liberty of the person, which has expanded at times and contracted at others but where the rough trajectory has been towards greater licence for the expression of individual conscience, especially on the subject of religion. However, a nation is an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, and England in the present is a country in which the freedom to blaspheme against one particular religion is coming under increasing challenge.

Hussain later clarified his remarks, claiming that he wasn’t objecting to the legality of offending religion, merely accusing the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe of a disproportionate focus on Islam. But free speech means you get to offend Muslims disproportionately or even exclusively if you so wish. There is no equality duty when it comes to heresy and, bluntly, if you mean to take aim at the speech-chilling power of intolerant religious crybullies, there is a pretty obvious candidate. It’s about time someone put the Methodists in their place.

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Whatever his intended point, Hussain would hardly be a lone voice for restricting freedom of expression when it comes to Islam. Labour MP Tahir Ali has called for laws to ‘prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions’. Fifty-two per cent of Muslims in Britain would like to see it become a crime to show a picture of the Prophet Mohammed. Prohibitions on blasphemy were officially removed from the statute books in England and Wales in 2008 but continue on a de facto basis for those who scandalise Islam or its adherents.

A man who burned his own copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish embassy in London was charged with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress’. There is no law on the statute books of England that makes it a crime to harass an entire religion, but the Crown Prosecution Service was satisfied to proceed all the same. Only after an outcry did it quietly drop the invented charge and replace it with one of causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress… motivated by hostility towards a religious or racial group’.

The police swoop in when a Qur’an is burned, but they are noticeably less forceful in suppressing intimidation of those accused of insulting Islam. After a religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School showed pupils an illustration of the Prophet Mohammed during a 2021 lesson, crowds of Muslims protested outside the school gates and the teacher was bombarded with threats online. He was forced to go into hiding where he remains four years later. As far as the Khan review could establish, not a single arrest was made over the campaign of harassment against the teacher.

Officers were similarly reluctant to get the cuffs out when throngs of Muslim men gathered outside British cinemas in 2022 demanding they pull screenings of the ‘blasphemous’ film, The Lady of Heaven. One cinema chain after another dropped the movie, wisely so given the apparent reluctance of the rozzers to protect them or their patrons.

The following year the Old Bill got more involved when a 14-year-old autistic boy at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield dropped and scuffed a copy of the Qur’an as part of a prank. West Yorkshire Police recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’ and dispatched a senior officer to the local mosque to criticise the boy’s ‘lack of understanding’ and give the imam his ‘really, really deep-hearted thanks… in regards to the tolerance and understanding shown’. Said officer remained there and watched as the boy’s mother — sporting a veil, naturally — pleaded her son’s case. When it comes to Islam and intimidation, police can’t decide whether to be hands-on or hands-off. (You’d have thought sharia-compliant policing would come down firmly on the side of hands-off.)

Liberals, of which I am one, are currently in denial about two-tier policing but even when the weight of evidence makes denial no longer possible, it will not be as easy as calling for legislative or policy changes to right the problem. We will have to do something much more daunting: confront the tension between liberalism and multiculturalism. No, not ‘tension’. I used to say ‘tension’ back when I believed the two could coexist in one country. I was wrong, idealistically wrong — the worst kind of wrong. The word I’m looking for is incompatibility. English liberalism and multiculturalism cannot be reconciled and the continued attempt to do so only delays the time of choosing.

Mass immigration plus non-integration have allowed enclaves of reaction to sprout up in Britain. In these parallel states, some migrants and subsequent generations live as paper citizens — voting, paying tax, collecting benefits, sitting on juries, and using public services — but do not subscribe to the cultural assumptions that have come to undergird British national life, including the rule of law, tolerance, religious pluralism and freedom of expression.

By no means does this describe all migrants or all Muslims, but it describes more than we should be comfortable with. Nor does the fault lie primarily with those who come here. Uncontrolled immigration is not their policy, they only benefit from it. It’s not their fault they’ve never been told there is a distinct and virtuous British culture to which they must acclimatise if they wish to live here. It’s not their fault that the UK state addresses them as a community with sectional interests rather than as citizens with shared obligations.

That is the doing of a governing class that prioritises the group over the nation, the universal over the particular, the legal over the political, and the modern over the traditional. Post-national managerialists committed to the celebration of every culture but their own. Their compassion heatmap is so far off in the distance it is barely visible. There can be no progress until this destructive and demoralising elite is replaced and with them their failed gods.

The crisis in British multiculturalism is a crisis of identity and philosophy, one not created but merely exposed by mass immigration. It is easy to pinpoint the flaws in our multiculture but much harder to say what our monoculture would look like. What is lacking is a British civic religion. America is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Australia is about mateship and the fair go. Canada is about peace, order and good government. What is Britain about? What are our common bonds?

A country which has ceased to be conversant in its own culture cannot hope to manage the level of multiculturalism brought by seemingly limitless immigration. If we define Britishness along civic lines — and I believe we must — then everyone born here or who makes this their home has a say in articulating our civic religion. The greater the volume of immigration the more susceptible that civic religion will be to challenges from those who bring with them different cultural assumptions, be that about blasphemy and free expression, sexual equality and gay rights, or ethnic prejudices and religious sectarianism.

Britain is a multiracial and multifaith success story, but it is a multicultural morass, because while individuals of all nationalities, ethnicities and religious affiliations can integrate into British life, insular and adversarial cultures cannot. Individuals and families may observe traditions, customs, festivals and practices foreign to the UK, they may express special affinity for ancestral lands, but they cannot live in cloistered cultures sealed off from the rest of British life and hostile to many of its precepts. Becoming British need not mean losing your cultural heritage but it must mean your cultural heritage being integrated into your primary identity as a Briton. That can only happen with government policies that compel integration, discourage sectionalism and control migration numbers to make this process manageable. Keir Starmer is beginning to speak in these terms but it is actions that count.

Diversity can be a strength but it can also weaken cohesion and consensus. Those who would prohibit offence to Islam don’t need to get a majority of Britons to agree with them. They just need to get a big enough minority to make their view unignorable so that liberty is no longer inseparable from British identity and becomes one of several competing perspectives, all worthy of consideration in the making of law and policy. The British state already sides with its enemies as a matter of habit, it hardly needs any more encouragement.

Free speech does and should protect the right to offend Muslims and every other religious or ideological category. Multiculturalism and mass immigration are not the only threats to a civic religion rooted in individual liberty but they embolden those with no apparent sympathy for Britain’s tradition of free expression. Forced to choose between a liberal order and a multicultural one, as increasingly we are, no British person would fail to choose the former.