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What does Trump’s minerals deal mean for Ukraine?
Has Donald Trump’s heavy-handed negotiation style scored a win, or have the Ukrainians managed to wrench a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat?
Although the details are still unclear, Kyiv and Washington are confirming that a deal on mineral rights has been agreed, and that Volodymyr Zelensky will be on his way to the White House on Friday to sign on the dotted line. Trump has abandoned his ludicrously overblown demand for a $500 billion (£400 billion) return on what has actually been no more than $120 billion (£95 billion) given in total aid, through revenue from Ukrainian oil, gas and rare earth metals. Zelensky had understandably rejected this, saying ‘I am not signing something that ten generations of Ukrainians will have to repay.’
Instead, it seems that a fund for the reconstruction of the country will be established, with a substantial US stake, which will draw on a share of those revenues. The precise terms of the deal and the American share have yet to be confirmed, but it is clearly less onerous and humiliating than the original demand. It does not include though the long-term security guarantees that Kyiv had previously demanded as part of the deal. Still, the Ukrainians are hoping that by giving the Americans a vested economic interest, it will incentivise Trump, who continues to think more in terms of balance sheets than geopolitics, to think of their security.
This will not mean an instant bonanza for either Ukraine or the USA. Most of the country’s mineral resources are, after all, in the east of the country, and either now under Russian control or else close enough to the front line that efforts to develop and exploit them would essentially require an end to the fighting. In many cases, they will also need investment to exploit.
Nonetheless, it does provide some hope for Ukraine that Trump is not looking to write them completely off. When asked what the deal gives the Ukrainians, he said ‘the right to fight on’.
Ukrainians don’t need Washington’s permission to fight on, but they do need continued US assistance, and this provides a welcome counterbalance to the spectacle on Monday of the USA siding with Russia to vote against a European-drafted resolution at the United Nations condemning Moscow’s invasion. Meanwhile, Trump gets to promise his America First base that he has won them a return on their investment, their money back ‘plus’.
This is a small mercy, but at least it means that Ukrainian security has not entirely been forgotten. A Ukrainian diplomatic source sighed that it was ‘better than I had feared, although not as good as I had hoped.’ Trump said that seccurity was an issue to be addressed ‘later on’, but with characteristic bravado added, ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. There are a lot of people that want to do it, and I spoke with Russia about it. They didn’t seem to have a problem with it.’
Would that it were so simple. After all, while his forces are still grinding away on the front line, Vladimir Putin is also slyly trying to outbid Zelensky. He has proposed a deal to develop Russia’s mineral resources – and he would want to include those in the occupied Ukrainian territories – adding that Russia ‘undoubtedly’ has ‘significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine’. This is probably a non-starter (though in Trumpworld, ‘probably’ is about as certain as anyone can be about anything), not least because an American president, unlike his Russian counterpart, cannot order companies to sign deals. Mindful of the legal and reputational risks of operating in occupied lands, as well as the losses suffered by other companies that were either forced to leave Russia or targeted by the Kremlin, it’s unlikely any would even contemplate this before a full peace deal had not only been signed but seemed to be holding.
More than anything else, it is a reminder of Trump’s overtly transactional approach and his unabashed use of America’s military and economic muscle. He opens negotiations with a tough, unrealistic bid, because he expects to be haggled down, but he ultimately wants to make a deal. This makes his position towards Moscow seem, on the face of it, contradictory or, to those still convinced he is somehow being controlled by Putin, suspicious. Yet it need not be so difficult. Trump will do what he feels he has to do to open negotiations, blithely convinced he can make a good deal. He offered concessions that weren’t really concessions – pretty much everyone knew that Ukraine would not be joining Nato in the foreseeable future, or reconquering all the occupied territories – to get Putin to the table. Whether he can make a deal, let alone a good deal, remains to be seen.
Will Trump’s ‘golden visas’ threaten Rachel Reeves’s tax plans?
Fed up with Rachel Reeves’s tax rises, with the calls for wealth and mansion taxes, and the loss of non-dom status? For $5 million (£3.95 million), there is now a very easy escape route. President Trump has just announced a ‘golden visa scheme’, allowing investors an easy path to American citizenship. That is aimed at attracting global entrepreneurs to the US. But it could also pose a real threat to the British economy.
The UK depends on a small group of taxpayers to keep its huge state machine financed
It is certainly a dramatic move. Golden visas that allow citizenship in return for investment have traditionally been restricted to a handful of micro-states and tax havens. President Trump has now decided to add the United States to the list. We will see how successful this is. Compared to places such as Dubai, the Caribbean islands, and Malta, best known for their golden visas, American taxes are relatively high. The footloose, tax-averse global mega-rich may just decide a US passport is not worth having.
In reality, the country that might be really hit is the UK. Sure, the visa will only appeal to a small pool of people. After all, not many of us have $5 million to spare. And yet, for anyone who does, the US is the country that the wealthy British have always found it easiest to move to. It has a vast range of cities to choose from, everyone speaks the same language, it has huge commercial opportunities, and world-leading universities. Most people already have friends and family in America. It is not a tax haven, of course, but taxes are significantly lower than they are in the UK, and under the Trump administration they are coming down. The people who are not sure about Dubai or Monaco may find it very appealing.
The real problem is this. Over the last 20 years, the UK has dramatically narrowed its tax base relying on collecting more and more money from the well-off. Sixty of the wealthiest people pay more than £3 billion a year in income taxes, according to a report by the BBC. They account for just 0.0002 per cent of UK taxpayers but paid 1.4 per cent of the country’s total income tax receipts. Likewise, last year, the top 1 per cent of income tax payers paid 28.2 per cent of income tax, up from 22.7 per cent twenty years ago.
In effect, the UK depends on a small group of taxpayers to keep its huge state machine financed. The Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Left keep arguing for that to be increased, insisting that the ‘rich’ should pay even more. But President Trump has just effectively put a cap on that, by offering them the US as a refuge. That will make it very hard for a British Chancellor to push taxes on the ‘wealthy’ any higher – indeed at some point she may even be forced to reduce them.
Ukrainians are keeping calm and carrying on in defiance of Trump
In 2023, I had coffee with the celebrated Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, on Yaroslaviv Val Street in the ancient heart of Kyiv. The modern city is built over the ruins of the rampart built by Yaroslav the Wise, the eleventh-century Grand Prince of Kyiv, to keep out invaders. Now, on the third anniversary of the most recent invasion of Ukraine, Kurkov, whose novels are known for their dark humour, is in a much more sombre mood. Donald Trump’s savage and surreal attacks on president Zelensky have left the country reeling.
‘Of course, Ukrainians are shocked and upset,’ he says. ‘If two weeks ago Russia considered Americans and Poles their main enemies, now Trump has moved Americans almost into the camp of Putin’s allies.’ Yet Kurkov sounds a note of defiance that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the country.
‘The rest of the world is playing funeral music but still Ukraine is not prepared to give up and to succumb to the Putin-Trump effort. The military say the war will go on and they are ready for this.’ It’s stirring stuff and the optimism remains contagious. It is only his final words that feel unconvincing: ‘This is also a chance for the European Union to become stronger and more united.’
My friend Maria Avdeeva, security expert, social media warrior and senior Eurasia fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, shares the sense of outrage at Trump: ‘It’s ridiculous, everyone is shocked.’ Beyond the disbelief, however, is the sense that Trump is getting the fundamentals wrong in his quest for a deal. There’s no evidence that Putin wants to end the war or achieve anything other than complete control of Ukraine, she says. It misses the point to focus on whether Russia keeps the territory it has taken. ‘Putin wants to put in a puppet government and make us a satellite state like Belarus. He wants Ukraine not to exist as an independent state.’ Trump’s tirade against Zelensky has had the predictable effect of rallying support for the embattled president. Maria sends me a link to Zelensky’s ‘Thank you for your support!’ post on X. It has 12 million views and 377,000 likes.
Roman Hnatiuk, a lugubrious businessman, has given up checking his media. ‘I can’t read the news,’ he moans, over a bowl of borscht. We are in Spelta, a hip bakery-turned-restaurant in Podil, Kyiv’s answer to Greenwich Village. ‘I’m serious. I get sick in the stomach, I don’t know what’s going to happen to Ukraine, Europe, the world. The worst scenario is for us to be pushed into elections and pro-Russian populists come to power. Then we repeat the Georgia scenario. With the number of weapons in Ukraine, that means civil war.’ First America pushed Ukraine to give up its nukes and promised it independence. ‘Now they’re ready to sell us to Russia. One thing I know for sure is that if America insists, Europe, the West, everybody, will sell us down the drain.’
One positive consequence of Russia’s invasion, which Trump’s scuttle will only accelerate, is the meteoric rise of Ukraine’s defence tech industry. In subzero temperatures, 3,000 parka-clad arms dealers, entrepreneurs, spooks and hacks from 40 countries descend on Mystetskyi Arsenal, a handsome (and appropriate) repurposed venue for the largest event in the sector’s history. Welcome to the world of advanced robotics, autonomous AI-driven drones, anti-radiation autopilot systems, laser weapons, visual inertial odometry, Raptor EO/IR gimbaled sensors, kamikaze swarming drones in GNSS-denied environments, distributed acoustic weapon location systems and other mind-spinning innovations. Strix Air, which provides radio control technology for drones, cuts through the jargon with a succinct summary of its product: ‘Your assistant in killing more Russians.’ ‘Ukraine has the capability to produce effective, innovative defence solutions at scale and at a fraction of the cost of similar systems from abroad,’ says Artem Moroz of Brave1, the government’s defence tech platform. ‘In the future, this industry can become a cornerstone of Ukraine’s economic recovery and a reliable arsenal for Ukraine’s allies from Europe and overseas.’ The West should take note.
Is tech really the answer to this war? Misha Rudominski, twentysomething entrepreneur and co-founder of Himera, the encrypted tactical radio manufacturer, thinks so. Like most of Ukraine’s would-be tech titans, he’s not letting Trump distract him and is focused instead on securing $1.5 million (£1.2 million) from venture capitalists. Himera already supplies the Ukrainian armed forces and is now dipping its toes in foreign markets, starting with the US Air Force, Estonia and the Philippines. Perhaps it’s the optimism of youth, but Misha is remarkably sanguine about the prospect of Ukraine going it alone without Uncle Sam. ‘Most battlefield kills these days are from Ukrainian technology – deep strike drones, FPV drones, any kind of drone,’ he says. ‘In 2022, without US help it would have been all over, same in 2023, less so in 2024. Now, with Ukrainian tech and European funding, we can sustain this fight.’
With the costs of weaponry manufactured in Ukraine five to ten times cheaper than the American equivalent, he reckons Europe could bear the costs. He’s probably right, but will Europe agree to it?
I’ll give the last word on Trump’s geopolitical blitzkrieg to Oleksandr, my mole in the special forces. ‘We’re not worried about it so much,’ he says, gloriously unruffled as ever, as Russia launches a massive drone attack on Kyiv. ‘I think the Americans should be more worried. It’s their country (Trump’s) going to destroy. We’re just going to carry on fighting.’
How North Korea will use its $1.5 billion of stolen crypto
For a country that is notorious for its lack of connection to the outside world, North Korea is one of the world experts in cyberwarfare.
Only this week, North Korean hackers managed to steal $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, in what is the largest cryptocurrency hack on record. The fact that the stolen money is just over 5 per cent of the country’s GDP does not mean the profits will be going to the North Korean people or economy though. After all, nuclear weapons and missiles hardly come cheap.
There has been a deluge of North Korean cyberattacks in the 21st century. The country even has its own state-run cyberwarfare agency, the elusive ‘Bureau 121’, which forms an integral part of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the country’s central intelligence agency responsible for managing and orchestrating clandestine intelligence operations. Bureau 121 was established in the late 1990s, and is explicitly tasked with conducting cyber disruption, such as infiltrating computer networks. The bureau quickly became infamous for hiring the brightest and the best minds, not least from young North Koreans studying computing at universities.
One of the most notable North Korea groups responsible for carrying out cyberattacks has been the so-called Lazarus Group, also known (ironically) as ‘Guardians of Peace’. Supported by the North Korean government, it has been responsible for many North Korean cyberattacks in the last two decades. Who can forget how in 2014 the Seth Rogen film The Interview – where two American journalists meet Kim Jong Un in North Korea and eventually manage to assassinate him – was stymied by a successful attempt to hack into the computer systems of Sony Pictures. Confidential data was leaked, including personal details of Sony employees and future film scripts. The not-so-peaceful Guardians of Peace demanded that Sony withdraw the film from public distribution and even threatened terrorist attacks on cinemas that showed the movie. The film’s intended premiere date in New York was postponed.
As technology has evolved, so too have North Korea’s tactics. Pyongyang initially targeted South Korean government websites and came close to raiding the Bangladeshi Central Bank. It then launched ransomware cyberattacks – such as the WannaCry malware of May 2017 which affected NHS computers – and began targeting journalists and academics with phishing campaigns. As the world became obsessed with cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) so too did North Korea. In March 2022, the Lazarus Group orchestrated a major heist, wherein it acquired $620 million in cryptocurrency from the NFT-based video game, Axie Infinity. Yesterday’s theft, of over double that amount, sets a concerning precedent.
Before the first Trump administration began in 2017, Barack Obama made clear to his successor how big a problem North Korea would be. Over seven years have passed since then, and the North Korean threat is now increasingly complex. For all the West’s efforts to sanction North Korea’s bad behaviour, the hermit kingdom continues to find ways to evade them. One of the targets on the FBI’s wanted list is Park Jin Hyok, a member of the Lazarus Group who allegedly played a central role in the 2014 Sony Pictures and 2017 WannaCry ransomware attacks. Park may also have been the mastermind behind this week’s theft. But the FBI’s arrest warrant has just been ignored by North Korea. In Pyongyang’s view, Park simply does not exist.
Illicit cyber activities have funded at least half of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction programmes
Meanwhile, North Korea’s cyberwarfare campaign looks set to continue. It is a highly lucrative means of funding its nuclear and missile capabilities. As of January 2024, illicit cyber activities have funded at least half of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction programmes which, in addition to nukes, also includes biological and chemical weapons.
Pyongyang’s renewed rapprochement with Moscow could mean things get worse. The Moscow-Pyongyang relationship is not just restricted to the exchange of munitions and manpower in return for oil, food, cash, and advanced missile technology. The possibility of these two rogue states engaging in cyber cooperation cannot be ruled out. You only need to read the ‘comprehensive strategic partnership treaty’ signed between the two countries in June last year to see why. It not only contained a mutual defence clause, but saw both states pledge to strengthen cooperation in ‘information and communication technology security’.
It is therefore vital that the West takes the North Korean threat seriously. The West – which includes Britain – cannot be seen to be afraid of our enemies. We instead need to act reliably and robustly, while standing true to our values of democracy, freedom, and prosperity.
Starmer’s surprisingly ruthless foreign aid cut
Ten years ago the idea of a British prime minister announcing a cut in foreign aid to 0.3 per cent of GDP would have been unthinkable.
David Cameron’s Tories had exempted the Department for International Development from austerity, repeatedly declaring that it would be wrong to balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest people. Naturally, Cameron’s coalition partners the Lib Dems supported this stance, while Labour revelled in having been the party that raised aid spending to this level and legislated to create a legal duty for subsequent governments to maintain it.
The case for radically cutting the aid budget only saw the light of day in the 2015 Ukip manifesto, to which I contributed. We suggested a reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.2 per cent and were of course pilloried as vile for doing so. Given the proportion of the aid budget currently being spent at home on tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, this Ukip policy is in effect what has just been announced by 10 Downing Street. By a Labour prime minister.
Even given the security context, requiring big extra spending on defence, this is the most right-wing thing a Labour premier has done for decades. David Miliband, the Blairite prince over the water with a vested interest in the aid industry, has gone on the record to state his opposition to the move, saying: ‘Now is the time to step up and tackle poverty, conflict and insecurity, not further reduce the aid budget.’
Yet Keir Starmer is completely unabashed by it. He has even underlined the thinking behind his decision via an exclusive article for the once hated Daily Mail.
So we may safely conclude that something political is going on beyond the simple need to be seen to better fund our armed forces in the future. The veteran Labour-watcher Andrew Marr hinted at this in a column for the New Statesman a couple of weeks back in which he drew attention to a series of moves to the right by Starmer, starting with the publication of a government video showing illegal immigrants being deported. This in itself told us something about Starmer given his hostility towards immigration control measures throughout his career as a radical lawyer and even during his early years in Parliament.
What these two moves – cutting aid and upping tough-talk on defending the borders – point to is the extraordinary ruthlessness of this Prime Minister, even by the standards of those who reach the very top of the greasy pole of politics. Marr pointed towards fear of Nigel Farage’s Reform, now topping the polls, as a major motivating factor, along with an appreciation that the election of Donald Trump had changed the political terms of trade all over the world. In which case, just as on the road to Brexit, Farage’s ability to force incumbent premiers who detest his politics to bend to his will must be appreciated as a thing of wonder.
Given Labour’s collapsing poll ratings, perhaps Starmer has asked again the question he posed of others with better political antennae after Labour’s catastrophic by-election defeat in Hartlepool in the spring of 2021: ‘Why does everybody hate us?’ The answer now would be the same as back then: Labour is too metropolitan, too left-wing, and too absorbed in anti-British identity politics and cultural ‘progressivism’.
The most interesting question now is where this shift to the right will show up next, because show up it most certainly will. Perhaps it will be in a sweeping cabinet reshuffle that removes or marginalises the likes of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Attorney-General Richard Hermer, two of the Government’s most dogmatic leftist culture warriors. Perhaps it will be in further and equally significant changes of policy.
Soon it may not only be David Miliband finding Starmer’s new politics unconscionable, but Ed Miliband too. Because energy and climate change policy is clearly at the heart of Britain’s industrial malaise and living standards crunch. Surely a Labour prime minister could never slow down the dash to net zero? Think again. This Labour prime minister will do almost anything to try and save his own skin.
The Climate Change Committee is living in cloud cuckoo land
Energy bills may be going up and the economy may be flatlining, but not for long. Thankfully, the government’s Climate Change Committee has the answer. In a press release introducing the committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, published this morning, interim chair Piers Forster declares: ‘The committee is delighted to be able to present a good news story about how the country can decarbonise while also creating savings across the country.’ By 2040, when the CCC sees the UK’s carbon emissions falling by 87 per cent on their 1990 level, the cost of heating and lighting our homes is going to fall by £716 a year and the cost of running a car by £699.
Surely never has such a Panglossian document been put before the public by an arm of government. The CCC has progressed from making what a committee of MPs called ‘heroic assumptions’ into the realm of outright fantasy. The report can’t even describe the current situation accurately, so why we should believe its projections for 15 years’ time?
The report tells us, for example, that ‘for many technologies (including solar, wind turbines, and batteries) consistent and rapid cost reductions have been seen over the past 20 years’ – which will come as news to the civil servants who ran the government’s auction for offshore wind in September 2023 and received not a single bid. The then Conservative government had to increase the long-term guaranteed ‘strike prices’ on offer by 66 per cent. The price of wind power plummeted while interest rates were on the floor – and suffered a sharp reversal when rates went up.
Surely never has such a Panglossian document been put before the public by an arm of government
The document also claims that electric cars are ‘already cheaper to run and maintain than petrol or diesel and will shortly be cheaper to buy.’ That will come as a surprise to anyone trying to run an electric car from public chargers. And while the cost of running an electric car from your home supply can be lower than a petrol car, that rather ignores the tax situation – around half what you pay at the pump is fuel duty. EVs won’t be so cheap to run once the government comes up with new motoring taxes – probably road pricing – to claw back the £28 billion a year it faces losing in fuel duty. As for the claim that EVs will be on purchase price parity with petrol and diesel cars by 2026 to 2028, that skirts around that reality that recent discounts have been made out of desperation, as manufacturers try to avoid fines for not selling enough EVs under the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate.
By 2040, the document claims, 63 per cent of HGVs are going to be electric. That is a dream figure given that there are hardly any electric lorries on the road at the moment, and the few light, 20 tonne lorries that are available can manage little more than 100 miles between charges (compared with 800 miles for diesel lorries). Moreover, Tevva, which was touted as the Tesla of trucks – which was going to manufacture them in Essex – went bust last year.
Similar fantasies are spun regarding carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and grid batteries, all of which are projected to play a significant role in balancing intermittent wind and solar power by 2040 – in spite of playing little or no role at present on account of their excessive cost. How these costs are going to come down so dramatically that they will save us £716 on our energy bills the CCC doesn’t explain.
But there is another striking assertion in the CCC’s Seventh Carbon Budget. It projects that meat consumption in Britain is going to fall by 25 per cent by 2040, with the numbers of cattle and sheep plunging by 27 per cent as land is given over to trees to try to soak up carbon. Not such a prosperous future for farmers, then – while the rest of us, it seems, will have to be strong-armed into changing our diets. There is little sign at present of the population wishing to play along with this. On this, at least, the CCC shows a rare bit of insight. While it first welcomes an 11 per cent fall in meat sales between 2020 and 2022 it does then admit that this might just have more to do with eliminating waste during the cost of living crisis than a desire to change what we eat – given that overall food sales fell by 10 per cent over the same period.
If meat consumption does fall by 2040 it will more likely be down to us having to survive on bread and water. The golden low-carbon economic future portrayed by the CCC is simply not credible – though sadly it will fool many MPs just like its previous reports.
Europe can’t silence its working class forever
Last December the European Commission published its ‘priorities’ for the next five years. All the bases were covered, from defence to sustainable prosperity to social fairness. And of course, the most important priority of all, democracy. ‘Europe’s future in a fractured world will depend on having a strong democracy and on defending the values that give Europeans the freedoms and rights that they cherish,’ proclaimed the Commission, which pledged it was committed to ‘putting citizens at the heart of our democracy’.
December was the same month that a Romanian court cancelled the presidential election, after the surprise first round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-progressive Călin Georgescu. It was claimed the election had been tainted by Russian interference. As Thierry Breton, a former European commissioner, boasted later on French television: ‘We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.’
There will be no need to cancel the result of the German election. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled 20.8 per cent of the vote – double its score of 2021 – but still came in second behind the CDU.
In a healthy democracy, the AfD would now have a major influence on its nation’s politics having earned the support of one in five of the electorate. But Germany isn’t a healthy democracy. There is what Germans call a ‘firewall’, Brandmauer, which will shut out the AfD from any meaningful involvement in the many major issues confronting the country. Instead, Friedrich Merz is expected to form a coalition government with the Social Democrats, who came third in the election.
‘Friedrich Merz has decided to maintain his blockade stance towards the AfD,’ said AfD co-leader Alice Weidel. ‘We consider this blockade to be undemocratic. You cannot exclude millions of voters per se.’
One can in Europe, particularly when the voters are working-class. When it began its rise a decade ago, the AfD’s core voter was described as ‘likely to be male, middle-aged, relatively uneducated, blue-collar worker or unemployed.’
They have broadened their appeal since, particularly among the young: 21 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted for the AfD on Sunday, more than any other party except Die Linke (The Left).
But the AfD continue to poll best among blue-collar workers. According to German broadcaster DW, in Sunday’s election ‘people with a basic education level were twice as likely to vote AfD as those with advanced degrees.’
Germany, of course, isn’t the only European country that ignores its working class. It’s been going on in France for years; a country whose national motto is ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’.
France’s firewall is called the ‘Republican Front’ and for decades it has been routinely erected at elections to keep the hoi polloi at bay, or as they’re otherwise known, Le Pen voters.
The average National Rally voter is similar to the AfD stalwart: middle-aged, in a blue-collar profession, with no higher education qualification and living outside a big city.
In last July’s French parliamentary election, the National Rally won 37 per cent of the popular vote, and they took 125 seats in parliament, making them the biggest single party. All other parties refuse to work with them. Many left-wing politicians even refuse to shake the hands of National Rally MPs; by extension, they are refusing to shake the hands of 37 per cent of their fellow citizens.
One of the most perceptive observers of the disintegration of democracy in France this century is the social scientist Christophe Guilluy. The book that established his reputation, La France périphérique [peripheral France] was published in 2014, and it explained how the metropolitan elite had lost touch with the working-class provinces.
A decade on, this disengagement is more profound than ever; I can testify to it, having moved 18 months ago from Paris to peripheral France, in my case rural Burgundy. The cultural chasm is huge. Paris might as well be another country and when Parisians venture into the provinces they stand out a mile.
The Paris elite make little attempt to conceal their contempt for the ploucs [yokels]. The Yellow Vest movement of 2018 began when the government introduced a green fuel tax. Cars aren’t that important to city dwellers but in the sticks – where there is hardly any public transport – they are vital. The government didn’t care. Its spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, dismissed the protestors as ‘people who smoke cigarettes and drive diesel cars… not the 21st-century France we want’.
In an interview this week to promote his new book, Guilluy said that ‘the cultural centre of gravity of Western societies is tilting towards the ordinary majority’. In other words, the will of the Yellow Vest protestor is winning out over Benjamin Griveaux and his ilk.
Guilluy endorsed the gist of J.D. Vance’s recent speech in Munich, praising ‘the clarity of his thinking’. He added: ‘The main cause of the so-called “collapse or end of the West”… is first and foremost the consequence of the choice made by Western elites in the last century. The choice to exclude those who are the lifeblood of society, those who keep a culture alive and well: ordinary people.’
Germany’s ‘firewall’ and France’s ‘Republican Front’ are examples of this exclusion. So too was the cancellation of Romania’s presidential election.
The EU brags of ‘putting citizens at the heart of our democracy’ but in reality Brussels is interested only in the ‘right sort’ of citizen. Those that are progressive and globalist, the ‘Anywheres’ of this world.
The ordinary people, the ‘Somewheres’, are of no importance. But the Somewheres are on the march, in Germany, in France and all across Europe, and the firewall won’t hold for ever.
My strange day with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
The day after the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) holds a protest outside Westminster Magistrates Court on the Marylebone Road.
I am here for the hearing of Ben Jamal, director of the PSC. He is charged with failing to comply with a police request that the January 18th protest avoid the BBC as it is near a synagogue. (The Palestine movement thinks the BBC is a Zionist asset, despite it having to remove a documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas official last week.) The PSC couldn’t stay away and their leaders were charged with public order offences after moving towards the BBC with flowers in their arms. My instinct is: they loved it.
Now they are protesting outside the court for the freedom to protest. You might think the PSC, which, with Stop the War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Muslim Association of Britain and Friends of Al-Asqa, has brought central London to a standstill many times in the last 15 months is aware of its freedom to protest, but narcissists are insatiable.
I queue outside the court from 8 a.m. and they come up to ask if I think keffiyehs and badges are allowed in. They are dependent on costume: they communicate by slogan, signage and badge. They look like social studies professors at failing universities, or bad ceramicists. They initially smile, because they cannot grasp the idea of opposition, or even disagreement.
But Jewish children dear to me have been called ‘dirty Jews’ on London streets. This rarely happened before 2015, and I blame these protestors and associated cretins. There are respectable ways to advocate for Palestine, but they can’t do it because demonizing Jews is an ancient, if sometimes subconscious, European tradition. At the first PSC protest in my hometown Penzance I asked the leader what he wanted. He looked puzzled to be asked, and said he didn’t know.
Inside the court building I watch them from the window laying flowers, waving ‘EXIST, RESIST, RETURN!’ placards and listening to John McDonnell, Socialism’s Batman villain, and Chris Nineham who, as the Westminster and Cambridge-educated son of a former warden of Keble College, Oxford wins Affluent Socialist Bingo for all time. He is chief steward of the marches, and, by his own testimony not an anti-Semite, though he is seemingly unable to prevent blood libel signage and marchers making cut-throat gestures and Hamas triangles – the sign you are a target – at the Jewish counter protests. The protestors seem quite happy for people who think democracy is dying because they cannot protest near a synagogue on a Saturday.
Few come to the public gallery, possibly because placards and megaphones are not allowed in courtrooms. Jamal, who wears a leather jacket and an expression of startled yet sustained self-importance, pleads not guilty to a judge who looks uncannily like Julius from The Thick of It. Jamal asks not to give his address in public because he fears a counter-protest in Kingston-upon-Thames. The judge tells him not to use his phone in the dock, and I wonder if he is playing Candy Crush.
Later, outside, we wait for Jamal to exit. I meet a woman who thinks Palestine should be a secular state: a sort of Rainbow nation. I wish her luck with an endorsement from Islamic Jihad (or the Kahanists). I ask her if she minds that Europe and the Middle East is filled with empty Jewish quarters. She replies, though hesitantly, that might have something to do with the Holocaust. Well, yes. I tell her you can cross Israel in half an hour, and she gawps: does she think it is the size of Russia? A man notices my questions and tells her I am hostile. He appoints himself bodyguard, and when Jamal comes out he stands between us, preening in the manner of the silent who has learned to speak at last.
Coffee cups and placards litter the street. Don’t forget to take your rubbish home with you, I tell a woman as I leave. She replies that I am nasty: why do they talk like children? A masked man notices us and walks towards me, megaphone at his lips, to drown out anything I might say. I forget the slogan. I walk away, flipping the bird with two fingers.
Around the corner, two police officers come up: they say they have received a complaint that I have caused alarm and distress to people who think 7 million Jews should be removed from the Middle East and this is potentially an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act. (For protestors who think the state is an abomination, they are swift to use it as a tool for the gratification of their own vanity, and the avoidance of pique. They also have infinite pity for themselves). The police say they do not plan to arrest me but – and at this they look almost pleading – do I mind giving them my details? I say I do not, and wave at the megaphone man, who has followed the police to check they are questioning me, because he wants Jewish people to be afraid in our own country. Do you think, I ask the constable, that I have caused alarm and distress? No, she says. Later it occurs to me that I could have made a counter-complaint on the grounds of the megaphone, but I don’t live to inconvenience the police with vexatious complaints.
The trial is set for July. Jamal’s lawyer asks for a large courtroom, as they anticipate significant public interest. I mourn, among other things, Jamal’s summer holidays. Tuscany may have to wait.
Who is to blame for the state of Britain’s military?
Old soldiers never die, in the words of the barrack ballad, but increasingly they do not fade away either. With an unusually intense public focus on defence issues thanks to the insistence of Donald Trump that Europe up its military spending pronto, platoons of former senior officers are now popping out of the woodwork to weigh in with analysis and advice on what needs to be done.
Last week, General Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme allied commander Europe for Nato, told the i that defence spending would need to rise to 3 per cent of GDP as a minimum. The government, he also said, should consider limited conscription of 30,000 a year to increase the size of the army. Perhaps now that Keir Starmer has said that defence spending will rise to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament, the General will be happy. Meanwhile, the former chief of the defence staff General Sir Nick Carter, appearing on the BBC’s Question Time, commented that the armed forces were ‘remarkably hollow’ due to a ‘process of neglect over a 30-year period’.
Shirreff and Carter were only the most recent retired top brass to speak out. Last weekend, General Lord Dannatt, chief of the general staff from 2006 to 2009, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that ‘any objective analysis would conclude that this country must increase its defence budget substantially’. He lamented that the UK had ‘taken several peace dividends too many’.
Last year, General Lord Houghton of Richmond, erstwhile chief of the defence staff, criticised ministers for allowing the military to be ‘hollowed out’ and reducing it to a ’boutique’ force with ‘no depth’. In 2023, General Sir Richard Barrons, ex-head of Joint Forces Command, warned that ‘we have an army that… is in no state to fight’ because the government was ‘deliberately keeping defence broken’.
The thesis they are all affirming is a widely accepted one. For a number of years – to talk of 15 years places the responsibility squarely with Conservative governments, while others suggest 30 years to share the blame across political parties – the armed forces have been systematically underfunded. Their capabilities have been chipped away gradually without ever being reduced to breaking point, and a culture of excessive optimism and blank denial of reality has allowed the Ministry of Defence to paper over ever-widening cracks.
Men who have served in the very highest positions in the armed forces have valuable perspective and experience to contribute to the public debate. It is hard to ignore the fact, however, that all these generals were serving in the military while this hollowing out was taking place. Carter was chief of the defence staff between 2018 and 2021, while Houghton was his predecessor-but-one from 2013 to 2016; Barrons was commander Joint Forces Command also between 2013 and 2016 and Shirreff was Nato deputy commander in Europe between 2011 and 2014. That places them even in the more restrictive 15-year bracket.
They cannot exhume Jeremy Corbyn’s weak excuse of being ‘present but not involved’
I would not wish to be too critical. Soldiers serve the civilian government and follow orders, and no one should suggest other than that ministers are ultimately responsible for budgets and spending decisions. In public, senior officers must remain loyal to the government; they cannot overtly criticise their political masters and are understandably banned from speaking out against government policy. General Sir Patrick Sanders made his opposition to the reduction in numbers of personnel known semi-publicly in 2023, and shortly afterwards was eased out as chief of the general staff after only two years, an unusually short tenure.
It is also true that the military prides itself on a pragmatic, practical, ‘can-do’ spirit. There is a peculiarly British pride in successful improvisation to overcome challenges without sufficient resources, part of our national genius for ‘muddling through’. Time and again, the armed forces have carried out tasks for which they have been ill-prepared or under-equipped and have prevailed against the odds. The response to the Argentinian seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1982 is perhaps the greatest example of this.
Nevertheless, there is a responsibility on senior officers – this applies to high-ranking civil servants too – to push back against impossible ministerial demands and be candid, albeit in private, about what is and is not possible. By definition, the public does not hear of this except through snippets of Whitehall gossip, but we do know that none of these generals, however fiercely they fought behind closed doors, found the situation intolerable to the point of resignation.
All of them were seemingly able to adapt themselves to the circumstances of diminishing resources until it was time for them to retire. The only senior officer strongly suspected to have quit because of inadequate defence spending was Brigadier Ed Butler, who resigned as chief of joint operations in 2008. Loyalty and duty are powerful impulses, and admirable ones, but they cannot insulate generals from any culpability.
I don’t believe that any of the officers recently so openly critical can be held responsible for the current condition of the armed forces. They undoubtedly believe they did the best they could under the circumstances while holding senior positions. But as they queue up to deliver punchy, clear-eyed analysis of what has gone wrong with the military and how to solve it, they might reflect on their own actions and inactions. They cannot exhume Jeremy Corbyn’s weak excuse of being ‘present but not involved’: they were there, they saw what was happening and they chose to stay. That is a decision they must own.
The changing smell of Britain’s streets
The other day, while on my lunchtime walk, I passed a woman on a mobility scooter holding an impressive-looking doobie. Later, on my bus home, a bloke got on having just extinguished a joint, bringing the overpowering stench with him. Some commuters don’t even bother to put them out. All you can do is sit and tut passive-aggressively, hoping they’re only going a few stops.
While cannabis use has slowly declined over the past 25 years, it seems that you can’t escape it in public. Perhaps part of the reason is that so few people now smoke at all, even tobacco. It makes weed far more noticeable. The other reason is that the police don’t bother punishing those caught. Most are either let off with a verbal warning or a fine. In many parts of the UK, smoking weed in public is no different from parking on a double yellow.
The other day, I saw a delivery driver in his stationary van rolling a joint on top of his clipboard. Quite apart from the fact that it’s illegal to drive under the influence of drugs, I couldn’t help wondering what effect his impending befuddlement would have on the parcel drops. I’ve even seen someone outside the local Wetherspoons enjoying a spliff with their coffee, while the schoolkids in my nearest park in Bristol smoke weed quite openly.
For dog walkers, drug paraphernalia is a hazard. Willow once had to be rushed to the vet after ingesting something left at the park by a careless reveller. Our new puppy could barely stand, and we feared the worst. Fortunately, the vet cheerfully announced that she was merely stoned. Ours wasn’t the first dog he’d seen that day in the same condition.
Despite my current aversion to cannabis, I was once a partaker. I was introduced to wacky baccy by a boy at school nicknamed Maroo. We’d slip off to Clifton Downs for a crafty joint when we were supposed to be at games (unlike today’s kids, we did at least go and hide ourselves in some bushes). It was the 1980s, and the world’s most famous toker, Bob Marley, had recently died. Smiley Culture sang about being busted in ‘Police Officer’, and Musical Youth encouraged us to ‘Pass the Dutchie ’pon the left-hand side’.
At university in London, my next-door neighbour, a huge cockney called Noggins, was already a prolific dope smoker. It was Noggins who first showed me how to construct a reefer and with whom I spent many happy hours getting off my box when I was supposed to be at lectures. Plainclothes police would circulate our college digs hoping to bust us while we flailed around, spliff in one hand, pint in the other. Fortunately, a fellow student was the girlfriend of one of the officers and would alert us to their presence.
Having graduated, I attempted to leave my dissolute ways behind and took up yoga. But then I joined Noggins on a pilgrimage to India. High up in the Kullu Valley lies a town called Manali, which back then was full of stoned backpackers. Cannabis grows in abundance there. We’d spend our days drinking bhang lassi (a yoghurt drink blended with marijuana) and smoking chillums packed with charas (a cannabis resin concentrate).
In the evenings, we’d sit on the verandah of our guest house enjoying the view and smoking while the manager ran up and down the stairs with our orders. Eventually, Noggins’s behaviour became so erratic – standing outside in subtropical storms, laughing manically, eyes wide as saucers – that we parted company.
I fume as I watch drug dealers arrive on my road and pass over the goods in what’s known locally as the ‘stoner handshake’
I don’t think I smoked more than a dozen times after returning from India, and I haven’t used recreational drugs in decades. However, I could still roll a joint if needed. One could see it as a life skill – like riding a bike. Once learned, never forgotten.
But now, old and square, I find the prevalence of dope smoking setting off my inner Victor Meldrew. Cannabis is a Class B controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, yet overstretched police forces have taken a more tolerant approach to possession for personal use. This has been a green light to some, who behave as if smoking it in public is no different from sipping a takeaway cappuccino.
I fume as I watch drug dealers arrive on my road and pass over the goods in what’s known locally as the ‘stoner handshake’. And if I see anyone smoking dope in front of their kids, I’m almost apoplectic. It was reported the other day that a foreign drug dealer – who fought a deportation order on the basis that it would negatively impact his family – was allowed to stay in the UK after promising only to smoke cannabis and not sell it.
Maybe I shouldn’t get quite so uptight. After all, there’s nothing more tiresome than a reformed smoker. But I’d like to suggest that, out of politeness, people consider the effect on others before sparking up in public. In an interview, Emily Post, author of Higher Etiquette, said: ‘Smoke is not a comfortable thing for everyone. I’d venture that you really want to pay attention to where your smoke is drifting.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Boring jobs are good for you
More than one in five people in the UK is out of work at the moment. As lockdowns lifted, many people developed anxiety and depression – most of which can be alleviated by companionship, routine and having your own cash.
What I can’t understand is young, fit people not working. From the age of 13, I stood in a cake shop every Sunday, boxing pâtisserie for affluent customers. The old lady who owned the shop would mutter for us to hurry up as there was a queue. It was a knackering job, being on my feet all day, and the owner didn’t trust her charges to work the till.
So we had to hand the money to her, she would hand us the change, which we would then pass on to the customer. It was a wearying rigmarole, leavened only by the fact that we were allowed to eat the cakes in our lunch hour. A French chef propositioned me, asking if I would like to stay after hours and watch how he made ze pâtisserie. No thanks. However, I stuffed my face with cake and managed to put on two stone within six months. By the time I gave up several years later, I could have rolled home like a giant profiterole.
At least this job was legal, unlike another I was talked into taking. I answered an advert for young ladies to be driven around London selling insurance. The targeted customers were student nurses in blocks of residential accommodation. Unbeknown to 15-year-old me, it was actually illegal for people to enter student accommodation without permission. I should have clicked – why else would the advert have specified young ladies?
The insurance job was only paid by commission, and I was much too honest to sell a single plan: when the nurse at each door would ask whether it was a good deal, I would shake my head in a conspiratorial way. My driver was a decent bloke, but the day I found out that there was no entry to the grounds of these homes to strangers like us, I insisted on getting out of the car immediately and giving up. It was a terrible job and I earned nothing, but I did learn to investigate thoroughly before accepting contracts.
A cushier number was babysitting for members of a Labour council. At night, I visited their homes; but during the day there was a lavish crèche for the children in a building near King’s Cross. Sometimes there would be no toddlers there at all; sometimes there would be one. The other babysitter was a bloke with a serious case of one-upmanship: one day I bought an NME on the way because I had a review in it. He made sure to tell me just how crap the magazine was.
During my year off between school and medical school, I was keen to dedicate all my time to writing for the NME, but an edict from my mother demanded that I get ‘a proper job’, so I applied to work in a playgroup for children between the ages of three and five. This was the polar opposite of the empty Labour councillors’ crèche – it was stuffed with rowdy children and there was only me and an older woman running the place.
A French chef propositioned me, asking if I would like to stay after hours and watch how he made ze pâtisserie
What made it worse was that many of the mothers insisted on staying in the kitchen for a couple of hours while their adored child played. They would chain-smoke, drink coffee and gossip so much that it became more peaceful being with the kids as they hit each other and stole one another’s toys. It was impossible to impose even the most gentle reprimand, because if you so much as said, ‘Stacey, please don’t bite,’ Stacey would give out an almighty wail and her mother’s head would poke out of the kitchen asking what was happening.
Of all these jobs, the only one I truly loved was working at the NME. I was basically being paid for doing what I loved – listening to music, going to gigs, and going to film previews and drinking wine. But I think it did me a lot of good to work at arduous jobs I didn’t enjoy. There is a thrill in earning money for yourself for the first time. Young people who reject the idea of a job they might find dull are missing out.
Work may be tiring, but there are usually other people to talk to, unlike mooching at home, and if you throw yourself into every job with enthusiasm, it all becomes material in your memory banks. The only thing you learn by sitting in your room idly is that your life is boring.
Can happiness be found in the gut?
I share little in common with the royal family, but like certain members of that beleaguered group, 2024 turned out to be a particular annus horribilis for me. With sorrows coming at me, not as single spies but in bloody great battalions (I won’t bore you with the details), I decided to take action by spending a week at a specialist clinic in Austria being pickled, pricked, pummelled and poked.
It’s been 50 years since the eccentric German entrepreneur Rolf Deyhle founded a permanent centre for what became known as the ‘FX Mayr Cure’. He bought the impressive property from a golf club and a former student of Franz Mayr, an Austrian gastroenterologist who focused on the regeneration of the intestines.
Having studied the complexities of the human gut, he concluded that lasting contentment lay not in the fripperies of the outside world but deep within the bowels of our digestive system. By eating healthily and proportionately, he surmised that a happy countenance would naturally follow. The fact that so many of the great and the good still flock to this remote corner of Carinthia suggests the clinic is onto something.
The Mayr Medical Resort is a cross between an upmarket nursing home and an even more upmarket private hospital, with a preponderance of beige and acres of comfy armchairs. The unfeasibly attractive physicians, dressed in pristine lab coats, are so upbeat that they make run-of-the-mill doctors seem dowdy and inadequate by comparison.
Of course, attentive staff is one thing, but what about the myriad treatments on offer? Did any of them actually help alleviate my year-long despondency? I like to think I have a good nose for quackery, and while much of what goes on here is standard wellness fare – plenty of meditation, therapy sessions and workouts – a few of the remedies border on woo-woo excess. The hayflower detox, for instance, involved a physician wrapping bags of hay attached to hot water bottles round my chest, supposedly to ‘promote circulation and boost liver function’. Other than feeling uncomfortably sweaty and slightly foolish, I can’t say I noticed any mood-enhancement.
Similarly, being made to float in a small pool surrounded by bags of hot mud left me cold, as did being smothered in layers of scratchy sea salt. Furthermore, having allowed my face to be used as a pincushion, I remain doubtful about the efficacy of acupuncture. But like most of my fellow guests, I was here chiefly for the famously strict diet that every patient must adhere to.
At first, I balked at the thought of having to survive on tiny pots of plain yoghurt
At first, I balked at the thought of having to survive on tiny pots of plain yoghurt, slices of buckwheat bread along with various spreads, broths and supplements. But by day three both my weight and, more importantly, my mood had lifted considerably. After careful examination, the delightfully named Dr Ursula Muntean-Rock put my low mood, lethargy and inability to deal with life’s challenges down to the amount of gunk I’d been carting around in my gut – the rotting residue of a thousand ready meals.
As an ultra-processed apologist, I’d been merrily inhaling cornflakes and cupcakes with barely a thought for what it might be doing to my insides. Likewise, I had regarded booze as a legitimate shield against 2024’s sorrow-inducing hordes. So I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly my mind and body adapted to the sudden change in food intake. A week of strict portion control, free from alcohol, sugar and all those other gut-rotting nasties, left me feeling revitalised and ready to face whatever horrors 2025 has to throw at me. Other guests told me they were there for the full three weeks.
Barring the odd G&T backslide, I’ve so far managed to stick to ‘the cure’, including Ursula’s advice to chew every mouthful at least 40 times to aid digestion. I’m pleased to report that so far, 2025’s slings and arrows have yet to penetrate. As we continue to eat ourselves to an early grave, perhaps our nanny state should think about promoting the health benefits of repetitive chewing practices and strict portion control. Such simple, easy-to-follow advice shouldn’t be the preserve of wealthy types.
Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life. The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966.
Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger. He enjoys his work, but he’s 31 and restless. He finds himself casting a speculative eye at the café on the corner, shabby and abandoned, ivy climbing up the wall. His landlady, a war widow, encourages him: ‘You always need a bit more hope than worries. Anything else would be pointless, wouldn’t it?’ He decides to take a chance.
The café opens and customers trickle in for coffee, cold drinks and bread and dripping. When winter bites, there’s hot punch and a lunchtime special: still bread and dripping but with added paprika. Soon Simon needs more help, and recruits Mila, a plump country girl from the yarn factory, who is faced with redundancy.
Robert Seethaler is drawn to supporting characters in his novels. The real star of The Tobacconist is the boy who hands Sigmund Freud his daily cigar. A Whole Life features an irretrievably modest protagonist, and The Field introduces us to an old man in a cemetery listening to the voices of the dead. This time we meet the living: Heide, from the cheese shop, who has a tempestuous affair with a penniless Russian artist; René, a summertime wrestler, ‘in winter a ticket-seller for bumper-car rides at the Prater’; girls from the factory; market traders. Katy Derbyshire’s translation offers underlying Viennese resonances without losing the demotic swing of everyday exchanges.
Outside life intrudes from time to time: the Reich bridge over the Danube collapses; a conflagration causes havoc; one president follows another – ‘the old Austria is over and done with,’ someone remarks. The prose has the stillness of a Vermeer: the milkmaid tilts her jug; Simon wipes the café counter. A pause: you see beyond the moment.
In a world of action movies and social media there’s little time for quiet contemplation. Seethaler reminds us we’re part of a whole. If the prevailing gentleness at times slips into sweetness, consider the war widow’s words to Simon. There has to be hope, otherwise what’s the point?
The Assyrians were really not so different from us
Among the most striking and memorable exhibits in the British Museum are the Assyrian reliefs depicting the royal hunt. These huge panels show the king, Ashurbanipal, shooting, spearing and stabbing a succession of lions, albeit ones that had been trapped beforehand and released from cages for the occasion. It is a magnificent work of art, carved in the city of Nineveh – on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq – around the middle of the 7th century BC.
My favourite section shows the king on horseback, riding full pelt, with no reins in his hands but only his bow and arrow. Our eyes are drawn to the detail of Ashurbanipal’s robe, the ringlets of his beard and hair, the expressions of horse and rider: the horse is champing urgently forward; the king, the very image of regal composure, stillness in motion, is calmly aiming his arrow, holding it in place with his thumb while stretching the bowstring with a delicately bent index finger. But Selena Wisnom would have us notice something else. Tucked into the king’s belt is a stylus. A telling detail. Here is a man who wants his literacy to be noticed. In any situation – in battle, in hunting – the king is ready to write.
For Ashurbanipal, literacy as much as might was a source of pride. Not just basic literacy, in fact, but prowess. In one inscription, on a clay tablet also in the British Museum, he boasts of being the equal of any of his scholars:
I have learned the craft of the sage Adapa, the secret hidden lore of all the scribal arts. I have read cunningly written texts in obscure Sumerian and Akkadian that are difficult to interpret. I have carefully examined inscriptions on stone.
In the Akkadian language spoken by Ashurbanipal and his people, the word for scribe testifies to the effort it took to master the 1,000-odd symbols of the cuneiform writing system. It translates as ‘tablet king’. Ashurbanipal is both a king, then, and a tablet king.
It was appropriate that such a literate ruler should have a significant library. Ashurbanipal’s ran to 30,000 tablets. Much was bureaucratic – the documentation of empire – but the library also contained medical and astrological texts, prayers and songs, dictionaries and schoolwork, and great works of literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Since cuneiform writing is composed of wedge-shaped impressions made on soft clay, the library consisted of clay tablets. Two decades after Ashurbanipal’s death, Nineveh, the largest city in the world, was sacked by the Babylonians and the royal palace razed to ground. It wasa tragedy which had – for us at least – an unintended benefit: the blaze served as a kind of kiln in which the tablets of the library were fired, hardening the clay and searing their texts into them, so that they are still legible two and a half millennia later.
A quick recap. We are talking about the region known as Mesopotamia, a name that translates as ‘between the rivers’ – in other words the ‘Fertile Crescent’ that spreads out from the Tigris and the Euphrates. On a modern map this would be Iraq, Syria and the Levant, along with southern Turkey and south-west Iran.
We begin in the fourth millennium BC with the Sumerians, whose settlements, Uruk and Ur, were the first city states and the first bureaucracies in the world. The Sumerian period lasts for 1,000 years before ceding, late in the third millennium BC, to the Akkadians, the Babylonians in the south and the Assyrians in the north, two rival powers whose fortunes alternated for the next millennium and a half.
Cuneiform emerges in Sumeria around 3400 BC and is used, for 3,000 years, by all of these empires, just as our own alphabet has been used for millennia across different languages and cultures. Cuneiform’s antiquity and its durability are worth reiterating, however. As Wisnom puts it: ‘From the Middle East to the West, more than half of human history is written in cuneiform.’
The academic discipline of Assyriology, which treats this great swathe of time, is, thus, an unfortunately titled one. In the 19th century, archaeologists, having branded themselves Assyriologists, kept finding evidence of successively older civilisations. Now, Wisnom tells us, ‘Assyriologists specialise not by decade or century but by millennium’. She, however, is concerned with the Assyrians proper, and The Library of Ancient Wisdom is an excellent, accessible guide to what we can learn about them from unpacking Ashurbanipal’s library.
Wisnom’s chapters cover worship, warfare, magic, medicine, astrology, literature and lamentation. The greater aim is to reduce the distance between us and the Assyrians. We are presented with Ashurbanipal, still a child, practising his writing by addressing a tablet to his father. The signs are wobbly and the spelling is in its simplest form, but there is something touching – universal – about the gesture: pride in one’s schoolwork, showing off to a parent. A few pages later, we find the king’s sister scolding his young wife on her poor writing: ‘Why don’t you write your tablet and do your homework?’
Once Ashurbanipal has ascended the throne, he writes to a vassal king demanding outstanding tribute in the form of blocks of lapis lazuli. The response is full of the kind of diplomacy that feels straight out of The Thick of It: ‘Does [Ashurbanipal] not know that lapis lazuli is our god? If I took the lapis lazuli, the country would rebel against me.’ Instead, the vassal proposes that, rather than send the precious stone, an Assyrian delegation should come and take it, seemingly by force, while he, feigning outrage, will refuse to invite the emissaries to dinner. Everybody’s happy: the emperor gets his treasure and the local king saves face with his people.
Then there is the scribe, a generation before Ashurbanipal, who hears the shocking news that his king, Sargon, has been killed in battle and his body carried off by the enemy. He goes to the library and takes down the Epic of Gilgamesh, ancient even then, and copies out the following lines:
‘Did you see the one who was killed in battle?’
‘I did, his mother and father honour him and his wife weeps over him.’
‘Did you see the one whose corpse lies in the steppe?’
‘I did. His ghost does not rest in the netherworld.’
From the Middle East to the West, more than half of history is written in cuneiform
The scribe has dated the tablet, so we know that it is a response to Sargon’s death. It’s an extraordinarily touching scene, one that we can surely recognise: the consolation of literature, of finding ancient words that speak to our present situation or emotions.
For all the familiarity of these episodes, one thing that jumps out about the culture is the extent to which omens are everywhere. This is a world of signs, where the stars are referred to as ‘heavenly writing’ and the coloration on a sheep’s liver might look ‘exactly like cuneiform’. Yet Wisnom reminds us that omens are not indications that something will happen for certain, only that it might, unless action is taken. A dark cloud doesn’t mean that you’ll get wet, we might say, only that you need to pack an umbrella. Meanwhile, The Library of Ancient Wisdom also shows us the tensions and contradictions in a world where physicians can treat exorcists with open suspicion and astrologers are on the cusp of developing mathematical astronomy.
Wisnom presents us with a rich treasure house of information about everyday life in the late Assyrian empire. More importantly, she has taken pains to humanise a culture that is far less familiar to us than, say, the Athenians of a couple of centuries later. Her book is both a learned work and a generous one, careful to show how a world that can, on the surface, appear very alien from our own is governed by patterns of behaviour that are not that different at all.
Three’s a crowd: The City Changes its Face, by Eimear McBride, reviewed
Nearly a decade after Eimear McBride published The Lesser Bohemians (her second novel after the success of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing),the Irish writer has returned to the drab, smoke-filled world of 1990s London. The City Changes its Face is told from the perspective of 20-year-old Eily, two years after she has left Ireland to study drama in London and has met Stephen, an established actor 20 years her senior. In the interim period, the pair have moved from Kentish Town to Camden. Eily has taken time out of drama school, and Grace, Stephen’s daughter from a previous relationship, has made an appearance. The novel consists largely of a conversation that takes place over the course of one night, with flashbacks to the intervening years.
McBride’s style is so direct that describing it at all seems somehow insulting. To say that it is ‘experimental’ doesn’t do justice to its flexibility and force. As with the earlier novels, we become immersed in the female narrator’s viewpoint. We feel all the other characters through Eily’s moods and hear dialogue modulated through her thoughts. Yet the style has not stagnated over the years. The City Changes its Face makes use of so much blank space – sparse dialogue with frequent line breaks – that it often feels like a play or film script. This is fitting for Stephen and Eily’s professions, as well as McBride’s own interests. Her 2021 short story collection, Mouthpieces, approximated dramatic monologues, and in 2023 she directed a Very Short Film About Longing.
At the centre of the novel is a rumbling disagreement between Stephen and Eily, which doesn’t fully reveal itself until the final pages. Eily spends days on end without leaving the flat, while Grace is living proof of the couple’s different ages and experiences. The main cause of tension is a film Stephen is engaged on, telling the story of his early years in London, his heroin addiction and his childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his mother. Through the camera’s lens we see him negotiate north London squats, hospitals and the painful end of punches – all too well-drawn to be dismissed as a kind of trauma-porn addition to beef up the novel’s emotional force. Just reading the script, with its speeches and stage directions, left me in tears more than once.
Alongside Stephen’s creation is Eily’s own. In her months away from drama school she has been writing a novel (it seems to bear some similarity to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing), which Stephen eventually sits down and reads. It becomes clear that Eily’s internal monologues have been an act of literary creation – her continual battle to force the stuff of life into words.
The City Changes its Face is a triumph. It’s a novel which functions as an unruly, unusual kind of ekphrasis: a story about creation and about love.
Any form of saturation bombing is a stain on humanity
Ian Buruma has narrated this article for you to listen to.
At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured.
Upon hearing the news, President Harry Truman called the bombing ‘the greatest thing in history’. Why the US unleashed the terrible bombs over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, has been much debated ever since. In his excellent short book on the subject, Richard Overy writes:
The question asked is usually ‘Was it necessary?’ The question, however, should really be ‘Why was it thought to be necessary at the time?’
Moralising or justifying in hindsight is too easy. The Americans desperately wanted the war with Japan to end as swiftly as possible, thereby avoiding a bloody invasion. They believed the Japanese would fight to the last man and woman. Truman thought he had no choice. Few people then would have disagreed with him.
But dropping an atom bomb on a densely populated city was not entirely uncontested at the time. Most of the scientists involved in the nuclear project thought a demonstration away from a city would suffice. And many still believe that killing people with such a horrendous weapon crossed a clear boundary. War is terrible. But what happened in Hiroshima was utterly immoral.
Overy questions whether there was even a clear moral distinction between the atomic bomb attacks and ‘strategic’ or ‘saturation’ bombing with more conventional arms. These were the incendiary and cluster bombs filled with napalm which destroyed almost every major Japanese city by creating uncontrollable firestorms that killed more than 100,000 people in one night in Tokyo alone. In the words of General Curtis ‘Old Iron Pants’ LeMay, the citizens of Tokyo were ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’.
LeMay liked to take credit for this strategy of destroying entire cities. In fact, it had already been tried in Hamburg, Berlin, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry. (The Germans had a nice phrase for this: Coventriseren, ‘to Coventry’.) Whether it was Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, LeMay or Hermann Goering, the general idea was that saturation bombing would demoralise the population so much that they would revolt against their leaders. This didn’t happen in Berlin, London, Tokyo or Hiroshima – or indeed in Hanoi, Kyiv or Gaza.
The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun
The bombing strategy had various reasons. Attempting to hit only military or industrial targets was difficult and costly in planes and air crews. In military turf battles, generals in charge of bombers wanted to demonstrate that their outfits could be more effective than other armed forces. And memories of the carnage in the trenches of the first world war made bombing seem like a better option.
But Overy is right. If a moral line was crossed, it started not with Little Boy but with the decision to boil and choke massive numbers of civilians to death. This is not a judgment in hindsight. In 1937, the US State Department asserted:
Any general bombing of an extensive area wherein resides a large population engaged in peaceful pursuits is unwarranted and contrary to the principles of law and humanity.
This does not answer the question of whether Truman, Churchill and their advisers were right to believe that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to bring the war to a speedier end. The problem, as Overy correctly observes, is that the Japanese had no experience of surrender, and their military leaders wouldn’t countenance it. Only a unanimous decision of the Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War could end the conflict. And as long as the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, this was almost impossible to achieve.
One of the sticking points was the future role, if any, of the Japanese emperor. Unlike Hitler, Hirohito was not a dictator; his powers were very limited. The unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany was essential. The emperor could have been left on his throne as a constitutional monarch – which is what eventually happened.
Even so, there was a ‘peace faction’ in the Japanese elite, including some members of the Supreme Council. Their view that Japan had no choice but to surrender, which was endorsed by the emperor himself, was probably not much affected by the bombing of Hiroshima, and even less by the attack on Nagasaki. What allowed the emperor to force the hands of the military diehards by making a ‘sacred decision’ to ‘suffer the insufferable’ and terminate the war was the fear of a Soviet invasion. The prospect of a revolution in Japan, which was never very likely, scared them too.
Instead of mediating with the western Allies to achieve a peaceful solution on Japanese terms, which Japan had hoped for, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. The prospect of a Soviet invasion was so terrifying to the Japanese leaders that they decided a surrender to the western powers would be preferable.
So, did the bombs make no difference at all? We will never know for sure. Overy reminds us that the Japanese prime minister, Suzuki Kantaro, recalled after the war that the bomb was ‘an additional reason’ to accept defeat. But this may have been even more true for the diehards than for members of the peace faction. Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed them to claim force majeure. Japan had not been defeated by conventional means but by what the emperor in his broadcast speech called a ‘most cruel bomb’. This might have saved the face of a sacred warrior nation, at least in the minds of its military leaders. If so, it was exceptional.
What Rain of Ruin makes clear is that the strategy of mass murder by bombs – atomic, hydrogen, napalm or incendiary – is not just immoral but hardly ever effective. That it is still employed in war is a terrible stain on humanity.
The enlightened rule of the Empress Maria Theresa
The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism. Yet, partly owing to Maria Theresa’s force of character, this complex tapestry of nationalities remained a great power
After she came to the throne in 1740, she felt ‘forsaken by the whole world’. Encouraged by France, Austria’s neighbours Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria invaded the monarchy in order to divide it between them. By the time of Maria Theresa’s death in 1780, the Habsburg monarchy had become, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, ‘the toughest institution in the history of central Europe’.
At that time, a state was compared to a machine which needed the systematic coordination of all its parts in order to function; but the sovereign’s personality remained as important as the machinery of state. ‘Those who are summoned to her councils will find the decisions rest with her, not with them,’ prophesied a Venetian ambassador before Maria Theresa’s accession. Bassett shows that the empress used her blonde hair, fine complexion and conquering eyes, as well as her dynastic prestige, to win hearts and minds.
Breaking through barriers of etiquette, on 11 September 1741 she made a celebrated appeal to the Hungarian nobles to save ‘our own person, our children and our crown’. Speaking in Latin, she called on their fidelity and ‘immemorial courage’. The Hungarians drew their swords, cried ‘eljen!’ (‘hurrah!’) repeatedly and offered 60,000 troops. Thereafter, Maria Theresa kept better relations than other Habsburgs with the kingdom of Hungary. The massive royal palace overlooking Budapest dates from her reign.
More skilful than most monarchs at ‘impression management’, she began the tradition of granting open audiences once or twice a week to members of the public, which distinguished the Habsburg monarchy from its rivals and lasted until 1918. She charmed the Mozart family with her ‘extraordinary friendliness’, which included her stroking Frau Mozart’s cheek and pressing her hands when they met at a public dinner.
She charmed the Mozart family with her ‘extraordinary friendliness’, which included stroking Frau Mozart’s cheek
In 1771, an English visitor, Lady Mary Coke, was impressed by Austria. She felt that ‘the common people’, as well as the old, were better treated there than in England: ‘The empress is so compassionate that she hates to see anyone put to death… [She had] more spirit and sense in her eyes than I ever saw… Her speaking is a kind of witchcraft.’
The structure of Bassett’s biography, as well as the personality of Maria Theresa, will appeal to readers. Maintenance of the empress’s dynastic inheritance through the Wars of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War (although she never recovered Silesia from her hated rival Frederick of Prussia) occupies the first half of the book. Thereafter, there are short chapters on subjects as varied as the visits of the artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, Mozart, the empress’s religion, music, sculpture and her relations with each part of the empire, from the southern Netherlands to Galicia. Some Belgians might be surprised to learn that they have never been so prosperous as they were under Maria Theresa.
She ruled through hard work as well as charm. She had tentacles in every part of her dominions and most aspects of the lives of her subjects. In 1766, the Codex Theresianus began the codification of laws – followed by the well-named Nemesis Theresiana for the code of criminal law. Austria had law codes of its own long before the Napoleonic code. In 1774 a General School Ordinance led to the establishment of new schools in much of the monarchy. Two years later, torture was abolished. Maria Theresa also founded a ‘chastity commission’ to limit prostitution; Casanova called its officials ‘the tormentors of pretty girls’.
Trieste was one of many cities which boomed. While imposing restrictions on Jews elsewhere, the empress encouraged them to settle in what became the westernmost port of the Levant, which also attracted Greeks and Arabs. It trebled in population and was called the ‘consoler of the afflicted and refuge of sinners’. Maria Theresa thalers, minted in Austria for use in the Ottoman empire, were known as levantiner.
Maria Theresa herself preferred as neighbours the Ottoman empire – ‘our good Turks’ – to those she called ‘treacherous Slavs’. Unlike her descendant Franz Joseph, who took Bosnia from the Ottoman empire with fatal effect, the empress foresaw nothing but trouble from Balkan acquisitions. She wrote in 1777: ‘I will never prepare myself for the partition of the Ottoman empire and I hope that our descendants will never see it expelled from Europe.’ She also opposed her son Joseph II’s attempt to secure Bavaria, which she called ‘coveting that to which we have no right’. She knew the partition of Poland was robbery, but accepted Austria’s share.
Few British writers know the ‘highways and byways’ of central Europe and the Balkans better than Bassett, as he has already shown in books such as Balkan Hours (1990) and Last Days in Old Europe (2020). A European Englishman, he knows Vienna and Trieste as well as London. He also understands the military foundations of monarchies. Regiments and armies can be more decisive than nationality or religion in determining allegiance and shaping events. For two centuries, the region called the ‘military frontier’ between Austria and the Ottoman empire was literally a law unto itself, distinct from neighbouring Hungary and Croatia.
Maria Theresa tried to mitigate the horrors of serfdom and forced labour out of concern for the fighting quality, rather than the legal rights, of Austrian recruits. Her desire to end serfdom was ‘the only thing which keeps me at the helm of the state’, she wrote. Their noble masters, especially in Bohemia and Hungary, emerge as cruelly oppressive, more interested in increasing profits by selling wheat abroad than in feeding starving serfs at home. Most aspects of serfdom ceased in 1781, a year after the empress’s death, and before serfdom’s abolition in Prussia and Russia.
Bassett shows that Maria Theresa was skilful not only at ruling but at forging links between Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia. When well-governed, a multinational monarchy can work better than some nation states. In 1792, the French national monarchy was destroyed by revolution, like its successors in 1830, 1848 and 1870. Many of the Habsburg monarchy’s successor states became nationalistic prisons. What Jaap Scholten wrote in Comrade Baron, his book on the fate of Hungarian nobles in Transylvania under Romanian communism, could also apply to Austria: ‘Mixed villages had the best tunes.’ And mixed monarchies – partly thanks to Maria Theresa.
Scotland’s education stats pose a problem for the SNP
The SNP may be outperforming Scottish Labour in the polls, but the party of government still faces tough questions on its record as it approaches the 2026 Holyrood election. Today’s education attainment figures won’t help the nationalists’ argument that they deserve another chance in power – as the stats show the attainment gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived students has widened once again.
The figures reveal that the number of school leavers heading to work, college or university in 2023/24 decreased from the previous year to 95.7 per cent. Despite John Swinney’s SNP government insisting it wants to eradicate child poverty and improve living conditions for the country’s poorest, the deprivation gap has widened from 3.7 percentage points in 2022/23 to 4.3 last year – with a lesser proportion of school leavers from a deprived background going into work or pursuing higher education. In fact, the number of school leavers who were left unemployed rose to 4 per cent in 2023/24, up on the previous year.
When it comes to students leaving high school with exam passes, the picture isn’t any less bleak. There was a decrease from the previous year in the proportion of school leavers leaving with one or more pass at National 5 level (broadly equivalent to a GCSE) and in those leaving with one or more pass at Higher (similar to AS and A-levels). Again, the deprivation gap widened across all qualifications – reaching a stretch of almost 40 percentage points between the most and least deprived students achieving passes at Higher.
Opposition politicians have been quick to blast the Scottish government over today’s figures, with Lib Dem education spokesperson Willie Rennie fuming that the SNP had ‘flunked’ its record on schools while his Scottish Tory counterpart Miles Briggs slammed the party for being ‘missing in action’, adding that ‘ministers have let down pupils and teachers at every turn’. It’s another blow for a party whose former leader Nicola Sturgeon pledged that education would be her ‘priority’, telling her school bosses in 2015: ‘Let me be clear: I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people, then what are you prepared to?’
Yet despite this promise, it was Sturgeon’s own party that took the questionable move to remove Scottish schools from key studies that examined academic performance. Leaving TIMSS (the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) caused uproar in the academic world at the time, with leading academics warning that the move was unlikely to improve falling standards. It was only under Humza Yousaf, Swinney’s predecessor, that the decision was reversed.
And Covid-era policies play a part, too. Edinburgh University’s Professor Lindsay Paterson told BBC Scotland that the country still hasn’t fully recovered from the closing of schools during Covid, noting that ‘unlike in England and other countries, there has never been a proper programme of educational recovery here’. He continued: ‘The harm is greatest to those children who have not been able to get help at home, or whose parents can't afford to pay for extra tutoring. But behind this is a deeper problem. The Scottish government has never had a coherent strategy for dealing with the educational effects of poverty.’
Swinney will no doubt be disappointed by today’s figures, not least given his party has only just started to recover in the Scottish polls. The First Minister's breaking away from the news-grabbing tendencies of his predecessors seems to be working; his new strategy involves keeping below the parapet, concentrating on issues which are devolved to Scotland and making the eradication of child poverty, rather than independence, his main focus. While the SNP leader might be commended by his opponents for being less preoccupied by the constitution, today’s stats suggest the SNP has a way to go on sorting out more entrenched problems facing the country before Scotland next goes to the polls. The clock is ticking.
How Macron beat Starmer to Trump
Emmanuel Macron’s lightning visit to the White House was a tour de force of French diplomatic energy, skill and bravado. Whether Macron has managed to convince Donald Trump of the need to involve Kyiv and Europe in US-Russian negotiations on the war in Ukraine will become clear in the next fortnight. But what it demonstrated forcefully was the striking humiliation of the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the slothful incompetence of diplomacy in London and Washington. It is a stark warning of how President Macron and the EU will run rings round the Labour government and its ‘reset’ with Brussels.
The Labour government announced some two weeks ago a Keir Starmer visit to Washington to meet newly elected Donald Trump. No precise date was given, but Sir Keir was expected to be one of the first world, and first European, leaders to visit the White House in ‘special relationship’ tradition. By contrast, Emmanuel Macron had no trip to Washington planned. As a lame duck president, desperately unpopular at home and with a tarnished international image, such a visit was improbable. As an acerbic commentator mischievously pointed out, Trump only had to whisper to Macron: ‘I hear you had another Islamic terrorist attack this week’ or: ‘Which number government are you on today?’ or: ‘How are things going with Algeria?’.
But Trump’s surprise direct negotiations with Putin earlier this month on the Ukraine war presented Macron with a golden opportunity to get back in the game. As soon as Macron learnt of Europe’s sidelining, the Elysée and the French diplomatic service went into overdrive to ensure Macron appeared as Europe’s leader by being first to meet Donald Trump to put forward Ukraine and Europe’s interests. This boost was required for domestic popularity and to restore Macron’s EU leadership credentials before Germany emerged from its torpor. The first casualty was Starmer and his Labour-billed putative role as leader of Europe.
Paris and London had been in close communication since Trump’s overtures to Putin in keeping with the 2010 Lancaster House Treaties. Little matter that their respective defence chiefs were in detailed discussions on a Franco-British military peacekeeping force and security guarantees to Ukraine. Macron and France’s needs were greater. According to Le Monde’s Philippe Ricard, French insistence on a visit provoked US National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, last week to suggest a joint Macron-Starmer meeting. But Macron would have none of it. The impeccably well-informed French daily cited a reliable source: “Macron wanted to be first and alone on the photo.” So much for displaying European unity to Donald Trump.
Macron got his meeting on the Monday three days ahead of Starmer. Elysée and Quai d’Orsay then moved up another gear to seal a Trump-Macron press conference topped with a meeting with US senators and a Macron interview on Fox News. In that diplomatic blitz, France’s institutions did their president proud. We will see how effective in presenting Britain as a global player the Foreign Office and our man in Washington have been on Thursday. They will already have expended much diplomatic capital with Team Trump in attempting to excuse Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Peter Mandelson’s old puerile anti-Trump social media invective.
Among those watching closely will be Brussels negotiators scrutinising the diplomatic impact of the prime ministerial team. There will be no hiding behind Lammy’s self-proclaimed ‘progressive realism’, nor Starmer’s human rights based internationalism. Kemi Badenoch’s speech today captured the international zeitgeist when she criticised those who play ‘by the most gentle of Queensbury rules’ while others break all the rules. We are back to nineteenth century international great power politics, where Trump-style nationalism and transactionalism are the flavour of the day. Macron’s eclipsing of Starmer at the court of King Donald is a taste of the true ‘reset’ Labour should be attending to.
Starmer’s defence spending hike isn’t enough
The prime minister has told the House of Commons that defence spending will rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027. The UK already spends 2.3 per cent, so this works out as an increase of £13.4 billion a year. It will largely be funded by substantial cuts to the international aid budget.
It is good that Sir Keir Starmer has got the memo on the desperate need to increase the defence budget. But the memo is dated ‘early 2024’: it was last April, after all, that Rishi Sunak pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent.
The UK’s current spending is not just inadequate to meet the increasing security threats and technological demands of the future, especially as the United States reduces its commitment to Europe and focuses on the Indo-Pacific region; it is inadequate to sustain the armed forces now. As I wrote here in January, we cannot currently carry out essential tasks: the Army’s main deployable war-fighting formation does not have the equipment or logistical support to be put into the field rapidly. At least three of the Royal Navy’s five Astute-class attack submarines are unavailable for operations while they await repair or maintenance.
The additional resources the prime minister has promised might be sufficient to fill the most glaring capability gaps. Even so, that will take time. His additional promise to increase the budget to 3 per cent of GDP by 2034 is so far away, and contingent on a general election victory, that it is no more than a hypothetical. In effect, Starmer has applied a tourniquet to stop a wound bleeding.
What should the armed forces look like? What should their primary tasks be, and what equipment do they need to carry out those tasks? All of these questions are unanswerable until the publication of the Strategic Defence Review, which will be presented to the government by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen and his team of reviewers in the ‘spring’. (Anyone who has dealt with Whitehall knows that the civil service definition of ‘spring’ has a flexibility that would astonish biologists.) At the moment, the additional money promised by Starmer is in some ways a shot in the dark.
In fact, even 2.5 per cent as a defence target is now seen as inadequate. Mark Rutte, secretary general of Nato, has suggested that member states should be considering a figure ‘north of 3 per cent’, while Donald Trump has mooted 5 per cent, although the president’s estimate is likely to have been snatched unthinkingly from the ether. If we look at reality, however, Poland already spends 4.1 per cent of GDP, Estonia 3.4 per cent, Latvia 3.2 and Lithuania 2.9.
It is no coincidence that those high-spending countries all border Russia. Vladimir Putin is the clear and immediate threat to Europe’s security, as the people of Ukraine are all too aware. If the settlement imposed by the United States after its negotiations with Russia effectively rewards Putin’s invasion, as seems currently likely, the threat will only be magnified.
The increasing Russian menace is accompanied by the certainty that the United States is no longer Europe’s ultimate guarantor of security. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have all made it clear that Europe must increase its commitment to its own security.
This week Sir Keir Starmer travels to Washington for his first White House visit since President Trump returned to office. He will no doubt present his announced increase in spending as a token of goodwill, an indication that the UK ‘gets it’ and will pull its weight on defence and security. It is hard to imagine Trump, the ultimate transactionalist for whom the bottom line is the only line, being swayed by a 0.2 percentage point increase in spending.
For Starmer though the real unanswered question, and the key to the UK’s future defence policy, is this: what more will the armed forces be able to do with this increased funding? What extra capabilities and missions will be enabled? How will this affect the UK’s contribution to ‘burden sharing’ with its allies?
More money is always better than less. But this modest increase, which will only take effect in two years’ time, is not a game-changer: it does not allow huge new procurement programmes or technological innovations. At best it keeps the UK at the table. If Starmer thinks he is taking a fattened calf to Washington, he may find President Trump’s assessment disappointing.