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Women won’t easily forget Scottish Labour’s gender turnaround
For the last fortnight, the employment tribunal brought by nurse Sandie Peggie against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton has gripped the nation. Nurse Peggie lodged a claim against both Dr Upton and the health board for sexual harassment, harassment relating to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation after she was suspended for questioning the presence of the transgender doctor in the female changing room. There is much more that could – and will – be said about the case, which will resume in July, but it is the response of Scottish politicians that has fuelled much ire over the past week in particular.
In an interview with the Holyrood Sources podcast, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and his Deputy Jackie Baillie revealed, after a prolonged silence on the matter, they support nurse Sandie Peggie ‘absolutely’. Sarwar added that he thinks cases such as Peggie’s indicate a level of ‘organisational capture’ in the institutions where they occur. ‘If we are to avoid a divisive culture war,’ he concludes, then Scottish Labour ‘must make it clear we support single sex spaces on the basis of biological sex.’ Better late than never, I suppose.
But for many Scottish women, Labour members and supporters amongst them – who have spent an inordinate amount of time being called ‘Nazis’, ‘terfs’ and bigots for saying exactly the same thing for the last decade – Scottish Labour’s leadership sudden change of tack over gender issues lavishes insult upon injury. Sarwar and Baillie may now be championing precisely what Scottish feminists have been calling for, but in 2022 Scottish Labour MSPs were whipped to back the SNP’s controversial attempt to introduce gender self-identification via the SNP’s gender bill. Asked by Holyrood Sources if they would vote similarly today, both Sarwar and Baillie insisted they would not – ‘knowing what we know now.’
As many have said on Twitter/X, there is absolutely no reason why they should not have known, in 2022, precisely what they claim to have realised only recently. Women like Sandie Peggie being confronted by men in female-only spaces and services is precisely what lobby groups for self-ID have been arguing for. In changing rooms, prisons, toilets, arts awards, maternity groups, breastfeeding groups (for heaven’s sake) where gender ideology meets our common language, ‘female-only’ can include males through said male’s desire and assertion, the latter of which must override reality and, it can reasonably be argued, common sense. To recover any credibility on this issue, Scottish Labour must admit that it simply did not listen to the siren warnings of many women, including their party’s former leader Johann Lamont, over the obvious collision between women’s rights and the demands of gender identity activists.
Alongside many other legislators capable of seeing that self-ID was incoherent at best and dangerous at worst, Lamont was vilified by colleagues across the chamber for staunchly setting out the sensible, women-centred case against Sturgeon’s flagship policy of gender reform. Not only that, she and many others were pointing out that even without a change in the law, self-ID was indeed ‘capturing’ institutions – from rape crisis services to prisons, arts organisations to the civil service and the Scottish parliament itself. If Sarwar and Baillie had done their job as opposition politicians over recent years, then Scottish women would not have had to step up and lead the fight against gender identity madness.
If Sarwar and Baillie had done their job as opposition politicians over recent years, then Scottish women would not have had to step up and lead the fight against gender identity madness.
These extraordinary women include Marion Calder, Susan Smith and Trina Budge of For Women Scotland – as well as the powerhouse policy-analysis trio Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, whose work is quoted often by the (far too few) MSPs who continue to try to unpick the damage done by Sturgeon’s gender-obsessed regime. There are countless others: anonymous women who never wanted this fight but who, when it arrived on their doorsteps, refused to back down. Apologies are due to every Scottish woman who has been let down by legislators so keen to avoid the wrath of gender ideology lobby groups that they pretended this was somehow about ‘balancing rights’. If MSPs had just listened to the women listed above, they would know that the only rights under attack were women’s.
Sandie Peggie’s case has created a seismic shift ver the discussion of gender issues in Scotland. Not only have Sarwar, Baillie and even SNP First Minister John Swinney felt the need to state their support for Peggie, those MSPs who screamed loudest in favour of gender reform in Scotland have been suspiciously silent over the past fortnight. Perhaps they have seen the same polling that tells Sarwar, Swinnie and other leaders that this particular jig is up.
That the Scottish Labour leadership is now saying things that would result in open letters and fiery abuse from youthful activists only three years ago is quite something. The response from trans activists is telling, too. I have yet to see Baillie called a ‘terf’, nor have I seen Labour activists openly plotting against her – as happened to her former UK Labour colleague, Rosie Duffield.
There is only so long a fundamental untruth can be allowed to thrive in a liberal democracy. Cases such as Peggie’s, which cut through to the mainstream, go to the heart of why self-ID cannot hold sway. Perhaps it would be folly to await apologies for the women who deserve them: women who have been psychologically abused, socially ostracised, often fired or threatened with economic sanctions, all for insisting, as Peggie has, that women are definable and important in life and in law on the basis of sex.
If Scottish Labour has any sense, the party will now be aware that female voters will not easily forgive those who blithely signed away their rights, while ignoring the abuse meted out to countless women for daring to state the position now proudly held by Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie. The Scottish Labour leadership may now be in line with public opinion, but this belated change of heart certainly does not guarantee them votes.
Could Zelensky have made a deal to stop the war?
Is there any truth to Donald Trump’s extraordinary and, to many, highly offensive comments apparently blaming Volodymir Zelensky for starting the war? Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said he was ‘disappointed’ that the Ukrainian leader complained about being left out of talks between the US and Russia in Riyad and claimed that Zelensky ‘could have made a deal’ to avert war. A ‘half baked’ negotiator could have secured a settlement years ago ‘without the loss of much land,’ claimed Trump.
Trump is factually wrong – but not for the reason most commentators have assumed. Zelensky could indeed have averted the war back in October 2019, and came very close to doing so. But the deal that would have kept Donbas inside Ukraine was derailed not by Zelensky but by violent threats from Ukrainian ultranationalists.
The story of the failed Donbas referendum is now little remembered. But it marked a crucial turning point in the Kremlin’s path to full-scale invasion two and a half years later. Also forgotten is the fact that Zelensky was elected by a massive 73 per cent of the vote in May 2019 on a platform of bringing peace with Russia, defusing Ukraine’s ongoing culture wars over the Russian language and returning the two rebel regions of the Donbas to Kyiv’s fold.
Paradoxically, back then the Kremlin agreed with Zelensky. Putin had invaded the Crimean peninsula in February 2014 and formally declared it part of the Russian Federation three months later. But the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (LDNR) were a different story. Though crawling with agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service and military intelligence, as well as Russian soldiers disguised as locals, the Donbas republics were not formally occupied by Moscow. Indeed the Kremlin repeatedly insisted that the enclaves were part of Ukraine, including at both rounds of peace talks in Minsk in 2014 and 2015.
Putin’s bottom-line strategic goal was to keep Ukraine out of Nato. Between 2014 and 2019, the Kremlin’s strategy for achieving this was to push for the rebel republics to rejoin Ukraine, but under a new constitutional arrangement that would have given them a veto on the country’s international alliances.
Zelensky’s predecessor Petro Poroshenko was strongly opposed to a more federal Ukraine and dragged his feet on a commitment he had made in Minsk to hold local referendums in the rebel republics. But if a new constitution was the price of peace, Zelensky was ready to pay it. In June 2019 he appointed former president Leonid Kuchma – a veteran of talks with Moscow who had longstanding contacts in Russia – as Ukraine’s representative in the Tripartite Contact Group for a settlement of the conflict. In July, Zelensky held his first telephone conversation with Putin and urged him to enter into a new round of talks mediated by European countries, as well as arranging confidence-building prisoner swaps (though Putin, characteristically, reneged on key elements of the exchange).
Zelensky finally stuck a referendum deal after several rounds of negotiations with the thuggish LDNR leadership and with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which was monitoring a ceasefire. The citizens of the rebel republics would be asked whether they wished to rejoin Ukraine on pre-secession terms, or under a new self-governing status. The referendum would be overseen and certified by the OSCE. Zelensky’s hope was that the republics would return to Kyiv’s control in a new federal system, Ukraine would stay out of Nato, and the threat of further invasion would be defused. The price would be to effectively acknowledge the loss of Crimea. The prize was that Russia would no longer have a reason to threaten Ukraine’s independence.
Unhelpfully, separatist media in the occupied Donbas crowed that Zelensky’s signing of the agreement was ‘a victory for the DNR and the LNR over Ukraine.’ But the most passionate opposition to Zelensky’s initiative came from hardline Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of protesters gathered on Kyiv’s Maidan Square under the slogan ‘No capitulation!’ More menacingly, several Ukrainian nationalist militias, including the Azov Battalion that was then fighting in the Luhansk region of Donbas, refused to accept the agreement. Andriy Biletsky, the leader of the far-right National Corps and first commander of the Azov Battalion, accused Zelensky of ‘disrespecting’ veterans and of acting on behalf of the Kremlin. Zelensky met Biletsky and other militia leaders in an attempt to convince them to surrender their unregistered weapons and accept the peace accord. They refused, and the referendum plan collapsed – and with it any realistic chance of peace in Donbas.
By the time Putin and Zelensky held their first – and so far only – meeting in Paris in December 2019, the Kremlin had lost faith in Zelensky’s ability to reintegrate Donetsk and Luhansk into Ukraine. Zelensky also continued to insist that Ukraine would join Nato. A different, far more radical course would be needed to keep wayward Ukraine in check, Putin decided. Russia was, from that moment, firmly on the path to war.
So Trump was factually correct when he said that Putin’s later full scale invasion could have been averted back in 2019. But he is wrong to suggest that this was Zelensky’s fault. On the contrary, Zelensky spent the early years of his presidency strenuously working to put the referendum plan together. And it was neither Putin nor the truculent rebels of the Donbas who derailed it but ultranationalists in Kyiv. The rest is history.
Climate groups wage war on ARC
Dear oh dear. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference almost got through its entire meet-up without much interference from lefty activists. But as it threatened to come to a peaceful close this afternoon, the eco-zealots stepped in.
Environmental justice group Fossil Free London has taken to Twitter to rally fellow climate comrades in a bid to ‘shut down the far right’s party’. Posting a series of garish clips on social media, Fossil Free London has warned its supporters that the ‘world’s worst climate deniers and far right goons’ are planning – wait for it – a ‘luxury party’ in celebration of this year’s conference. How scandalous!
The lefty group has dubbed Jordan Peterson’s ARC meet as ‘the Glastonbury of climate deniers’, insisting:
It brings together the pro-Trump and pro-oil rich, backed by the owners of GB News. Speakers include: climate deniers, think tanks criticised by LGBTQ+ groups, Nigel Farage and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.
Golly! It adds disdainfully: ‘Now they want to have an afterparty to celebrate this hateful event.’ Truly terrible stuff.
Despite their outrage, the eco-activists seem a little unsure about how to protest the party. Relying on social media traction, Fossil Free London has urged its followers to repost its graphic, express their disappointment at the venue hosting this evening’s event over email and, er, leave bad reviews on Google. That’ll teach them, eh?
Not that the left’s attempt at censorship seems to be garnering much attention this time – with less than 1,000 people having seen the post. It’s a bad day to be an eco warrior…
Labour has until Easter to stop prisons running out of space
There are just over a thousand men’s prison places left in the UK out of a total of 88,618 total. Where does the government go from here? Are our prisons about to run out of space? If they do, will we see even earlier releases?
To put these figures from the start of the week in context, in August 2024 there were only around 700 spaces available. In the aftermath of the Summer riots there were concerns that courts might have to stop jailing people. Disaster was only averted by the government’s early release scheme, SDS40, under which thousands of additional prisoners were released in September and October. Meanwhile, David Gauke’s Sentencing Review has been underway since October, and has described our prisons as ‘on the brink of collapse’.
The additional capacity should just about keep ahead of the rising prison population
Available spaces are dropping by around 200 per week. If nothing else changed this would mean no more capacity by the time the clocks go forward. The government is, naturally, determined to avoid that nightmare scenario. But how?
Thankfully, SDS40 bought just enough time. HMP Millsike, a new 1,500-capacity jail will open in Yorkshire next month. Meanwhile, the government’s prison expansion efforts will add hundreds more places across the estate this year.
Of course, prison places are not all the same. Inmates must be jailed in appropriate security conditions and ideally in suitable parts of the country. To this end, the prison service has become more creative, moving people to open conditions earlier in their sentence. Assuming prisoners are properly risk-assessed this is a positive step. Open jails allow prisoners to truly rehabilitate, and even take paying work, pay taxes and save money for their release.
I have also heard suggestions that the London region has begun to house Category B prisoners at HMP Brixton, a Category C jail, with the hope that this reduces pressure on ‘reception’ jails like Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs, which hold remand prisoners and the newly-sentenced. Again this is promising. Reception jails are often the worst in the system, with high levels of drug use, violence and self-harm, made worse thanks to overcrowding.
These particular jails also often have high levels of deaths. On Monday, I attended the first day of the inquest into the death of Rajwinder Singh, a man who died at Wandsworth in 2023, less than two weeks into a four year sentence. It was a brutal reminder that the prisons’ crisis has a real and terrible cost. Rajwinder had three children. The courts sentenced him to four years, not death. Rajwinder was one of five men who died at Wandsworth that year. In addition to the need to deliver punishment, public protection and rehabilitation, there is a moral urgency to saving our worst jails.
In the longer run, Labour’s strategy rests on the Sentencing Review. When it reports in the Spring, it is to be expected that Gauke will recommend much greater use of community sentences, scrapping mandatory minimum sentences and shorter periods of supervision by probation, all with the aim of reducing the prison population. We’re also likely to see a greater use of ‘tagging’ to supervise or curfew people instead of jailing them. I understand that the government will act quickly to implement the review’s findings, and that they expect the impact to be felt by early next year.
So for the next twelve months, the government has to find a way through. They inherited a disaster in July, but I understand that they believe they’re going to make it. The additional capacity should just about keep ahead of the rising prison population, and then next year pressures will begin to ease. If this proves to be the case then they will deserve praise. Prisons minister James Timpson and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood could not have been dealt a worse hand.
Of course, the next risk is that the changes recommended by the Sentencing Review don’t work. If fewer prison sentences mean more crime, and probation prove unable to effectively supervise many more offenders, then the government may find that they face a public backlash. A lot rests on improving the probation service. There must be doubts about this after high-profile failures to fit curfew tags last year, and data which suggests significant backlogs have existed on ‘sobriety tags’.
The stakes are very high, but the potential prize – a justice system which turns people away from crime instead of destroying them – is even greater. We should all hope the government’s ideas work.
Read: Oliver Anthony’s speech at ARC
The below is an edited version of Oliver Anthony’s speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) on Wednesday, 19 February.
Since August of 2023, I have received a flood of messages social media, email, handwritten letters. I’ve had I don’t know how many conversations with people face to face. Probably thousands at this point. And I realise now that we don’t have any clue as to how many around us are really broken. How many are silently suffering and barely hanging on. More often than not, they start the message with ‘hey, I’m a nobody, but’, followed by horrors of addiction, mental illness, financial and household struggles, oftentimes incredibly complicated stories that I suspect they may have never told anyone before. But they still have hopes of a hopeful future, and they don’t want to give up no matter what.
And it kills me because these people, they aren’t nobodies, as they describe themselves. Our modern society’s convenient, comfortable, fragile little existence is oftentimes carried on the backs of these self-declared nobodies. And forgive my generalisation, but in the modern world we are so busy idolising the genuine nothings of society: the self-centred celebrities, spineless politicians, clickbait social media influencers. It seems from my perspective that oftentimes these people live comfortable little lives while many of our real heroes are dragged through the mud and never once given a genuine thank you for it. But it’s not just them that are hurting. We all are. That’s why it’s time to do something.
We currently exist in an age of rapid digital immersion. The current average American teenager will have spent something like 30,000 hours, by the time they are 30, on social media. The average American spends six to nine hours a day staring at devices, whether it’s on a city sidewalk, a family dinner table, the receptionist at an office, even people driving their damn cars down the roadway. I constantly see the struggle between maintaining conscious attention in the real world, and the overwhelming pull we feel towards the digital one. And in my unprofessional opinion, neuroplasticity has made us increasingly digitally proficient, but at a cost of being digitally dependent. And if being hired on as a London cab driver, can change your brain on an MRI scan, and if life experiences like PTSD can alter the DNA in sperm, what irreversible alterations will 30,000 hours of staring into algorithmically-fed state of hypnosis due to the human mind or to their offspring?
And in this short breath of time, we live in a state of existence that quite possibly no one else in world history has. We have both access to instant global connectivity, infinite information, and consumer-level access to artificial intelligence. But we are the last few humans in world history who remember what life was like before it. We are the last living people in history to have experienced life before the digital age. And I fear that it may become nearly impossible for younger generations to even differentiate the digital world from the real one before the end of my lifetime.
There is nothing inherently wrong with technology. There is nothing wrong with instant connection, and there is nothing intrinsically bad about access to abundant information. But what is bad is the lack of control and agency we have over these systems, and without realising it, we are being programmed and our culture is becoming commodified. Therefore, the more time we spend on these digital information systems, the more we revert to the mean of one of a fixed set of broad internet cohorts. In other words, the more time we spend online, the more commoditised our culture, the more tribal our psychology and the more vulnerable we become.
When the floods first came to western North Carolina last year where I used to live, there were tens of thousands of people who showed up to help from all over the country. No one asked them, no one paid them. And most of the world has no idea they were ever even there. I was there the same day that the governor of North Carolina came for his little photo op. He made a public announcement that day with the current statewide death toll of the floods. But that same morning alone, volunteer veterans with cadaver dogs that I had met with had pulled 15 bodies out of a single pile of debris near the KOA campground in Swannanoa. The statewide count at that point had to have been well into the hundreds. I believe the number the governor used that day was 28. There was a reefer truck that sat for two days full of bodies because the morgues were overflowing. And while Fema was hoarding donated generators and denying people on their applications, it was the nobodies of the world that were driving ATVs and Jeeps with chainsaws up mountain roads, rescuing people. There was two guys we met that hotwired a bulldozer from a quarry to cut a navigable path through a washed-out road in two days that the state said would take months, allowing supplies to people who hadn’t had contact with anyone in over a week. Volunteers were working 16 hours a day, taking supplies on everything from horses to helicopters.
It was humanity there in front of my very eyes, and it was in that seven days in North Carolina that changed everything for me. It was people saving people. Even with lack of leadership, failed protocols and overwhelming inefficiency from the state. The nobodies took up the slack. And so I’m just here to remind you that we don’t need our false idols. We should no longer rely on politicians who bow down to money to manage our city or our states. We need to find the real leaders everywhere and empower them. Western North Carolina was proof to me that there is an army of good people left in this world who want to do good things. We just have to give them places to gather and give them the ability to act.
And so I close with this: do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong. For like the grass they will soon wither. Like green plants they will soon die away. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Take delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And so I’ll see you on 5 April at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, for the first official gathering of the Rural Revival Project. It is now my life’s mission to revive rural America, one town at a time.
Is X still worth £38 billion? Elon Musk thinks so
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, his many critics gleefully predicted a catastrophe. We were told that everyone would quit the site for its rivals, such as Bluesky and Mastodon. The rebranding to X made Musk the object of ridicule. Musk was warned that he was unlikely to see a return on the $44 billion (£38.1billion) he had splashed out on the site. But hold on: today brings news that Musk is attempting to raise extra cash for his site at the same valuation as what he bought it for. Musk’s critics will no doubt say he is deluded. But his business acumen speaks for itself: this is a man who built a car company from scratch and beat Nasa at its own game. So, yes: X under Musk’s leadership has changed; but the site is thriving. X’s death appears to have been greatly exaggerated.
There is no doubt that Musk’s shake-up at X has been controversial. When he took control, the tech billionaire cleared out almost 80 per cent of the staff and dramatically reworked the site’s business model. The liberal-left, who had dominated the site, reacted in horror. Many have since decamped for alternatives, doing their best to make a scene on the way out. They hoped that their departure would open the floodgates. For a time, that seemed likely. Yet Musk’s confidence that his site is worth what he paid for it three years ago serves as a big rebuke to his critics.
Bloomberg reports that Musk is in talks to raise money at the same $44 billion (£38.1 billion) valuation he paid for the site. Of course, it remains to be seen whether there will be any takers. But if Musk can raise equity at that price, perhaps he won’t have lost any money after all. Indeed, given that X is now operating on a far leaner base, he may even make a profit over the next few years.
It is starting to look as if Musk was right all along. It turns out that X did not need a bulging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) team, or indeed most of its staff; it certainly didn’t need to spend huge sums of money regulating what people post. The disapproval of the great and the good at what has happened to X doesn’t seem to have made any difference. The site has ploughed on, even after losing users such as Jamie Lee Curtis or Barbra Streisand, along, of course, with all the centrist dads who stormed out in a flamboyant huff. Even the boycott by advertisers doesn’t appear to have killed it off. X has been just fine, and appears to have bounced back. Meanwhile Bluesky, its main rival, and the new home of all the Musk haters, is only likely to be valued at $700 million (£560 million) in its latest finding round.
Bluesky’s valuation shows that providing an alternative to X does not appear to be as great a business opportunity as some people thought it would be. At some point, Musk’s critics may have to concede that the entrepreneur has a point, and it is perfectly possible to run a far leaner company. Who knows, perhaps the US government will survive similarly brutal cuts – and, despite all the predictions of collapse, emerge in far better shape as well.
Which female minister did Sunak call ‘effing useless’?
There’s only one book which all of Westminster is talking about. Traditionally, the post of Chief Whip has been filled by various men in grey suits, the very embodiment of discretion and anonymity. But today Simon Hart has begun serialising his tell-all diaries. From 2022 to 2024, he served as Rishi’s enforcer, desperately trying to keep the Tory party together as it tore itself apart. Talk about a thankless task…
There is plenty to digest in the first extract in today’s Times. There’s the tale of a hapless backbencher calling Hart to stump up £500 for a prostitute. There’s the story of Suella’s sacking on a voice call in No. 10. And there’s Alister Jack’s sage advice on beautiful Chinese honey traps: ‘If you think you are punching above your weight, ask yourself why.’ But the story that has got Tories clucking is Hart’s account of the 6 February 2023 Tory reshuffle. His record in the Times is that:
One lucky cabinet appointee is less grateful than her promotion deserves and more entitled than professionals should be when selected by the PM for high office. ‘Let’s all agree about one thing,’ says the PM. ‘She is f***ing useless but we can’t get rid of her.’
Quite something for the usually strait-laced Sunak to say. Of course, there were just three female cabinet level appointments in that February 2023 reshuffle. Lucy Frazer became Culture Secretary while both Michelle Donelan and Kemi Badenoch were handed revised portfolios. Which of those three could Sunak have allegedly been referring to? Answers on a postcard…
Why is Tom Hanks mocking Trump supporters?
We have long become accustomed to actors holding and sharing their progressive political views. So when David Tennant opened the Bafta awards on Sunday with a dig at Donald Trump, repeating the line that the American President is a dangerous moron, many people were annoyed, but few were surprised. Mechanically reciting fashionable mantras is what actors do, and Tennant, hitherto known for his vocal support for the trans movement, is no exception. The entire film Team America: World Police (2004) was founded on this reality about thespians.
When his counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic, Tom Hanks, did similarly at the weekend, there was, however, genuine shock. Appearing on the 50th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live, Hanks took performed a sketch he first took part in in 2016. Dressed as a slovenly hick, speaking with the voice of a slack-jawed yokel, Hanks put on a performance of what America’s liberals like to believe is a typical Trump supporter: a stupid, racist and religious bigot, a hillbilly who recoils from shaking hands with a black man.
This is not merely condescending and insulting, it sits in stark contrast with the public perception of Tom Hanks as a man for all people, one based on his big screen performances. He has built a film career by playing variations of the proverbial everyman: an unsophisticated, grounded Ordinary Joe placed in extraordinary circumstances – and circumstances that he overcomes through honest toil and guile.
On screen, Hanks has embodied the man in the street who wants a better life
In Big, the 1988 movie that propelled him to stardom, Hanks was an unexceptional teenager mysteriously transformed into an adult, who flourishes in his new strange environment to become a successful advertising agent. In Forrest Gump (1994) he was a physically disabled idiot savant who overcame adversity. In Apollo 13 (1995), he was an astronaut from a humble background who guided his stricken capsule safely back to Earth, and in Saving Private Ryan (1998) Hanks played an unassuming Pennsylvania schoolteacher who died a hero in battle.
On screen, Hanks has embodied the man in the street who wants a better life. In his screen roles, and by extension his public persona, he has come to represent a variation of the American Dream, an aspiration that many decent, ordinary people who voted for Trump would like to believe in.
The key word in the call to arms ‘Make America Great Again’ is the last one: again. Trump supporters do often hark back to times of old, and while nostalgia can be foolish or misplaced, longing for a healthy ethos and spirit of a previous age is not inherently unwise. While America did fail repeatedly over time to live up to its promise to treat all its people as equals, the aspiration itself remains a noble one. As does the aim to reward people justly for their efforts irrespective of their background, an approach that a race- and gender-obsessed ideology actively deplores.
The roles that propelled Hanks to fame chime with a homely, old-fashioned America still beloved by many normal folk. It’s no coincidence that Hanks has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Steven Spielberg, a director whose films are typified by themes of overcoming odds and redemption. That’s why the liberal intelligentsia and Hollywood sophisticates have always sneered at Spielberg and his lack of nuance and ambiguity, for his tales in which good people confront and defeat bad people.
Hanks similarly projects an optimistic and benign attitude to life. This is what made his snide performance on Saturday Night Live so disconcerting. While he was superficially performing an impersonation of a Trump supporter, or a grotesque caricature of one, he was unwittingly also doing a good impression of an aloof and ignorant member of America’s celebrity elite.
These are the types who fail to acknowledge that it’s the very detachment of the liberal classes, beholden to voguish ideas often divorced from reality, that have alienated so many Americans from the Democratic party over the years, ensuring that they lost the presidential election in November. These are the echelons who have failed to recognise, or are in denial about the fact, that ethnic minorities and the blue-collar class have been drifting towards the Republican fold because of their luxury beliefs and bizarre concerns. Those who inhabit the ‘flyover states’ have little connection with the elites in Los Angeles and New York, with their undue concern with pronouns, intersectionality and the rest, the types who regurgitate views primarily to win approval from their peers.
The real-life actors of today have increasingly come to resemble their on-screen counterparts from Team America. As one marionette in the film puts it: ‘As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.’
It’s sad that Tom Hanks appears to have joined their ranks. It’s all the more unsettling for its dissonance. Regular people have always liked to believe that he represented ordinary, decent folk.
Reform makes more gains in Scotland
Well, well, well. As Nigel Farage’s Reform party continues to poll well across the UK, north of the border the right-wing group is making yet more gains in Scotland. Now yet another Scottish Tory councillor has defected to join Reform UK, with the party announcing this morning that Alec Leishman had switched sides – as Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay was delivering a keynote speech – before dubbing the move as a ‘bitter blow’ to the Conservatives. Another one bites the dust…
The Renfrewshire councillor remarked today that he is ‘delighted’ to have joined Reform. Quick to blast his former party, Leishman proclaimed:
Scotland badly needs change. The SNP have failed our country with their narrow-minded obsession with independence but, both Labour and the Conservatives have enabled them in their policy support in Holyrood. From Net Zero madness to woke gender ideology and policing free speech, the Holyrood bubble is proving how completely detached it is from Scotland’s communities.
Oo er. The move will come as a particular blow to the new Scottish Tory leader, who is the MSP for the West of Scotland region which covers Leishman’s Renfrewshire patch. More than that, though, old newspaper cuttings show Findlay delivered a glowing endorsement of Leishman, urging Paisley Daily Express readers to back the council candidate in 2021 and gushing:
Alec is a smart guy who wants to serve his community. He’s a pragmatic Conservative who loves Scotland just as much as any SNP supporter… I would urge all those who have a vote on 14 December to use it.
Bet he regrets being quite so supportive now, eh?
Leishman is the sixth Scottish Tory councillor to trade in his blue badge for a turquoise one, following in the footsteps of two Aberdeenshire politicians, two Ayrshire councillors and Glasgow’s Thomas Kerr, with the latter’s decision revealed by Steerpike last month. Scotland’s Reform party tell Mr S they have now reached 9,000 members – overtaking the Scottish Tories – and are hopeful more defections are on the cards.
It comes after a Survation poll in January suggested the party could win 15 seats in 2026 – overtaking the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Greens to become the fourth biggest party in Holyrood. Will more politicians jump ship? Watch this space…
Why is Birmingham council spending £14.5 million on taxis?
We’re less than a week into the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, and Spaff has already shone a light on hundreds of examples of government waste. So far, we’ve mostly focused on central government – and, no doubt, council officers throughout Britain have rejoiced at being left untouched by our watchful eye.
But no more. I’ve been looking at how some of Britain’s biggest councils have been spending their constituents’ cash. Here are some of my findings.
The first thing that shocked me is the sheer amount of money spent by local authorities on taxis – in large part for ferrying children to and from school each day. I’ll start with a particularly shocking figure: Birmingham’s bankrupt city council has spent almost £14.5 million on school shuttle taxis since June 2023. That’s the annual contribution of more than 10,000 council taxpayers in the most common council tax band in the city. And they’re showing no sign of slowing their rate of spending on this front either: nearly £4.5 million of that total came in January of this year. Other cities are no better. In January 2025, the top three taxi firms in Sheffield raked in £345,000, £172,00 and £160,000 of taxpayer cash respectively. Figures such as these seem shocking, but they’re entirely typical. Who voted for the remit of local authorities to be expanded to include hauling hundreds of thousands of children to school every day on our dime? Also likely not at the top of voter’s minds when they installed Labour last summer was the possibility of taxpayers coughing up for displaced private school students to be taxied to school, an instance of which has been reported by The Telegraph recently.
Bizarrely, council are also paying for yoga classes. In Birmingham, one particular company has received £51,000 since the summer of 2023. Leeds council has made dozens of payments in recent months to yoga teachers and companies, as well as for Zumba classes – spending £1,645 in a series of transactions at the end of last year. Why? One particular yoga teacher bankrolled by Leeds council offers ‘trauma-informed yoga.’
Another big outgoing: interpreters. In the last 18 months, council taxpayers in Birmingham have forked over just under £375,000 in fees paid for translation services. Leeds council, in the main, uses freelance translators – and doesn’t clearly label these in their disclosures, so an exact figure is difficult – but I found, looking at their spending last December alone, payments to interpreters offering their services for: Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese, Thai, Mandarin, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Polish. Spending on interpreters and translators likely goes hand in hand with another large source of expenditure – illegal migration. Two big beneficiaries of Brummie taxpayer’s cash in this area were the ‘Refugee and Migrant Centre Ltd’, who took almost £2 million in the last 18 months, and ‘Refugee Action’, who’ve taken almost £5 million in the same period.
Some of the spurious spending is, unsurprisingly, just downright silly. Notable in this category are: £500 to an all-black female a cappella group, almost £7,000 for a jazz festival, £59,000 for the Kashmiri Arts & Heritage Foundation – all in Birmingham. My favourite highlight of the silly category of spending is, however, £100,000 for Sheffield Christmas illuminations – despite a large part of their benefit being lost when the switch-on ceremony was cancelled. I’ve also noticed dozens of payments to different branches of KFC by Leeds council, categorised as ‘social care’ spending. Are they feeding bargain buckets to the elderly? Similarly strange is £4,000 spent on office art, payments to Swarovski, and the £150,000 Sheffield council has spent on the city’s clean air zone.
The main conclusion I’ve drawn is that major councils are spending just as much on metaphorical rubbish as they are on disposing with literal rubbish. The expansion of the remit of local councils to include chauffeured school shuttles – to the tune of millions of pounds – has happened without any notable public debate. No voter has etched their cross on a ballot paper with that particular issue at the top of their mind. It’s a change that everyone, with the exception of taxi drivers, should oppose.
The BBC’s Gaza documentary omitted something astonishing
The BBC’s documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone at first glance seemed to offer a raw and intimate portrayal of life in Gaza amid the ongoing conflict. However, the programme, which aired on BBC Two on Monday, was deeply flawed. The documentary, narrated by a Palestinian child, Abdullah Ayman Eliyazouri, presented a personal account of the suffering endured by Gaza’s residents. But the investigative journalist David Collier has reported that the BBC seems to have omitted something astonishing. Eliyazouri is not just a random child caught in the crossfire, but the son of Ayman Eliyazouri, the Hamas-run Gazan government’s deputy agricultural minister.
Collier’s investigation cross-referenced social media profiles and other publicly available information. The Facebook profile of Ayman Eliyazouri shows him posting about his son Abdullah, who he calls Aboud. This is not just incidental information – it is central to understanding the family’s perspective and the narrative being presented to viewers. The BBC did not disclose this critical context. Instead, it now says that ‘the children’s parents did not have any editorial input’. A laughable claim.
It is not the first time that the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come under scrutiny. Over the years, I have personally witnessed and written about the corporation’s bias in its reporting, even having to challenge their coverage myself on air. I appeared on one BBC programme during the pandemic in which the presenter insisted the Oslo Accords required Israel to vaccinate Palestinians, when in fact, as I pointed out, the opposite was true: the Accords gave the Palestinians healthcare autonomy as part of their preparations for statehood. Only a viewer complaint after broadcast forced them to admit I was right.
In my work, I have consulted experts like David Collier and the invaluable team at Camera Arabic, who specialise in monitoring the BBC’s Arabic-language content. Camera’s insights have shown that the BBC’s Arabic output is often sympathetic to Hamas and the Palestinian cause. Yet despite mounting evidence, the BBC has made little effort to confront its biases or make any meaningful changes. If the BBC genuinely wanted to address these issues, it has the resources to do so. It could consult experts like Collier, or even hire them directly, to ensure their coverage is impartial. Instead, the BBC continues to dismiss the work of these experts, and ignore their valuable contributions to uncovering the truth.
This unwillingness to engage with external scrutiny is further underscored by the BBC’s rejection of the Asserson Report, an analysis of the BBC’s bias in its coverage of the 7 October war. On 6 March I will be chairing a discussion in London, hosted by Ben-Gurion University Foundation UK, about the techniques used in the report’s research, with the leading academics behind the study outlining how their team used artificial intelligence to measure sympathies in the BBC’s reporting. They then conduct scientific analysis and comparisons to establish problems in the overall coverage patterns, with worrying results. The AI-driven analysis reveals a troubling discrepancy between the BBC’s English and Arabic-language outputs, with BBC Arabic showing a far stronger bias in favour of Hamas. This internal inconsistency – where one arm of the BBC’s reporting is significantly more sympathetic to one side than the other – reveals a failure in the corporation’s editorial practices.
The BBC has rejected the findings of the report, saying its use of AI is ‘unreliable and unproven’, and claiming that the ‘methods used in the report fail to take account of basic journalistic principles and practice.’ Rather than embracing this innovative tool to improve its coverage, the broadcaster has chosen to dismiss it. The AI used in the report is not some untested theory – it is a proven, effective tool developed by world-leading experts in computational social science, with rigorous scientific methods informing its design and execution. Rather than adopting this objective method to address its editorial flaws, the BBC has signaled its reluctance to make the changes necessary to ensure impartiality.
The BBC’s rejection of the Asserson Report highlights a far deeper problem: not only does the corporation steadfastly refuse to confront its biases or make meaningful efforts to address them, but it also dismisses the very experts and methodologies that could help it improve. Funded by ordinary Britons, the BBC possesses the resources, expertise, and tools to rectify its editorial shortcomings. Its refusal to do so suggests, more than anything, that it simply does not want to.
Responding to Collier’s claims, a BBC spokesperson said:
Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, a documentary showing the conflict through the eyes of three children in Gaza, was produced in line with BBC editorial guidelines and the BBC had full editorial control. The film told the children’s own stories, showing viewers their direct experiences of living through a war, and the children’s parents did not have any editorial input.
As the BBC has previously explained, the film was edited and directed from London, as independent international journalists are not allowed into Gaza. The film gives audiences a rare glimpse of Gaza during the war, as well as an insight into the children’s lives, it hears the voices of other Gazan civilians, several of whom voice anti-Hamas sentiments.
Trump is making sure that Zelensky is re-elected
Ukrainians don’t like it when foreign leaders tell them what to do – whether they are Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. Last night, Trump blamed president Volodymyr Zelensky for ‘starting’ the war with Russia and demanded that elections take place in Ukraine if it wants to be involved in the peace negotiations. Trump also expressed his disappointment that Zelensky hadn’t struck a deal with Russia before now, and said that Zelensky only had a ‘4 per cent’ approval rating in Ukraine.
Trump may have been trying to put pressure on Ukraine to make peace faster, but his comments are actually only helping Zelensky secure a second presidential term.
Zelensky’s approval ratings have fallen from their peak of over 90 per cent in March 2022, with war fatigue and domestic missteps both playing their part. Yet, he remains a popular wartime leader. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology put his approval rating at 57 per cent this month. Trump’s own approval rating currently stands at around 48 per cent.
It's likely that Zelensky’s approval ratings will improve after Trump’s parroting of the Kremlin’s talking points. Ukrainian opposition figures are already taking Zelensky’s side. Inna Sovsun, an MP from the Ukrainian Golos party, addressed Trump directly on X, reminding him that Ukraine won’t hold elections until a peace agreement with security guarantees is in place. In 2023, Ukraine’s party leaders signed a declaration committing to elections six months after the war ends. To break that promise would be to betray the electorate, which does not want to see politicians bickering about an election while the country fights for its survival.
Trump’s beef with Zelensky dates back to 2019 when the US president was impeached for pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son in exchange for military aid. Zelensky’s refusal to sign a deal with Trump over Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, and his public criticism of the US-Russia negotiations in Saudi Arabia, have not improved their relationship either.
According to European Pravda, Trump’s team reportedly blackmailed Zelensky in Munich last week to make him sign a deal granting the US 50 per cent of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, oil and gas deposits, and revenues from its ports and infrastructure. Zelensky was reportedly given an ultimatum: sign now, or there would be no deal – and no meeting with JD Vance to discuss Ukraine’s peace terms. Zelensky refused. Vance met him anyway.
Zelensky’s refusal to play ball explains why Trump would like to see the Ukrainian president removed. But Trump is ignoring one crucial factor: the Ukrainian people. After all the death and destruction, Ukrainians are never going to replace Zelensky with a pro-Russian puppet or a leader willing to trade sovereignty for peace.
In reality, no Ukrainian leader is ever going to accept a deal like the one Trump has currently proposed. It is just a form of reparations for past aid, with no security guarantees for Ukraine. ‘We gave them I think $350 BILLION… where is all the money that’s been given? Where is it going? I don’t see any accounting!’, Trump said last night. His own Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, debunked such claims earlier this month, stating that America has spent $174 billion on Ukraine and tracks every dollar with inspectors on the ground.
Zelensky’s refusal to hand over Ukraine's resources to Trump is widely supported by Ukrainians. If anything, his defiance against Trump means voters are more likely to overlook his domestic missteps until the war ends.
Even if Trump and Russia manage to force Ukraine to hold elections, they are likely to be disappointed by the outcome. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians will vote for Zelensky: not because they necessarily like him, but because he’s their legitimate wartime leader, and it's up to them to decide when to get rid of him.
Could Jeff Bezos face jail under Labour’s knife reforms?
It’s a gaffe day with Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot and now the spotlight is on policing minister Diana Johnson. The Labour MP took to the airwaves this morning to sell Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s announcement that the maximum prison sentence for people selling knives to children under 18 will be increased in light of the Southport murders – from six months to two years in prison. Golly.
But there’s more to it than that. Not only will those directly making the sales be punished, company CEOs are in the firing line too. If, for example, under-18s are found to have purchased knives from online shopping sites like Amazon, the organisation’s chairman Jeff Bezos could face the consequences. LBC’s Nick Ferrari pressed Johnson on this point: could bosses like Bezos face jail time? In short, yes. An enthusiastic Johnson responded:
We’re very clear that if there are sales of knives to under-18s, we are increasing the sentence from six months to two years. So that could be the chief executive of a company selling knives online.
Er, right. Johnson’s remark comes just hours after her party’s sentencing tsar David Gauke warned that being overly reliant on a ‘tough on crime’ approach is worsening the overcrowding crisis in British prisons. And Mr S can’t imagine threatening Bezos with incarceration will do much for Labour’s investment plea either. Whenever will the common sense kick in, eh?
Inflation rises to 3% – should we panic?
Prices are rising. Inflation rose to 3 per cent in the twelve months leading up to January, up from 2.5 per cent in December. It’s a bigger jump than expected, with markets and the Bank of England expecting a rise to 2.8 per cent, driven largely by higher transport costs, as well as higher costs for food and non-alcoholic drinks.
Is there reason to panic? While the CPI figures are higher than expected for January, they are not far out of line with the Bank’s latest forecast, which expects inflation to peak closer to 4 per cent this summer, due to rising energy costs. As Capital Economics notes this morning, ‘it’s no secret that higher energy prices will push CPI inflation further above 3 per cent over the next seven months' when Ofgem updates the price cap once again. But the forecaster, along with the Bank, still expects these rises to be temporary, with inflation returning to target in the medium term.
As Threadneedle Street has pointed out many times in the last six months, these fluctuations should not stop the Monetary Policy Committee from continuing to cut rates – albeit they will encourage the Bank to remain cautious. This morning’s inflation news is likely to silence any talk of an earlier, or more aggressive, reduction in the base rate. Rather, the Bank’s slow and steady process for cutting interest rates is likely to continue, especially if headline inflation is drifting, albeit slowly, in the wrong direction.
The rise in core inflation this morning will also give the Bank reason to stay vigilant. The rise in the twelve months to January to 3.7 per cent was expected, but given core inflation excludes volatile costs like food and energy, it is a reminder that inflationary pressures remain in the system. This will also keep the Bank on a slow-and-steady track for cutting rates, especially when also factoring in this week’s labour market update, which revealed the ‘fastest pace of pay growth in over a year’.
In response to all this, the Treasury this morning pledges to ‘further and faster to deliver economic growth'. It’s a welcome message, though not necessarily the answer to rising inflation (indeed, rate hikes are designed to take heat out of the economy, to bring down inflation). While the Bank isn’t going to be hiking rates anytime soon, the MPC may well slow down their plans for cuts even more if inflation keeps ticking up, close to double the Bank’s 2 per cent target. That won’t help the Chancellor’s growth mission – though it’s also wishful thinking to suggest that rate cuts are some kind of silver bullet to the government’s growth problem. Updates like this morning’s inflation figures are a reminder as to why cuts can’t be counted on. And even if rates do come down a fair bit, that does not compensate for the desperate need for a bonfire of housing red tape and broader reform.
Are 3.1 million Brits really too sick to work?
Is it any wonder that the economy is struggling in spite of an apparently booming jobs market, with employers finding it difficult to hire recruits and average earnings rising by 5.9 per cent in the past year? Here is a shocking statistic which goes a long way to explaining the apparent paradox: there are now 3.1 million people claiming Universal Credit with no requirement to seek work – a number which has doubled in just three years.
We have to be careful with the absolute numbers, because as benefit claimants are gradually moved onto Universal Credit the figures are bound to grow. But as the chart from the Department for Work and Pensions’ latest release on Universal Credit shows, it isn’t just the number of people who are claiming Universal Credit with no requirement to seek work which is growing – the proportion of Universal Credit claimants in this category is also growing sharply.
We are being asked to believe that there are over 3 million people of working age in Britain – nearly 10 per cent of the total – who are officially too sick to perform any kind of paid work whatsoever. Does that really sound credible, that in an age when we are notionally healthier than we have ever been – or at least we are living longer than we have ever done – that nearly a tenth of adults are invalids?
The alternative explanation is that a system designed by the last Conservative government to get people off benefits and back to work – Universal Credit – has backfired spectacularly. Far from encouraging people into work it is trapping them on benefits. As the Learning and Work Institute observes this morning, hardly anyone who receives long-term sickness benefits gets off them – just 1 per cent of people in this position were found to be in any kind of work six months later.
Interestingly, the sharp rise in people out of work and on sickness benefits has continued during a period when more and more people have been working from home. The ability to work from home ought in theory to increase the numbers of sick and disabled people who are able to contribute to the economy because it eliminates the problem of travelling to work. Compared with a couple of generations ago, a far higher proportion of the population is engaged in sedentary occupations rather than manual occupations. This, again, should have increased employment opportunities for people with mobility issues, yet there is no sign of it helping to reduce the numbers being signed off as too sick to work.
As has been noted before, the rapid rise in the numbers of people being signed off as unfit to work has coincided with a dramatic fall in the number of work capability assessments (WCAs) which are being carried out face to face. Even in March 2020 – the month the first Covid lockdown began – 62 per cent of WCAs were carried out face to face. In December 2024 it was just 10.4 per cent – with 70.4 per cent carried out by telephone, 6.5 per cent by video call and 12.6 per cent entirely paper-based. The proportion of WCAs carried out face to face is lower now than it was in 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. It is hardly to escape the conclusion that people are being routinely signed off sick because they are not being properly assessed. That doesn’t necessarily mean that most claimants are playing the system, but that somehow the system is failing to do its job.
To be fair to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, she does seem to appreciate the problem and has pledged to put it right. Whether Lord Hermer will allow her to is another matter. But somehow the government has to get this right. It isn’t just a case of cutting the welfare bill, but of providing the economy with an adequate workforce. Without a properly reformed welfare system the economy is going to struggle to grow.
Trump’s support for Taiwan has infuriated Beijing
They were only six words on a website, but they helped maintain Beijing’s fiction that Taiwan is part of its territory. Their disappearance has infuriated China’s communist leaders. ‘It gravely contravenes international law and the basic norms of international relations,’ raged Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, on Monday.
The website in question was that of the US State Department. The words – ‘we do not support Taiwan independence’ – have been removed from its ‘fact sheet’ along with a tweak to another section that implies stronger support for Taiwan’s right to join international organisations, which Beijing has consistently blocked. The changes were welcomed by the government in Taipei, which described the changes as ‘positive and friendly’.
The US is committed by law to providing Taiwan with the weapons to defend itself
The State Department denied the change in wording represented a change in policy. ‘As is routine, the fact sheet was updated to inform the general public about our unofficial relationship with Taiwan,’ a statement said. ‘The United States remains committed to its one China policy.’ The long standing ‘one China policy’ is essentially an agreement to disagree and is a legacy of the days when Taiwan was ruled by nationalists who lost the Chinese civil war in 1949 and fled to the island, still dreaming of taking back control of the mainland.
The policy is now obsolete, since most Taiwanese want nothing to do with China – at least as long as it is ruled by the Chinese Communist party (CCP). They have built a rich and vibrant democracy, with all the trappings of an independent state. The fact that it is not recognised as such is the result of Beijing’s bullying – of Taiwan, but also globally. Recently the CCP has stepped up efforts to have countries recognise its right to pursue ‘all’ efforts to gain control of the island, implying support for military action. Some 70 have done so, mostly those who are more dependent on Beijing economically.
China has threatened to use force if Taiwan formally declares independence or if all other efforts at ‘unification’ fail. It has ratcheted up pressure on the island in multiple ways short of an invasion, with cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, the alleged sabotage of underwater communications cables, and military exercises, which include practicing for a blockade of the island.
The US is committed by law to providing Taiwan with the weapons to defend itself and has followed a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ over what it would do in the event of an invasion. This appeared to become less ambiguous under President Biden, who on several occasions said American troops would defend Taiwan, only to have his officials backtrack. But he never changed the words on the website.
Trying to make sense of President Trump’s position on Taiwan is much tougher. After meeting Japan’s prime minister earlier this month, the two leaders said that they ‘opposed any attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion’.
When asked about the island during the election campaign, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use force to prevent a blockade because Xi ‘respects me and knows I’m f***ing crazy’. ‘I had a very strong relationship with him’, he said. ‘I would say: if you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150 per cent to 200 per cent’. Yet at other times he has appeared indifferent to the defence of Taiwan, which he has accused of stealing the US chip industry. There have also been suggestions it could become a pawn in some grand bargain with Beijing over trade and global spheres of influence.
Shortly after he was elected for his first presidency, Trump took a call from then Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, who congratulated him on his election win. Trump’s conversation with Tsai was the first such contact with Taiwan by a president-elect or president since President Jimmy Carter adopted a one-China policy in 1979. It infuriated Beijing, which was probably what it was designed to do. The six deleted words on the state department website may have a similar intent.
Or they may not. It should be remembered that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long been a staunch supporter of Taiwan. During his confirmation hearings, he expressed ‘serious concern over China’s coercive actions against Taiwan and in the South China Sea’. He vowed to strengthen Taiwan’s defences to prevent a ‘cataclysmic military intervention’. On the other hand, Elon Musk, who also has the ear of the President, has consistently echoed China’s line on Taiwan, asserting that the island is an ‘integral part’ of China. The Tesla boss, who has significant business interests in China, suggested the island should become a special administrative region of the People’s Republic, a view that has been criticised as dangerous and naive.
This week, Taiwan has been hosting former US deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and retired US rear admiral Mark Montgomery. They discussed bolstering defence spending and building ‘safe’ supply chains – the sort of issues they hope will resonate with the White House. Beijing hates these unofficial visits, though not as much as it hates the removal of those six words from the State Department website. Taiwan is a de facto independent state, and a very successful one at that, and China’s claim to the island is highly dubious at best. Yet its status has been hidden by smoke and mirrors and a general obfuscation designed to appease Beijing, which tightens its grip regardless. That’s why Beijing so loathes any sort of clarity.
What Labour can learn from the glory days of British Rail
The Department for Transport has just launched an eight-week consultation to determine the shape of its much-vaunted Great British Railways – our renationalised railway system. Will it, I wonder, be anything like the earlier nationalised incarnation, British Rail (BR)? I do hope so. Because, although BR was disparaged for being old-fashioned and a bit creaky, inefficient and loss-making, I was very fond of those trains of yesteryear.
John Major’s privatisation of the railways in the 1990s was meant to introduce competition, improve services and reduce costs. It didn’t work out that way though, did it? Trains today have never been so unreliable or so expensive. Not to mention overcrowded. So, champion of free market capitalism though I am, in this instance I think we can let the state have another go.
Call me sentimental, but trains really were better in the old BR days
My warm feelings towards dear old British Rail come from the fact that, back in the 1970s, I frequently took trains as part of my first job as a journalist: staff writer on the weekly Local Government Chronicle. My assignments took me all over the country to report on the doings of local authorities; that was how I discovered the land I had recently moved to and adopted as my own.
I never travelled first class – my expenses weren’t that generous – but in those days you didn’t have to, in order to have a first class ride. How? In the restaurant car, of course. Its rows of tables were set with white tablecloths and proper crockery and cutlery, and you were served by courteous waiters. On an early train you would head there to order a full English breakfast, or if later in the day, treat yourself to lunch. On the homeward evening journey you could enjoy supper with a nice glass of wine while watching the countryside speed by in the dusky light. Quite the most civilised way to travel.
Naturally, restaurant cars were the first to go with privatisation, because the new rail companies could sell many more tickets if they used that space for seating. They were replaced with ‘buffet cars’, a grandiose name for a little counter where you can buy tea in a plastic cup and a bag of crisps or chocolate bar. The (bog standard) sandwiches are usually gone by the time you get there and reach the top of the queue.
Back then I don’t recall ever being on a train so full that people had to stand all the way or else sit on the floor beside the toilet, as they often do nowadays. And I suppose trains were occasionally delayed, but it couldn’t have been a major problem because I was never late to an assignment because of it. And is it my imagination, or were the traditional British Rail seats more comfortable than the harder ones in use today?
There was the odd mishap. Once, on a journey back from Wales my train was stopped for a couple of hours because of cows on the tracks…or were they sheep? Anyway, a nice farmer came to the window and I gave him 50p to call my husband and tell him I’d be late for dinner. And he did.
What I loved most about my many train journeys was the opportunity they gave to meet people. Passengers weren’t glued to phones and laptops in those days; sometimes they talked. My most memorable meeting, in 1975 or ’76, was with the boxer John Conteh, then at the height of his fame. I boarded a train at Euston, heading to Liverpool, sat down by the window in an empty seating bay and started reading a book. A moment later someone sat down opposite me and when I looked up I saw it was Conteh.
I felt a little thrill. But I carried on reading. As the train began to roll another man sat down, in the seat beside me – he was middle-aged, chubby and sweaty-looking. He recognised the boxer too, and almost immediately struck up a faux-matey conversation with him. I couldn’t concentrate on my book because I sensed our famous fellow passenger’s irritation. The sweaty bloke called him ‘John’ and babbled about himself. He pulled out a business card and put it on the table in front of Conteh, who didn’t pick it up.
A few minutes later Conteh and I exchanged glances. ‘Good book?’ he asked. We started talking, and he told me he was going home to visit his parents. He spoke of them with affection, and said that when he became successful and rich, he moved them out of the slummy district they had lived in for years and bought them a lovely house with a swimming pool in a salubrious suburb of Liverpool. ‘But my parents were miserable,’ said Conteh. ‘They missed their old friends and neighbours. They lasted six months. Then I had to move them back to the old area.’
We laughed and chatted on, and for the rest of the journey the man sitting beside me never got a look-in. I’ve always felt that my encounter with the illustrious boxer and the over-chummy bloke taught me something about life.
Call me sentimental, but trains really were better in the old BR days. So I would say to the experts now shaping our new renationalised railways: please don’t be greedy. Don’t cram us in like sardines, just lay on more trains. Don’t charge funny money for tickets or we’ll drive instead. And bring back the restaurant cars. Let’s make it a civilised way to travel again.
Can the British army stretch to peace-keeping in Ukraine?
It has been a traumatic week for Europe’s political and military leaders. Last Wednesday, without warning, US President Donald Trump announced that he had spoken to Vladimir Putin by telephone for 90 minutes. During a ‘highly productive call’, he and the Russian leader had ‘agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately’ to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had not been informed of the conversation beforehand, much less involved.
The transactional high-handedness of Trump’s approach, ignoring the injured party in the conflict and making direct and friendly overtures to the aggressor, should not have come as a surprise. But it left European governments, focusing on that day’s meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels and preparing for the weekend’s Munich Security Conference, suddenly feeling bypassed. If Ukraine’s head of state had not been part of the conversation, the Europeans were even further from the centre of the action.
All of these ideas put the cart many miles ahead of the horse
Their collective reaction has been a peculiar one. Emmanuel Macron hastily invited the ‘principaux pays européens’ to a summit in Paris on Monday to discuss European security. By the time the leaders of the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the secretary general of Nato and the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, convened in the French capital, one of the main topics of discussion had become the potential composition and role of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine.
This was, remember, the day before the American and Russian negotiators had even had their first meeting in Saudi Arabia. However eager President Trump may be to achieve a settlement in Ukraine, there was something both presumptuous and detached from reality about debating how a ‘peace’ agreement could be monitored before the process had even begun.
Sir Keir Starmer was quick out of the traps. Before he reached Paris, he had written in the Daily Telegraph that he would consider deploying UK military personnel to Ukraine ‘to contribute to security guarantees’ – in other words, as part of a multinational peacekeeping (or peace-enforcing) force which President Zelenskyy had suggested would need to be 100,000-150,000-strong.
Macron had indicated a willingness to do the same months ago, but the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said he would not send troops. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, meanwhile, called any discussion of peacekeeping ‘completely premature’ and ‘highly inappropriate’. He then left the summit early, burdened by the knowledge that his government faces the electorate on Sunday and his coalition is likely to be defeated.
One newspaper suggested that the UK might provide 20,000 troops. This is obviously fanciful: the most recent statistics showed that the British Army only has 74,612 regular personnel. Taking into account current commitments and readiness, the UK would be stretched to generate a force much bigger than a single brigade of 4,000-5,000.
Then a new approach was trailed in the media: the Royal Air Force could contribute to an ‘air policing’ mission, with Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4 aircraft on alert for any breaches of a settlement. Again, it would be an element of a larger effort, since the RAF only has 100 Typhoons in service, of which the majority provide air defence for the UK from RAF Coningsby and RAF Lossiemouth.
All of these ideas put the cart many miles ahead of the horse. Negotiations have barely started; the Ukrainian government has not been involved. One of the few things we do know is that Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said that the idea of a peacekeeping force, especially one comprising Nato member states, is ‘completely unacceptable’ to the Kremlin.
There is a long way to go. President Trump wants a peace agreement by Easter, which this year falls on the same day, 20 April, in the Western and Eastern Orthodox churches. The signs are that he is willing to make substantial concessions to Moscow at the expense of Ukraine.
Rehearsals of who might do what to enforce a notional settlement give the strong impression of displacement activity by European governments. Donald Trump, now repeating Kremlin lines-to-take almost verbatim and openly hostile to Ukraine, sees the prospect of a deal with Vladimir Putin. He knows he has no need of European leaders to achieve that, and they know it, so they must somehow find a nominal role. The American president said airily that he ‘wouldn’t object’ to European peacekeepers, but Russia does.
Sir Keir Starmer will visit Washington next week. Perhaps ground forces or ‘air policing’ represent a burnt offering for President Trump, but at the moment he is moving pieces around an imaginary board, while events unfold elsewhere.
Why did the Foremans travel to Iran?
A British couple detained in Iran have been charged with espionage, according to the Iranian judiciary news agency. Craig and Lindsay Foreman have been accused of entering the country ‘under the guise of tourists’ and of being ‘affiliated with intelligence services’. No actual evidence to back up the spying charges has been provided by the regime in Tehran, which has a habit of ignoring such legal niceties.
The Foremans were arrested last month during a round-the-world motorbike trip. After staying in the cities of Tabriz, Isfahan and Tehran, they travelled to Kerman in the centre of the country, where they were detained. According to their social media feed, the couple were in Iran as part of a psychology research project asking people what constitutes a ‘good life’. What possessed them to conduct such a survey in paranoid and repressive Iran, of all places, is anyone’s guess. The couple shared regular social media updates from the country – hardly the behaviour, one would think, of spies on a secret mission.
The chances of a fair trial in Iran are non-existent
‘To put your minds at rest, we are having the most amazing time in Iran,’ they posted on Facebook on 3 January. On Instagram, Lindsay Foreman even acknowledged that travelling to Iran, in defiance of Foreign Office advice, was ‘slightly scary’. She added: ‘Yes, we’re aware of the risks. But we also know the rewards of meeting incredible people, hearing their stories, and seeing the breathtaking landscapes of these regions could outweigh the fear.’ The couple appeared oblivious to the obvious dangers.
An Iranian judiciary spokesman said that the pair were arrested ‘during a series of coordinated intelligence operations and while collecting information in Kerman city’. The Iranian authorities have a way of making every activity, however innocent or innocuous, sound sinister. A photograph was released of the detained couple with their faces blurred meeting the British ambassador at the public prosecutor’s office.
The detention of foreign citizens on trumped-up charges in Iran is nothing new. In recent years, the country has arrested a number of British citizens, often Iranians with dual nationality or foreign permanent residence, mostly on spying and national security charges. Those under arrest are often held as leverage, released only when Iran receives something in return. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in 2016 after visiting the country on holiday. She was ultimately released and returned to the UK six years later – but only after the UK agreed to settle a historic £400 million debt dating back to the 1970s.
No one should be left in any doubt about what is really going on. Iran’s actions amount to hostage-taking, and it is growing in scale. The regime demonstrates a cavalier contempt for the basic tenets and conventions of international law – yet Western democracies appear unwilling to address the substantive issue. If a paramilitary force did this – rather than a state – it would never be tolerated.
The Foremans are not entirely without blame. The Foreign Office officially advises against all travel to Iran, saying British and British-Iranian dual nationals are at ‘significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention’. Having a British passport or connections to the UK ‘can be reason enough for the Iranians to detain you’, it adds. Is this not clear enough as a warning? Why risk it? A statement issued by the Foreign Office on their family’s behalf said that the ’emotional burden of this situation weighs heavily on us’. Heartache all-round. The naivety and foolishness of this couple is breathtaking.
Alicia Kearns MP, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on arbitrary detention and hostage-taking, has called on the British government to put in place a plan for the immediate release and return home of the couple. She is right to point out that it is critical to secure the couple’s release before any trial proceedings begin. Why? Because the chances of a fair trial in Iran are non-existent. The assertion by the Iranian authorities – without bothering to offer any evidence – that the pair were ‘cooperating with covert institutions’ merely confirms that these trumped-up charges are being pursued because the couple are British nationals. That is where their true value lies for Tehran.
British diplomats certainly have their work cut out. The Foreign Office said it is in contact with local authorities in Iran and is providing the couple with consular assistance. The negotiations will require delicate diplomacy and quiet persuasion at the highest levels of government. It is remarkable that Britain still has no special envoy dedicated to securing the release of British nationals arbitrarily detained abroad, especially when more and more authoritarian regimes are resorting to such tactics. Everything must be done to bring the Foremans safely home. Let’s hope they’ve learnt their lesson.
The confusing sex lives of Gen Z
What do Hollywood bonkbusters Bridget Jones: Mad About a Boy, Baby Girl, and Lonely Planet have in common? The middle-aged blonde ice maidens at the centre of each film are all women who refuse to age gracefully. Their faces show a toxic desire to cling onto youth.
The movies also all feature large age-gap relationships with the woman as the older party. Thanks to the gender reversal, pop culture is lauding the storylines as inspiration and liberating. But what message are young people – especially guys – supposed to take away? The bald fact is there’s a reason why it’s a social taboo to have sex with people young enough to be your kid. Anyone maintaining otherwise is indulging a luxury belief.
The tradwife phenomenon is the pretty face of the rebellion
My generation, Generation Z, drew the short end of the stick by growing up when the sex-positive feminism movement was at its height. The zeitgeist preached ideas which have aged like milk: kink-shaming is the ultimate faux pas – something only prudes and Tories do; sexual liberation is somehow the key to unlocking female emancipation; porn is great. We gobbled up contradictory lessons dished out by careless pointy-heads on what healthy relationship behaviours look like, and now everyone’s dealing with the fallout.
In the past few months, some revealing reports have been published about Gen Zers’ sex lives. Social scientists have dubbed us ‘the kinkiest generation yet’, and we are more likely to be open to hookups and breath control play – a euphemism if ever I heard one. One report found that 55 per cent of us have fantasies involving BDSM.
‘Fantasies’ is perhaps the operative word here though, because an eyebrow-raising one in four Gen Z adults haven’t had sex. Even those who have popped their cherry aren’t having a great time of it; 37 per cent of Gen Z reported no sexual activity in the past month, compared to 19 per cent of Millenials and 17 per cent of Gen X.
There’s no single cause for the sex recession. The unsatisfying truth is we were unlucky to be born in an age which has experienced immense societal and technological change in a short period of time. The result is we have become the most oversexed and sexless generation in history.
I find our response to living in a time of weird sexual mores fascinating. For instance, our knee-jerk hesitancy to kink-shame. It isn’t a sign that we’ve developed well-adjusted attitudes, but rather the opposite: people want to be seen as liberal at the expense of their actual sexual pleasure and, frankly, common sense.
Take prostitution. At university, a bloke in my tutorial went to great pains to explain the idea that sex work is work. When he finished and looked at me expectantly, and I couldn’t resist: ‘Well, in that case I pity your girlfriend.’
The other week over drinks with girlfriends, the topic of conversation drifted to how it’s always obvious to tell if a young guy watches too much porn. We dissected the giveaway signs: jittery body language, a very short attention span, a propensity for their faces to glaze over. This all came as something of a revelation to the only lesbian sitting round the table, who recoiled in horror. ‘Now it’s been pointed out, I won’t be able to unsee it,’ she said.
Another friend compared it to being given a pair of glasses you didn’t know you needed. She shook her head and continued, ‘God, these poor men.’ Yes, poor men, but let us not forget the poor women who are lumped with the emotional labour of trying to decalcify their pornified brains.
Yet there is hope. Rather betraying the title bestowed upon us, a report by dating app Feeld and the Kinsey Institute found that 81 per cent of Gen Z fantasise about monogamous relationships. Hardly a radical stance. Interestingly, we are more enamoured with monogamy than previous generations – perhaps because it feels out of reach for the average young person in our topsy-turvy dating landscape.
Happiness doesn’t necessarily lie in conventional relationships, but the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction a backlash is stirring. The tradwife phenomenon is the pretty face of the rebellion, and while it makes me feel uncomfortable, I’m clear-eyed about why it exists. Most people don’t want to be choked during sex, faff about making puff pastry, or date someone twice their age. Hopefully culture will soon meander back to a happy medium, because actually what we want out of love turns out to be pretty ordinary.