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Nagasaki shouldn’t have snubbed Israel from its A-bomb ceremony
Nagasaki’s Peace Park held a ceremony today to mark the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city (which killed 74,000 people). It was a sombre and moving occasion, as it always is, and one usually attended by high level representatives of all nations. This year was different though: the ambassadors of the UK, US and Israel were elsewhere, holding their own memorial at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, 750 miles away.
Nothing spooks the Japanese as much as disorder
The reason is an unseemly row over the withdrawal of an invitation to Israel, by the mayor of Nagasaki Shiro Suzuki, apparently over fears of potential protests in the wake of the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Suzuki announced the un-invitation in a 31 July news conference, saying it was ‘absolutely not…political…but a decision based on our hopes to hold the ceremony, peacefully, solemnly and smoothly’.
The problem with this is that Israel was thus lumped in with the other non-invitees Russia and Belarus. Adding insult to this grievous injury, for the first time, a representative of Palestine was invited. The Nagasaki event thus contrasted starkly with the corresponding ceremony in Hiroshima of 6 August, which saw Israel, but not Palestine represented.
The Nagasaki authorities should not have been surprised by the response. They were warned. The UK’s ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom had expressed concern that the exclusion of Israel risked giving the unacceptable impression of an equivalence between the actions of Israel and that of Russia and Belarus; a letter warning of a possible boycott by G7 nations (except the EU) was sent to Suzuki in mid-July. But apparently no response was forthcoming.
To be fair, there is undoubtedly some truth to the fears over a disturbance at the Nagasaki event. Nothing spooks the Japanese as much as disorder, especially during what should be a flawlessly solemn occasion, arguably the most important day in the city’s calendar and one when the mayor’s reputation is on the line. Israel’s participation in the Hiroshima memorial had sparked criticism and some protests and the Japanese generally have been panicked by television images of violent anti-Israel disturbances around the world. Adding to the tension, the Japanese anti-nuclear lobby has been energised recently by prime minister Fumio Kishida’s plans for a military build-up.
But the mayor’s rationale must be taken with a pinch of wasabi. The Japanese are not averse to noisy street protests when appropriate, but the likelihood that the memories of the victims of the Nagasaki bombing would have been disrespected by serious disturbances on the day is very low.
Whether petitioning by activists or representatives of the Hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) led to the decision, one thing is clear: Suzuki comes out of this looking rather foolish. The affair is a tawdry one that won’t soon be forgotten, especially by the majority of Japanese who are plainly pro-Israel.
The original sin arguably was the suspension of Russia and Belarus from the memorial ceremonies in 2022 (from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki). While many would sympathise with that decision, it was nonetheless controversial as it marked a clear politicisation of what should be an entirely humanitarian event, and could be interpreted as a snub to the Russian and Belorussian people as much as to their grisly regimes.
But once you start excluding countries from memorials, or indeed sporting or cultural events, as a result of the actions of their governments, it raises inevitable and impossible to satisfactorily answer questions. Why do some countries become pariahs and others do not? Who actually suffers as a result of these sanctions? And who gains? And what do they gain?
If Suzuki has answers to these questions, he hasn’t supplied them yet. He has said that ‘it is unfortunate that ambassadors won’t be able to join us this year, but I hope they will attend from next year’, a disingenuous statement suggesting that the non-attendance was unavoidable rather than deliberate.
But the damage is done, the memorials to the A-bomb victims have been overshadowed. The wrong headlines have been generated, just as always seems to be the case when politics intrudes on what ought to be strictly non-political. There must surely be a better way?
Man handed 20-month jail sentence for stirring up hate on Facebook
And there we have it: the first person to be charged with intending to stir up racial hatred online has now been jailed for 20 months. 28-year-old Jordan Parlour pleaded guilty to charges put to him at Leeds magistrates’ court on Tuesday, confessing in court to having taken to Facebook during the recent unrest to rile up rioters. His own city Leeds saw approximately 400 people turn out last weekend and cause chaos on the streets – with a local hotel manager having to put his business into lockdown after rioters pelted it with stones and smashed windows. Good heavens…
But while the court heard Parlour was at home at the time with a broken heel, he was still engaging with what was going on. Taking to the social media platform between 1-5 August, the Leeds man told people online that ‘every man and his dog should smash [the] f*** out of Britannia hotel’ – amongst other rather unsavoury posts. Indeed, the first conviction for posting online in relation to the riots comes after Home Secretary Yvette Coooper’s warnings to ‘armchair thugs’ who stoked tensions from the comfort of their own homes – with Parlour himself told by the judge that ‘this offence is so serious that an immediate custodial sentence is unavoidable’. Crikey.
As Mr S wrote this week, Parlour’s case caught the attention of many of the online community – including Twitter CEO Elon Musk himself. The US tech billionaire took to his own platform in a rage when he heard there had been an arrest in the UK over online posts. ‘Arrested for making comments on Facebook!’ he fumed, adding: ‘Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’ Not stopping there, the businessman went on to post an image of a Family Guy character in a torture chair, writing: ‘In 2030 for making a Facebook comment the UK government didn’t like.’ The period of rioting might have quietened down but Elon’s war on Labour continues…
The oldest hatred is thriving in Britain
Britain’s antisemitism problem continues to grow. A report from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors racist attacks and abuse against British Jews, documents 1,978 incidents in the first six months of 2024. That is the highest figure ever recorded for the first half of any year and a 105 per cent increase on the same period in 2023. It is no coincidence that this comes after the October 7 attack, in which Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people, raped women and took 250 hostages. As the CST noted in a previous report, October 7 occasioned an outbreak of antisemitic activity in the UK long before any Israeli military response was under way. This latest report confirms the connection, with 52 per cent of incidents linked to Israel or its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Antisemitic damage and desecration to Jewish-owned property is up 246 per cent
There has been a 41 per cent increase in assaults on Jews. The most common forms were throwing projectiles, punching/kicking, spitting and stripping Jews of their religious garments. In January, four Israelis visiting central London were overheard speaking Hebrew and attacked by three men of Arab or North African extraction. They were pelted with glass bottles and one of the women was punched in the neck while their assailants shouted ‘Fuck Jews, Hamas is the best’. In 37 per cent of cases, the assault involved a Jewish child being attacked by other (non-Jewish) children.
Antisemitic damage and desecration to Jewish-owned property is up 246 per cent. This includes the targeting of Jewish family homes, schools and kosher food aisles in supermarkets, as well as the dumping of treif (non-kosher food) on Jewish-owned properties. The CST documents arson, the smashing of doors and windows, and the destruction of mezuzot, prayer scrolls affixed to the doorways of synagogues and observant Jewish homes. Incidents targeting synagogues are up 148 per cent. Vandalism incidents included a London menorah drenched in red paint and daubed with ‘Gaza’. The report contains photographs of anti-Jewish graffiti found across the country, such as ‘6 million Jews wasn’t enough’ (County Armagh), ‘Gaza a “real” Holocaust’ (Glasgow) and ‘Death to Jew scum’ (Surrey).
Specific threats against British Jews have risen 158 per cent, including in-person intimidation, menacing phone calls and bomb threats. A Holocaust education organisation received an email that opened, ‘I have come back to exterminate the Jews’ and concluded: ‘I don’t want converts from Judaism, or put it this way, you can convert but you still have to die.’ There has been a 119 per cent surge in school-related antisemitism, defined as attacks or abuse towards Jewish schools or pupils and staff going to and from school. These included assaults and threats against Jewish children, as well as abusive behaviour. At a non-Jewish school in Kent, a Jewish girl was taunted with shouts of ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘dirty Jew’ and was added to a WhatsApp group titled ‘Holocaust’. Meanwhile, university-based antisemitism has risen 465 per cent, which will be a shocking figure to anyone unfamiliar with the average UK university campus.
Two-thirds of these incidents took place offline. We’re not just talking about knuckle-draggers posting their bile on social media. We’re talking about people who hate Jews going out in person and acting on it. If you’ve ever wondered why Jewish schools and places of worship in this country require such an extensive security infrastructure, this is the reason. The ethnicity of offenders was recorded in under a third of cases, of which 44 per cent were white, 30 per cent Arab or North African, 14 per cent South Asian and 12 per cent black. The CST notes that these are higher-than-usual figures for non-whites, a trend it has seen before when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the news.
Although these incidents represent a record high, the actual figures are likely to be higher still. The CST’s rigorous methodology means it excluded from the final figures 1,493 incidents which were reported as antisemitic but where its researchers could not establish sufficient evidence. The charity says many of these reports involved ‘suspicious activity or possible hostile reconnaissance’ outside Jewish properties.
The recurring theme in this report is the link between anti-Israel attitudes and antisemitic actions. In our diligence to distinguish between hostility towards the State of Israel and hostility towards Jews we have allowed this connection to go under-scrutinised. Whether hating Israel leads some to hate Jews, or vice versa, the fact is that this hatred is playing out on our streets are we are not doing nearly enough to combat it. The new government shows even less interest than the old one when it comes to tackling antisemitism directly, candidly and with determination. You can suspend as many export licences and recognise as many Palestinian states as you want, but in turning a blind eye to antisemitism you will ensure British Jews get more of it. As the CST report shows, they already get more than their fair share.
Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is a disaster for Putin
It’s four days into Ukraine’s surprise offensive in the Russian region of Kursk and Moscow is only just sending reinforcements to repel the advance. Multiple launch rocket systems, artillery guns and armoured vehicles – which were probably redeployed from other parts of the front line – have been sent to shore up defences, according to the Russian ministry of defence.
The delayed response has reportedly allowed Ukrainian forces to advance as far as 10 kilometres inside Russia’s territory, forcing Moscow to declare a ‘federal emergency’ in the region and tell several thousand of civilians from districts around the town of Sudzha to relocate. It’s the deepest cross-border advance by Kyiv since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022.
Russia’s army chiefs will have to face Putin’s wrath for allowing it to happen in the first place
A source close to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday said that the Ukrainian army had captured a gas line in the region crucial for transporting oil to Europe. There are reports today that suggest Ukraine has also managed to hit a military airfield in Lipetsk (which is deep within Russia and more than 200 miles from Sudzha) using drones to destroy guided bombs stored at the airfield.
The Russian army’s lumbering delay will be deeply embarrassing for military officials, not least due to the fact they were so unprepared for such an attack by Ukraine that the part of the border they breached on Tuesday was guarded only by ill-equipped conscripts. After three days of downplaying the severity of the incursion, and several claims made in the Russian state media that Ukraine’s advance had been halted, the Russian ministry of defence admitted for the first time today that fighting had indeed spread as far as Suzhda.
Jitters in the army’s top ranks are likely to be made worse by the fact that a quiet purge of the military’s top ranks has been slowly carried out over the past several months: many of those close to the former defence minister Sergei Shoigu have been demoted, forcibly retired or indeed arrested on dubious criminal charges. Shoigu himself was unceremoniously removed from his post and replaced by the more hardline Andrei Belousov in May who was widely expected to improve the armed forces’ efficiency. He will now have questions to answer.
After a relatively successful year in the war so far for Putin’s forces, the handling of Ukraine’s attack could quickly risk becoming a PR disaster for the Kremlin. Locals forced to evacuate from the area of the fighting and leave property, jobs and belongings behind have reportedly been compensated with the equivalent of just £100 for the trouble with no idea how long they might be gone for.
One group of Suzhda residents has already recorded an appeal to Putin for help, lamenting: ‘Our relatives, husbands, neighbours are defending Donbass. We have lost our land, we have lost our homes, we have fled under fire, many without documents. We want to ask for help, we have been left alone.’ In what appears to be a classic example of the dangerous incompetence Putin’s regime of fear has fostered since the beginning of the war, one local authority leader had yesterday posted on his Telegram channel urging locals to voluntarily evacuate – before deleting his message half an hour later, likely out of fear it could be interpreted as ‘discrediting’ the Russian army.
How long Ukraine manages to maintain its advance into Russian territory remains to be seen: the further in they move, the more logistically challenging it will become for their army to keep hold of their gains. But it is already certain that, regardless of whether they manage to repel Kyiv’s forces from Russian territory, Russia’s army chiefs will have to face Putin’s wrath for allowing it to happen in the first place.
Migration figures are falling – but the crisis is far from over
Ok folks, the show is over and there’s nothing left to see: that traditional refrain of an American police officer at the scene of an on-street drama is being repurposed for Britain’s immigration debate. Official figures out today show a significant downward trend in visa applications for work and study – and especially for bringing in dependants after a tightening of the rules at the fag end of the last Conservative administration.
Sponsored study visa applications fell by 16 per cent in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year, while applications to bring in dependants plunged by a massive 81 per cent. Applications for health and social care worker dependants are also down sharply.
YouGov has recorded yet another surge in public anxiety over immigration
For the Tories, this shows that measures implemented last year to counteract an enormous spike in foreign students and low-paid workers bringing in family members have worked. For that they deserve the credit. For Labour, the figures point towards them comfortably meeting their election promise to bring down immigration levels bequeathed to them by the Conservatives without really having to break a sweat.
Overall annual net migration is clearly going to come off the 650,000-750,000 range of the last few years and reduce to something more palatable – perhaps even heading down to as low as 400,000. But that’s where the narrative falls apart.
Why? Because the huge changes wrought in British society by mass immigration over the past quarter of a century have been based on average net influx levels of about 250,000 per year. This was the level that torpedoed Gordon Brown’s election campaign in 2010 when he came face to face with the redoubtable Gillian Duffy. It was the level that David Cameron deemed so excessive that he promised to get it down below 100,000. His failure to get anywhere near doing so was probably the biggest factor propelling the Leave cause to victory in the EU referendum of 2016.
The doubling and trebling of the already massively excessive 250,000 typical net influx that occurred on the watches of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak was likewise the biggest factor in the evisceration of the Conservatives at the recent election.
The cumulative negative impacts of these volumes on issues ranging from the dilution of the nation’s capital stock, to contributing to public services overload, housing shortages and the collapse of social cohesion in many places are locked into British politics long-term.
To imagine that the immigration debate over the next few years will consist of Labour and the Tories arguing which of them should get the credit for solving the crisis is therefore ridiculous. Just this week, the pollster YouGov has recorded yet another surge in public anxiety over immigration. It is now the overall top issue cited by voters, seven points ahead of the economy. Much of this may relate to the volume of illegal immigration, which is set for yet another boom after the government dumped the Rwanda plan with no equivalent deterrent to put in its place. Labour’s plan to move illegal migrants out of hotels and into empty homes is hardly going to calm public anger either as rents surge even higher in response to the extra demand.
A large section of the British electorate now demands an altogether more radical change when it comes to migration policy. Nothing less than a generation-long pause in mass immigration will satisfy some voters. And the presence of Nigel Farage and four other Reform UK MPs in the House of Commons – all of whom campaigned on a policy of implementing net zero migration – is going to provide a high-profile outlet for such views.
Farage, whom I am told has been abroad again on a long-haul trip to see his new grandson, soon after a well-publicised visit to the US, has not enjoyed the most sure-footed start to his parliamentary career. His personal ratings are down somewhat. But as sporting pundits are wont to say, while form is temporary, class is permanent. Farage will be grabbing the immigration debate by the scruff of the neck by the time Parliament reconvenes in the autumn – and getting plenty of electoral traction as a result.
Given the active role that all the other main UK-wide parliamentary parties have played in the great mass immigration experiment – Labour 1997-2010, Conservatives 2010-2024 and even the Lib Dems in coalition 2010-2015 – Farage has a huge political opportunity ahead on a core issue on which all his opponents are stymied. A few tweaks on sectoral and dependant visa requirements are not going to cut the mustard. The show is not over and there will be plenty left to see.
Beeb asks Huw Edwards to pay back £200,000 from salary
Back to the Huw Edwards scandal, where the disgraced ex-BBC presenter is facing more trouble. Last week, the former TV star pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children at Westminster magistrates’ court. Edwards had 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by another man on WhatsApp. At the same time, it emerged that the presenter last year received a £40,000 pay rise despite not working for most of those 12 months. Now it transpires that the Beeb wants its money back.
The public service broadcaster has asked Edwards to return the six-figure salary he was paid after being arrested last November for possessing indecent images of children – the grand total of which amounts to more than £200,000. Crikey. Edwards and the Beeb both came under fire after the BBC’s annual accounts revealed he was the third highest-earning presenter between March 2023 and April 2024 – despite being suspended last summer and formally leaving his post in April 2024. Now, the corporation’s chairman Samir Shah has slammed Edwards for having ‘behaved in bath faith’ by continuing to take the money.
The BBC board said that the broadcaster’s ex-presenter had pleaded guilty to an ‘appalling crime’ and had ‘clearly undermined trust’ in the company, adding: ‘Had he been up front when asked by the BBC about his arrest, we would never have continued to pay him money.’ Yet the board insists that it supported the handling of the case by director general Tim Davie – who confirmed last week that the Beeb had been aware that Edwards had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children. How curious…
Why is the pound falling?
Is America about to enter a recession and take the world with it? Yesterday the pound was on track for its longest losing streak in a year as markets once again began to fear a US recession. The week started with what looked like the bursting of a tech bubble. Japan’s Nikkei dropped by 12 per cent in a day – its largest fall since Black Monday nearly four decades ago. But by Tuesday morning, stocks had recovered 10 per cent and markets looked to be steadying while the jittery hands of investors began to hold firm.
Are we out of the woods? Not quite. A leading Wall Street Bank – BNY Melon – this morning warned that global markets would be in turmoil for ‘months’. Earlier in the week, Japan’s share price falls were followed by some brutal sell offs in the US and Europe, with the microchip giant Nvidia seeing the worst of it: sales wiped out most of the gains on European markets from the past few months. As the week wore on, markets recovered some of those losses and things looked to be stabilising. But the week is ending with a renewed sense of fear.
Sterling fell nearly half a per cent this week and it looks like this will be the fourth declining week in the pound’s value in a row – the worst consecutive run since September last year. This hasn’t been helped by the Bank of England’s decision to cut interest rates last week (a move welcomed by many).
The FTSE 1000 dropped more than 1.2 per cent yesterday while major markets in the EU finished up about 1 per cent lower, too. Analysts at JPMorgan raised their predicted likelihood of an American recession from 25 per cent to 35 per cent and said there is a 45 per cent chance it will happen by the second half of next year.
But what caused the fears this week? US job creation data, which came in much lower than expected – with just 114,000 new jobs added to payrolls. This was then compounded by the unemployment rate spiking at 4.3 per cent which, as Kate Andrews wrote on Coffee House, is what seems to have caused fears that positive US growth forecasts for this year now look far too optimistic. However, there was better news from across the pond: US benefit figures yesterday showed claims for joblessness benefits falling at their fastest pace in nearly a year. This reassured investors that things were perhaps not as bad as they seem. The Dow Jones average of industrial stocks rose half a per cent at the open while the S&P 500 rose by 1 per cent. A mixed picture.
There’s one man who might have seen this coming: Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway boss has drawn attention in recent months for the mountain of cash (as opposed to stocks) held by his fund. The firm’s holdings of cash and treasury bills have grown from $189 billion (£150 billion) to $277 billion (£220 billion) while it halved its holding in Apple. Buffet’s cash pile is so enormous that he could buy McDonald’s and have $80 billion (£63 billion) to spare. Did the ‘Oracle of Omaha’ predict the future? Given he grew a similar (though smaller) pile in the mid 2000s, it doesn’t seem like good news for stock market investors.
If those of us who aren’t economic oracles have learned anything this week, it’s that the economic picture is mixed. Some economists are calling for calm – pointing out that the staggering gains in tech stocks over the past few years were probably overvalued – while others say the worst is yet to come. What’s clear is that another wave of economic uncertainty has hit, which will have consequences – especially for Rachel Reeves. The Chancellor’s plan for growth is heavily pinned on making Britain a hub for investment again, but that seems unlikely when the leaders in the field are fleeing investment for the security and – low rewards – of cash. And fears of an American recession will not help forecasts at home. Those wondering why Reeves has seemed unable to move on from her Tory-bashing campaign mode have their answer.
Elon Musk’s battle with Labour continues
As if the new Labour government doesn’t already have its work cut out trying to get a handle on riots breaking out across the UK, it is also engaged in an ongoing fight with Elon Musk. The US entrepreneur appears to have taken a rather lot of interest in Britain this week – and he’s not pulling any punches when it comes to Starmer’s army. Wading into the ‘two tier policing’ argument, Musk started tagging Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Twitter, blasting him as ‘#TwoTierKeir’ and suggesting that the UK government is overstepping in its criticism of those who incite violence online. ‘Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’ he fumed about the news that the first person in the UK to be charged with stirring up racial hatred on Facebook will appear in court next week.
And now it appears Elon has turned his attention to lefty Labour backbenchers. On Thursday evening, it emerged that new Labour MP Lauren Edwards had made some rather controversial Twitter posts in the past – with a selection of online comments made between 2009 and 2011 dredged up. In one from June 2009, the now-MP for Rochester and Strood wrote: ‘I want these f***ing Estonian r*tards out of my flat now!’. In another from 2011 Edwards talked about giving a homeless man a ‘massive elbow to the ribs’ after he ‘deliberately barged’ her. The Labour MP took to social media to apologise for her past ramblings, telling her followers:
I have recently been made aware of a small number of tweets that I posted on Twitter from over a decade ago which I now deeply regret. They were a significant error of judgement on my part, and I apologise wholeheartedly. Since becoming a local councillor, and more recently an MP, I have seen firsthand the importance of bringing communities together and working with tolerance and respect for all in our society. I pledge to use my platform to continue that important work and dedicate myself to serving all residents of Rochester and Strood.
But Edwards’s apology didn’t quite manage to, er, calm the furore. If anything, her old tweets were amplified even more – not of course helped by the fact that Twitter’s owner reposted a damning screenshot to his 193 million followers. Mr S previously thought a tech billionaire may be too busy to target random Labour backbenchers – but it seems Musk’s war on Labour is only getting started…
The SNP still has no ‘plan B’ for Scotland’s economy
Scottish independence has always been economic lunacy, but rarely has that reality been exposed as well as by Alistair Darling. Ten years ago this week, the Better Together chief faced off against the then SNP leader Alex Salmond, quizzing the former first minister about what he would do if the UK government refused to let Scotland use the pound post-secession. A decade on, it is striking how the SNP has failed to learn from that ruthless exchange – and still has no ‘Plan B’ for Scotland’s economy.
Extraordinarily, the SNP’s position on currency has not evolved in any meaningful way since Darling challenged Salmond over it ten years prior.
Taking part in the first TV debate of the independence referendum campaign on 5 August 2014, Darling – who passed away in late 2023 at the age of 70 – ruthlessly and relentlessly revealed the fiscal fallacy offered by the Yes campaign. In front of a live TV audience and over 750,000 viewers at home, Darling challenged Salmond on what his ‘Plan B’ would be if an independent Scotland couldn’t maintain a formal currency union with the UK. In response, an increasingly rattled Salmond could only offer bluff and bluster, and by the end of the exchange most viewers saw him as a nationalist grifter who would gamble their economic future if it meant getting independence over the line. As the campaign continued, Salmond’s failure to adequately answer Darling’s ‘Plan B’ challenge came to symbolise wider concerns about the economic uncertainties of independence.
TV debates are a much – and generally correctly – maligned feature of modern British politics, but this particular exchange helps both to explain why the nationalists were defeated in 2014, and why, ten years later, they have still failed to gain any ground. During the referendum campaign, the SNP centred the economic arguments for independence on Scotland’s abundance in fossil fuels. With the oil price hitting $110 a barrel in 2013, it was argued that the North Sea would not just be the bedrock of an independent Scotland’s economy, but the treasure chest that would fund a vast expansion of the kind of universal benefits people in Scotland have become accustomed to under devolution. As an independent country, Scotland would, in effect, become a more liberal Saudi Arabia.
Public doubts about this proposition emerged in earnest in mid-2014, as the oil price began a steep decline and Scotland’s notional budget deficit began to look more Argentinian than Arabian. As the September vote neared, big business also became increasingly concerned about the potential impacts of separation and some firms publicly (but many more privately) made contingency plans to move their headquarters elsewhere in the event of a Yes vote. In such an atmosphere, the public began to look at many of the Yes campaign’s claims – such as setting up an entire diplomatic function, with embassies around the world, for a mere £90 million – with growing scepticism.
Darling’s debate performance brought all these concerns together into a two-minute salvo from which the Yes campaign never recovered. This undoubtedly helped to contribute to Better Together’s victory on 18 September of that year. But what is more astonishing still is the SNP’s failure to address the lack of a ‘Plan B’ to this day. Extraordinarily, the SNP’s position on currency in an independent Scotland has not evolved in any meaningful way since Darling challenged Salmond over it ten years prior. The party still has no real answer to his question. Meanwhile, the SNP’s volte face on oil and gas and its much-publicised opposition to new licences in the North Sea makes the wider economic case for independence more incoherent than ever before.
Amid such ideological idiocy and indolence, it is little surprise that the cause of independence is floundering. The number of people in Scotland who support separation has hardly shifted since 2014, with most polls reflecting the same 55-45 split as a decade ago. More problematically still, independence continues to slide down the list of Scottish voters’ priorities. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is undoubtedly the SNP’s abject failure to address the core flaws in its proposition that were so brutally exposed by Darling in 2014. More than a decade on, the SNP’s problem is still that it has no ‘Plan B’.
The everyman immortality of Jack Karlson
Jack Karlson, whose death this week aged 82 has been reported in Britain and around the world, was an Australian small-time crook, prison escaper and colourful character who had a tough and difficult life. He was also, however, the reluctant star of a 1991 TV news report that later became an internet sensation.
Back then, Karlson was having a bite to eat in a local Chinese café in suburban Brisbane, when, like Monty Python’s Spanish inquisition, a posse of Queensland police suddenly and unexpectedly swooped to arrest him. Thanks to a tip-off to a journalist, it was all captured on camera.
Imagine a stubbled Brian Blessed in a half-buttoned polyester shirt, caught in the middle of a police scrum
According to the news report, Karlson was being followed by ‘an American Express investigator’ who had identified him as a suspected credit card fraudster. The investigator called in the police, who came in numbers to apprehend Karlson and inadvertently gave him internet immortality.
To say that Karlson did not come quietly is an understatement. His bundling into a police car by half a dozen burly constables, and an off-duty detective, has become the stuff of legend. That Karlson himself had a deep, stentorian and highly theatrical voice booming from his rumpled, larger-than-life, Falstaffian figure added to the spectacle. Imagine a stubbled Brian Blessed in a half-buttoned polyester shirt, caught in the middle of a police scrum.
Looking over the roof of the car at the TV camera, policemen struggling to contain, let alone restrain him, Karlson gave the performance of his life. ‘What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?’ Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!,’ he boomed with a rolled-r flourish that can’t be replicated in print: it simply has to be watched.
Then Karlson pointed at one of the coppers: ‘see that chap over there?,’ he bellowed, before demanding (he later admitted without foundation) that the policeman ‘get your hand off my penis!’. It was only then that Karlson was finally subdued and taken away to the local ‘cop shop.’
What of the ‘succulent Chinese meal’? In the news report, an interviewing detective remarked on Karlson having a flair for amateur theatricals and labelled him ‘a prolific false pretender’. In labelling his Chinese meal as ‘succulent,’ Karlson certainly was pretending with a heavy dollop of irony – Australian suburban Chinese cafés are legendary for their cheap but bland and tasteless food, often with the consistency of soggy cardboard.
Karlson was bailed – although years later he suggested that he actually skipped bail and absconded yet again from custody – and to the end of his life insisted that the whole thing was a matter of mistaken identity.
Whether it was or not, the man born Cecil George Edwards was never charged. He died this week having dined off his 1991 dining misadventure ever since his first online notoriety almost twenty years ago. Indeed, in the past month Karlson, and one of his arresting officers – with whom, in the tradition of Australia’s original convict settlement, Karlson had become great mates – had been doing the Australian media rounds to promote a new documentary about the incident, and Karlson’s hardscrabble life.
Some of those presenters, like the hosts of breakfast programme Today, patronisingly treated Karlson and the episode as a huge joke. But that attitude misses a key point about why the incident still resonates with many. The heavy-handed and over-the-top police restraint of Karlson, and that his arrest turned out to be unjustified, strikes a chord with viewers of the online clip. This is particularly the case for those who felt the forceful hand of authority on their own shoulders in Australia’s excessively repressive Covid years, and consider their lives blighted by the two years when the country became a byword for lockdowns, curfews, and ordinary Australians being denounced, and even humiliatingly arrested, if they resisted.
Many in Australia, and no doubt others around the world, relate Karlson’s televised moment of infamy to their own harsh experiences of governments’ authoritarian Covid responses: for a time, we were all Jack Karlson. This put-upon Aussie battler was transformed by this one experience into an Everyman, and that is the key to his immortality as an online folk hero.
What Liz Truss must learn from Humza Yousaf
Hats off to Humza Yousaf. He knows how give a straight answer. At the Edinburgh fringe, he was quizzed by Matthew Stadlen who asked if he took responsibility for the chaos that led to his resignation as Scotland’s first minister.
‘I frankly f***ed up,’ admits Yousaf. Warm applause greeted this confession, and Stadlen compared his honesty with the more equivocal approach of Liz Truss. ‘It upsets a lot of people,’ said Yousaf, ‘that she’s unable to utter a syllable of contrition. She blames the markets, the Bank of England, and the deep state. We need fewer Liz Truss’s.’
Yousaf argued that the far right are complaining about a migrant crisis that they created
Yousaf is still committed to Scottish independence and he predicts that it will happen during his lifetime, although he won’t say when. He argues that ‘around 50 per cent’ of Scots still support the policy and he rejects the idea that Scotland’s economy will suffer. ‘Independence makes you wealthier and fairer,’ he said. ‘No country that ever left Britain has ever wanted to come back.’
Stadlen asked him about wrecking centuries of shared identity and turning English people into ‘foreigners’ in Scotland. ‘What’s wrong with being a foreigner?’ said Yousaf. Stadlen pursued the point and asked him ‘what’s good’ about estranging the English from their Scottish neighbours. Yousaf advised him to remove himself from the discussion. ‘It doesn’t hinge on what you think about independence.’
During the 2014 referendum, it emerged that many Scots cherish their British identity and don’t want to let it go. Yousaf said that their attitude was wrong. ‘We’re not damaging or threatening British identity,’ he insisted.
Yousaf couldn’t explain why he wants open borders internationally while hoping to build a new frontier between Scotland and England. Although he praised multiculturalism, he seemed curiously fixated with the ethnic origins of other politicians. He referred to Rishi Sunak as ‘the Hindu prime minister’ and to Sadiq Khan as ‘the Muslim mayor of London.’ No other European capital would elect a Muslim as mayor, he said. That sounded like a snub to the European Union which he said he greatly admires.
He gave an intriguing account of his appointment as first minister. On the evening of 14th February, 2023, Nicola Sturgeon called him at home and told him she planned to resign. Would he take her job? This bombshell led to two days of agonised discussion between Yousaf and his wife as they talked through the pros and cons of the opportunity. She made her priorities clear. ‘Do not ever forget my expectations of you as a husband and father.’ When he accepted the job, she imposed the ground rules that dominated his timetable. He wasn’t allowed to be absent from home for more than three nights on the trot, and he had to show up every Monday evening to feed and bathe the children.
As a father, he said, he found the recent unrest across Britain profoundly disturbing. He has even considered leaving the UK. ‘I’m aware that this would let the racists win … but I’m first and foremost a husband and father.’ He added that ‘every single Muslim I’ve spoken to is thinking the same thing.’ Stadlen asked what message he had for other Muslim.
‘Allyship is imperative because the far-right are in the minority. The majority believe that diversity is our strength,’ said Yousaf. He called for a bold statement from Number 10. ‘I’ve never heard a prime minister make a speech about the positive benefits of immigration,’ he said. His memory may be faulty on this point but he advised Keir Starmer to state clearly that ‘immigration is good and necessary’.
Yousaf said the riots were caused by ‘decades of institutionalised Islamophobia … and X which is a cesspit of disinformation’. His solution to the crisis is rather vague. He says that ‘desperate’ migrants are crossing the channel because all legal routes have been closed. And he’s appalled that migrants who work in old people’s homes ‘are not allowed to bring their loved-ones over’.
Stadlen suggested that immigration is too high. ‘No,’ said Yousaf. Immigration should be ‘sensible’ and determined by local needs. Every sector of the Scottish economy has vacancies, he said, and these can be filled by migrants or by our own people. We just have to train them.
Stadlen asked what he would say to angry British voters, mired in debt, whose local hotel is full of asylum-seekers. Yousaf replied that their anger was misdirected. ‘Migrants didn’t crash the economy. Migrants didn’t fail to build council houses. And migrants didn’t take us out of the EU.’
All three policies happen to be associated with Conservative governments. This was a very nifty bit of footwork. Yousaf argued that the far right are complaining about a migrant crisis that they created.
On Israel/Palestine, he said that he supports the arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. And he deplored the arming of Israel. ‘It’s one of the best armed countries in the world.’ Stadlen dug a little deeper: ‘Should all arms shipments to Israel stop?’ ‘Yes,’ said Yousaf. ‘You don’t make a country safer by killing civilians.’
Stadlen finished by asking if he wants to revive his career as first minister. ‘No,’ came the answer. Yousaf is undecided about standing for Holyrood in 2026. For the future, he imagines himself, ‘tackling the far right on a global level. I’m always happy to advise.’
It’s easy to guess what this means. The United Nations.
We oldies can’t help but think of death
I used to think a lot about Switzerland and how to accrue enough morphine to top myself when the time comes. But yay, at last, an assisted dying law seems likely and I can stop plotting.
No one talks about death. But oldies think about it all the time, not deliberately – it just inserts itself into everything. I’d like to write another trilogy, but will I finish it? Doubt if I’ll last through novel 1, never mind 2 and 3. When the garden centre chap tells me to buy tiny saplings and avoid 15-foot trees which will likely die, I know I’ll be dead before the three-footers look anything like a copse. But he quotes the ancient Greek proverb, ‘Society thrives where wise men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit’. So, now we now have a young orchard, a mini-copse and lots of trees mostly hidden by their tree-guards.
One answer to this might be to have Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on your back and chest
Every day, confronting my wall of necklaces and earrings, I think I should be getting rid of some of them, not adding to them. (But ‘not needing’ is not the same as ‘not wanting’ is it?) Every time I slap a hormone patch on my bum, I think of my doc telling me (not because she believes it, but she needs to cover her back) that continuing with HRT in my eighties could be the death of me. I’ve been on it since my forties and thank it for my energy and generally upbeat attitude. If I die, I die, but it’s been a good life.
Other frequent thoughts are: how many more summers have I got? Can I risk signing another TV contract? How will I bear it if John goes before me? How long will I be able to climb these stairs? Am I leaving my affairs in reasonable order?
The last is the only serious one really. You do need to leave life with crystal clear instructions, with everyone knowing what’s in your will. You don’t want to cause nasty surprises or family fall-outs. I wrote a will 12 years ago and a file for my offspring, about finances, leases, mortgage, passwords, etc. But in 12 years, things have changed a lot: siblings have died, we moved house, I re-married, sold my house, grandchildren were born… So the lesson is, yes, write a will, but review it every five years.
My children will get what’s left of my lolly which won’t be much after what I hope will continue to be a spendthrift, merry old age. But I also plan to leave a bit to six charities that I have cared about for years. Deciding who gets what and how much took a bit of serious thought, and selfishly, I decided to restrict myself to the organisations which have given me the most satisfaction working with them. One is the Royal Society of Arts, which I once chaired and which has been plugging the holes in society since 1754. Then there is the Soil Association, which runs Food For Life, teaching children to love healthy food, and schools and other organisations to serve good food. They also help farms to go organic, caterers to serve sustainable food, and badger governments to back nature-friendly food and farming. Charities don’t pay inheritance tax. And you can feel your halo glowing warmly.
I’ve also been sorting out all those things I really don’t want to think about, like organising an LPA (Lasting power of Attorney) so my children can manage my affairs when I’m incapable of doing it myself, and writing a ‘Living Will’ or ‘Advance Instruction’ about how to treat me, or more important, not treat me, when I’m gaga or speechless or dying.
But where to put this? Your lawyer, doctor and children should have copies I guess, but frankly they are unlikely to be there at the critical moment. My 97-year-old mum, Peggy, was quietly dying with Alison, her carer (who knew her wishes) holding her hand as she lay peacefully in bed. At that moment the nursing assistant assigned to help put her to bed at 6 p.m. arrived, realised at once from Mum’s laboured breathing that she was dying, and promptly ran for the phone to call 999. Mum’s carer called to stop her, trying to tell her Peggy didn’t want to be kept alive, but the poor woman, trained to save life, was determined, and Alison didn’t want to leave Peggy to wrest the phone from her hand. So the ambulance was called. But my mama, an actress who knew her exits and her entrances, died minutes before the paramedics arrived.
Whew. Too many old people are kept alive by a system designed to save life at all costs, even if it means repeated dashes to hospital, often violent resuscitations, more stays in hospital when they just want to be at home. One answer to this might be to have Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on your back and chest, but that seems a bit extreme. Better might be, I think and hope, to belong to the Lions Club, a charity with a simple solution: they provide a little bottle you keep in your fridge with your medical details, and instructions to resuscitate or not, inside. Paramedics are trained to look for the Lions Club Logo on a sticker by your front door, and know to look in your fridge. Of course, all this sorting and planning doesn’t make the grim bits of old age go away, but it helps on the peace of mind front. I recommend it.
In praise of the Olympic champ stamp
As a confirmed critic of modern tattoos, who sounded off in these very pages about the ugly plague of body tats infesting our streets, I might be expected to disapprove of the latest manifestation of the fashion – the habit of many athletes taking part in the Paris Olympics to adorn themselves with the distinctive five interlocking rings of the Games’ logo: what I’m calling the ‘champ stamp’.
In fact, the athletes have such beautiful bodies – young, toned and fit – and the rings themselves have such a pleasing symmetry that I can only approve and applaud the discreet addition of the logo to their rippling musculatures. As they spring into action on the racing track or diving board, these athletes do not remotely resemble the ambling lumps of Stilton cheese who mostly sport contemporary tattooing.
The logo on the Olympians is more akin to the war wounds of the Agincourt veterans lauded by the King in Shakespeare’s Henry V, who strip their sleeves to show their scars in their dotage as a way of saying ‘We were there upon St Crispin’s Day’. They, like the medals they win, are a proud badge of honour to show future grandchildren.
The logo, like the modern Games themselves, is the brainchild of France’s Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Ancient Greek Olympics in the 1890s to encourage fitness and sportsmanship and (as an unspoken by-product), to prepare and toughen up his fellow Frenchmen for the coming war with Germany that he knew was coming. In 1913, on the eve of that war, the Baron first sketched out the rings of the logo in a letter, explaining that their five colours represented the five continents that had already joined his Olympics movement.
In fact, de Coubertin drew much of the inspiration for his Olympics ideal from Britain’s public schools, which had made an almost religious cult of games and sporting prowess. His major hero was Thomas Arnold, head of Rugby School, as portrayed in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who exemplified the amateur spirit he admired. It was taking part in games, rather than actually winning them, that counted. Such a spirit was also expressed in another British literary work, Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitae Lampada’, with its repeated refrain to ‘play up, play up and play the game’.
Historians are divided on whether the Ancient Greek Olympians were really gentlemanly amateurs as Coubertin liked to believe, or (like their contemporary counterparts in Paris) were actually determined sweaty professionals bent on winning at all costs. Along with their medals, the athletes who have marked themselves with their Olympic champ stamps will be taking home, a lasting badge of pride and honour that the old Baron himself may well have approved.
A tip for Britain’s richest flat handicap
York’s famous Ebor meeting will be here before we know it and trainer William Haggas will be attempting to plunder many of its top races with his talented string. Although his stables are in Newmarket, Haggas is a Yorkshireman and so he particularly enjoys seeing his runners win at the course which lies some 40 miles from his birthplace of Skipton.
The race that Haggas targets with relish each year is the Sky Bet Ebor Handicap, which is the richest flat handicap run in Britain and has a prize of £300,000 for the winner. The contest on Saturday 24 August is over a distance of one mile six furlongs and for a maximum field of 22 runners so, with a fast pace all but guaranteed, stamina is of the essence.
Haggas has already revealed that NAQEEB is being targeted at this race and, after four races since the beginning of May, this four-year-old gelding looks to be running into form at just the right time. His last run when second to Temporize at Newbury offered plenty of encouragement and the fact that the horse has good form over two miles is a plus.
It is slightly worrying that Naqeeb’s only run at York saw him tailed off in the Group 2 Boodles Yorkshire Cup but that run was simply too bad to be true and I am happy to put a line through it.
As always in this hot handicap, there will be dangers aplenty, including those horses trained in Ireland, and there will be more places on offer on the day from bookmakers, particularly from the race sponsors. However, I am happy to take the 16-1 offered now by Sky Bet on Naqeeb, with five places each way, because the horse is surely going to be shorter on the day.
I am certainly hoping Haggas can continue his rich vein of form for another couple of weeks. He has his string in rude health: 16 of his 38 runners over the past fortnight have won for a remarkable strike rate of 42 per cent.
A trip to York racecourse – known affectionately as ‘The Knavesmire’ – comes highly recommended for those who have never been. Just a two-hour train journey from London, it’s a stunning track with a wonderful atmosphere, while the York Tap has to be one of the best station pubs in the country too.
I have already put up a second bet at York in the form of Ghostwriter for the Group 1 Juddmonte International Stakes on Wednesday 21 August so the beautifully-bred Naqeeb is my second and last ante-post tip for the meeting.
As for this weekend’s fare, I am a great fan of tomorrow Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup meeting in terms of the course staging a fun day out and also, hopefully, encouraging more people to sample the sport of horse racing. Many racegoers come as much for the after-meeting concert as the horses but, if they enjoy their day out at a racetrack and come again, sobeit.
However, the nature of the Shergar Cup with teams of jockeys from all over the world competing in a team-format and drawing horses at random in the six races makes things fiendishly difficult for punters.
I am convinced that trainer David O’Meara’s New Image is a horse that is going to be running well in some of the big one-mile handicaps of this season and next. However, his odds of around 3-1 favourite, are plenty skinny enough for the last race on tomorrow’s card, the Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup Mile (4.30 p.m.).
As regular readers of this column will know, I never mind backing a veteran horse because their odds are often bigger than their chances of winning. I have to admit that a bet on BLESS HIM is far from guaranteed to be a winning one but this 10-year-gelding loves Ascot’s straight course and good ground. Furthermore, he will have every help from the saddle from young Billy Loughnane.
Bless Him’s recent form leaves something to be desired but his first run of the season, back in May when third in the 21-runner Victoria Cup at Ascot off a mark of 98, gives him a definite chance tomorrow off a mark of just 95.
With his hold-up style of running, Bless Him needs a fast pace to be at his best but that’s likely in a race of this nature with lots of international jockeys . Back him each way at 12-1 with William Hill to get the four places on offer.
My only other recommendation for the other five races at Ascot is to keep stakes small if you do have to have a bet and simply to enjoy the unusual spectacle that this unique meeting provides.
Pending:
1 point each way Bless Him at 12-1 for the Shergar Cup Mile, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Ghostwriter at 20-1 for the Juddmonte Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Naqeeb at 16-1 for the Ebor Handicap, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.
Last weekend: – 1 points.
1 point each way Super Superjack at 13-2 for the Coral Goodwood Handicap, paying 1/5th odds, 7 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Blue For You at 16-1 for the Coral Golden Mile, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Darkness at 15-2 for the Coral Golden Mile, paying 1/5th odds, 6 places. 4th. + 0.5 points.
1 point each way Euchen Glen at 16-1 for the Coral Summer Handicap, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. 4th. + 2.2 points.
1 point each way Rowayeh at 10-1 for the Coral We’re Here For It Handicap, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. 3rd. Rule 4 deduction of 35p in the £. + 0.3 points.
2024 flat season running total + 8.4 points.
2023-4 jumps season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
- My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 15 of the past 17 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 517 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a ‘point’ is your chosen regular stake).
The problem with pintxo
Visiting San Sebastián last month, I was reminded of the joys and hazards of grazing. The speciality in this chic city, and throughout Spain’s northern Basque region, are pintxos – miniature open sandwiches topped with everything from chorizo and padrón peppers to anchovies and baby eels. Pintxoing, as I’ll call it, becomes almost like a game in San Sebastián’s labyrinthine Old Town, in which the regional delicacies are colourfully displayed in bar-top glass cabinets. The goal is to eat enough pintxos to keep hunger at bay, but not so many that you don’t have room for one more. You’re never starving, but the flipside is that you’re never entirely satisfied, either.
About ten minutes passed before I finally caught the eye of a barman, glaring intently at me from inside his castle of pintxos
It’s easy to assume that grazing will always be cheaper than a sit-down meal – and in some cities in Andalucía, especially the tapas capital of Granada, that is true. But that principle doesn’t quite hold in San Sebastián, Spain’s third most expensive city. Widely regarded as the country’s top culinary destination, it ranks third in the world for Michelin stars per capita (after Luxembourg and Kyoto). Prices average about €15 for two beers or glasses of wine and two pintxos, which quickly mounts up – especially as you need quite a few of them to feel full.
Bar Sport has been one of my favourites ever since I first wandered in 2017: it has great service, reasonable prices and good food. I also love Gorriti Taberna, which has several of the characteristics by which you can always identify a proper local hangouts: a retro Coca-Cola sign on which the bar’s name appears in white letters, a till that looks like it’s been poached from a museum and a floor covered with used napkins. Also popular with locals is noisy Danena Taberna, which serves what must be San Sebastián’s cheapest glass of wine (€1.50) and is famous for its huge squid sandwiches (bocadillos de calamares). It also has one of the Old Town’s few outdoor terraces.
The pintxo order form sounds like (and perhaps is in some places) an easy and helpful system, especially if you don’t speak Spanish: each pintxo is described and numbered in the display cabinets, so you simply tick how many of which you want on the form and hand it in. But in the bars I visited that have converted to the form, there wasn’t much evidence of streamlining.
Take, for example, another of my favourites, Bar Casa Alcalde, which was, the last time I visited in 2018, a form-free zone. The choice in this place is overwhelming – a fortress of pintxos that looks like it could keep a tank out. After perusing the cabinets, my friend and I submitted our requests and went to stand at a little round table. About ten minutes passed before I finally caught the eye of a barman, glaring intently at me from inside his castle of pintxos. He impatiently pointed to our drinks and snacks on the bar, as if they’d been there, awaiting collection, for hours. I went up, resisting the very British urge to apologise for not having acted as my own waiter, and he took my payment without a word or smile.
In another establishment, I started ordering drinks at the bar, only to be told that they, too, could be acquired via the form. But we’d already submitted those, so I ended up using the old-fashioned face-to-face method anyway. Several other tourists were also hanging around, meekly waving their forms at passing waiters as if in surrender. Our pintxos (a crab bisque and giant pork scratching) were eventually brought to our table, but not at the same time and without cutlery. Procuring a spoon – as the bisque steadily cooled – was a long, drawn-out ordeal.
We rounded off two days of pintxoing in the tiny Bar Txepetxa, which specialises in anchovy toppings and has so far also resisted the form. It was here that I finally reached my grazing limit. Almost gagging on foie gras and anchovies, my stomach shrunk to half its normal size. I had to admit defeat for this year: another stuffed but happy victim of San Sebastián’s version of the hunger games.
Labour’s trophy hunting ban is confused
Labour’s election manifesto promised to ban the importation of hunting trophies. This is part of a campaign spearheaded by animal rights activists in Britain. It is well-intentioned, and driven by a wish to protect endangered species. But it just happens to be entirely counterproductive.
Trophy hunting, when properly managed, supports wildlife conservation. It generates revenue for habitat protection and anti-poaching efforts, makes people want to protect wildlife and supports local communities. In fact, most trophies are imported from countries with stable populations of hunted species, including South Africa, Namibia, and Zambia.
It is condescending for rich British activists to tell African countries how they are meant to manage conservation and development. As Shylock Muyengwa, of communities charity Resource Africa, has said: ‘Colonialism is over – yet British politicians still forget to respect the will of African communities. We should be viewed as partners in conservation, not as British subjects that are forced to adhere to policies that please the British public who don’t have to live alongside elephants, lions or other dangerous animals.’
In response to efforts to ban the trade, Botswana’s environment minister Dumezweni Mthimkhulu threatened to send 10,000 elephants to Hyde Park earlier this year.
It is condescending for rich British activists to tell African countries how they are meant to manage conservation and development
‘I hope if my offer of elephants is accepted by the British government, they will be kept in London’s Hyde Park because everyone goes there’, Mthimkhulu said. ‘I want Britons to have a taste of living alongside elephants, which are overwhelming my country.’
But there’s another reason why the new Labour government – who have made a big song and dance about complying with international agreements – should be hesitant about proceeding with the policy. My new paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Elephant in the Room, shows how Labour’s ban contradicts global agreements that already manage the legal and sustainable trade in hunting trophies.
A multilateral agreement is already in place to judge whether species are threatened and, if they are, to put measures in place to mitigate this threat. The UK has been a party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) since its launch in 1976. Endangered animals require special export permits, strict assessments that the trade is not detrimental to their survival, and proof of legal purchase. With more than 180 countries participating, this convention is a widely accepted international initiative.
Importantly, the agreement recognises countries’ sovereignty in making decisions about exports. An import ban would undermine the UK’s position. If the UK is to respect the role of other parties, it should accept export permits for hunting trophies for CITES-listed species.
A trophy import ban would also undermine the new Labour government’s ‘commitment to greater multilateral action’, as they write in their manifesto manifesto, as well as their view that ‘multilateral institutions remain indispensable.’
This should include supporting the UK’s role as a party of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its current Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF says countries must ‘ensure that the use, harvesting and trade of wild species is sustainable, safe, and legal’ and ‘ensure that the management and use of wild species are sustainable, thereby providing social, economic, and environmental benefits for people’.
Banning the import of hunting trophies would be an illiberal measure that contradicts the UK’s commitment to trade liberalisation and to the CITES measures to promote sustainable and legal trade of wild species. It would be an anti-conservation measure that undermines the ability of exporting countries and their local communities to benefit from the sustainable use of their wild species.
Rather than banning the import of hunting trophies, Labour should work with other countries and support the sustainable and legal trade of hunting trophies.
Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont escapes arrest – again
There was something fitting about the name of the thoroughfare in which Carles Puigdemont was welcomed back to Barcelona on Thursday. Cheering supporters lined el Passeig de Lluis Companys as the former president of Catalonia arrived back in the city after almost seven years of self-imposed exile.
In 1939, seeing that General Franco’s troops were about to enter Barcelona, Companys, another former president of Catalonia, fled to France. Captured near Nantes by the Gestapo, he was returned to Spain where he endured five weeks of torture. A court martial lasting less than an hour then sentenced him to death. Refusing to wear a blindfold, Companys stood barefoot before the firing squad so that he could die touching the soil of his beloved homeland. ‘Per Catalunya!’ (‘For Catalonia!) he shouted as the Civil Guards opened fire. The cause of death was given as ‘traumatic internal haemorrhage’. Decades later as democracy was restored, numerous streets and plazas in Catalonia were named ‘Lluís Companys’ in his honour.
Thursday’s events look set to cause major problems for Spain’s national government
Nearly eighty years later, hidden in the boot of a car to escape arrest, Puigdemont fled to Belgium in 2017 after leading the region’s illegal push for independence from Spain. It was the general election held in July last year that finally gave him a chance to return. Although the vote for his separatist party declined significantly, the parliamentary arithmetic was providential: if Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s incumbent left-wing prime minister, was to cling onto power he would need the seven votes of Puigdemont’s separatist party, Junts per Cataluyna. The price Puigdemont exacted for those seven votes was a general amnesty for several hundred people accused of criminal activities during Catalonia’s secession push, including the illegal declaration of independence in 2017.
Most of the charges against Puigdemont are covered by that amnesty. However, last month Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that Puigdemont and others had had no right to use public funds to finance their illegal push for independence. They considered that the misuse of public funds is outside the scope of the amnesty law, so the warrant for Puigdemont’s arrest remains in force.
Knowing that, Puigdemont nevertheless appeared in the centre of Barcelona early on Thursday morning and delivered a rousing six-minute speech to some three thousand of his fired-up supporters. And then to national astonishment – this was broadcast live on television – he somehow contrived to disappear, humiliating the many Catalan regional police officers who were standing by waiting to arrest him. Realising their mistake, the police rushed to set up roadblocks. Although they did remember on this occasion to check inside the boots of the cars, they only succeeded in causing massive traffic jams.
At the time of writing, Puigdemont’s whereabouts remain unknown. There were rumours on Thursday afternoon that he was inside the Catalan parliament building and would appear in time to vote on the investiture of a new President of Catalonia (following the regional elections held earlier this year). But in the event Puigdemont was conspicuous by his absence.
That vote resulted in the election of Salvador Illa, leader of the Catalan branch of Pedro Sánchez’s socialist party, with 68 votes in favour, 66 against, and one vote – Puigdemont’s – not cast. Illa is Catalonia’s first non-separatist president in fourteen years; his promise to concentrate on solving day-to-day problems in the region is good news for Catalans.
But Thursday’s events look set to cause major problems for Spain’s national government. If, as now seems likely, Puigdemont has escaped arrest and leaves the country again, the political ramifications will be enormous. Spain’s right-wing opposition parties are pointing out that there is a warrant for his arrest which had to be executed if possible – and, as everyone could see on Thursday morning, it was entirely possible. The right-wing parties are laying the blame at the door of Prime Minister Sánchez and they are expressing the indignation felt by millions of Spaniards who have never forgiven Puigdemont for leading the illegal push for independence and would dearly like to see him behind bars.
It’s not clear what Puigdemont thinks he has achieved by appearing for a few minutes and then disappearing again. But during his short speech on Thursday morning he repeated one of his favourite ideas: that he, and indeed all Catalans, are somehow the victims of ‘the repressive Spanish state’. The truth however is that Spain today is a modern liberal democracy. If he is ever arrested, Puigdemont’s rights will be respected – he isn’t going to be tortured and then summarily executed.
The truth about two-tier policing in Britain
Does Britain have a two-tier policing system? Accusations that some protesters are treated differently to others have emerged in the wake of this week’s riots and the various counter-protests that have taken place. But while the blame is being directed at Sir Keir Starmer – with Elon Musk tweeting about ‘two-tier Keir’ – questions over the police’s handling of protests must not solely be directed at Britain’s current Prime Minister. Since 2020, I’ve harboured an uncomfortable feeling about the way protests are dealt with – and a sense that something is wrong.
The policing of protests holds up a mirror to society
That year, as lockdown elided into rafts of complex restrictions, I was a fly-on-the-wall at various demonstrations in London, where I was helping feed the homeless. What I saw troubled me deeply.
Central London during the pandemic was surreal. Only two groups of people populated the empty streets: police inhabiting red vans; and hundreds of homeless people. Most had been given hotel accommodation as part of the Covid response but, with day centres shut and many staff from the big homeless charities working from home, all their usual support networks had gone. Volunteers for Under One Sky, a homeless charity, distributed hot meals cooked in a Covent Garden restaurant, receiving jokes and gratitude in return.
Then the Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests began. Young people congregated in Trafalgar Square, up and down Whitehall, outside No. 10 and around parliament. The atmosphere was festive; some sat drinking from cans, and the air was laced with cannabis. It was basically a street party with the police looking placidly on.
I didn’t have a problem with the festive protestors. I felt sorry for those who’d been confined at an age when the need to socialise is visceral and was glad they were enjoying themselves. What did bother me was the blatant contradiction between the government’s edicts to the general population and the exception apparently being made on ideological grounds. As the summer wore on, I decided to attend an anti-lockdown protest to see if the policing style was different.
I’m something of a connoisseur of protests; as a travel writer, I’ve observed demonstrations around the world. I rarely participate, seeing them as a way of getting anthropological insight into a country, a bellwether of national mood and the relationship between people and authority. I’ve witnessed feminist protests in Spain and Portugal, anti-government rage in Albania and the first demonstrations against the totalitarian regime in Syria.
The policing of the anti-lockdown demonstration in September 2020 was so different from that of the BLM protests that it might have well have taken place in another country.
The protestors, predominantly working-class folk feeling the impact of government restrictions, appeared to be largely peaceful. But the atmosphere was tense and the demeanour of the police antagonistic. A nice couple from Surrey explained to me why officers formed lines and then rushed at sections of the crowd; it was a tactic to clear the area.
Later, I watched a lone woman courageously articulating her right to protest as a line of heavily-equipped policemen advanced on her in a way clearly designed to intimidate. They threatened me with arrest for simply taking a photo.
Is it possible that a shift took place in 2020
I left Trafalgar Square seeing my country with new eyes. What I’d witnessed contrasted sharply with the policing of protests embodying the principles of British policing by consent. These required officers to provide ‘absolutely impartial service…without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws’. I’d seen officers smile on carnivalesque protestors during Donald Trump’s 2019 visit and then protectively encircle a small group of counter-protestors being reviled by members of the public. That was impartiality in action.
Is it possible that a shift took place in 2020 when police acquired unprecedented powers during the pandemic? The contrasting policing styles I observed brought to mind events I had witnessed in the Middle East. Syria’s regime tolerated protests about Palestine because they expressed state-approved Arabist sentiments, but had a very different attitude towards gatherings critical of government. The huge military presence at the one I observed sent ordinary Syrians the message: ‘We rule. You submit’.
British policing, by contrast, has traditionally been rooted in egalitarian democratic values, expressed in the formulation ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’. This differs sharply from the model in continental countries where the police operate as a paramilitary force. As an Italian friend told me: ‘In Italy, when you see a policeman, you expect trouble’. Two-tier policing goes hand in hand with an overbearing attitude towards the public. It’s a sign loyalties lie elsewhere, with government, ideology or popular trends.
Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s response to a question about two-tier policing. Attitudes to journalists are an indicator of attitudes to the wider public; the commissioner’s manhandling of a reporter’s microphone was a world away from the courteous engagement of the two Met commissioners I interviewed in the early 2000s. Dismissive and aggressive, Rowley’s actions recall the crude political culture that prevails in Albania where the prime minister, faced by students protesting impossible conditions, just called them names.
This week’s riots have been a depressing spectacle. But it’s good that an open discussion about double standards in policing is finally taking place. Back in 2020, I went to that lockdown protest in secret – its policing style reflected a wider double standard that was playing out in society. I remain convinced that the policing of protests holds up a mirror to a society. Let’s take a good look at what we see in it.
Is the ‘motherhood penalty’ really behind the UK’s falling birth rate?
Britain is so beset with immediate problems that major issues, ones which could drastically alter our society and the way we live, are being sidelined. One of these is our plummeting birth rate.
The number of deaths in England and Wales could this year exceed the number of births. Our total fertility rate, at 1.49 children per woman and falling, is far below the 2.1 required to sustain population growth.
Ultimately, we don’t know how to get people to have more children
The economic implications are obvious: in the late 1970s, there were four workers for every dependent person. There are now only three and, all other things being equal, this could drop to two by 2050. Welfare is already ballooning; we are spending £138 billion on the state pension, almost £2,000 per UK citizen. More than two-fifths of national health spending in the UK is devoted to the over-65s.
Onward, the think tank responsible for Rishi Sunak’s national service wheeze, has now launched a new campaign with Mumsnet which it hopes can ‘move the dial’. They suggest that women want more children, but the ‘motherhood penalty’, which makes them worse off and less secure in their jobs, is putting them off.
It is true that the gender pay gap widens at the point when women start having children. The latest data show that women aged between 18 and 21 earn 0.2 per cent more than their male counterparts, while those between 40 and 49 earn 10 per cent less.
But too many people look at these figures and leap to superficial conclusions. A third of mothers now work part-time. IFS research has shown men tend to spend longer commuting to work than women, while women tend to retire earlier. Is it really any wonder some earn less, or have lower savings?
Then there’s the polling, referenced by Onward, which indicates ‘impact on career’ or ‘impact on household finances’ are the two ‘biggest’ factors influencing women against having children. Social engineers may love stated preferences, but how many of these respondents would really start, or grow, their families because the government has tweaked the rules around paternity leave or slightly raised statutory maternity pay (SMP)?
Over the last half century, lifestyle changes and career expectations have led more and more women to delay marriage and children. Between 1975 and 2023, the female labour participation rate rose from 57 per cent to 72 per cent. The opportunity cost of having babies has increased substantially, and that’s before you get to the social justice activism, the climate doom-mongering and the endless blogs which bemoan how tough parenting is while lecturing us on the right way to do it.
Why would yet more public spending put this genie back in the lamp? The Japanese government is covering the cost of fertility treatments and offering lump sum payments to new mothers – yet deaths were double the number of births last year. Hungary spends 5 per cent of its GDP on pro-birth measures, but its total fertility rate is only fractionally above our own.
Many argue that affordable childcare or flexible working practices will encourage more women to have babies younger. This is highly doubtful. Yes, it is morally and economically the right choice to liberalise planning in order that 20-somethings aren’t left spending half their post-tax income on a one-bedroom flat in Zone 6. And yes, we should deregulate childcare so that families aren’t forced to spend a third of their disposable income on a product that is too often sub-par. But the taxpayer’s generosity in providing ‘free’ childcare to all parents regardless of means doesn’t appear to have had much impact on our birth rate.
High levels of immigration have helped mask the true scale of our demographic crisis, but it’s a short-term fix when migrants both age themselves and quickly adapt to the native birth rate. Ultimately, we don’t know how to get people to have more children. Maybe it will happen, more likely it won’t. We’ll just have to meet the challenges by shaking up many of our long-held assumptions. We should start now, but it’ll take a far braver prime minister than Keir Starmer to scrap the triple lock, raise the pension age or fundamentally reform the NHS.
Will Ukraine’s Kursk offensive pay off?
For the first time since the Second World War, foreign forces have invaded Russia. As Ukrainian troops push over the border into the Kursk region, Vladimir Putin, with breathtaking lack of irony, denounces this as ‘terrorism’ and a ‘provocation’. But what is Kyiv’s goal?
Previous incursions, largely into the Belgorod region, have been carried out by small units of pro-Kyiv Russia troops, so although they are in practice controlled by HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence, this could be spun as ‘liberation’ by anti-Putin forces. However, these have also been little more than PR exercises: a dash across the border to take some half-defended villages, some selfies, and a hurried withdrawal.
The Kursk offensive is unlikely to penetrate far
The Kursk attack, though, is rather different – not least as it is being conducted by Ukrainian troops, including elements of the relatively elite 22nd Mechanised Brigade and 82nd Air Assault Brigade, equipped with US-made Stryker armoured fighting vehicles. It is also on a much more serious scale, so far involving over a thousand troops and with the apparent goal of holding some territory, at least for a while.
Although the Russians did start delivering disruptive strikes on the Ukrainians’ assembly points around the nearby Ukrainian city of Sumy on the eve of the attack, they seem to have been anticipating a smaller operation. Initially, then, the attackers were only really met by border troops and some smaller units of conscripts. In short order, they pushed some six miles along a 35-mile front, reaching and apparently taking the Russian town of Sudzha.
Despite some inflated description of Sudzha as a ‘city,’ it is a small town which had a population of under 6,000 (comparable to such British metropola as Welshpool and Fort William). However, it has strategic importance as the site of a gas metering station on the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod pipeline through which flows about half of the gas still supplied to Europe.
This may provide one answer to the reason as to why Kyiv has chosen to make this attack now, at a time when it is slowly being ground back by the Russians along the Donbas front to the east. The initial assumption was that it was essentially a bid to panic Moscow into transferring troops from that offensive to the Kursk line. However, that seemed to make little sense: Kyiv’s over-stretched troops are needed there, and Moscow has greater reserves, especially as it can draw on conscript forces – which it cannot send into Ukraine for legal and political reasons – for defence of its own territory.
Of course, Kyiv could always have simply broken the pipeline, but that would have angered Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic. It would also have deprived it of earnings – the irony is that even while at war, Ukraine earns over £600 million a year in transit fees under a deal expiring at the end of this year. Control of Sudzha, granting Ukraine the power to turn the gas supply on and off, might be considered a powerful symbol of its continuing agency, and the need to take it seriously.
That may well be a significant aspect of the operation: changing the narrative. Even though Ukraine has just received long-awaited F-16 fighters and more support is on the way, it has been a hard year and there is a lurking suspicion in Kyiv that there is a growing desire to see it reach some kind of a deal with Russia. Given that, in the current circumstances, this would inevitably mean territorial concessions, there is a desire to dispel any sense that Ukraine is on the ropes.
The Kursk offensive is unlikely to penetrate far. Although flying columns have driven another 20 miles along highways to threaten the small town of Korenevo north-west of Sudzha and the village of Anastas’evka to the north, the prospects of further progress to such targets as Kursk city or the Kursk nuclear power plant (some 50 and 40 miles further, respectively) seem unlikely. Nonetheless, Putin has been forced to declare a state of emergency in the Kursk region, apoplectic ‘turbo-patriot’ online commentators are calling for generals’ heads and the state propagandists are desperately trying to square this attack with their complacent assessments of a week ago. Already, the official media has declared victory six times, yet the incursion continues. Once again, a nimble Ukraine has wrong-footed ponderous Russia.
Yet does this really matter? Time will tell if it was a sensible gamble or not, but those Strykers could have been put to good use in the desperate defence of such Donbas bastions as Chasyv Yar, and already the Ukrainians are losing men and materiel. Taking villages against scattered light forces taken unawares is also a great deal more straightforward that holding them, especially as Russian airpower and Lancet loitering munitions start to take their toll on Ukraine’s supply lines. Call it audacity or call its desperation, but the attack clearly demonstrates that Kyiv felt the need to change the narrative.