Watch: Sunak admits no Rwanda flights will go before election

As election campaigns officially kick off, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is back on the airwaves today just hours after he called a general election. On a wet Wednesday evening, a soaking Sunak called on the British people lend his party their support. The Tories would improve the economy, enhance national security and get tougher on migration, the Prime Minister pledged. And yet when quizzed on his immigration deterrent this morning, the PM’s response didn’t sound all that promising…

On BBC Breakfast, the Prime Minister was pressed on stats that showed record levels of illegal crossings to the UK between January to March of this year in a ‘reality check’ that he had ‘not stopped the boats’. On the specifics of his immigration deterrent, Sunak told viewers that flights to Rwanda would indeed leave in July — but was quick to caveat his promise:

If I’m re-elected as Prime Minister on 5 July, these flights will go. We will get our Rwanda scheme up and running.

And on LBC Sunak was even clearer. Asked whether flights will leave ahead of the 4 July poll, the Tory MP replied: ‘No, after the election.’ How interesting…

It poses a rather significant question about the future of the entire Rwanda scheme altogether. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party announced at the start of the month that it would scrap the Rwanda policy ‘straight away’, and instead focus on hiring specialist investigators to break people-smuggling gangs. Given that Starmer’s army are over 20 points ahead of Sunak’s boys in blue in the polls, unless there are any eleventh hour election miracles, this all looks like the beginning of the end for Rishi’s Rwanda plan — and only a month after it was passed through parliament. Oh dear. It’s not exactly the strongest start to election season…

Watch the clip here: 

Sunak’s summer election gamble is bound to backfire

The general election we’ve all been waiting for has finally been called. The Prime Minister announced the election date – 4 July – in the pouring rain, his suit jacket becoming drenched as he spoke, all while someone blared ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ outside Downing Street. The whole scene was so on the nose, no satirist would have ever thought of staging it. It should be clear already that Rishi Sunak has made a terrible mistake.

The PM has clearly been advised that going early with his election announcement is preferable to being seen to ‘do a Gordon Brown’ and holing up in No.10. The inflation figures yesterday may have also been a factor. But while it’s true that inflation has slowed to 2.3 per cent on the year to April – which marks the lowest headline inflation rate in almost three years – this is hardly something that is going to persuade people to vote Tory.

The inflation stats will not be noticed by anyone who isn’t obsessed with politics already. People will notice inflation lowering when prices seem to be genuinely stabilising for them. This will take longer than the next six weeks to happen. Even if voters feel like inflation really is reducing, they still wouldn’t give a lot of credit to Sunak or Jeremy Hunt for that. 

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

Announcing his snap election so soon after the local elections also looks foolish: the Tories lost more than 470 councillors and control of 10 councils. Many of those councillors will have fought hard for their seats. Had an election been held in May, they could have tried to get out the vote for the Tories in the general election at the same time as they fought in their local contests. But now, having lost their seats, who can blame these campaigners for staying at home?

Perhaps Sunak hopes a summer election might coincide with Brits feeling positive about the future. The European football championships are on during the campaigning period, so the PM might be expecting a boost from people in England who could well be feeling more patriotic than usual.

This looks like wishful thinking, Sport and politics don’t mix well, and it’s hard to see how the thought that ‘England have made it into the quarter finals of a major football tournament’ translates to ‘Perhaps I should vote Conservative after all’. England usually makes the quarter finals of major football tournaments. It also usually loses at this stage. And whether they do so or not has very little bearing on who the country thinks should be in government either way. 

Another reason to go to the country now is that Sunak hopes to pull out the rug out from under Reform UK. This, again, seems like an overly optimistic assessment: Nigel Farage will put himself at the centre of the Reform general election campaign, or he won’t. The timing of the election has little bearing on this. If Farage announces today that he is going to be the face of Reform’s campaign, Sunak is in trouble; if he stays out, he was probably always going to do so anyhow. 

It’s clear that Sunak should have waited until the autumn, probably November, to call an election. Sure, nothing might have changed between now and then, but you never know. Some international crisis could have come along and given him a better chance of hanging on. But by calling it in six weeks’ time, Sunak has virtually guaranteed that Keir Starmer will be the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in a matter of weeks.  

The haphazard way in which the PM has begun the campaign tells us much of what we need to know about how miserable the next few weeks will be for the Tories. Standing in the pouring rain while the New Labour theme tune plays behind you is a terrible look that will haunt Sunak.

Barring a miracle, Sunak is about to lead his party to an historic defeat – perhaps one that changes British politics in a profound way for the next few generations. As far as unforced errors go, this may have been the biggest, most consequential one in the history of British politics.  

It’s time for Nigel Farage to get off the fence

Rishi Sunak’s snap summer election means that Nigel Farage faces a decisive moment. For months if not years, Farage has held back from taking a role in the heat of the political fray. Instead, he has preferred to be a backseat driver to his ally Richard Tice as leader of the Reform UK party he created.

Farage, as his fans claim, has ‘kept his powder dry’ as honorary president of the party, and restricted himself to commenting on politics as a presenter on GB News. He has, at times, seemingly put more effort into helping Donald Trump win back the US presidency than into British politics. The hard graft of building Reform has been left to Tice, who, while he has avoided any egregious errors, lacks Farage’s popular charisma and his appeal as a barnstorming orator.

But now that Sunak has unexpectedly fired the gun for a six-week summer election campaign, Farage’s position as a backseat driver is not sustainable. Farage has vowed to think ‘overnight’ about whether he will be standing for Reform UK. The former Brexit party leader said there was ‘no commitment either way from me at the moment’, but hinted that the Tories are running scared: ‘I met a cabinet minister at a social event on Monday this week, and the venom directed towards me was quite extraordinary, the fear was quite extraordinary.’

The Tories are right to be worried: even Farage’s enemies concede that he is the most consequential politician since Margaret Thatcher. If it had not been for his twenty years on the road campaigning to free Britain from the clammy grip of the EU, David Cameron would not have been forced to call the 2016 referendum, and Brexit would not have happened.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

Then, when it became clear that Theresa May was hell bent on watering down Brexit, Farage created the Brexit Party almost overnight. In doing so, he stormed the 2019 European elections – reducing the Tories to a paltry nine per cent of the poll – and forcing the hapless Mrs May from office.

Now that the Tories have confirmed all Farage’s most dire forecasts by botching Brexit and chaotically governing in a way that does not resemble ‘true blue’ conservatism, Farage has no excuses left: aged 60, he must come out of his well-heeled retirement and rally his troops for one last campaign to take the fight to Starmer and Sunak.

Farage’s active participation in the election campaign would surely boost Reform from their present 12 per cent in the polls to the mid-teens: enough to rout the Tories in many Red Wall seats, and turn a mere defeat into something much more decisive. It would be a just punishment for a party that promised so much but delivered so little for Red Wall voters and others who put their trust in the Tories for the first time.

Reform would not pick up many – if any – seats themselves under Britain’s first-past-the-post system. And, as Farage has himself conceded, Labour is almost certainly on course to win the election: ‘The whole plan for Reform was that it was a six-year plan – fight this election, get ready for when Labour fail, which they will,’ Farage said last night. But that Reform might not return any MPs shouldn’t put Farage off: as he did by holding May’s feet to the fire, Farage can put pressure on the Tories to embrace a more typical conservatism that it has turned its back on in recent years. By leading one more campaign, Farage could lay the ground for the emergence of a new genuinely Conservative party.

‘I think the timing of this general election has quite a lot to do with me,’ said Farage of Sunak’s snap announcement. He’s probably right: by going early, Sunak is banking on Labour – and Reform – being unprepared for the coming fight. But ready or not, it’s time for Farage to get off the sidelines and join the fight.

Don’t blame climate change for the crummy weather

It was climate change wot gave us such a wet and stormy winter – or so you may have gathered from various reports this week. ‘Never ending UK rain made ten times more likely by climate change,’ declared a Guardian headline. ‘Climate change is a major reason why the UK suffered such a waterlogged winter, scientists have confirmed,’ asserted the BBC. There have also been numerous references to a ‘record stormy winter’ – based on it having the highest number of named storms in, er, the nine years since the Met Office started naming storms.

But how much of this reflects reality? The reports were based on the publication of the latest analysis by something called World Weather Attribution – a Netherlands-based initiative which attempts to link particular adverse weather events to climate change, by running climate models. But the report into Britain’s wet and stormy winter also lays out the actual real-world data going back several decades. What does it tell us? That UK winters are getting wetter but also – contrary to what you may have heard asserted in the past few months – less stormy. Depending on what metric you use to measures storminess – the occurrence of 40 knot, 50 knot or 60 knot winds, or an amalgamated measure known as the Storm Severity Index (SSI) – the winter just passed was the stormiest since only 2021 or 2016. By the standards of the 1980s or early 1990s it would have been a calm winter. 

The decline in storminess is all stated in the report, and even makes it into a paragraph in World Weather Attribution’s press release, but seems to have dropped out of the reporting. We hear endlessly about the costs of flooding, but not at all about the savings from the declining incidence of strong winds. 

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

As regards rainfall, an increase is consistent with a warming climate as warm air can contain more moisture – which is why the wettest places in the world tend to be in the tropics rather than the Arctic. But higher rainfall doesn’t necessarily translate into greater flood risk as warmer air also increases evaporation, which promotes the drying-out of ground between rainfall events and means that rain is likely to be falling on less-saturated ground. As for data on actual flows of flood water this tends to be rather sparse, and doesn’t feature in World Weather Attribution’s study. 

But what about the modelling, which gives rise to headlines such as that claiming that the wet winter of 2023/24 was made ‘ten times more likely’ by climate change? As with previous World Weather Attribution studies, the latest one reveals a huge gulf in modelled predictions. One model predicts that the warming of the planet since ‘pre-industrial’ times (by which it means late 19^thcentury) should have increased rainfall intensity on stormy days during the UK winter by 32 per cent, another predicts that it should have decreased intensity by 17 per cent. In this case the real-world observational data suggests that there has been an increase of 35 per cent – higher than any of the models. The study comes up with claim that climate change made rainfall ‘about 20 per cent heavier’ by combining these figures to make an average.

What does the extraordinary spread of predictions in the models tell us? That climate models are not nearly robust enough to allow anyone to quantify the increased risk of winter rainfall in Britain. Indeed, scientists undertaking previous studies for World Weather Attribution have declined to quantify increased risks for this very reason. This does not, however, seem to prevent the media lapping up the headlines which World Weather Attribution feeds them. Sadly few reporters, I fear, may get round to reading the actual reports.

The UK’s archaic court system is not fit for use

When I walked into court on 1 July 2022 to see my rapist Daniel McFarlane receive a sentence for his crimes against me, I expected to feel triumphant. This was my chance for closure. He’d been found guilty and now he would face the consequences. What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was that his defence lawyer Lorenzo Alonzi would use the hearing to launch into a tirade of insults against me – while I had to sit and listen in silence.

Alonzi spoke of how my first-class honours degree and masters with distinction were an ‘injustice’ compared to the fate of my abuser. How we were like ‘chalk and cheese’ in terms of sexual morality, and how really what happened wasn’t a serious crime, but rather a case of McFarlane having ‘fallen in love with the wrong person’. It was played off as a tragic love story, rather than a pattern of sick abuse at the hands of a convicted rapist.

I left court feeling humiliated and traumatised. My rapist had been given a five-year sentence and yet I felt no real sense of justice. I sunk into a depression, wondering if all the vile things Alonzi had said about me were true – was I responsible for the abuse I suffered? My health suffered from the stress and I had to take time away from work.

I knew what had happened to me during the trial wasn’t right. I began reading up on the laws of evidence and the codes of conduct lawyers must abide by in the courtroom. In Scotland, where my case was heard, there are so-called ‘rape shield laws’ in place that prevent vulnerable victims being subject to invasive questioning on their sexual history or their character. Similar laws are also in place in England and Wales. Additionally, lawyers acting in such cases must act in a ‘courteous’ and ‘respectful’ manner.

While my experience at sentencing was probably the worst part of my court ordeal, my cross-examination by Alonzi was also difficult. He’d repeatedly tried to imply I was promiscuous and asked me about other men in my life. The heated questioning culminated in me being accused of having narcissistic personality disorder, despite no medical evidence of such a condition being present. The judge had repeatedly warned Alonzi that his behaviour was in violation of these laws, yet he persisted regardless.

I wrote all of this down in a complaint to the regulatory body, the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, in the hope that action would be taken swiftly. They wrote back to me informing me I’d need my court transcript to corroborate my claims and it was then that I hit my first major hurdle. I had no idea that the transcript of my own case wasn’t freely accessible. The court informed me that the records would cost £100 per hour of court proceedings (not including VAT) and that accessing the whole case would cost me thousands. 

I despaired: how could it be that in a modern democracy, justice and accountability were only for those who could afford it? My next step was the media. I launched a public campaign for free court transcripts in Scotland and subsequently set up a crowdfund to access my own. I was then able to raise the money, get the proof I needed and submit my complaint. The publicity from the crowdfund helped exert additional pressure on the Scottish government, and in May 2023 the then-first minister referenced my campaign in his announcement of a pilot programme for free court transcripts for rape survivors.

My complaint was upheld last month, with Alonzi having been found to have ‘abused his position’ and last week it was revealed that he would have to pay me compensation. As victorious as it feels having taken on the legal establishment by myself – and having won – I still feel a residual anger about how much time, money and effort it took to reach this outcome.

My experience in court is not unique, and countless rape survivors across the country report similarly dehumanising experiences at the hands of the defence. Many defence lawyers are well aware of the rules of evidence yet push the boundaries anyway, hoping to bias the jury. While a judge can ask a jury to disregard things, once something is said it can’t be unheard.

The court system in the UK is archaic and secretive, while outsiders are treated with contempt. It is this institutionalised secrecy which allows for a culture of impunity for lawyers who cross the line. While we now have free court transcripts in Scotland, survivors in England and Wales still face fees of thousands to access theirs. The Open Justice campaign seeks to change this – yet the UK government refuses to engage with it. 

We often bemoan low reporting rates for rape and sexual offences and tend to chastise the victims themselves for not coming forward. Yet can they be blamed for not wanting to partake in a system that cares little for their needs and dignity? If we want rapists behind bars then, while radical action to reform the justice system is certainly needed, it starts by actually listening to the people who have been attacked. 

What will Europe look like in the future?

This year, several articles in mainstream papers have sounded the alarm that the global human fertility rate will soon cross below the point needed to keep the population constant. Anxiety that our species is about to die out seems a bit premature, given that we’re still predicted to add another three billion to the world population before levelling off. Furthermore, these reports always gloss over a key outlier because it undermines the case for our imminent extinction: Africa.

A leading reason that continental Europe is shifting to the political right is popular concern about mass immigration. So I’m putting Europeans and their short-sighted representatives on notice: you folks haven’t seen anything yet.

Forgive the blitz of arithmetic, but these numbers are eye-popping (and thanks to Paul Morland and Edward Paice of the Africa Research Institute and the UN population database). Regionally, Africa’s are the only population projections the UN has steadily been obliged to raise. In 1950, there were 200 million Africans, just over a third of the number of Europeans (550 million). Currently about 1.5 billion, Africa’s population should reach 2.5 billion by 2050 and almost four billion by 2100, when Africans will constitute about 40 per cent of our species, outnumbering Europeans six-to-one.

This is the UN’s ‘medium’ population estimate, which assumes Africa’s birth rate subsides to just below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. But the UN’s ‘high estimate’ envisages Africa’s total fertility rate (TFR) staying above 2.5 and the population rising to 5.4 billion by 2100. By then, some 43 per cent of the world’s under-18s would be African. Demographic momentum would likely ensure the continent’s population keeps growing into the next century.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

During the historic fecundity of the 19th century that facilitated colonialism, the European population doubled. In the same length of time, 1950-2050, Africans will have increased by a factor of ten. Eight African countries will have increased by a factor of 15; Niger – where women still average 6.7 children and the population doubled in the past two decades – by a factor of 25.

Experts regard it as inevitable that as poor countries develop, the birth rate drops. But last year, Africa’s TFR was 4.2, sub-Saharan Africa’s 4.6. This fertility rate has barely changed for 70 years. Africa is not getting with the programme.

Take Nigeria, whose population is expected to rise from 225 million now to about 375 million by 2050, vying with the US to become the third-most populous country in the world. Nigeria still has a TFR of 5.1. Twenty years ago, its TFR was 6.0 – so the decrease in family size has been slow. Yet half the country lives in extreme poverty, one of the highest rates on the continent.

Are elevated birthrates simply due to inadequate provision of contraception? Probably not. For example, in West and Central Africa in 2015, women averaged 5.5 children. But they undershot their desired family size by half a child. They’d rather have had six. Most Africans don’t accidentally have big families. They want big families.

Some 42 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa is under the age of 15. (The same is true for 16 per cent of Europeans: our young are now outnumbered by our elderly.) Africa’s child population is growing faster than the ability to teach them (‘Low-quality teaching is a huge problem and getting worse,’ says the World Bank). Ethiopia’s wealth may have doubled in the past ten years (from a low base) but almost half its population remains illiterate and 40 per cent of its children still don’t complete even primary education.

Neither can the continent keep up with the demand for new jobs. As Paice says: ‘Between 2014 and 2018, almost 20 million young Nigerians sought to join the workforce, but only 3.5 million new jobs were created.’ Africa has the lowest workforce participation of any region in the world.

Never mind climate change; Africa has always been prone to drought and chronic freshwater shortages. Despite repeated prophesies of an African renaissance that never materialises, the continent suffers from poor governance, persistent ethnic conflict and endemic corruption. In middle Africa, three-quarters of the population endures moderate to severe food insecurity. Wouldn’t you consider heading somewhere else?

This massive demographic shift is this century’s most momentous development, yet it’s barely ever discussed. Right on Europe’s doorstep is a fast-rising population of poorly educated, unemployed young people with lousy prospects. The more these desperate people make it to the prosperous West, the more friends and relatives will also be incentivised to try. They all have smartphones, whose pictures of glistening martinis, fast cars and glamorous advertising models are beamed to dusty villages and urban slums. ‘What’s there for us here?’ asked a young Senegalese man trying to convince his parents to let him go to Europe in last weekend’s New York Times. ‘We all have migration in mind.’

This is certain to get ugly. Worthy Euro-crats may lecture their citizenries about the wonders of multiculturalism, but a continent overwhelmed by hundreds of millions if not billions of immigrants from radically different cultures won’t be a happy place. Race will make the situation touchy and politically fraught. The welfare state could collapse as the nationalities at issue tend to be net economic drains. Yes, the West has labour shortages, but with accelerating automation and AI, the workers we’ll most need will be highly skilled.

No one is planning for this. Me, I would scrap the entire asylum system as the relic of an earlier era without cheap international transportation, instant communication and generous welfare benefits, conceived when global population was a quarter of today’s. I’d also scrap the Refugee Convention, the ECHR and any other treaty or law that impedes enforcement of national borders. I’d stop government funding of interfering pro-migration NGOs. The alternative is to accept that Europe as we currently know it is culturally and economically finished. I try to avoid predictions, but this one is sure-fire: absent a populist electoral uprising, European authorities will get serious about border control only once it’s too late. And you know what they’ll say in the online comments, don’t you? ‘It’s already too late.’

Watch Lionel Shriver and demographer Paul Morland discuss more on Spectator TV:

Olive oil was the key to Roman excellence

Owing to a rise in temperature in southern Europe and a reduction in rainfall, the production of olive oil this year may drop by nearly 40 per cent. For the Romans, who ensured that the olive spread all around the Mediterranean, it would have been disastrous.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

Olives were a food, and in its liquid form as oil it was used to light lamps, form a base for medicines and cosmetics, and as a skin moisturiser, cleansing agent, lubricant and contraceptive (Marie Stopes used it in trials and found it 100 per cent successful, whether virgin or extra virgin is not recorded). As an evergreen, it had great spiritual importance as holy anointing oil.

Further, it could be extensively exploited, requiring little work – the tree is as tough as old boots – except in winter when it was harvested. This gave it prime importance for another reason: Romans required revenue to run their empire, primarily to fund their army, and olive production, being so straightforward and olives so much in demand, was extremely profitable.

All this is well illustrated in Lepcis Magna (in modern Libya, part of the Roman province of [north] Africa). The olive presses there were some of the biggest in the ancient world, each one able to produce about 10,000 litres of olive oil in a good year. Since the area seems to have contained around 1,500 such presses (many grouped together), Lepcis alone could in principle produce 15 million litres a year (Rome alone probably needed about 30 million litres p.a.). The problem of destructive rainfall, often dumped in enormous storms, was met with complex systems of flood control walls, terraces, dams, sluices and spillways.

Since olive oil goes rancid after a couple of years, it was also pointless hoarding it. This was to the producers’ advantage, since they had to take profits at once, which gave them a degree of protection against bad years.

No wonder, then, that the agriculturalist Columella described the olive tree as prima omnium arborum, ‘first of all trees’, and Pliny the Elder as ‘an absolute necessity’ (even more than wine).

South Africa’s migrant crisis

It’s called the ‘Reverse Jive’, retracing your steps to where your journey began, and you’ll hear it talked about all over Johannesburg, especially now, with an election next Wednesday and immigration such a hot-button issue.

In Pretoria, the government estimates there are more than three million Zimbabweans, or ‘Zimbos’, living in South Africa. Decades of oppression and mismanagement at home have collapsed the economy and Zimbos form a visible presence in Jo’burg, Durban and Cape Town. And thousands of them have done the Reverse Jive.

Enelise comes from Bulawayo and works the till at my local corner-store and, with me being Zimbabwean and a ‘home boy’, we always chat while I pay. She is 28 and rents a room in a nearby house. One night, on her way home from a party, Enelise was stopped by police looking for illegal migrants. Her accent gave her away as a foreigner and she was unable to produce a work permit. ‘Sometimes they take a bribe,’ she said, ‘Sometimes not.’

She was allowed to pack a bag, then taken into custody and eventually bussed 320 miles north to Beitbridge, the sole crossing between South Africa and Zimbabwe over what Rudyard Kipling called the ‘great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River’.

The bus, she later told me, had 60 or 70 illegals on it. ‘We were processed through the emigration point on the South African side,’ she said. ‘Some had overstayed their visa, but most had no papers. I had given the police a fake name and they accepted it.’

But how did she tell me this, you ask. By phone from Bulawayo? No! Enelise was arrested on a Thursday and was back at her till the next week. ‘Once you cross the bridge, the Zimbabwean authorities ask for your local ID number. Or your passport. They log that, ask what town you are from, and let you go.’ And right there, she said, just outside the customs hall, are the mini-bus taxis or malaisha – slang for ‘we will carry you’ – waiting for business. ‘Eight of us climbed into a malaisha and went back to Jo’burg.’

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

The drivers are known to the authorities on both sides of the Limpopo and pay a bribe to each. Enelise and her fellow travellers had done the Reverse Jive.

Last year, a new Border Management Authority was established including a paramilitary wing tasked with catching those who have jumped South Africa’s 3,000-mile land border, and thousands have been intercepted and sent home. But it’s a fraction of those who get through and the rest will no doubt try again.

But why do so many millions from across the country end up here on its southern tip? Do the maths. Zimbabwe, once the second-most diversified economy in Africa, has a GDP of just £25 billion, equivalent to that of Derbyshire. Rwanda’s is £10 billion and Liberia’s is a third of that. By contrast, South Africa’s economy is worth £320 billion a year including a huge informal sector – tuck shops, market stalls, unlicensed bars – where the poor can at least scratch a living. And with a population of 62 million, largely urban, it’s easy enough to hide.

The best intelligence lies on the ground and, as a journalist, when I want to take stock of how people are thinking or who they might vote for in the election, I visit a beer hall, known locally as a ‘shebeen’. There are hundreds in the black townships around Johannesburg. Some are licensed, others not; they range in size from a living room to an aircraft hangar, but the beer is always cheap. In this land of plenty where so many go to bed hungry, the beer hall is an escape, a place for talking, dancing, gossiping and bumming drinks from a white journalist.

Invariably I will be the only white face in a throng of black South Africans and almost as many migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and all the way north to Sudan. Never have I been singled out or made to feel unwelcome, and speaking the vernacular – no matter how badly – does help. South Africa has the world’s third-highest murder rate and violence can erupt in a flash but I have a security team, all Zulus, who eye the mood and tell me if it’s time to leave.

Black-on-black xenophobia can be an issue, but for the most part people mix freely and I hear about the problems of unemployment, power cuts, taps that often run dry and why some in their twenties plan to vote for the 82-year-old former president Jacob Zuma, who stands accused of embezzling billions. ‘Because no one else is listening,’ they say. Zuma does walkabouts and will drop in at beer halls, whereas other politicians have armed guards just to move from their house to the blue-light convoy that speeds them through the traffic.

In the beer halls over the years, I’ve heard endless accounts of the Reverse Jive. Some have been deported to Malawi a thousand miles and three countries away, others much further, to Burundi, the Congo and Cameroon, only to return. At election time, the round-ups become more aggressive so that voters can see the ruling party is finally getting tough.

Recently Mozambique announced that, on leaving school, young men will need to spend five years in the army, in an effort to defeat Islamic rebels in the north. The result has been an influx of Mozambicans to South Africa, most of them illegal. Not long here, some tell me they’ve already done the Reverse Jive. And it doesn’t only happen in South Africa. Congolese are deported from oil-rich Angola, to no avail. Ethiopians coming to work on fishing boats in Mozambique are sent home, and then make a U-turn.

Ismaël Bakina, who manages the Hope Hostel in Rwanda, where the first of Britain’s asylum transfers will be housed, has been on a PR offensive, insisting that his ‘guests’ will not be under lock and key and are free to go anywhere they want. Well, they want to be in the UK. And if they managed in the first place to get from Bangladesh, Eritrea or Burkina Faso to France, then by small boat to England, why wouldn’t they do a Reverse Jive from Rwanda? The worst that could happen would be another round of hotels and hospitality at taxpayers’ expense and a second flight to Kigali.

Those who have been deported and have then returned tell me their first trek south was the most expensive. Now they know of farms along the way where casual work can replenish your wallet, and touts who will sell you a train ticket because at the station they ask for ID. There are fishermen who will row you across a river when there are police at the bridge. The journey is slower, but more affordable. And on the cobweb of routes across Africa, there are sleepovers that specialise in migrants. Some are run by the family of the soldiers meant to stop you: shower, bed, breakfast and a cryptic note good for the next few road blocks.

If what I’ve heard at the shabeen is anything to go by, most who walk through the door of Hope Hostel in Kigali will be in Britain for Christmas.

The Reverse Jive might just be the most popular dance in Africa, but Rishi Sunak and his cabinet are going to need to learn the steps too.

How to quit like the Japanese

For many, the idea of quitting a job they hate, of walking into their boss’s office and telling him or her in no uncertain terms what they think of it (and them perhaps), and then striding out without a backward glance, is a delicious one, a pleasant daydream to be enjoyed on the dreary daily commute. But for the Japanese, the idea of resigning from your company is positively traumatic, so much so that the latest boom industry here is agencies who will take care of the whole messy business for you.

There are now dozens of so-called ‘resignation firms’ in Tokyo, which will act as an intermediary between the prospective resignee and their company. The firm will deliver the news of the desired departure, negotiate the terms of release and take care of all the paperwork. The typical cost for the service is quite reasonable for Japan – about £150, or half that if you are just a part-timer.

A particularly successful example is the artfully named ‘Momuri’ (Japanese for ‘I can’t take it any more’). Momuri received 174 requests (a company record) for resignation assistance on the last day of the annual Golden Week holiday (5 May). This is the peak quitting period as the prospect of a return to work, with no more holidays until a brief one in August, looms depressingly large. This angst even has its own name, gogatsubyo (May blues), a more intense version of Sazae-san syndrome, a reference to the work-related gloom that descends on Japanese people at the end of the weekly animated sitcom Sazae-san (7 p.m. Sunday).

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

The resignation companies report the main reason people give for wanting to quit is that the reality of the jobs they have taken differs from their expectations. That sounds like characteristic Japanese polite understatement to me and could probably be translated as ‘My job is a living nightmare’ or ‘I’m a Japanese salaryman/woman, get me out of here!’

Despite various government attempts to pep things up (flexi-time, dress-down Friday, working from home), Japan’s employee lifestyle can be an utterly miserable affair. Working hours are punishing, often involving excessive amounts of overtime. This is sometimes even unpaid (‘service overtime’), if you are unlucky enough to work for one of the notorious ‘black’ companies who exploit their staff mercilessly.

Then there is the rigid hierarchy and strict protocol of a Japanese office, somewhat redolent of a medieval court, but with no jesters allowed to lighten the mood. This not only means having to pour your boss’s drinks on obligatory late-night drinking sessions (when most staff would rather just go home) but extends to the language used in every interaction. A junior can only address a senior using humble respectful language. This chore, combined with all the other potential etiquette pitfalls, puts staff constantly on edge for fear of offending.

The mental-health consequences of this are a serious problem and appears to be getting worse: there were nearly 3,000 suicides last year ascribed to work-related stress, and a similar number the year before. And it’s not clear that companies are doing much to help. The worst case I heard about was a bank that built a gleaming new office block in the centre of Tokyo, with the un-usual feature of balconies where staff could take a break and enjoy the skyline. Unfortunately, the work culture was in all other respects so brutal that the balconies were more often used for suicide jumps. The problem became so bad that the company was forced to take action. Which they did – by removing the balconies.

So work is hell (often, not always – there are decent companies too). But why then would escaping from this hell be so difficult? The problem lies partly in the attitude the Japanese have to their work and how it defines their position in society. I once interviewed a famous businessman who explained that ‘Japanese people feel like they are working for Japan’. They see it as like being in the army; a hard life but one must do one’s duty. By quitting you are essentially letting the side down – the side being Japan. It is tantamount to deserting.

Which makes the face-to-face encounter itself, the admission of failure and its aftermath – the sour mood that must be endured as you serve out a notice period and train up your replacement, all the time conscious that you have sown disharmony and added to the already heavy burden born by your colleagues – an intolerable prospect. It is perhaps understandable that many Japanese people are choosing to leave the whole painful process to the professionals.

It is also part of a broader societal trend. Just as in the professional sphere, so too in the domestic is much of the awkwardness of life being either outsourced or automated. For instance, while there were always match-makers in Japan, taking the hard work out of finding a suitable life partner, and specialist agencies to investigate the background of your prospective match (to save you having to ask), there are now also professional ‘match-breakers’ (wakaresaseya) who can be employed to facilitate a separation if you wish to divorce your spouse but can’t face the confrontation.

It makes you wonder where all this is heading. To a world where you can go through your entire life without ever having a difficult conversation – or perhaps any meaningful face-to-face interaction at all? A frictionless, perhaps even contactless, future.

Are ultra-processed foods really so bad?

Last week saw a flurry of media reports, of whose headlines one of the worst preceded one of the best reports. ‘Eating too many ultra-processed foods has been linked to a higher risk of early death,’ barked the Telegraph – but went on to explain carefully and fairly a ground-breaking report. Other broadsheets opted for the easy option: big report, ultra-processed food, death.

The report caught my eye because I’ve been consistently sceptical about sensationalist books and statements demonising in wholesale terms the consumption of foods categorised, in pseudo-scientific language, as ‘ultra-processed’. I question the usefulness of the category. Food-type blaming can be a comforting evasion of a simple truth: that overeating makes you fat and unhealthy. Instead, we’re told food manufacturers are to blame. Telling people that obesity and ill-health are somebody else’s fault sells books and newspaper articles. But what if this area of knowledge is a house built on sand?

So I read the whole Harvard report, usefully set out in the British Medical Journal. Its findings are almost grotesquely inconsistent with those headlines. The report pours a bucket of cold (if academically phrased) water on generalised and simplistic linkages between ultra-processed food (UPF) and ill-health. (Here I should state that I have no vested interest in defending any of this often unwholesome stuff, nor the remotest association with the food industry.)

In summary, the Harvard report found an astonishingly weak link (4 per cent) between heavy intake of UPF and reduced longevity; and when processed meats, dairy and high sugar content were subtracted from the equation, there was no link at all. Nor was there any link with cancers or heart disease. In fact a good deal of UPF, for instance nut-based, wholegrain cereal-based and even wholegrain bread, turns out to be positively life-prolonging. As the authors say: ‘We aim to rectify the potential misperception that all ultra-processed food products should be universally restricted, and to avoid oversimplification when formulating dietary recommendations.’

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

To put it in numbers: the research found the mortality rate among the quarter of humans who ingested the most UPF was 1,536 per 100,000 person years; among the quarter who ingested the least UPF it was 1,472. The authors concluded: ‘This study found a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with slightly higher all-cause mortality, driven by causes other than cancer and cardiovascular diseases. The associations varied across subgroups of ultra-processed foods, with meat/poultry/seafood based ready-to-eat products showing particularly strong associations with mortality.’

These results are the more compelling because the research has followed the food intake of some 74,000 women and 39,000 men in America for more than 30 years. The 4 per cent linkage was obtained from comparing the quarter with the diets highest in UPF and the quarter with the lowest. Even as regards that small apparent linkage, your mind may have gone, as did mine, to a problem with all such studies. What if the kind of people who eat a lot of junk food tend to have unhealthier than average lifestyles: smoking, obesity, sedentary habits, for example, spring to mind? Might these factors rather than the UPF they eat be the primary link with mortality?

The researchers have not overlooked this: ‘We adjusted for race/ethnicity, marital status, physical activity, body mass index, smoking status and pack [cigarette consumption] years, alcohol consumption…’ – the list goes on. But ‘controlling for’ extraneous factors that might be the real culprits is always a hazardous business for data analysis, importing (as it sometimes must) a measure of guesswork about the likelihood and strength of other connections. In Britain there’s probably a notable but counter-intuitive correlation between scratch-card use and morbidity, before you control for social class.

The study is surprising, too, for some of the factors that it turned out didn’t need to be controlled for: ‘We found no interaction by body mass index or physical activity [and] no associations for mortality due to cancer or cardiovascular diseases.’ The findings ‘remarkably’ suggested no association overall between smoking and morbidity, but I wonder whether that’s because the young smoke less but eat more junk so the two cancel each other out?

And here’s a surprise: ‘Compelling evidence shows that nuts and (dark) chocolate, common constituents of “sweet snacks and desserts”, are inversely associated with cardiovascular diseases. We observed that dark chocolate in the [UPF] subgroup “packaged sweet snacks and desserts” was associated with decreased mortality.’

UPF studies rest upon a classification system – ‘Nova’ – that originated with a Brazilian academic. The more I read this Harvard study, which has all the hallmarks of honest and rigorous enquiry, and the more tangled, self-confounding and counter-intuitive the results seem, the more convinced I became that medical science has a root-cause problem here. My next thought was triggered by this hint: ‘The Nova classification is based on broad categories that do not capture the full complexity of food processing, leading to potential misclassification.’

‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘are you stopping short of a possible destination for your reasoning? What if the problem is not how we classify the processing of what we eat, but the whole concept: “ultra-processed” food? What if it’s not a useful catch-all term at all? What if, whatever the health risks undoubtedly are with some foods, they don’t arise from the simple fact of processing? Perhaps they have no single cause at all?’ That would help explain another suggestion in this report: that mortality rates may be more associated with the absence of a healthy diet than with the presence of UPF within that diet. Indeed, the report points out that some of the components of a healthy diet are in fact processed foods. They conclude: ‘Dietary quality was observed to have a more predominant influence on mortality outcomes than ultra-processed food consumption.’

In our hunt for what foods, or what components in food, reduce lifespan, could ultra-processing be a red herring? I’m a rank amateur here but I do understand marketing. UPF is a great marketing tool for treatises of popular science, but it is no basis for new government taxes.

Listen to Matthew Parris and Dr Chris van Tulleken debate ultra-processed foods on The Edition podcast:

The need for greed

I suspect I’ve had a lot more fun writing about the annual Sunday Times Rich List over the years than many of its denizens have had clambering into it and staying there behind their high-tech security gates and their phalanx of tax advisers. The 2024 roll call includes some great British wealth-creation stories – led by the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the inventor Sir James Dyson and the Far Eastern trading Swire dynasty. But if the completed jigsaw of 300 names makes any sort of picture, it is of a vast treasure hoard from elsewhere, and in some cases from nowhere, that has found a relatively safe vault in the UK.

That’s not a bad thing in itself as an advert for our quality of life and rule of law. But it hardly speaks of entrepreneurial joie de vivre – while a real advert, poignantly placed in the middle of the list, highlights the burdens of boundless wealth: it’s a double-page spread for Clinic des Alpes at Montreux in Switzerland, offering ‘exceptionally private’ treatment for substance dependency, anxiety, depression and burnout.

Irish heroes

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

All the more reason to salute a self-made billionaire who in his heyday exuded joie de vivre in spades: Sir Tony O’Reilly, the Irish rugby international, inventor of Kerrygold butter, newspaper proprietor, transatlantic tycoon and all-Ireland philanthropist who has died aged 88. Stamina, style and ego combined to bring O’Reilly to prominence in the days when Ireland was still a grey economic backwater. He invested his own money in his home country while simultaneously running HJ Heinz in the US – his achievements far outshining the next generation of Irish high-rollers who made easy money in the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years before the 2008 crash.

It was the cruellest of ironies that O’Reilly was hounded into bankruptcy in 2015 as a token scalp for Allied Irish Bank – which had ruined itself by bad lending in the boom era and survived only through nationalisation. Too gilded to be universally admired in his pomp, he won much wider sympathy for his dignity in financial defeat.

Those who knew O’Reilly speak of his radiant energy and bonhomie. He joins my small pantheon of Irish heroes alongside the world trade negotiator and BP chairman Peter Sutherland, who died in 2018. There’ll be another niche – many years hence, I hope – for Europe’s most indefatigable business disruptor, Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary.

Echoes of Gekko

Another one gone, this time an anti-hero: Ivan Boesky died this week, aged 87. A notorious Wall Street arbitrageur who made fortunes on share bets in the 1980s boom until he was jailed for insider trading, Boesky secured a place in history with his speech to the graduation ceremony of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley in California in May 1986, the students having voted to invite him: ‘Greed is all right, by the way,’ he told them. ‘I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’

His lines were parroted the following year in the film Wall Street by the corporate raider Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas, addressing a shareholder meeting of a threatened industrial company called Teldar Paper: ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good… Greed clarifies, cuts through  and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.’

In both cases, arguably what was meant by the speaker was that innovation, efficient use of capital and wider prosperity are all driven by a healthy urge for material rewards on the part of entrepreneurs and business leaders – a more or less respectable strand of American thought that can be traced back to the post-war novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand’s work on ‘the virtue of selfishness’. But what was understood by cinema audiences (and, of course, intended by Oliver Stone, Wall Street’s left-leaning director and co-writer) was that free financial markets are the domain of greedy monsters like Boesky and Gekko. The words of both of them have done untold damage to the cause of responsible capitalism ever since.

Czech mate

Is Daniel Kretinsky, the media-shy Czech billionaire who looks set to take over Royal Mail, an O’Reilly or a Gekko? The jury’s out on that question. But the so-called ‘Czech sphinx’ – who already owns 27.5 per cent of Royal Mail’s parent International Distributions Services (IDS) – has raised his cash offer for the whole of IDS from £3.1 billion to £3.5 billion, which the board of IDS is ‘minded’ to recommend to shareholders – while Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch has indicated she won’t raise national security objections so long as Royal Mail’s universal service obligation (for six-days-a-week delivery to every household) is protected by ‘cast-iron’ guarantees.

So the deal seems likely to go ahead. Bizarrely, the Communication Workers Union, which might have been expected vehemently to oppose it, has been taking stick from the harder left (I refer you to the World Socialist website) for ‘collusion’ with Kretinsky’s EP Group, while the presence as an adviser to EP of former Labour MP Chuka Umunna, now a banker with JP Morgan, has been taken as further evidence of a stitch-up.

Some observers think Kretinsky will have bagged himself a bargain if a current regulatory review permits a reduced second–class letter service that could transform Royal Mail’s finances for the better. Others, including me, still think he’s only interested in acquiring GLS, the profitable Netherlands–based international parcels arm of IDS, and will end up trying to pass the Royal Mail package to yet another buyer, or back to a Labour government. Either way, how odd is it – after all the fuss over energy and water – that another piece of vital national infrastructure should be passing into foreign private-equity ownership with so little public or political outcry?

Who has the worst voice in parliament?

For the first time in more than two decades we are dog-less, and the house feels horribly empty. Our Patterdale terrier, Bonnie, led a long, vigorous life but her balance had gone and her breathing was heavy, so we called the vet. Patterdales are little imps and Bonnie was ‘known to the police’. I never discussed politics with her but she liked Lib Dems; that is, she liked biting them. A public footpath bisects our garden. Most ramblers escaped intact but Bonnie had a habit of nipping tall, grey-ponytailed men with walking poles. She nipped the vicar, too, tearing a cartoon-style square out of the seat of his chinos. The language! Despite that, we remain hopeful Bonnie is in doggy heaven. ‘St Peter won’t know what’s hit him,’ said my wife. ‘You mean St Peter won’t know what’s bit him,’ said our daughter Honor.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

Sir Brian Langstaff’s vocal resonance lent force to his verdict on the infected-blood scandal. The Langstaff voice is baritone, not classically posh yet possessing a tone of unflappable command. As he started his speech at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster on Monday, I jotted in my notebook that he had something of the sentencing judge at the start of Ronnie Barker’s comedy Porridge. Yet it soon became evident Sir Brian’s voice was more interesting than that. Whereas the Porridge judge, acted by Barker himself, had a dry, mocking nasality, Sir Brian’s is a richer, phlegmier instrument that delivered his findings with natural composure. It helped that he was closely miked. This amplification meant the vast hall could hear him hitting the ‘h’ in ‘why’, something few English speakers nowadays bother to do. When he took a drink of water, the audience heard it gurgle down his drainpipes. His eccentric pronunciation of ‘donor’, which made almost a separate word of the second syllable, helped further to establish him as an otherworldly figure. Audibly, he was not part of the glottal-stoppy, anxious-to-meld tendency that dominates our political class. When my late father (b. 1928) said ‘white’ or ‘which’, it was almost as if he was blowing out a candle. That practice has nearly disappeared, erased by what phoneticians call the wine-whine merger; in Sir Brian’s precise, old-fashioned voice it could still be heard. The acclaim of the audience showed that this was popular.

Today’s public debate is a tinny assault on the ears. Who in parliament has a rich-gravy voice? Sir Geoffrey Cox, former attorney-general, does not say much these days but when he does it is with a vintage Lagonda’s growl. The MP for Clacton, a sometime actor called Watling, has a raffish rasp to match his Garrick club tie. George Galloway of the Workers party has a larynx lacquered by cigar smoke. In the Lords, the culture minister Lady Barran sounds agreeably ginny. Lady Finn, a Conservative ex-special adviser, could do a good karaoke version of Lee Marvin’s ‘I Was Born Under a Wanderin’ Star’. But most public voices are flimsy. Rishi Sunak’s feels our pain. Sir Keir Starmer might as well be speaking through a snorkel. The Archbishop of Canterbury has the whine of a garden strimmer.

Westminster reporters travelled to Purfleet, Essex, to hear Sir Keir Snorkeller launch Labour’s new pledge card. One of the warm-up speakers was a poor fellow with terminal cancer who blamed the Tory-run NHS for his plight. This was not altogether newsworthy because the same chap made a similar speech at Labour’s party conference. If anything, he looked rather better now. Sir Keir spoke of himself in historical terms, evoking the memory of what he said was the three previous Labour leaders – Attlee, Wilson, Blair – to win office from opposition. The omission of Ramsay MacDonald, who did that twice for Labour in the 1920s, felt petty.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi died while returning from the Azerbaijan border, where he inspected a new dam and had his hand pumped, with alarming heartiness, by President Ilham Aliyev. Visits to Azerbaijan are not without hazard. Lord (George) Robertson, former defence secretary and Nato secretary-general, was once in Baku and found himself invited to an intimate ‘supper for two’ by Aliyev’s father Heydar, a sometime KGB man who ran the country for years. He and Aliyev Sr had just finished their nosebag when a 40-strong male-voice choir sprang out of the wings and blasted forth a medley of wig-lifting folk tunes. Then a Mata Hari singer appeared, her dress slit almost to the armpits. As she sang she climbed on to Aliyev’s knee, smothering him with kisses and dribbling her fingers over his chin. The Azerbaijan tough guy lapped it up, saying: ‘She is singing my late wife’s favourite song.’ George, son of an Islay policeman, made his excuses and left.

What happened to the electric car revolution?

China is often characterised as a copycat when it comes to industry and technology but in one way it has proved to be a pioneer. It was China which saw the first boom in electric cars – and it was China that was the first to suffer when demand for them collapsed. The vast graveyards of unsold vehicles found in Hangzhou and other Chinese cities are the result of a huge, subsidised push to manufacture electric vehicles, demand for which has never caught up with supply. Ride-share services bought the vehicles– in a rerun of the great cycle-share fiasco of 2018, which led to piles of unused and unwanted bikes. But private buyers have been notably less keen.

Where China leads, the rest of the world seems doomed to follow. With China’s manufacturers struggling to sell their electric cars at home, last year they started shipping them in large numbers to Europe – where many are now accumulating in ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp. The window in which to sell them may prove small, as the EU is considering measures to prevent the ‘dumping’ of cheap Chinese cars in Europe. The Biden administration has already taken action, increasing tariffs on cars imported from China from 25 per cent to 100 per cent. While that may put paid to Chinese imports, it won’t do anything to alleviate unsold stocks of US-made electric cars. The great electric revolution that was promised just three years ago is already failing – and it will bring the car manufacturers down with it.

If there ever was a real-world demonstration of the old proverb ‘you can lead a horse to water…’, it is electric cars. Elon Musk’s visionary work with Tesla panicked the old combustion engine firms, which set themselves ambitious targets to phaseout petrol completely: Fiat, Ford, Jeep, Nissan and Lexus by 2030, Vauxhall by 2028, Jaguar by 2025. One of the most dramatic announcements came three years ago when Hertz declared that a quarter of its entire rental fleet would be electric by 2025. ‘The new Hertz is going to lead the way as a mobility company,’ it said. It certainly did lead the way – into headlong retreat.

At the time, Hertz signed a $4 billion deal with Tesla and announced plans to buy 175,000 EVs from General Motors. In January it went into reverse and said it would instead start selling 20,000 EVs (later raising this to 30,000). It has pledged to ‘re-invest a portion of the proceeds from the sale of EVs into the purchase of internal combustion engine vehicles’. Its share price (down 80 per cent since the Tesla announcement) has made it a case study.

In Britain, things don’t look much better. The slowing EV momentum led Rishi Sunak to drop his target of banning new petrol car sales by 2030 and push it back to 2035. The number of electric cars sold to drivers (as opposed to companies) was falling by 20 per cent as of last month. The UK’s market for EVs is being propped up by fleet companies which, spurred on by government incentives, now buy five in every six EVs sold.

‘Urgent action is needed to re-enthuse private buyers into switching,’ said the UK Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) in its last update. It pointed out it’s not just driver demand that is flat: the infrastructure is an issue. The ratio of charging points to EV drivers has not improved since last year. The cost of electricity from a rapid charger is up by about 10 per cent, according to the RAC. So not only are EVs themselves 40 per cent more expensive to buy than petrol cars, but they are also costlier to run. The average charge for refuelling at a rapid charger is 22p per mile, compared with 17p for petrol.

Even those figures don’t really provide a fair comparison. Around half the price of a litre of petrol is tax; the tax on electricity is just 20 per cent (in the form of VAT) or 5 per cent if you charge at home. Nevertheless petrol remains cheaper. But the government is not going to sit by and watch as £25 billion of revenue from fuel duty disappears – which will happen if electric cars do take over from petrol. So at some point it is going to devise some way of recouping lost fuel duty revenue, most likely through road-charging. Early adopters who bought electric cars have effectively been treated to a generous introductory offer, which is now stealthily going to be withdrawn. When electric cars come to be taxed like petrol ones, it is going to become obvious that they cost a lot more to buy and run. That is especially true if you live in one of the 30 per cent of UK households which do not have off-street parking.

Sunak drew outrage from the green lobby when he delayed what was an obviously unworkable target. But few seemed to have noticed that he had left in place an initiative called the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. This came into force in January and obliges car manufacturers to ensure that 22 per cent of the vehicles they sell in Britain this year are fully electric (as opposed to hybrid). If they fail, they will have to pay a fine of £15,000 for every vehicle by which they fall short. This target ratchets up. It will rise to 28 per cent next year and go up steadily until it hits 80 per cent by 2030.

But what to do if the public are refusing to buy? In the first four months of this year, according to the SMMT, electric cars had a market share of just 15.7 per cent, hardly up on the 15.4 per cent share in the same period of last year. Unless sales soar, manufacturers are going to be facing enormous fines in just a few months’ time.

Earlier this month Carlos Tavares, the chief executive of Stellantis (the parent company of Vauxhall, Peugeot-Citroën and Fiat) warned that the ZEV had the potential to bankrupt car-makers. He complained that the ZEV had been set at ‘double the natural demand of the market’. He said he wouldn’t be selling cars at a loss – suggesting that, if electric car sales do not pick up soon, the company might have to restrict sales of petrol and diesel cars. (It would be easier to sympathise had Stellantis not cheered on government efforts to turn the car industry fully electric by 2030.)

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

Petrol-car owners have reservations that may be hard to budge. Even among households which have off-street parking, only 8 per cent say that it’s likely they would buy an electric car as their main vehicle during the next five years – although 20 per cent said they would consider one as their second vehicle. Electric cars have found a niche as second cars for relatively wealthy, environmentally aware households. But the market is beginning to run out of those kinds of buyers.

This leaves Sunak with a dilemma. The US wants to repel China’s incoming electric cars, while Germany wants to welcome them and cut all tariffs (hoping Beijing will reciprocate – BMW now sells a third of its new cars in China). What will the UK do? If Sunak wants to prioritise net-zero targets and help with the cost of living, the logical thing would be to leave the ZEV in place and welcome China’s low-cost cars (made by MG and BYD). This could be billed as using Brexit powers, lowering motoring costs with other carmakers forced to compete. But this is Stellantis’s nightmare scenario. ‘If you go and cut pricing disregarding the reality of cost,’ Tavares said in January, ‘it’s a race to the bottom and that will end up with a bloodbath.’

Forcing consumers to pay over the odds for cars would lead to an electoral bloodbath, however – which is why, unless there is a sudden rush of interest in electric cars over the next few months, the government is likely to yield. The ZEV will probably be relaxed, just as the 2030 target was relaxed last year, which will mean yet another watering-down of net-zero promises, possibly just before the election. The price will be more outrage from environmentalists, and inevitable legal challenges. Last time Sunak relaxed net-zero measures, the former minister Chris Skidmore resigned his seat and triggered a by-election.

Could the outlook suddenly improve for British EVs? It’s hard to see how. The biggest single cost is batteries, and China has built up a dominant position in the global market. About 80 per cent of EV batteries are made in China, and the West’s efforts to catch up often end in debacle. The Britishvolt factory in Northumberland went bust before its foundations were even laid. But the situation is even worse when you consider that China has near-total dominance in LFP batteries, which are cheaper to produce than the lithium manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries made in Europe. They also come with fewer ethical objections as they do not require cobalt, which is often mined by child workers under terrible conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The traditional carmakers have responded by scaling back. Aston Martin has delayed its first electric model from 2025 to 2027 because of falling demand. Bentley has deferred its all-electric deadline. Fiat was going to phase out the petrol-powered Panda in 2026, then 2027, but now that date has been pushed back to 2030. Tesla’s deliveries fell 20 per cent in the first quarter of this year and market value has halved since the 2021 peak.

Last week, Stellantis announced a deal with the Chinese electric carmaker Leapmotor, which might just help it put off the day of reckoning with the ZEV: some of Leapmotor’s cars will be sold through a Stellantis subsidiary based in Amsterdam. In reality, this won’t do much for the planet. Making electric cars is a much more carbon--intensive business than making petrol ones, with the result that they have to be driven at least 15,000 to 20,000 miles before they can be said to have emitted less carbon. Worse, Chinese--made cars are manufactured with a far dirtier mix of electricity than UK-made cars are. Three-quarters of electricity in China is still generated by fossil fuels, 55 per cent of it from especially filthy coal. The government may well tinker with the ZEV before the year is out, but it is unlikely to admit to this greater folly, that the much--heralded switch to electric cars is likely to destroy our car industry, drive up costs for motorists – and fail to cut global emissions.

Watch Rory Sutherland and Freddy Gray debate the EV revolution on Spectator TV:

The shadow fleet helping Russia to evade sanctions

Economic sanctions were meant to be the West’s secret weapon against Russia, a way of crippling Vladimir Putin’s war machine and bringing his invasion of Ukraine to a halt without Nato firing a shot. Instead, Russia’s economy and military remain in rude health. After recent heavy attacks north of Kharkiv, Putin’s troops have seized more than 38 square miles of territory and stretched Kyiv’s already thinly deployed defences as they grind forward in Donbas. Putin has demoted his long-serving defence minister Sergei Shoigu, replacing him with the little-known economist Andrei Belousov. Appointing a finance specialist as military chief was a reminder that armies march on money. In Russia’s case, oil money.

Remarkably, since February 2022 the Kremlin has defied more than 16,000 separate sanctions imposed by the US and EU; the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which ended Gazprom’s stranglehold on Europe’s energy supplies; and a costly war that will consume up to 8 per cent of Russia’s GDP this year. Despite these catastrophes, Russia’s economy is poised to grow at a faster pace than any other G7 nation. It’s currently running a budget deficit of just 0.8 per cent of GDP, down from 1.9 per cent last year. Its overall federal revenues hit a record $320 billion in 2023 and are expected to go even higher in 2024. Those are remarkable figures for a country spending some 40 per cent of its state budget on war.

The secret of this remarkable resilience? A shadow fleet of oil tankers registered outside the G7, which has allowed Russia to thumb its nose at western sanctions and to maintain an uninterrupted stream of lucrative oil exports.

Russia produces around ten million barrels of oil a day and exports half of that, putting it behind the US and Saudi Arabia as an international supplier. That’s far too large a volume for the West to try to ban. Taking that amount of oil off the market would cause an oil price shock and world recession far more dramatic than that of 1973.

Instead, the West’s response has been to try to depress the Kremlin’s revenues by imposing an oil price cap of $60 a barrel – well below the current market price of $78 – on all Russian oil exports.

The West had hoped to enforce the oil price cap by making it impossible for Russian ships to operate by withholding insurance for them. Some 95 per cent of maritime insurance was western-controlled, mostly based in London. No tanker, regardless of its flag, can dock in port without insurance.

 What’s more, no ship engaged in illegal activity – such as sanctions-busting – can be legally insured. The West’s plan, however, came unstuck. The International Group of Protection and Indemnity Clubs’ near-monopoly of the world’s shipping insurance quickly collapsed as India began writing its own policies for tankers, as did Russia’s state-owned insurers Rosgosstrakh and Ingosstrakh. By late summer of the first year of the war, vessels carrying western-issued insurance fell to under 68 per cent of global shipping. Russia’s shadow fleet was born.

The tanker fleet used by Russia is vast and expanding. It grew by 17 per cent this year to 787 vessels, according to ship broker BRS (equivalent to nearly 14 per cent of the world’s total tanker tonnage). Every one of these ships is, almost certainly, violating international sanctions in the form of the oil price cap. Yet it’s maddeningly hard to verify the real price being paid by Russia’s customers in China, India, Indonesia and Turkey.

There are a host of simple accountancy tricks (known as ‘attestation fraud’) that can be used to get around the price cap. Oil is typically loaded at a ‘free on board’ (FOB) price of just under $60 but then sold to customers with extravagant surcharges for transport and insurance that bump the price up to just under the real market value.

Another legal dodge is for Russian oil companies to sell oil under the price cap to their own subsidiaries in Europe. Lukoil, for instance, still operates major oil refineries in Romania and Bulgaria and has a 45 per cent interest in a refinery in the Netherlands. Another common (though illegal) ruse is to pump oil from tanker to tanker at sea, magically transforming the product from Russian crude to something else listed on the other ship’s paperwork. Sweden’s Coast Guard reports that many shadow-fleet vessels are regularly engaging in risky ship-to-ship oil transfers off the eastern coast of the island of Gotland, just outside the 12-nautical-mile limit which denotes a country’s territorial waters. Sweden is powerless to stop them.

Indeed, international maritime law makes policing the activities of Russia’s shadow fleet almost impossible. A cornerstone of the world’s sea-borne trade is the Right of Innocent Passage, which allows vessels to sail through international waters without harassment, hindrance or inspection as long as they are not engaging in hostile military activity. Whether transiting through the Danish Straits or the Bosporus Strait at the entrance of the Black Sea, tankers cannot legally be stopped. And, again by international maritime law, illegally hindering a country’s merchant shipping constitutes a naval blockade – formally considered an act of war.

Sanctions-enforcers in the US and EU have had to become creative in finding ways to sidestep attestation fraud and the Right of Innocent Passage. On 1 May the Greek navy announced military exercises off the coast of Laconia in the Peloponnese, thereby denying those offshore waters to shadow tankers who often use them to transfer oil at sea.

The EU is exploring ways to use the Baltic Sea Action Plan, a ‘strategic programme of measures and actions for achieving good environmental status of the sea’. It was originally signed in 2007 by all littoral states (including Russia) to introduce environmental spot-inspections at sea. This could be used to end ship-to-ship transfers off Gotland.

The ‘hostile military activity’ clause could also be invoked against Russian ships believed to be engaging in surveillance. According to Swedish Rear Admiral Ewa Skoog Haslum, some Russia-linked tankers in the Baltic have been found to be carrying ‘antennas and masts that typically do not belong’ to merchant vessels. The Swedish navy says it has evidence these vessels are fitted out to pick up signals intelligence – a throwback to Soviet-era ‘Auxiliary General Intelligence’ vessels which used to regularly ply the Baltic during the Cold War.

Lastly, the United States’ Office of Foreign Assets Control has begun the painstaking process of imposing sanctions on individual ships suspected of sanctions-busting. According to ongoing monitoring by the Kyiv School of Economics, the US has successfully sanctioned 41 vessels. But these have been almost instantly replaced with 35 new tankers Russia has added to its shadow tanker fleet since December.

None of these measures is likely to put a serious dent in Russia’s continued ability to export its oil. Around 46 per cent of Russian oil is still carried legally in western-insured ships with the supposedly correct paperwork. And that’s not even counting exports of Russian Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which is not yet subject to any sanctions at all, for the simple reason that Europe remains dependent on Russia for a significant chunk of its LNG supplies. Despite the EU’s goal to become independent of all Russian energy by 2027, Spain and Belgium are currently the second- and third-biggest buyers of Russian LNG respectively, just behind China.

The EU says it’s working to limit imports of Russian LNG as part of the upcoming 14th package of sanctions. But as Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, admitted earlier this month, Europe will need more, not less, LNG in 2025. That’s because Russia continues to supply some 8 per cent of Europe’s piped natural gas.

Most of this gas transitions through Ukraine into Slovakia. Despite the war, in 2023 Gazprom paid Ukraine $800 million in transit fees (about 0.46 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP). But those transit contracts between Ukraine and Moscow are due to expire at the end of this year, forcing Europe to replace yet more of its natural gas with LNG.

Since the beginning of this year, Ukrainian drone strikes against refineries in Russia have taken out around 15 per cent of Russia’s oil refinery capacity. But this has had the paradoxical effect of forcing Moscow to export more of its crude oil due to a lack of storage capacity. Russian seaborne oil exports rose by 4 per cent in March, driven by a 12 per cent increase in crude oil shipments (around 400,000 barrels a day) while exports of refined oil products declined by 6 per cent.

Most of that extra oil has headed to European forecourts after India refined and re-exported it. ‘In Europe we’re still buying Russian crude, except it’s been refined in China and India, so all you’ve done is add a four-month sea journey to the crude that we used to refine here in Europe much cheaper, and all the extra costs are being inflicted here,’ says Ben Aris, editor-in-chief of bne IntelliNews, a Berlin-based analyst. ‘The irony is that the sanctions are just [market] distortions which are actually helping the Russian government.’

‘We have this weird sort of compromise where we negotiate with ourselves into a situation which allows the Russians to completely cheat,’ says Bill Browder, a sanctions activist and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. ‘They bought a whole bunch of tankers. Those tankers are moving the oil, and the Indians and the Chinese and the Indonesians are very happy to get that oil.’

But blaming sanctions-busting customers is too easy. The real reason Russia can afford to continue funding its aggression in Ukraine is that Europe and the US refuse to contemplate the economic pain of a real blockade of Russian crude. Europe also claims to stand behind Kyiv yet continues to import, either directly or indirectly, huge quantities of Russia’s oil and gas, putting more than half a billion dollars a day into the Kremlin’s coffers.

‘We are a united and great people and together we will overcome all obstacles,’ Putin said during his inaugural address earlier this month. What he meant was that Russia controls a great and valuable resource that the world can’t do without – even if that oil reeks of blood.

My message for Columbia’s protesting students

There are several frustrating things about American college campuses, just one of which is the sheer volume of column inches they take up. Whenever an American campus has an ‘occupation’ because the students want veto powers over foreign wars, the world media study their actions with great interest. Whenever a group of farmers or truckers complain about the loss of their livelihoods, whatever media attention does arrive comes from people eager to dismiss the protestors as know-nothings who are on to nothing.

Still, in recent months Columbia University in New York has distinguished itself with especially unpleasant scenes. Since Hamas attacked Israel last October, Columbia has gone insane. The students seemed positively eager for a great cause and found it in Hamas. One student told a journalist that since Columbia had ‘this massive history of protests’, he had to get stuck in. ‘I’m from a first-gen, low-income background. So I knew that if there was ever going to be an escalation, it was something I wanted to be a part of.’ Another student who joined in explained that going to the early protests meant he ‘missed a lecture about literature and cultures of struggle in South Africa’.

In the middle of all this, Jewish students have been screamed at by protestors, invited to be the targets of Hamas’s next attack and been greeted with cries of ‘Go back to Poland’. The Columbia protestors have also been chanting ‘Glory to our martyrs’ and ‘Globalise the intifada’. The university administrators came to realise that this was not a good look. As a result they arranged for the police to come in and clear away the illegal protest encampments.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

There is something especially pitiful about this. British students may have to pay for the privilege of attending university, but their debt is nothing like that which American students rack up. If you are hoping to study South African struggle literature at Columbia, you will pay an average of $66,000 a year, meaning you will come out a couple of hundred thousand dollars in debt. The less intelligent students seem to think that this money goes directly to Israel’s war effort. Quite how, they never explain. The more intelligent students might prefer to keep their heads down and hope to come out of Columbia with a qualification that will allow them to get a job to pay down that debt before they retire.

Unfortunately, as so often, the least sensible and least intelligent students make all the weather. So much so that this year’s commencement ceremony at Columbia (where students graduate in front of their proud families) was cancelled. An example of actual collective punishment right there. The university’s leaders knew that any commencement would be a target of protest and that there would be scenes like those at other US campuses this month – such as at Duke University, where students left their own commencement ceremony in protest when the invited speaker turned out to be Jerry Seinfeld, who is apolitical but Jewish.

Then, last week, with not much notice, a group of Columbia students and faculty heard I was going to be in New York and invited me to speak at an alternative ceremony for the non-insane students and faculty. So one morning I agreed to speak, not far from the campus, to an audience of graduating students of every imaginable background. Speaking with them before and after, I noted how many of them were veterans or were conservative, Christian or Jewish. One young man explained that he had served in the US military, risked his life and lost friends defending the American flag, only to arrive at Columbia and discover that same flag was viewed as a hate-symbol. Wondering what I could possibly tell these students, I decided to take a constructive path. I decided to talk about four unpopular virtues which would set them up well in their lives.

The first was to respect tradition and wisdom. So many people tell young people (particularly at US commencement addresses) that they are the most important generation in history, uniquely wise and much more. I told them that while they may know something, the chances are that people older than them know more, and that they should listen to them and respect them.

I told them that they should try to orient their lives towards courage. While many of their contemporaries are desperate to climb the victimhood hierarchy, they should venerate people who have actually done something deserving of admiration. If they had already learned to swim against the tide of some of their more vitriolic contemporaries, then they might just be on that path already.

I told them never to stop being curious, and that the years at university aren’t the only ones in which intellectual discovery can happen. And I urged them to live lives of gratitude. If other people want to be tied up in lives of resentment, then so be it. They should be grateful for what they have and build on it, and if they did, the chances are they might make something for which their successors could be grateful in return.

Above all, I wanted to communicate to them something which is easily forgotten in our era of perma-doom. The devices we all have in our pockets obviously have the ability to completely derange us. But if we use them wisely, we have the opportunity to communicate, learn and problem-solve in ways our species never dreamed of. Today, wherever I go in the world, I find that the smart young people are on the same wavelength and onto the same problems, whether they are in New York, Sydney or Soweto. It means that the competition is greater than it’s ever been. But the opportunities are greater too.

I felt sorry for these students – that I was the one waving them off into the world. But they were filled with courtesy, eagerness, intelligence and gratitude. I suppose I might say that we ended up encouraging each other.

Why is the government making it harder to get an au pair?

You will have heard, I am sure, of the Conservatives’ recent largesse towards working parents, as their ‘free’ childcare policy has been much publicised. Fifteen hours a week for your kid, from nine months old to the grand age of four. You may not, however, have seen the new rules governing au pairs, which came into effect last month. Our dear, wise governors, while giving with one hand, have taken away with another; they have placed more obstacles in the way of those who need help with looking after their children. They’ve made it even harder to have an au pair.

Children, of course, have a tendency to grow past the age of four, at which point they trundle off to school down the merry lane in the sunshine, complete with their adorable little rucksacks. This doesn’t happen automatically. Last time I checked, minors can’t drop themselves off at the gates; they can’t wander whistling home, stopping to share a joke with the fishmonger as they pick up a lobster and a pint of beer, because it is not the 19th century. For decades, the dual-income family unable to stretch to a nanny (which now, at £36,000-plus a year for even a part-time one, would bankrupt most) opted for an au pair. An equal: someone who lived with you and helped out, in return for a room, food and modest pay.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

She (usually a she) would be a young person who studied during the day, often English. She’d then pick up your children from school, fill them up with fish fingers and get them ready for bed. Everyone wins: the au pair by being immersed in a different culture, and having relative freedom at a young age while retaining home-like security; the children from having a quasi big sister around; and the knackered parents.

An au pair was paid ‘pocket money’, in recognition of the fact she wasn’t really an employee and was receiving bed and board. The going rate is around £700 a month, plus travel expenses (and the extra food, of course), so it’s still a stretch, but within the budgets of many. Au pairs could only stay with their host families for up to a year, so there was little chance of exploitation.

We’ve had some lovely au pairs. The children adore them, and we adore the fact that they adore them. It hasn’t all been rosy: one once texted me while I was driving my eldest to school demanding that we ‘keep the noise down’ in the morning. When I returned, she complained that I hadn’t replied to her immediately. I pointed out this would have been illegal, as I was on the road, and was tempted to sack her on the spot. But that aside, they’ve been wonderful.

So why change this agreeable arrangement? The government, scenting any opportunity to muscle into private contracts, has decided that au pairs must be paid the minimum wage. This is, of course, great for au pairs, who suddenly command up to £20,000 a year (dependent on their age and the amount of hours they are supposed to be doing: ours usually do 3.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. five days a week, plus more in the holidays).

Ah well, you’re probably thinking: surely you can deduct bed and board? Yet here’s the kicker. The government has deigned to allow us to claim back a whopping £9.99 per diem. If I let an au pair sleep in the broom cupboard and gave her one Pot Noodle a day, just under a tenner would probably cover it. Is that what the government wants: skivvies sleeping under the stairs? Have they gone mad? What do they think we can do? Send a letter up a chimney and pray Mary Poppins answers?

There are about 40,000 au pairs in the country: will the tax from their salaries really make a difference? No more informal contract, allowing for flexibility between both parties. Instead we have something that renders the phrase ‘au pair’ defunct, for it is now an employer/-employee relationship, with all the responsibilities that entails. And thanks to Brexit, au pairs from the EU can only stay for six months. Do those in power know how long it takes to find someone? The hours spent reading badly spelled profiles (‘Hello!! I hav always like children!!’) and responding to messages on the bizarre dating-style apps? I think they do not. Aside from stretching budgets even further, this all adds yet more bureaucratic buggery to our already red-taped lives.

I know what the effect of this new diktat will be: one parent will work fewer hours or give up work entirely. What that will do for equality and the economy, you can guess.

If the government really wants both parents to work, it needs to make childcare arrangements of all kinds easier and cheaper. At the moment, it seems neither party understands this. All I ask is that whoever wins the next election makes it fair to get an au pair.

Listen to more from Philip Womack and Lucy Denyer on The Edition podcast:

How dangerous is it to fly by helicopter?

Crime without borders

How many nations are signed up to the International Criminal Court?

– 124 signed the Rome Statute in 1998 and ratified it.

– 31 have signed it but never ratified it (includes Iran, Thailand, Ukraine).

– 2 (Philippines, Burundi) ratified it but have subsequently withdrawn.

– 4 signed the statute, never ratified it and have since withdrawn (US, Russia, Israel and Sudan).

– 41 have never signed (including China, India, Turkey). 

Chopper cropper

How dangerous is it to fly by helicopter as opposed to fixed-wing aircraft? It is hard to find comparable global statistics, but the National Transport Safety Board keeps figures for the US:

– In 2022 there were 7.2 accidents for every 100,000 hours flown by helicopter, of which 1.3 per 100,000 flying hours were fatal.

– The comparable figures for fixed-wing aircraft were 5.4 accidents per 100,000, of which 1 was fatal.

– The main causes of fatal helicopter accidents were:

Loss of control in flight 97

Failure of components 28

Low altitude operation 27

Engine failure 20

Issues with fuel 11

Loss of control on ground 7

Source: www.ntsb.gov

Stepping down

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris became the 66th Conservative MP to announce that he will not seek re-election at the general election later this year. Is this an unusually high number? MPs (of all parties) who did not seek re-election:

1979 61

1983 77

1987 88

1992 79

1997 117

2001 78

2005 86

2010 149

2015 90

2017 31

2019 74

Source: House of Commons Library

Bouncing back

Has tourism in Britain and elsewhere recovered from the pandemic?

Foreign trips by residents

2019 93m

2020 23.8m

2021 19.1m

2022 71m

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

2023 86.2m

Foreign trips by overseas UK residents to UK

2019 40.9m

2020 11.1m

2021 6.4m

2022 31.2m

2023 38m

Source: Office for National Statistics

Anti-Semitism has returned to French politics

New Caledonia is an archipelago in the South Pacific not far from Australia. James Cook discovered it in 1774, but, after concluding that too many languages were spoken there, he declined to annex it to the British Empire. France, not as cautious, made it a distant colony under Napoleon III. Today, riots are convulsing the territory. Supposedly ‘decolonial’ in aim, they are most certainly violent and fuelled by the anti-white racism that, from London to Brussels and Paris, has become the trademark of the new radical left. The strangest thing is that among the flags of the Kanak independence movement, one also sees Azeri flags. Why Azeri? Because Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Turkey and is an ally of Russia and Iran, sees an opportunity to make France pay for its support of the Armenians chased out of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2022. The dictators vs Emmanuel Macron.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

As is always the case when nothing is known for sure, the air is rife with conspiracy theories concerning what happened to the helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi after his visit to Azerbaijan. As when Fidel Castro denounced the ‘imperialist’ typhoons buffeting Cuba, there are those on social media who attribute the fog over the Dizmar forest, near the city of Varzaghan, to the special services of the United States, Israel, Britain and France. My Iranian friends, meanwhile, are mourning the 223 people executed by the regime since the beginning of the year. They are praying, too, for Ervin Netanel ben Tsiona, a 20-year-old Iranian Jew, who is currently sitting on death row.

I recently received a new letter of appeal from Mikheil Saakashvili, who was president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013. He’s been rotting away in a jail cell in Tbilisi as a political prisoner for the past two years. I’ve lost count of the number of letters appealing for help that he’s sent me during this time. As on each prior occasion, I recognise his feeble handwriting, increasingly shaky and nearly broken as the conditions of his detention and his state of health worsen. Solitary confinement. Hunger strikes. Successive poisonings. When Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, Saakashvili was a sort of Volodymyr Zelensky before his time. With another invasion looming of this great but tiny nation, people are protesting at the prison gates. The number of demonstrators is twice what it was on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2014, as a proportion of the two countries’ population. I only hope Saakashvili doesn’t become the next Alexei Navalny.

I know Kharkiv very well. I filmed key scenes of three Ukrainian documentaries there. And I am spending the night on the phone with my surviving comrades who are resisting in the trenches. It’s a bitter fight, they say. The Russians are reoccupying the neighbouring villages that Zelensky’s forces had retaken in September 2022 during the Izium offensive. Kamikaze drones and Grad rockets rain down on the road leading to the Russian border and on to Belgorod. But the city is holding. The defenders’ morale is better than that of the more numerous but thoroughly unmotivated attackers. Let’s hope Ukraine’s allies keep their commitments so that this resistant, isolated nation may eventually prevail.

In France, the electoral campaign for the European parliament is entering the home straight. Compared with our neighbours, we enjoy a dubious distinction: one slate of candidates under the name of ‘Free Palestine’, whose logo features a map of the Middle East from which Israel has been erased. And another headed by neo-socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, that, in answer to all of the questions put to it about taxes, retirement, the cost of living, climate change, Europe’s common agricultural policy and Europe in general, has but one thing to say: ‘Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.’ That’s what the German Social Democrats of the late 19th century called socialism for imbeciles. In short, it’s anti-Semitism.

According to Time magazine, Rachel Goldberg-Polin is one of the world’s 100 most influential people. We met recently in the Jerusalem office where she battles day and night to keep the world from forgetting the hostages of 7 October, including her son, Hersh. For me, she’s first and foremost a mother, fragile and beautiful, who waits, with a heart broken but full of hope, for the return of her child. She is the best of Israel.

Letters: save our churches!

Free the C of E

Sir: Patrick Kidd’s article on the shortcomings of today’s Church of England maintains the importance of the ‘volunteers in the pews’ who bind the church together (‘Miracle workers’, 18 May). He warns that these people ‘can so easily run away’.

This is exactly what happened to the Church of Scotland in 1843 when the hierarchy got things badly wrong. The Great Disruption was caused by a disagreement over patronage: should a patron be the sole arbiter in hiring and firing ministers or did this undermine the spiritual independence of the congregation? The exit of more than 400 ministers from the Kirk’s General Assembly and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland (the Wee Frees) was the answer.

I would happily join a Free Church of England if this meant fewer bishops, more parish clergy, no Church Commissioners and all of Cranmer’s collects.

Rohaise Thomas-Everard

Dulverton, Somerset

Endangered churches

Sir: Patrick Kidd is spot on when he says that volunteers are key to the future of our churches. That’s exactly why our plan to save the country’s church buildings, Every Church Counts, makes more support for heroic volunteers a top priority.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

We can’t expect the volunteers who look after these buildings day to day to be experts in historic building repairs, or in the complex task of large-scale fund raising. But we can expect dioceses and denominations to do more to support them, and to simplify the bureaucracy that makes the work harder than it should be and deters new people from getting involved.

Half the country’s most important historic buildings are churches, but many are at risk and an increasing number face closure. We need action by government, the denominations, philanthropists and local churches themselves, with local people at the heart of securing their future.

Sir Philip Rutnam

Chairman, National Churches Trust

London SW1P

Faith in politics

Sir: Douglas Murray (‘Why is it so hard to be a Christian in public life?’, 18 May) is partly right. But as a Christian, I found that neither the Conservative party, nor my constituents, made it hard. I was also encouraged to read in Katy Balls’s interview with Labour’s Shabana Mahmood (in which she stood up for Kate Forbes) that she would as a Muslim oppose loosening of the abortion law and assisted dying – views that I share, and which are almost certainly not held by the majority of her colleagues. That implies to me that the Labour party is accepting of the implications of faith in public life, as presumably it would offer the same freedom of conscience to Christians, Jews, Hindus and those of other faiths.

It seems to be mainly the Liberal Democrats and SNP who have a problem in this area, although the recent appointment of Kate Forbes as Deputy First Minister is a welcome sign of a more broad-minded approach. I pray that it lasts and that the Lib Dems follow suit. In the meantime, we can thank God that we can still worship and proclaim the Gospel freely in this country. We do not face the persecution and even murder which so many Christians and others suffer for their faith across the world and which Fiona Bruce MP speaks up against as the Prime Minister’s special envoy on religious freedom. However, there is no room for complacency. Such freedom has been hard won over the centuries in our country and is easily lost.

Jeremy Lefroy

Conservative MP for Stafford 2010-2019

Corkscrewed

Sir: Having read Sean Thomas’s article about exorbitant tipping in the USA (‘Slippery slope’, 18 May), may I suggest he does what a friend of mine does? He only tips for the food – which in fairness has to be prepared and served – but when ordering a $300 bottle of wine refuses to pay $60 for the removal of the cork. He has met some resistance but persists.

Rob Phillips

Lymington, Hants

Underground, overground

Sir: Rory Sutherland is right about how marketing transformed what we now call the London Overground (The Wiki Man, 11 May). When it was managed by British Rail, few knew of the existence of the North London line and it was actually proposed for closure in the post-Beeching era. The transfer of ownership to London Transport and its marketing as part of the Tube network transformed its profile and it is now so popular that it is sometimes difficult to get on the trains.

An interesting example of how – just as with private ownership – there can be good state organisations and bad. Also, BR was not the only one to get things wrong. The Spectator itself opposed the extension of the Jubilee line as offering poor value for money. Once again, it is so popular that it is often hard to get on the trains.

David Reed

Mirfield, West Yorkshire

Avo alternative

Sir: Mystic Martin Vander Weyer does it again, in a far-sighted reach into the future (Any other business, 18 May). I almost choked on my ‘old school’ porridge at his gag about mushy peas in the avocado analysis. Mushy peas as a super substitute? They are already here, in a nice little breakfast venue in Piccadilly, hiding in plain sight and labelled ‘No Avo on sourdough’ (naturally). The ‘No Avo’ is mashed or pressed peas with some watercress, chilled. It was pleasant enough, while others might resurrect an old City label which Martin will remember: ‘Cannot recommend a purchase.’

W. McCall

Kippen, Stirlingshire

Holy wine

Sir: Domaine de la Vieille Eglise is not, pace Jonathan Ray (Wine club, 11 May), France’s only working winery in a church. The Cellier des Dominicains inside a Dominican convent built in 1290 in Collioure, Roussillon, is a flourishing cooperative.

Christopher McKane

North London

Big island

Sir: Toby Young refers to Britain as ‘a small island in the North Sea’ (No sacred cows, 18 May). Britain is actually a large island, the ninth largest in the world, far larger than such sizeable ones as Iceland, Cuba, Sicily and Corsica. If you want a small island, think of one of the Greek Cyclades or the Inner Hebrides. Toby may well have meant ‘a small country’, but even that description probably needs qualifying.

Stephen Terry

Lustleigh, Devon

Dead cat strategy

Sir: Toby Young’s article on accidentally abducting cats reminded me of a friend whose cat died days before he was due to exchange contracts on a new house. His wife insisted he bury the cat in the ‘new’ garden which they did not yet own. So my pal crept out at 2 a.m., slipped into the garden and buried the cat. The sale fell through two days later.

Peter Fineman

Barrow Street, Wiltshire

The real reason Ofcom has gone after GB News

I don’t envy the people who run Ofcom. On the one hand, they’re under enormous political pressure to sanction GB News, which, in the eyes of its establishment critics, is a contaminated river of far-right propaganda that’s polluting the ‘delicate and important broadcast ecology of this country’ (Adam Boulton). But on the other, they want to preserve their status as the keepers of the ring and cannot be seen to be holding GB News to a higher standard than other broadcasters. That makes their lives complicated because, in reality, the channel’s politics are far closer to the Telegraph than they are to Fox News, and it’s no more partisan than LBC or Channel 4 News. Indeed, it may actually be less politically biased than those broadcasters, with a recent poll discovering that more GB News viewers intend to vote Labour than Conservative.

Until now, Ofcom’s solution to this dilemma has been a typical English fudge in which the regulator appears to take the complaints of left-wing activists about the channel seriously, dutifully ‘investigating’ them over several months, only to conclude that it hasn’t actually breached the Broadcasting Code or – if it has – in such a minor way that it’s only deserving of a wrist-slap. But that changed this week with the announcement that Ofcom is considering whether to impose a ‘statutory sanction’ on GB News, having concluded that People’s Forum: The Prime Minister,in which Rishi Sunak was grilled by a studio audience last February, broke ‘due impartiality’ rules. If it does decide to wheel out the big guns, the channel’s punishment could be anything from a fine to the removal of its broadcast licence.

Most popular

Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

Steerpike

NHS trust offers support sessions over Supreme Court ruling

Stephen Pollard

Badenoch needs to be brutally honest with voters

Why the harsher treatment? Ofcom says it’s because this is the third time the channel has breached ‘due impartiality’ rules, that the rules in question are important (they require broadcasters to give due weight to a wide range of significant views when it comes to matters of major political controversy) and it’s incumbent upon GB News to follow these rules at the moment because we’re in a ‘period preceding a UK general election’. But having looked in detail at the regulator’s case, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the real reason it’s taken the gloves off is because it knows which way the wind is blowing.

Take the last part of Ofcom’s rationale. You could say we’re in a period preceding an election at more or less any time, given that the Fixed Term Parliament Act has been repealed and the Prime Minister can call an election whenever he wants. To argue that broadcasters should have particular regard for ‘due impartiality’ during an actual general election campaign is one thing, but Ofcom is introducing an entirely novel concept to justify its decision.

What about the charge that the programme in question failed to give due weight to a wide range of significant views? GB News had a field day on Monday, pumping out clips of the Prime Minister being hauled over the coals by a studio full of undecided voters. He was skewered on the government’s ‘chronic underfunding’ of social care; the likely failure of its Rwanda policy; the housing shortage; its lack of support for the LGBT community; and its neglect of the vaccine injured. Aha, says Ofcom. But the audience members weren’t given an opportunity to ask follow-up questions, so Sunak ‘had a mostly uncontested platform to promote the policies and performance of his government’.

Having watched the programme, I wouldn’t describe the response to the Prime Minister as ‘uncontested’. Yes, the questioners didn’t get a right of reply, but no sooner had Sunak fielded one fast bowl than another was coming straight for him. The claim that this is a third offence, with the channel having been found guilty twice before of breaching the same rules, might carry more weight if those other offences were serious. But they weren’t, which is why they attracted no penalties. It’s a bit like a magistrate saying to a defendant that because he’s been caught going 23mph in a 20mph zone twice before, he’s now considering sending him to jail for doing so a third time.

The truth is, Ofcom has enormous latitude when it comes to applying these rules, which is why it hasn’t sanctioned LBC for its almost identical Call Keir show. How its executives interpret the ‘due impartiality’ requirements is at their discretion, which means their decisions are unavoidably political. Indeed, this latest ruling is a regulatory version of lawfare – a thinly disguised political attack. Ultimately, it will do more damage to the reputation of Ofcom than GB News.