Sunak introduces the ‘Triple Lock Plus’

Another day, another big policy pledge from the Tories – and this time it’s a pitch for the grey vote. Rishi Sunak is pledging to cut tax for pensioners. A Conservative government would increase the personal allowance for pensioners in line with the Triple Lock by introducing a new age-related allowance. It is being billed as the ‘Triple Lock Plus’ whereby both the state pension and their tax-free allowance rise in line with the highest of earnings, wages or 2.5 per cent.

As things stand, tax thresholds are being frozen for three years – which would not only drag five million more into higher tax bands but mean the basic state pension would, for the first time, be subject to income tax as that threshold stays at £12,570. This so-called fiscal drag has been softened for workers via National Insurance cuts but not for pensioners: that would now change. This being an election campaign, the absence of a tax rise is being billed as a tax cut worth £95 for eight million pensioners next year and £275 a year by 2029/30 (see chart below).

Laura Trott, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, explains in the Daily Telegraph that…

…without change, next year pensioners would start paying income tax on their state pension alone.  That isn’t right. That is why, from April next year, we will increase the personal allowance for pensioners, a tax cut worth around £100 for eight million pensioners. Better still, to make sure the state pension never crosses the income tax threshold, we will ensure personal tax allowance for pensioners rises by the triple lock in each year of the next Parliament. A new triple lock plus.

The announcement comes as Labour is making inroads with the pensioner vote. This weekend, Labour took out a page two advert in the Mail on Sunday titled ‘an open letter to the pensioners of Britain from the Labour party’. In the letter, shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall attacked Sunak over his ambition to abolish national insurance contributions ‘which help fund the state pension’. Starmer’s team see talking about the Tories and NI as a way to signal to pensioners as they grew up with the view that NI was all about funding their pensions and the NHS.

Yet this policy will raise questions of affordability. Labour is already attacking it as ‘another desperate move from a chaotic Tory party torching any remaining facade of its claims to economic credibility’. But even Tory politicians have raised questions over whether the Triple Lock is sustainable or fair – let alone the ‘Triple Lock Plus’. As the Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said of the Triple Lock last year: ‘In the very, very, long-term, if you have an arrangement like the Triple Lock that keeps ratcheting up pensions by the highest of three different metrics – it seems to me that it does become unsustainable in the long-term.’

There have been Tory nerves over a potential pensioner backlash since the Budget which focussed on those in work (by cutting National Insurance). When Sunak appeared on Loose Women recently one of the panellists asked him: 'why do you hate pensioners?' This policy is aimed at addressing such criticisms – and trying to get the one age voter group that still leans Tory (a recent YouGov poll found the Tories still led at 33 points to 28) to keep doing so.

For now though, this policy coming soon after Sunak's call for mandatory national service for 18-year-olds appears to suggest the Tories are adopting a core vote strategy – trying to shore up the vote among the older ages so as to limit losses.

Tory MP suspended for backing Reform successor

It never rains but it pours for poor Rishi Sunak. After a difficult start for his election campaign, the Prime Minister tried to steal a march on his Labour opponents by proposing the reintroduction of a form of national service. One person he would presumably now like to conscript is Lucy Allan, the longtime Telford trouble-maker. Having been elected in 2015, Allan announced last June that she intended to stand down as an MP.

Unfortunately for Sunak she has decided to mark her leaving this week with a final two-fingered salute at the Tory leader. In a statement posted on Twitter/X today, she announced that she was supporting the local Reform candidate in her Shropshire seat and shared his campaign details online. ‘I am supporting Alan Adams to be Telford’s next MP’ she wrote. ‘If you want to help Alan or donate to his campaign, sign up on his website.’ A gleeful Richard Tice duly declared that he was ‘delighted’ to welcome Allan into his ranks.

Moments later came the inevitable news that Allan – who remains an MP until the dissolution of parliament on Thursday – had been suspended by the Tories. A Conservative party spokesman told Steerpike that:

Lucy Allan has been suspended from the party with immediate effect. The people of Telford now have the chance to vote for a dedicated and hardworking new candidate who will put Telford first. A vote for Reform is a vote for Keir Starmer.

Still, at least Reform can boast two MPs – for now at least…

Which seats are the Scottish Tories targeting in the election?

The Scottish Conservatives were facing a difficult election this summer but SNP leader John Swinney may have thrown them a lifeline. In choosing to attack Holyrood’s standards committee for proposing a 27-day suspension for nationalist MSP Michael Matheson, Swinney has put his party on the wrong side of public opinion. Matheson was censured for running up an £11,000 data bill on his parliamentary iPad during a family holiday in Morocco and trying to have the taxpayer cover it. Swinney claims the standards process was prejudiced by one of the committee’s members and says he will oppose its recommendations.

This has been a welcome surprise for the Scottish Tories. A senior party figure tells me: ‘Matheson has huge cut-through. The voters see Swinney opposing a sanction they don’t think is enough.’ This matches what others say: Matheson is coming up on the doorsteps and the punters are not happy about it. It feeds into the impression that, after 17 years in government in Scotland, the SNP considers itself above the rules. It’s an impression the Conservatives are only too happy to kindle.

Until a few weeks ago, everyone knew what the Scottish Tory playbook was going to be for the general election. The party’s leader Douglas Ross had drawn on it in one First Minister’s Questions after another: hammer the SNP for its coalition with the Greens. The governing pact had become toxic with certain nationalist MSPs and some supporters, who were furious over capitulations to the Greens on gender reforms and road repairs. The Scottish Government’s turn against North Sea oil gave the Tories an opportunity to Green-bash their way to electoral gains in the North East.

Then Humza Yousaf abruptly broke the coalition before following it out the door. The Tories’ central campaign theme was gone. But the Matheson story, and particularly Swinney’s decision to back his personal friend, offers even more traction. And the Conservatives intend to ride it all the way to polling day – or until Swinney U-turns.

They’re not pinning their hopes entirely on Matheson. They believe that, while the party might suffer thanks to the anti-Tory wave sweeping England, there are opportunities to hold on in certain seats and even pick up others with an SNP incumbent. Although the Scottish Tories refuse to cite a benchmark number, they have roughly half a dozen seats they aim to retain and half a dozen they believe are in play.

First the incumbents. Borders stronghold Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, currently occupied by Scotland Office minister John Lamont, is a key seat to retain. Lamont has been the MP since 2017 and his 2019 majority was 5,148. Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, long-time constituency of former Scottish Secretary David Mundell, has been Tory since its creation in 2005 and Mundell is defending a 3,781-vote majority. Nuclear minister Andrew Bowie is standing again in West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, but defending an aching small majority of 843 with the SNP biting at his heels.

Ex-minister David Duguid has held Banff and Buchan since 2017 and hopes to be returned for its replacement seat of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, where his notional majority is over 2,000. Dumfries and Galloway, seat of outgoing Scottish Secretary Alister Jack, is being contested by John Cooper, a journalist and former special adviser, who will be hoping to build on Jack’s 1,805 majority. Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey succeeds Moray, which is held by Douglas Ross who is not standing for Westminster this time. Local veterinarian Kathleen Robertson will try to wrestle back what is now a notionally SNP seat.

Then there are the battlegrounds where the Scottish Tories aim to topple nationalist MPs. Stephen Kerr, currently a list MSP at Holyrood, is trying his hand at Angus and Perthshire Glens, the successor seat to Angus, a nationalist heartland but one the Tories held between 2017 and 2019. The notional SNP majority is just over 6,000. His Scottish Parliament colleague Sandesh Gulhane, is tackling East Renfrewshire, a middle-class bellwether with an SNP majority over 5,000 that changed hands at each of the last three elections. Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber, which replaces Argyll and Bute, is another target but could prove beyond reach given the decision by former Lib Dem MP Alan Reid to contest the new seat. The SNP has a notional majority just shy of 5,000.

May-era minister Luke Graham hopes to recapture his old Ochil and South Perthshire seat in its latest incarnation as Perth and Kinross-shire but doing so will involve defeating veteran nationalist Pete Wishart, defending a notional majority north of 2,000. Gordon and Buchan, the new name for Gordon, is a straight fight between the Tories and incumbent nationalist Richard Thomson, who finds himself in a much more Conservative-friendly constituency. Meanwhile, Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock is held by the SNP’s Allan Dorans with a 2,000 majority but fell to the Tories in 2017, giving rise to hopes for a blue revival.

Prior to Swinney’s intervention on Matheson, ‘devolved stuff’ was ‘the big issue’ in canvassing sessions, according to my source. This echoes recent polling suggesting the SNP’s record on health and education is finally catching up with it. Anti-independence rhetoric will, predictably, form a key plank of the Tory message, though Swinney has only encouraged this with his pledge that independence will be ‘page one, line one’ of the SNP manifesto.

The Scottish Tories face an uphill battle and can only be dragged down by the Westminster party. If they can wall themselves off from that, and run the election campaign as a referendum on 17 years of the SNP, they could salvage a few of their seats. They might well do better than that.

Tory backlash grows over Sunak’s national service pledge

The Conservative campaign pledge to introduce mandatory national service is still dominating the news two days on. Many of Monday’s front pages carry details or questions over the practicality of the policy. There are also questions about what sanctions 18-year-olds would face for refusing to take part in community service or take part in a twelve-month armed forces placement. Officially, this is one for the royal commission to decide (if Sunak is somehow prime minister after 4 July) – but ideas floating around include being blocked from civil service jobs, fines or credits in relation to university applications.

However, the more immediate problem for Sunak here is once again his party. As Fraser and I discussed on Sunday’s Coffee House Shots, several MPs and ministers have privately voiced concerns and bemusement since the policy was announced. Now one has gone public. Step forward Steve Baker. The Northern Ireland minister has today suggested that the policy was dreamed up by campaign staff and goes against the government policy: ‘It’s a Conservative party policy. The government’s policy was set out on Thursday.’ Baker is referring to his colleague Andrew Murrison who recently said in a government statement there are no plans ‘to reintroduce service’.

Baker said on Monday:

I don’t like to be pedantic but a government policy would have been developed by ministers on the advice of officials and collectively agreed. I would have had a say on behalf of [Northern Ireland]. But this proposal was developed by a political adviser or advisers and sprung on candidates, some of whom are relevant ministers.

It comes at a time when it is safe to say there is plenty of bad will in the Tory party over the election timing. Several ministers still feel bounced into an early poll – the feeling is Sunak’s decision to see the King before he told the Cabinet decision, showed he had already made up his mind and cared little for their views. As for the party, Tory MPs with majorities around 15,000 feel that they were misled and needed the summer to campaign and build up a team of ground campaigners. A leaked memo – published by the Times – in which CCHQ staff single out some MPs and ministers for not campaigning enough points to the problems with the surprise announcement – and isn’t likely to build party morale.

Just today departing Conservative MP Lucy Allan has announced she is endorsing the Reform party candidate in her constituency of Telford rather than the Tory one. There is a risk, as the campaign starts to kick off, that more MPs and ministers will speak out – particularly if they don’t like the direction the campaign takes. Then the Tory election campaign will be dominated by internal division rather than taking the fight to Labour.

Catch up on the latest Coffee House Shots with Katy Balls, Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews:

CCHQ memo blasts ‘noncommittal’ Tory MPs

It’s all a barrel of gaffes at CCHQ these days. The latest slip-up comes in the form of a leaked memo in which party staff criticised Conservative MPs for failing to ‘get behind’ the election campaign — accusing some of focusing too much on ministerial business, others of being more concerned with holiday plans and adding that a number of seats were rather low on funds. Oh dear…

The controversial email in question delivered to Tory politicians was mistakenly sent with two attachments: one with a constituency breakdown with constructive comments, and another with rather frank remarks about what CCHQ staff thought of the Conservatives’ campaign efforts. The memo focused on key seats that are thought to be part of CCHQ’s ’80/20′ strategy — where resource is focused on the 80 most marginal seats and the 20 most likely constituencies to be gained.

The note listed a number of Tory politicians who were not thought to be fully supporting campaigning, including nature minister Rebecca Pow who was accused of ‘still focusing too much on “ministerial business”‘ and being ‘noncommittal on time she will spend in the seat now and during the campaign’. Meanwhile Wrexham’s MP Sarah Atherton was slammed for ‘refusing to engage’, with the memo noting that she ‘wants to cancel this week’s campaigning sessions’. The document went on to detail which politicians had prioritised personal events over political postering. Ian Levy, candidate for the new Northumberland/Tyne & Wear seat, was recorded as having ‘used his 80/20 week to attend a wedding’, while Cheadle’s Mary Robinson was down as being ‘away for seven days on holiday’.

Candidate attitudes aren’t the only things bothering CCHQ however. As campaigns kick off, party staff are also concerned with money problems. In the Plymouth Moor View seat of veterans minister Johnny Mercer, it was noted that support had been offered as there was an issue with ‘MP co-operation with CCHQ’ and ‘funding issues — currently £2,000 in bank’. Deputy chairman of the party James Daly is facing funding problems in his Bury North constituency too, with the document stating there were ‘low funds, circa £2,000, met with donors but so far no donations’. Meanwhile Frome and East Somerset, as well as Glastonbury and Somerton, were said to ‘urgent need’ better funding. Mr S would have suggested candidates take a leaf out of the SNP’s book and set up Crowdfunders — but that doesn’t seem to be going too well either…

As one might imagine, the rather embarrassing gaffe hasn’t been received well by politicians. One MP blasted CCHQ for its ‘rank incompetence’, while another fumed the slip-up would ‘piss everyone in marginal seats off in the first week.’ An apology has now been offered to email recipients — but it’s hardly the slickest start to election season…

Private schools can’t complain about Labour’s VAT raid

Of course Labour’s policy of charging VAT on private school fees is all about throwing a bit of red meat to those in the party who are motivated by class envy. Why otherwise expend so much political effort on a policy which in the opinion of the Institute of Fiscal Studies will only raise £1.6 billion a year? And that, of course, is mere guesswork. No-one really knows how the parents of private school pupils will really behave when whacked with a 20 per cent uplift in fees.

Even if parents don’t withdraw pupils immediately, many might be tempted to do so at the end of prep school – and it will certainly impact on the decisions of parents whose children haven’t yet reached school age. Every UK pupil withdrawn from the private sector will cost the taxpayer far more than they would have raised in VAT had they stayed. The average fee for a private school pupil this year is £15,200, the VAT on which comes to £3,040. The average spent on educating pupils in the state sector is £8,000.

But I wish I could sympathise with private schools a bit more than I do. Labour’s policy would strike me as a bit more of an outrage had private schools not spent the past 30 years steadily pricing the middle classes out of private education. The expected 20 per cent uplift in fees (assuming that schools pass on the full burden of VAT) will merely echo the real-terms rise in fees which the private sector has already inflicted on parents since 2010. Since 2003 the real-terms rise has been 55 per cent. Doctors, lawyers, small business-owners – groups who in the past had little problem in affording private education – have steadily found themselves struggling, and looking to the state sector instead.

The Conservatives bark at universities for favouring wealthy overseas students over UK ones, but the independent schools sector has been doing the same for years. Of the 556,551 pupils enrolled at private schools last year 62,708 were from overseas. Of these, 26,195 had parents living abroad.

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Not all private schools pitch themselves in the international market, but those which have come to rely on oligarchs’ children to allow them to jack up fees can hardly complain when Labour sees them as fair game for VAT. Independent schools will point towards the growing numbers of bursaries and other forms of assistance to argue that they are deserving of their charitable and VAT-exempt status, but how much stronger would be their case if they focused on affordable, academic education rather than joining an arms race in ever-smarter facilities.

What the independent sector has been crying out for for years is a Ryanair or a Lidl: a chain of schools unashamedly providing education at an affordable price. The absence of grammar schools in most parts of the country has created a huge hole in the market for rigorous academic education. Why should it have to cost more than the £8,000 a year the government spends educating state pupils? Normally, the private sector succeeds in undercutting the costs of the state sector, but private schools are an exception: they have become a sector only interested in providing an upmarket product. By doing so they have lost the support of people who would now be supporting them, especially those in the middle: too poor to afford the fees but too well-off to qualify for full bursaries.

Why is Rachel Reeves so proud of working at the Bank of England? 

We don’t know much about what taxes she will impose. Nor do we have many clues as to how she will boost growth, or find the money to improve public services. Still, not to worry. It turns out that we can, at least according to her feed on X, trust the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves to ‘run the economy’ for a very simple reason. She used to work at the Bank of England, and apparently they know about that kind of stuff over there. There is just one problem. In reality the Bank is not as brilliant as Reeves seems to think it is – and it is questionable, to put it mildly, if working for it really qualifies you for anything.

For anyone wondering if the Labour government is likely to improve the UK’s dismal economic outlook, Reeves had some reassuring words this weekend. On her feed on X, formerly Twitter, she posted a clip of herself boasting about her formidable CV. ‘I was an economist at the Bank of England for many years before I became an MP,’ she bragged. ‘I know how to run a successful economy.’

Seriously? In fairness, Reeves is probably familiar with an inflation forecast, and knows what the exchange rate actually means, which may be more than some of her colleagues around Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet table. And yet, there are two big problems with constantly bragging about her time at the Bank. First, its track record, especially over the past ten years, has been terrible. It pumped too much money into the economy, and cut interest rates too far, allowing inflation to run completely out of control, so that by 2022, prices were rising at 11 per cent, a 41-year-high, and five times the Bank’s legally mandated target. Meanwhile, it failed to regulate the banking system adequately, contributing first to the banking collapse of 2008 and 2009, and then the LTI crisis that hit the insurance companies in 2022. Next, and you would sort of hope its former staff realised this, the Bank does not actually ‘run’ the economy anyway. It is in charge of setting monetary policy to keep inflation on target, which is a slightly different thing, and it is not even very good at that. 

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In reality, Reeves’s habit of boasting about her CV is becoming increasingly embarrassing. There is an alarming possibility that she actually believes her experience at the Bank means she can ‘run’ the economy better than investors, consumers and companies interacting in a free market can. If so, she is likely to get a rude awakening once she is installed in Number 11 Downing Street – it is just a shame that the rest of the country will have to pay the price for her hubris. 

Starmer’s ‘why Labour’ message needs to get slicker

Keir Starmer has been considerably less discombobulated by the election announcement than the party that made it, but he still has some catching up to do. The Labour leader knows that he has to answer the question of ‘why Labour’ to voters who have already largely accepted that there is a strong reason to change from the Tories. To that end, his speech this morning was an attempt to explain to the public what Labour now stands for.

Slightly improbably, Starmer started by telling the audience that they really should visit Oxted. The reason for this was that Starmer sees Oxted as being the way he can explain his politics and what he stands for. He was starting with his biography (again).

Anyone in the Westminster bubble could have written large sections of the speech for him because they’d heard many of the sentences before. In fact, before this election, Starmer would have been making jokes about the lines ‘my father was a toolmaker’ and ‘pebbledash semi’, but he delivered them today as though he’d never said them before — because an election campaign is when normal voters start to pay attention and hear for the first phrases we have all become used to. The Labour leader wanted voters to see that he understands what it means for a family to struggle to pay the bills, and that he believed in ‘the basic ordinary hope that Britain will be better for your children’.

More than presenting himself and his backstory to the public, the bigger challenge for Starmer was introducing the explanation of ‘why Labour’ to voters. It’s not something Labour has managed to articulate very clearly up to this point, relying instead on voters’ frustration with the Tories rather than the attraction of Starmer’s party itself. Today the Labour leader explained his party’s priorities as being ‘economic security, border security, national security’, adding that this was voters’ ‘core test. It’s always their core test. The definition of service.’

This underlines why the 2024 Labour campaign is not going to be groaning under the weight of the retail offers made by Starmer’s predecessors over the past 14 years. Those campaigns, despite offering all kinds of free things, did not win the election for Labour. Now, Starmer is trying to sell his party as being serious and maybe even a little boring in contrast to the constant ‘chaos’ of the Tory party. He described the Conservative campaign so far as changing ‘every day’, characterising the national service policy announcement as being the party rooting around in its ‘toy box’.

The latest Tory attack on Starmer is that he is ‘weary’ and ‘sleepy’— something he laughed off in the question-and-answer session following the speech. The Labour leader also had a better answer to the question of why he’d dropped his previous pledge to abolish university tuition fees; when he had been quizzed about this on Friday he had sounded very unsure of himself. When journalists asked why he was talking about his backstory again, he explained that it was important to repeat things to the public — though he didn’t say explicitly that this was because most normal people pay no attention to politics outside elections. Now that they are paying attention, Starmer needs to hit his stride. He didn’t quite manage that today, but the Labour leader still seems more comfortable with having an election than the party that called it.

The grandstanding against the Hay Festival is short-sighted 

When the country’s largest literary festival parts ways with its main sponsor, it is not usually a cause for rejoicing among writers, performers, and the sorts of people who like to go to literary festivals. It is usually a disaster for the festival. Yet when on Friday the Hay Festival sacked (yes, it was that way round) the investment fund Baillie Gifford as its main sponsor, it was felt that a mighty blow had been struck against injustice.

The decision was the result of a campaign that took exception to the colour of Baillie Gifford’s money, seeing the company as part of a disaster-capitalist enterprise that profits from the destruction of the planet by investing in fossil fuels, and that indirectly supports Israeli aggression against Palestinians.

The singer Charlotte Church, the stand-up comic Nish Kumar and the politician Dawn Butler (Hay’s not as narrowly literary as it once was) have all recently pulled out of the festival as conscientious objectors. On Friday, Hay took fright and caved abjectly. ‘In light of claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw,’ its chief executive Judy Finch said, ‘we have taken the decision to suspend our sponsorship from Baillie Gifford.’

 ‘Claims’ and ‘pressure’ don’t suggest a leadership taking a principled position so much as bending with the wind – like all those longstanding Garrick members who were surprised and outraged to discover their club didn’t admit women. 

Moral clarity is a hell of a drug. Even if we take as unquestionable axioms that fossil fuels are bad, and that Israel is bad, and that literary festivals are an important good, this seems to me a rash and silly move. How many investment funds can be sure of having no exposure whatever to shares that will fail somebody’s purity test?

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Baillie Gifford say, as they have said before, that their exposure to fossil fuels is relatively modest for the sector (two per cent against an industry average of 11 per cent). Charlotte Church declares that ‘only 2 per cent is not good enough’ and talks of their ‘£10 billion in companies with links to Israeli occupation, security apparatus and genocide of Palestinians’. (The phrase ‘links to’, there, is wickedly vague.) But, sure: they are not perfect.  

Who is? My iPhone is the fruit of exploitative labour and conflict minerals. If you have a pension or a bank account, if you use PayPal or Visa to transfer money, you are involved in a system that is complicit in facilitating ethically questionable transactions around the world. And let’s not get started on snorting coke, eating chocolate or buying books from Amazon.

To observe that everything is tainted does not mean that it’s impossible or unnecessary to take principled positions. 

But what is the end game here? If it is to cause investment funds, or even this one investment fund, to stop investing in firms that have any ethically questionable involvements, it fails. Rather, the campaign has taken a fund that does some good things (sponsoring the free exchange of views and ideas in festivals) and some bad things (owning shares in oil companies) and put a firm kibosh not on the latter but on the former. That may allow participants in the festival to feel personally uncontaminated by Bad Things, but it doesn’t do much to improve the world.

The campaigners behind this, Fossil Free Books, claim to want to drive fossil fuel money out of the literary and publishing world. That seems, for all their rhetoric of standing in solidarity with the global south, a weirdly parochial and self-regarding aim. The book world isn’t exactly one of the main arteries through which such money flows in the first place.

In taking this view, incidentally, I find an unlikely ally in George Monbiot. Mr Monbiot is no great defender of capitalism, fan of the fossil fuel industry or cheerleader for the invasion of Gaza, but when asked if he’d be joining the boycott of Hay he said he would not. He said he thought the festival a ‘good cause’ and told the Guardian: ‘We can’t just point to one instance of this Earth-eating, people-eating system and say that, and that alone is the problem.’

He’s right. This is not a consumer boycott of the sort that hits a company in the wallet. Baillie Gifford will be richer, rather than otherwise, for not shelling out a small fortune on sponsoring literary festivals. If the hope was that the threat of refusing its sponsorship would cause this very large company to change its core business model (ie: letting its clients, within the law, make their own ethical decisions), that was a hubristic one; and now their connection with the festival has been severed, such leverage as Hay had will anyway have vanished. 

When it’s said that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it’s good to remember that the operative word there is ‘unacknowledged’.

And think of this the other way round. What if we said that any companies that invest in fossil fuels (I’ll leave aside the ‘genocide’ in Gaza as being a whole other conversation, and one whose ‘inextricable’ linkage to climate justice doesn’t strike me as self-evident) were to be punished for doing so by being forced to donate a percentage of their profits to good works: sponsoring a literary festival or a book prize, say? It’s hard to see how the current campaigners against Baillie Gifford’s involvement with Hay could be anything other than full-throatedly in favour.

So is it the fact that Baillie Gifford does what it does voluntarily that rankles? Is the problem that by accepting its sponsorship Hay (and the Edinburgh Book Festival, and the Baillie Gifford Prize, and all the rest) lets it ‘artwash’ or ‘greenwash’ its ill-gotten gains? Well, yes and no. It buffs the brand a bit to seem culturally engaged, though probably not in a very measurable way. You could also say that the downside trumped the upside: in engaging with the literary world Baillie Gifford made itself vulnerable to attack by grandstanding celebrities. No good deed goes unpunished. 

The very many other investment firms which are ear-deep in arms companies, rare earth metals, child exploitation, fracking, seal clubbing and so forth, but don’t get stick because bien pensant literary folk have never heard of them, sail on regardless.

And will we now see the beneficiaries of Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship, up to and including the nonfiction prize which bears its name, one by one cut off their noses to spite their faces? If so, that will do a great deal of damage to the literary culture of this country – and absolutely none at all to the fossil fuel industry or, for that matter, the Israeli war machine. 

SNP candidates struggle to Crowdfund campaign money

Uh oh. As election campaigns kick off, a number of nationalist politicians have had a rather rocky start. The SNP has already gone into election season on the back foot as polls consistently predict the party is likely to lose around half its Westminster MPs in the next election. To make matters worse the SNP is also having trouble attracting investment while the police probe into party finances hangs hangs over it. The latest accounts show the Nats saw an £800,000 financial loss as membership numbers fell and donations dried up. Now it transpires that Scottish National party candidates have had to resort to launching Crowdfund pages to try and pull together funds for their campaigns.

But it turns out that begging voters for money isn’t always a surefire way to garner support. SNP candidates are looking for around £60,000 in all to help the Nats fight for seats, with politicians individually asking for between £1,000 to £10,000 of extra cash to campaign. Alba and Labour party candidates have also opted for similar methods of fundraising to varying degrees of success. Yet the response to the Nats from the Scottish public has been rather lacklustre to say the least…

Stephen Gethins, standing for the Nats in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry had only managed to raise, er, £45 by Sunday afternoon. And things aren’t looking much better for long-standing SNP MPs either. Tommy Sheppard, SNP MP for Edinburgh East, had racked up a mere £70 by Sunday — despite being a Member of Parliament for over nine years. Anum Qaisar is hoping to defend her Airdrie and Shotts seat, but has raised only a little over 10 per cent of her £2,000 goal. And former BBC presenter John Nicolson, who has been an SNP MP since 2019, is hoping for donations of a whopping £10,000 — yet has only received £1,145 so far. Oh dear…

Figures from the SNP’s Holyrood group have defended the use of donation pages however, and SNP MSP Kevin Stewart told the Scottish Daily Mail that there are ‘hundreds of thousands of pounds in reserves’ for candidates, adding: ‘It looks good that we’re not in the hands of people giving millions of pounds.’ That’s one way to spin it…

France has become Europe’s Wild West

New Caledonia must not become the ‘Wild West’ declared Emmanuel Macron last week during his flying visit to the Pacific Island. For two weeks the indigenous people, the Kanaks, have been in revolt against a voting reform they believe will marginalise them.

The French President’s visit achieved little. Not long after Macron’s departure an insurgent was shot dead by police. Seven people have been killed in the unrest and the material damage is estimated at more than one billion euros.

It is not only the Overseas French Territory that is in danger of resembling the Wild West. Mayhem has become a characteristic of Macron’s France, and rarely does a week pass without an act of barbarity. On Sunday afternoon in Lyon a man with a knife wounded four passengers in the metro.

But nowhere feels more like Dodge City than Paris. The weekend before last a jewellers in the upmarket 8th arrondissement was robbed. It was a brazen heist in the middle of the morning, and as the bandits fled they fired shots in the air like a scene from a Hollywood western. The crime took place less than a mile from where, twelve months ago, an estate agent was shot dead by a contract killer. It was a case of mistaken identity; the victim had no link to a drugs cartel, as the intended target allegedly had.

If violent crime is creeping ever closer to the centre of Paris, the worst of it remains in the ‘wild north’ of the city. Last week in Aubervilliers two people were wounded by a grenade hurled from a car onto a pavement in the early evening.

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An eye-witness said the aftermath of the explosion was ‘the kind of scene you see in war footage’. A woman suffered severe injuries to her hand, and a man lost an arm and had ‘half his face ripped off’. Police are investigating the motive.

The incident occurred a few miles west of Sevran where earlier this month two men were executed in an alleyway. Both were known to police as drug traffickers.

My wife teaches in a school a mile from the alleyway. A few days after the double murder, she and her class went into Paris on a school outing in the evening. It took them over three hours to get home; the metro and suburban train network have been severely disrupted for months because of work to the lines ahead of the Olympics. Replacement bus services have been provided but following the shooting the route was shortened to avoid the area. It was considered too risky for buses.

So, at midnight, my wife and 25 teenagers found themselves standing in one of the most dangerous districts of western Europe. Fortunately the parents came to the rescue, arriving in cars and vans to collect their frightened offspring.

Also in the north of Paris – a mile and a half from the grenade attack – is the Stade de France, the main venue for the Olympic Games.

Last week the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was taken to task by an opposition city councillor, who accused her of turning Paris into two cities: ‘The Paris of the Olympic Games: well-organised, festive, and which will feel the benefit of the Games. And the Paris that suffers, which no one looks at. That is everyday Paris, where the people will see no benefit.’

An angry Hidalgo rejected the accusation. ‘I’m sick and tired of the Games bashing!’ she declared, adding that the Olympics was an exceptional opportunity for Parisians ‘to celebrate something together’.

Is that true? The best way to celebrate the Olympics is as a spectator but ticket prices are exorbitant. ‘These are going to be the most expensive ticket prices in an athletics arena that we have witnessed at an Olympic Games,’ complained Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics. ‘We asked for a balance… you want fans within affordable prices.’ Coe was the chairman of the organising committee of the 2012 London Olympics, a where 90% of tickets were under £100. This is not the case for the Paris Games. For example, in London the cheapest ticket for the final of the men’s 100m was £54 (64€); in Paris it is 125€. 

Ticket prices are beyond the range of many Parisians, who are struggling with a cost of living crisis that has included sharp rises in prices for food and energy bills. Parisians are also confronted with other increases: violent crime and drug trafficking are both up; in 2023 there was a 20% increase in murders on the previous year in the greater Paris region.

It’s not much fun being a Parisian these days unless, of course, you’re a person of importance who has private transport and a security detail. Life, in other words, for the politicians in the ‘Paris Bubble’ is rosy. Many will probably be seen at the Olympics, enjoying the lavish corporate hospitality on offer.

Outside the bubble it’s business as usual. Murder, mayhem and misery. If Hidalgo has turned Paris into two cities, Macron has turned France into two nations. One is the well-off and the other is the Wild West.

There’s trouble ahead for Taiwan’s new president

Not many inaugural ceremonies bring together dragons, dancers, rappers, and a 10-metre-high blue horse breathing steam out of its nostrils. But last Monday morning, as thousands gathered to watch the inauguration of Taiwan’s new president William Lai, Taipei’s residents were treated to just that. And as Lai danced on the stage, he may well have been very happy. His inauguration ceremony, an eclectic display of Taiwanese culture, had gone off without a hitch. 

Moreover, his inaugural speech, designed to outline a pragmatic foreign policy while developing new ideas to stimulate Taiwan’s economy, had elicited what felt like a relatively muted reaction from Beijing. Like his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, Lai committed to maintaining the status quo, promising to ‘neither yield nor provoke’.

But only three days later, China announced a series of surprise military exercises, described by Beijing’s spokesperson as a ‘punishment’ for Lai’s ‘provocative statements.’ Spread over Thursday and Friday, Chinese state media reported that the exercises included joint army, navy, air, and rocket force drills in zones surrounding Taiwan. Exercises and patrols were also conducted around Taiwan’s outlying islands, which Taiwan’s former chief of general staff, Lee Hsi-ming, has suggested would be impossible to protect were China to invade. 

However, while the exercises represent an escalation of recent cross-strait tensions, China stopped short of demonstrating the aggression it had shown in the summer of 2022, when a visit by Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the US House of Representatives, triggered missile launches around Taiwan. Despite this, the operation’s codename, ‘Joint Sword-2024-A’ has left some wondering whether there may be a 2024-B or even C still to come.

As well as allowing the Chinese military to increase its battlefield readiness, gather intelligence on Taipei’s response, and wear down Taiwan’s military infrastructure, these drills also function as a signalling mechanism. As far back as 1995, China has used military exercises in the Taiwan Strait to communicate its positions. Firstly, to send signals to a domestic audience that the leadership is serious about its goal of unifying Taiwan with the mainland. Secondly, as a means of deterring the wider world, and importantly the US, from interfering in what Beijing views as its internal affairs. And thirdly, as a signal to Taiwanese leaders and residents not to pursue de jure independence from China. 

On this last front, however, Beijing does not appear to have been successful. In fact, online searches for ‘military exercises’ in Taiwan are surpassed by queries about a local celebrity currently mired in controversy by a factor of almost three. Google does not even register China’s military exercises in its top 15 trending searches in Taiwan.

While almost 65 per cent of Taiwanese are worried about war with China, for those who have grown up with Beijing’s ever-present threat looming, this fear is now just a part of daily life. Despite the Taiwanese military mobilising elements of its forces to track the PLA’s actions, life in Taiwan has continued as normal.

Instead, in Taipei, a different drama is unfolding, which may present just as much of a challenge to the incoming Lai administration. Inside Taiwan’s parliament, a colonial-era Japanese building that sits in central Taipei, a surreal battle is playing out between William Lai’s governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and the opposition parties that now control a majority in the legislature.

The once red carpeted floor is littered with colourful banners emblazoned with political slogans, and opposition legislators equipped with armour, bike helmets, elbow braces and protective gloves have encircled the speaker of the house, barricading the doors that surround him with chairs and sofas. 

Facing them are a group of DPP legislators, that have repeatedly attempted to disrupt proceedings by storming and occupying the speaker’s chair. These spats have themselves spilt into physical fights. On Friday, a punch thrown by one government representative left an opposition legislator hospitalised, while videos circulating on social media last week showed another being pushed to fall onto his head from a height, as he scrambled to occupy the speaker’s chair.

At stake are a series of controversial laws that the more China-friendly opposition, the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s party, are trying to pass. Among the new laws are clauses that would greatly increase parliament’s investigative power, allowing them to summon individuals to give testimony in front of legislators, with fines and prison time for those who fail to do so, or are found to have withheld information. 

Also included are articles that would increase the level of oversight the legislature has over the government, and would force the president to answer questions in parliament, a move that some analysts describe as an unconstitutional undermining of Taiwan’s separation of powers.

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The skirmish has also spread to the streets of Taipei, where Taiwanese civil society is out in full force. On Friday, roads surrounding parliament were blocked by throngs of protestors, who argued that the legislation is being passed without adequate scrutiny. For some, a local church became a base of operations, with priests drafted in from neighbouring districts to direct the flow of people. A livestream of parliamentary proceedings was displayed inside the church hall, interrupted only by the evening’s sermon. 

While government legislators made regular appearances, shouting encouragement to those demonstrating, not all protestors were in favour of Lai or the DPP. Of the 100,000-odd attendees, some have frustrations with both the opposition and Lai’s party. Moreover, a recent poll suggests that a majority of Taiwanese people actually support elements of the opposition’s proposed legislation.

Taken together, the developments unfolding in Lai’s first week in office highlight some of the problems that his administration will face moving forward. On the international front, Lai will have to continue dealing with a neighbour that is likely to keep increasing pressure on Taiwan. Domestically, while physical violence between legislators is not unprecedented in Taiwanese politics, it nevertheless draws attention to the polarisation and deep divides that exist within Taiwan. Presidents in Taipei have rarely been forced to govern without a majority in the parliament, and we are already seeing the beginnings of what could be a more volatile and unstable parliament.

As the former mayor of Tainan, a large city in the south of the island, and as Taiwan’s vice president for the last four years, William Lai has had time to develop his political instincts and prepare himself for office. Whether these skills are enough is yet to be seen. What remains clear is that both domestically and internationally, Lai’s new administration faces a bumpy road ahead.

Tories race to find 160 candidates

The decision to call a snap election last Wednesday caught many in Tory and Labour high command by surprise. Both parties are now racing to finalise candidate selections for all 630 seats in Britain by the deadline of Friday 7 June, with Labour much further advanced in this process than the Conservatives. Fewer than 35 constituencies currently lack a Labour candidate, and some in Keir Starmer’s team are keen to highlight the contrast in readiness between the two parties. The Tories now have 12 days to fill 160 vacancies – the equivalent of picking one candidate every 100 minutes.

Within CCHQ, however, there is confidence that this target can be met, in spite of the onerous demands of the national campaign. The bulk of the outstanding 160 seats in England and Wales –the Scottish process is separate – are those deemed ‘unwinnable’ in unfavourable territories such as inner London and Bristol. Such seats typically have smaller associations that tend to attract fewer candidates. They are normally fought by younger councillor types on a ‘development’ pass – one of the three types of pass available to candidates, along with ‘key’ candidates who typically fight marginals and ‘comprehensive’ passes for those in safe seats. Historically, the Tories have been able to choose candidates in development seats at speed and in past elections have done this in up to 25 to 30 seats a day. The majority of these should therefore be completed by the end of this week – though it remains to be seen what kind of quality control has been done on these contenders.

Most of the aforementioned 160 constituencies would be uncompetitive even if the polls were not showing a 15-point Labour lead. But there is a minority of around 20 attractive seats where the incumbent MP announced they were standing down in the past fortnight. These include the likes of Jo Churchill’s Bury St Edmunds, Andrea Leadsom’s South Northamptonshire, Huw Merriman’s Bexhill and Battle and Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath. Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, both Nadhim Zahawi and Chris Heaton-Harris also created respective vacancies in Stratford-upon-Avon and Daventry. In these seats, there will be a more competitive process for candidates, given the high likelihood that they will return a Tory MP come 4 July.

A three-person shortlist will be drawn up for these constituencies, in conjunction with the local association chairman. Critics within groups such as the Conservative Democratic Organisation assert that this is when favoured candidates are ‘parachuted’ into plum seats, with Tory branches being presented with three names as a fait accompli. Yet one senior party source insists that it it is ‘more of a deliberative process than its critics give credit’ with local chairmen consulted beforehand on the shortlisted names. ‘It’s not in our interest to antagonise the members,’ they add. Once the three-person shortlist is accepted, the candidates are then voted on at hurriedly-organised special general meetings. These can be arranged at very short notice and are expected to take place throughout this week.

The next seven days will therefore play an important role in shaping the future direction of the Tory party, given the record number of MPs standing down. Despite CCHQ’s assurances, many candidates suspect that they will be cut out of this debate. ‘I do wonder how rigorous the vetting has been for those who are being lined up to inherit some plum seats,’ says one. ‘Can we really afford another half century of [Anna] Soubrys’?’ Another says that there is a ‘fear that longstanding campaigners and people who really know the party will be pushed aside by government drop ins.’ Given the already demoralised mood among many activists, Tory organisers will have to take care over the next 12 days to not antagonise their members even further as they navigate the pitfalls of candidate selection.

I’m a middle-aged man in Lycra – and I’m proud

It began after pint of beer on a Friday evening and a grudging realisation that, well, getting a little bit more active would be no bad thing. Before I knew it, I’d talked myself into doing a 60-mile cycle through the Essex countryside the following Sunday morning – part of an organised cycle race, charmingly called the Tour de Tendring.

Setting off from Harwich in a borrowed Lycra two-piece cycling outfit – looking like a human love handle mated with a mobility scooter – I set off at 8.30 a.m., pedalling into the unknown. What would give up first, my knees, the gears on my rusty old, steel-framed Dawes Galaxy or my spirits? 

What followed was unpleasant: by mile 18 I was deep into buyer’s remorse. By the time I reached Clacton, the half way point, I felt like an immolated extra in the Boschian depiction of hell – you know, one of the chaps at the back with the skewer buried especially deep you know where. My feet were numb, my legs wet jelly, my neck and wrists ached from the cycling posture and repeated potholes – and I was almost sobbing every time I saw a faint incline. To the rescue came a pouch of sugary gel which tasted like thick undiluted orange squash and was so positively delicious that it would have made John Torode tear up with joy. 

Three Garibaldi biscuits and two litres of water later I was back in the saddle. Here’s the rather astonishing news: I went the distance – 56 miles, as it turned out. What’s more, while I was out there pedalling through Essex’s sweet uneventful countryside, I saw the light: I sampled the true joy of being a mamil, one of those despised middle-aged men in Lycra.

Yes, undoubtedly, Lycra on a man of a certain age is to fashion what brutalist buildings are to architecture: an abomination. But just like brutalism you discover it’s far better to be inside looking out. At least you aren’t obliged see it. 

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And Lycra works so who cares what it looks like? Once you’ve been married for more than ten years that kind of thing ceases to matter. Plus, the thick-nappy-style pad insert in the shorts really does save your backside a lot of unnecessary agony (dare to spend four hours in the saddle without one, if you don’t believe me).

Oh, what a joy it is to be a mamil. First, to cycle through countryside is to really see it, because you’re going slowly enough to take it all in. At ten to 15mph you get it: the landscape, the hills – oh yes, even Essex has actual hills, unfortunately – the cow parsley and the first red poppies in the hedgerows, the whisper of leaves of the trees, the hot fields of crops, the silhouettes of squashed hedgehogs. 

And you actually hear the birdsong – nature’s sweet soundtrack, which you never do when you’re burning along in an Audi A4 estate with Taylor Swift thrashing out over the growl of the two-litre diesel engine. Then there’s a truly champion quantity of decent, blokeish chat – hours of it, usually gear-related. Men of a certain age start to open up as they pedal. There’s something almost spiritual about men engaged in collective hard work.

This is what it means to be one of those huddles of cyclists, typically consisting of anything from two to six riders, that you normally see holding up the traffic on a Saturday morning. They’re the irritating people who – if you’re like me when I’m not on a bike – you usually end up having to accelerate past ever so slightly dangerously on a country road in order to make an urgent appointment at Waitrose or cubs. On the bike, it’s worth it for the camaraderie.

That said, on my first outing I managed to find one lonely cyclist who was in worse shape then me: and let me tell you, what sheer, peerless mastery it was to creak past him, the rasp of my bike chain masking the heaviness of my breathing on an evil, never-ending hill to a place called Beaumont-cum-Moze. (I’m never going there again unless it’s in a car). In that moment, when nothing but sheer shame kept my numb feet pumping the pedals, I was Lance Armstrong.

Against such triumphs, of course, is the constant stream of infinitely slimmer and better-attired uber-mamils; toned cyclists who doubtlessly do peaks in the Pyrenees when they’re not cruising Essex, who sweep past you, apparently effortlessly, on whirring carbon fibre road-bikes wishing you a cheery ‘good morning’ as they go. They’re not fooling anyone with that.

For mamils like me, though, it’s not about winning – it’s about making the distance. And, anyway, the physical exertion hurts so much that people overtaking you is the least of it. This points to the most important reason why being a mamil is a joy. The fact is that long-distance cycling is what some folk call Type 2 fun. That’s the sort of activity that’s actually miserable to endure when you’re doing it but enjoyable in retrospect – as opposed to the first type, like having a pint, which is fun while you’re doing it.

You can take it from me, cycling 60 miles through the Essex countryside having done zero training on a 15-year old Dawes Galaxy with only six working gears is the definition of fun only in retrospect. But Type 2 fun is far better than Type 2 diabetes – which could well be where I’ll be heading if I don’t change my ways.

Labour refuse to say if Bercow’s ban is lifted

It is now 812 days since John Bercow membership of the Labour party was suspended on an ‘administrative basis’ pending an investigation into his bullying. Back in March 2022, the former Speaker was banned from ever holding a parliamentary pass after an independent panel upheld the findings of Kathryn Stone, who found him guilty on 21 counts of 35 complaints over five years. The panel’s 89-page review of their probe revealed that Bercow threw phones at staff, displayed ‘undermining behaviour’, and ‘lied extensively to try and avoid the damning reality of the truth’.

Since then, there have been various reports that Labour’s investigation remains ongoing, despite Stone’s comprehensive findings. So Mr S was therefore surprised to find him being filmed out door-knocking with Labour activists, just two days after the general election was announced. The onetime true blue Tory is now canvassing for Keir Starmer’s shiny-new Labour party, who appear to have no problem with his past record. So much for the workers eh? Steerpike asked Labour’s press office whether Bercow has formally had his suspension lifted but, alas, answer came there none…

Still, Tories should not be too worried about the former Speaker knocking doors for the Starmer army: the length at which he talks, he must be lucky to get through half a dozen houses in a day.

Kim Jong Un’s catchy propaganda revamp

Think of North Korean propaganda and you might think of old-fashioned revolutionary marches praising the Supreme Leader, denouncing the United States, and intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to be launched. The sight of cheering military officials using computers, donning a pair of Sony headphones, may not immediately come to mind. Even more unimaginable, however, is the thought that a North Korean propaganda video would go viral, not least, ironically, on platforms that the North Korean population cannot even access.

Yet, North Korea’s latest propagandistic video, entitled ‘Friendly Father’, has done just that. Lauding the ‘bright future’ for North Korea under its ‘trustworthy and loving leader’, Kim Jong Un, the song’s melody offers what, by North Korean standards, is a modern revamp of propagandistic music. It has attracted the attention of millions online, and been particularly popular on the Chinese-owned app, TikTok, with one user even saying that they were ‘off to North Korea’, having heard the ditty.

Whilst the target audience is primarily domestic, it is not known as to how many of the 26 million-strong population have watched the video or listened to the song. The video seeks to offer a vision of North Korea that is a far cry both from our existing preconceptions of the country, but also from the truth. North Korea in 2024, so the regime would want us to think, comprises smiling retirees, hospital workers, and construction workers grateful for the care of their Supreme Leader. The population head to work listening to music on mobile phones that resemble the iPhone; they lead fulfilled lives. An oppressive, totalitarian state is nowhere to be found. The reality is anything but the case. Yet, the video is not just directed internally. The regime wants to depict North Korea as akin to any other ‘normal’ country.

The portrayal of Kim Jong Un as a ‘father figure’ is, however, nothing new in terms of North Korean propaganda. Even during the reign of his father and grandfather, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, posters displaying the North Korean leader as a maternal and paternal figurehead overseeing the ‘family’ of the North Korean nation were prominent.

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As the North Korean melody diffused across cyberspace, not least into South Korea, the South Korean government banned access to the video across the country on account of ‘psychological warfare’ and the idolisation of Kim Jong Un. Whilst unusual, this decision is a legacy of the establishment of the two Koreas in 1948, when South Korea established a National Security Act that sought to protect the country and its people from malevolent influences, whether propaganda emanating from its communist northern neighbour, or to prosecute North Korean spies operating in the South. The law remains in force today. Amongst other things, it forbids South Korean citizens from reading books published in North Korea and prevents access to North Korean websites in South Korea. We must not forget that the Korean War never ended with a peace treaty, and the two Koreas remain technically at war.

This isn’t the first time that the National Security Act has been invoked in the modern era. In one instance, in 2012, a South Korean photographer received a prison term for re-tweeting North Korean tweets. That same year, another South Korean with pro-North Korean sympathies, Ro Su-hui, was arrested for paying an unauthorised visit to North Korea, to commemorate the recent death of Kim Jong Il.

North Korea is certainly no stranger to engaging in psychological warfare. After its fifth nuclear test in January 2016, the two Koreas engaged in a literal war of words via loudspeakers across the Demilitarised Zone. From the South’s side came K-pop songs (banned in North Korea), and broadcasts about the realities of the North Korea – contrary to the state narrative – as well as Korean dramas. In return, the South Koreans were treated to condemnations of South Korea and ‘its’ United States, as well as bombastic rhetoric in the wake of North Korea’s claims that it had then-conducted a test of a hydrogen bomb.

Whilst netizens in South Korea can still watch the video by side-stepping internet controls, the South Korean government’s decision to block its access reflects how the geopolitical context of the Korean Peninsula in 2024 has one crucial difference from the past. In January, Kim Jong Un ordered the North Korean Constitution to be rewritten. The reunification of the Korean Peninsula – a time-old goal of the North Korean state – was no longer a foreign policy objective. South Korea was declared the ultimate foe, the North threatened the use of nuclear weapons in the event of any war and inter-Korean relations reached a new low.

What is more, however, the very existence of the video underscores just how determined Kim Jong Un is to cement his own legacy as the North Korean leader. It is not just enough for him to put his own stamp on the country by his very presence, as demonstrated by the recent addition of portraits of the leader in public buildings for the first time. For Kim Jong Un wants to be set apart from his father and grandfather. Crucially, he is sending a clear message that contrary to rumours, he won’t be going anywhere any time soon.

The logic of national service

It would be hard to argue that the Conservatives have had a flawless start to the 2024 general election campaign. Rishi Sunak’s rain-drenched Downing Street announcement, the removal of a Sky News journalist from a media event, the symbolism of an inexplicable prime ministerial visit to Belfast’s Titanic Quarter – almost every move so far has required immediate damage control. The unveiling of a plan to introduce some kind of compulsory national service seems at first glance like another hasty gambit which has created its own ecosystem of problems.

‘Bring back national service!’ is a well-worn conservative trope. The feeling that we have lost a sense of community and mutual responsibility, and that younger people need to have discipline and self-sacrifice instilled in them, comes together with anxiety about recruitment to the armed forces and parlously inadequate personnel levels. Taking school leavers and making them ‘give something back’ before they embark on their proper adult lives seems a neat solution.

The social media reaction to Sunak’s announcement has been, naturally enough, eye-blink rapid, vehement and simplistic. The opposition to the idea focuses on three principal arguments: that this is a nostalgic, reactionary instinct with no underlying logic; that it represents, or at least betrays, a deep disdain for young voters; and that it is an outrageous imposition on individual liberty.

We need to be clear, first of all, exactly what is being proposed. In the past, ‘national service’ meant mandatory conscription of 17- to 21-year-olds into the armed forces for a period of up to two years. This was abolished in the 1960s, with call-up formally ended on 31 December 1960. The last conscripted servicemen were discharged in May 1963. Those who experienced national service are now therefore well into their 80s.

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The prime minister’s proposal is more sophisticated than that. He has pledged to appoint a royal commission to advise on a scheme encompassing 30,000 full-time placements in the armed forces, complemented by an option to volunteer one weekend a month to undertake community service, working with organisations like the NHS, the police and the fire service. Sunak hopes this will help young people develop ‘real world skills, do new things and contribute to their community and our country’.

It is not a bolt from the blue in policy terms. In January, the chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, warned that the UK would have to approach defence as ‘a whole-of-nation undertaking’, and hinted at more universal involvement in the armed forces. ‘Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.’ Sanders stopped short of advocating a return to conscription, and the government was until recently consistent in saying that the armed forces would remain volunteer-based.

We are not talking about a simple return to national service. There is a defensible logic in trying to harness the willingness of people to undertake duties for the common good which was demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic and is reflected in the fact that 13 million Britons volunteer regularly. Making a spontaneous instinct into a systematic programme is one of the abiding challenges of government, and there is no doubt that a shift from a voluntary to an enforced action can change its moral character.

The Conservatives are open to the charge that this policy appeals to older voters while placing a burden on younger ones. A cynic could argue that it is an appeal to the party’s electoral base, reassuring an older demographic which might be tempted by Reform UK in the knowledge that very few young people currently vote Conservative anyway.

The idea that it is an unacceptable curtailment of personal liberty is hard to sustain. While the United Kingdom has traditionally relied on a volunteer military, only enforcing conscription from 1916 to 1920 and 1939 to 1960, mandatory military service is very common. In Europe alone it exists in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, hardly a roll call of brutal autocracies. The United States ended the draft in 1973 but men aged between 18 and 25 are still required to register with the Selective Service System.

If Sunak’s idea were to be implemented, the important questions would be of effectiveness and fairness. The Home Secretary, James Cleverly, told Sky News ‘There’s going to be no criminal sanction – here’s no one going to jail over this,’ so any means of enforcement remains uncertain. Nor is it clear that the injection of 30,000 conscripts would solve the armed forces’ personnel challenges.

There is merit in a scheme which would, as Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, framed it, ‘give every young person the chance to serve, and reap the rewards to doing so’. David Cameron launched the National Citizen Service in 2011 as part of his ambition to create a ‘Big Society’. Many of our strategic allies have some kind of systematic contribution to national welfare and resilience.

On the other hand, sound policy rarely emerges in the heat of a general election campaign. The government claims it would fund the new scheme from reducing tax avoidance and using the UK Shared Prosperity Fund; the opposition counters that it is a £2.5 billion ‘gimmick, where the sums don’t add up’. Ultimately, this is a complex issue of resilience and cohesion, raised by a government most expect to be defeated, aired at a time of sharp partisan clash and oversimplified debate. It is unlikely to see the light of day in this form – but we may not have heard the last of the idea.

‘No mow May’ isn’t long enough

There’s one way of getting the look of the Chelsea Flower show winner, Ula Maria’s forest bathing garden, and that’s not to mow your lawn but let the flowers and long grass spring up. ‘This is not,’ I would say austerely to the neighbours if they hang over the wall to suggest a man who could cut the grass, ‘an unkempt and neglected space; it is immersive, relaxing and calming’. Actually, that would be pushing it given that most people’s grassy area lacks flint, a blue shed and trees, but you get the gist. And one of the important aspects of this garden, according to Liz Nicholson, the chair of the judges, is that it created ‘possibly the biggest insect habitat I’ve ever seen’ – in Chelsea, presumably.

Which brings me to the horticultural topic of the month, No Mow May. This is the time of year when environmentalists exhort us to give the lawnmower a rest, and let the long grass spring up, so your manicured garden looks more like a meadow; very Ula Maria. The impression of simple neglect can be overridden by creating a path through the long grass to suggest – look! – this isn’t mere sloth; this is planned long grass. For places where mown lawns are part of a public space, the central lawns can be kept, for instance in a college quad or court, and the long grass reserved for the back of the show. In Green Park in London, just part of the park, rather than the whole, is given over to long grass all the year round; that partial approach is fine too.

The point of the thing isn’t to be insanely irritating; it is to create a habitat for flowers and pollinating insects which will compensate for the depletion of meadows across the country. There are 20 million gardens in Britain. If all owners did their bit to create an hospitable space for bugs and birds, it could be genuinely transformative. The idea was started by the environmental organisation, Plantlife, and it’s premised on the reality that 97 per cent of native meadowland has been lost since the 1930s. You read that correctly. So, the pressing need of the moment is not to carpet the country with trees (though obviously that has a place) as most political parties seem to want; it’s to restore meadowland. And if you want to see the amount of creaturely activity that takes place in an average meadow, look at the film Microcosmos. It’s a fascinating, if stage-managed, depiction of a day in a French field.

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The results can be seen quite quickly. A friend, who’s into all this, writes that ‘Last year I ended up with orchids growing on our little patch of lawn in Hay – this year it’s cowslips and dandelions  which will give way to the jewel-like flowers of vetch’. And to my simple mind, there is nothing prettier than an expanse of buttercups and daisies.

The thing is, Nature doesn’t recognise May as such; for her, the high season of flowers and grasses and bug and bird breeding goes from May into June. So we need not one month of giving the mowers a miss, but two; June, as well, to maximise the benefits and give insect breeding a chance. I think Pride in Nature might do it as a slogan, don’t you?

Granted it would take quite a lot for the UK’s 20 million gardens to compensate for the loss of habitat from other causes: bad agricultural practice (I give you the alternative: regenerative farming, where livestock is part of the deal, and vegans can just suck that up) and, still more, the problem of the amount of land being given over to housing development, most likely as a result of increasing demand from uncontrolled immigration over the last quarter century. But still, as someone said, Every Little Helps.

Come July, you can go back to your lawns, though it may take a scythe rather than a mower to bring it back to order. My environmentally-minded friend recommends the Natural History Museum’s guide: How to grow a lawn that’s better for wildlife. But really, the slogan No Mow May says it all.

Could Scotland decide the election result?

The starting gun for the general election has been fired. This 2019 parliament is over and we will have a new government in Westminster in six weeks’ time.

There have been many significant political inflection points this parliament. Partygate of course. The departure of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss’s brief period as Prime Minister. Arguably as important as any of this is the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon in March 2023.

Since her surprise departure from Scottish politics, it is worth dwelling on just how far the SNP have fallen. 

At the 2019 general election, they won 45 per cent of the vote and 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats. At the height of the pandemic, more than seven in ten Scots were satisfied with the job Nicola Sturgeon was doing as First Minister. Even the month she resigned, following a mix of personal scandal and political crises, she still had net positive favourability rating with the Scottish public. Her party was averaging 41 per cent in Scottish Westminster polling in the first quarter of 2023, down only slightly on 2019.

Things have got worse for the SNP since then. Ipsos polling this March showed Scots hold a net negative view of the SNP and think they have done a bad job in government on issues such as improving the NHS or living standards. Meanwhile, independence, the most important issue for Scots as recently as April 2021 (just before the last Holyrood election), now sits fifth on a list of the Scottish public’s priorities behind the NHS, cost of living, the economy and education. Humza Yousaf has gone and the SNP’s average Westminster poll rating this year stands at 33 per cent. It is increasingly common to see Labour ahead – especially since Humza Yousaf’s departure as SNP leader.

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Perhaps most importantly of all, seven in ten Scots now say Scotland needs a fresh team of leaders. The palpable sense in Britain that it is ‘time for change’ at the general election appears to be felt in Scotland too. This cannot be underestimated and it does not bode well for the SNP.

Scottish politics is important. Not just because it obviously matters to the Scottish public who governs them, or who represents them in Westminster but because it matters for the future of the UK too. The question of independence has not gone away, even though it currently isn’t as important for Scottish voters. A majority of those  under the age of 50 in Scotland consistently tell pollsters they favour independence. It would be foolish for Westminster to be complacent about the future of the union.

In the more immediate term, Scotland is also crucial to the outcome of the coming general election. Earlier this parliament, election analysts often pointed out that Labour needed a strong double digit lead nationally to win a majority of one in Westminster. But significant change in Scotland alters that calculation considerably. The kind of swings we are seeing from the SNP to Labour in the opinion polls today suggests that Labour gaining 30 or more seats in Scotland, with the SNP losing a similar amount or more, is a plausible outcome. These are perhaps at the upper end of estimates at this stage but plausible nonetheless. That would mean Labour could afford to do much less well in the rest of the UK to win a majority this July.

Of course, things can always change. A small change in vote share in Scotland can drastically change the number of seats a party wins. A modest improvement in the SNP’s position could lead to the party saving scores of seats and making Labour’s path to a majority in Westminster more difficult.

What is clear however is that Scotland will be a key battleground at this election. It will be interesting to see how much time Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer spend in Scotland during the campaign. Whilst navigating the challenge of winning over pro-independence SNP voters in some areas and pro-union Conservative voters in others will not be easy for Keir Starmer, the potential political dividend is obvious.  

What kind of city dweller complains about noise?

I’m a highly insensitive person, which means that I’m rarely perturbed by aural excitement. I love public noise, the sound of the crowd. I would never want double-glazed windows – and I even like the sound of drills and construction because I enjoy living in a boomtown where lots of people want to be. The only noise I don’t like is that of children screeching in restaurants, pubs and bars, but that’s because I don’t believe they should be there in the first place; I love noisy adults in restaurants, having the time of their lives. Little dogs barking in these places I don’t mind – but not big ones as they look like they’re showing off. I like quiet in libraries – and that’s about it.

I especially like public music, whether blaring in cars or murmuring in elevators, but especially by water; house music by swimming pools, indie music from transistors on the shore, chill-out music in beach bars. When lockdown eased in June 2020, I was mystified as to why the Brighton seafront watering holes were silent; all became clear when government guidance on the longed-for reopening of places of libation instructed that they should ‘prevent entertainment likely to encourage audience behaviours increasing transmission risk… for example, loud background music, communal dancing, group singing or chanting.’ A bar without music? It’s like that sad old song ‘A Pub With No Beer’.

I love heritage pop in shops; sometimes I stand back in queues to let people go in front of me so I can linger longer, listening. During lockdown shops were the last refuges of public music. At the height of the pandemic panic I was standing in a freshly-disinfected mini-mart when ‘West End Girls’ started playing and instantly I was right back there in the sexy-greedy 1980s, running with my gang in Wild West Wonderland, all of us so innocently avaricious. I’m not an emotional person, but when I am moved, it’s generally by pop songs, and to affect me they have to be on the radio, not actively pursued, taking me back to the 1960s when I was a shy provincial child still staggering under the first blow of benediction by black music, all day long lapping up great creamy earfuls of it on wonderful Radio 1. I found music sad in lockdown; perhaps because we first come to love it as adolescents, it seemed like a grotesque echo of being bored teenagers, grounded and longing to get away; pop music represented the freedom we took for granted in the past.

Did Covid make people with miserabilist tendencies more miserable? There certainly seems to be a lot more complaints about noisy fun that there used to be, especially when it comes to pubs. One of my locals – the Paris House in Hove – recently won a long and unnecessary wrangle which started when residents of four nearby properties complained to the council about loud jazz music late at night. You’d think that a pub being noisy in the evenings might not exactly be a revelation; the Paris has been there for as long as I can remember and these neighbours have lived nearby for upwards of 12 years, yet only now they’re complaining that the sound is keeping them from their nightly rendezvous with Morpheus. Which I must say is the first time I’ve ever heard of jazz keeping people awake before.

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Luckily, the panel who judged the case saw sense, concluding that ‘the area itself is a busy, vibrant city centre location with many other licensed and retail premises and thus a level of noise is inevitable’ and remarking that ‘there are many representations from residents who live closer to the premises than the applicants who are not disturbed by noise from the premises – including those who live immediately next door.’ Could it be that the people who choose to live closest to a pub are cheerful grown-ups while the complainants are glum and infantilised types who expect people In authority to fix every last one of their own errors of judgement? 

The Soho Society aren’t keen on noise either; yes, Soho, whose very name derived from a hunting cry in the 17th century, became a thriving restaurant and music hall sector in the 19th century and has been a busy hub of nightlife ever since, The Soho Society was founded in 1970 and campaigned against the domination of the area by sex shops, gaining conservation status for the district and helping to make it what it is today; a part of London which actually feels like one imagined London would feel when one was a provincial child. If I had to live in London again, I’d live there. But having been wrenched from my beloved Brighton to the fleshpots of W1D, I certainly wouldn’t spend my time involving myself in a preservation society which gets aerated about noise, to the extent that they objected to a restaurant retracting windows in the summertime because of possible chatter from excitable diners.

Though I’m hardly a raving Europhile, I find few things more heartening than a packed city street filled with alfresco diners enjoying the rare sunshine; with the pandemic, many restaurants were saved from bankruptcy by moving operations outside. But even something both so pleasurable and practical as dining under the stars is problematic for the Soho Society, as the Guardian reported: ‘In Soho, the centre of London’s nightlife, residents say alfresco dining and drinking has disrupted access and created intolerable noise. People who have lived there for decades are considering leaving, according to the Soho Society.’ Off they trot, then, preferably to a place which has not been synonymous with noisy fun across three centuries. And now an ice cream van has been threatened with legal action for its ‘too noisy’ chimes, according to the Daily Mail:

John Barton, 33, who runs Harrison’s Ices, based in Lincolnshire, was left stunned when he received a council letter saying they had got complaints about his jingles. East Lindsey District Council said there had been reports of ‘undue noise’ caused by the ‘misuse/overuse of the chimes’ from his bright pink and white van. The letter warned him they had a duty to investigate the complaint and he could face possible prosecution at court under the Control of Pollution Act 1974. The council wrote: ‘It is alleged that when the weather is nice the van is in the area nearly every evening from between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. It has been alleged the chimes are overly loud and are used excessively between the above times.

Understandably, Mr Barton retorted ‘I have come across some weird things in my time and I have to say this is one of the weirdest. The letter basically told us someone had complained that we play our chimes too loud and are claiming we are breaking the law. They’re not too loud, I can barely hear it in my van – it’s 12 second of music! In the middle of the summer season, you don’t expect to get that sort of complaint – someone has got too much time on their hands.’ On Facebook, he exasperatedly elaborated: ‘What has the world come to when you have people complaining about an ice cream at 6 p.m.? If this is you – get a life.’ Lockdown engendered some sad souls who came to fetishise isolation and masking and having stuff brought to them by silent muzzled servants, returned to the pre-birth state of safety like tiny madmen in their padded cells. But we shouldn’t be pandering to these oddities. Why make a silly fuss about a bit of noise on the way to the grave?