Welsh Labour’s speeding U-turn shows devolution is beginning to grate

The tragedy of Wales’ 20 mph speed limit, which is now to be relaxed, was that it took a good idea and ruined it by taking it to extremes. There are plenty of roads which do deserve a 20mph speed limit, but the Welsh government didn’t want to stop there: it had to impose the same limit on main roads with wide carriageways on which it feels absurd to be driving at 20mph.     

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When highways authorities impose an artificially low speed limit on through roads not only do they unnecessarily delay commercial traffic, they create a perverse incentive for traffic to divert onto minor roads, creating rat runs. If you are going to be stuck at 20mph on a main road – where the speed cameras are more likely to be – why not take the twisting but more direct route, where you are less likely to be caught?     

The 20mph speed limit fiasco is a fascinating case study in devolution. Over and over again, the devolved administrations have felt obliged to go that bit further than the Westminster government. It allows them to claim they are being progressive, and helps to justify their own existence. What would be the point of a Welsh Assembly, they may fear people will start to ask, if it just copies the same policy of the national government? Hence during Covid we had the Scottish and Welsh governments imposing even pettier rules than Downing Street. We had Mark Drakeford calling for his ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown, Nicola Sturgeon trying to close the border.

For a while this pointless differentiation seemed to impress voters, but it is beginning to grate somewhat now. In the past week alone Scotland has had to abandon its 2030 carbon reduction target after the Committee on Climate said it was impossible to achieve (many might say the same about the UK government’s 2050 net zero target, but that is a problem which will have to be confronted another day). And now Wales has had to relax its blanket 20mph speed limit.     

Welsh Labour has admitted that it didn’t consult sufficiently on the 20mph limit. When even the transport minister is admitting that his own family signed a petition against the 20mph limit it does underline how this policy was imposed on the public. How ironic that devolution, which was supposed to bring government closer to the people, has ended up taking it further away.   

It is not just the 20mph limit. The Welsh government has also hampered its own economy by dropping plans for a motorway south of Newport, leaving Cardiff reliant on the narrow and congested section of the M4 north of Newport.  Could that be the next U-turn? 

Maybe Vaughan Gething will turn out to be a more energetic reformer than people give him credit.

Britain doesn’t need an Iron Dome

Air defence was in the news this week, after Israel, with the help of allies including the UK, shot down around 99 per cent of over 300 cruise and ballistic missiles and drones fired at it by Iran. The perils of depleted air defences were shown by Russian missile and drone bombardments of Ukrainian energy infrastructure and cities, leading again to many civilian deaths. Eighteen civilians were killed in a Russian strike on Chernihiv.

In the wake of the Iranian attacks, Tobias Ellwood, former chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, told the Telegraph that the UK needs to build ‘a permanent umbrella of security defending our key locations’. This required, he said, ‘investments, absolutely, in an Iron Dome’ – our own version of Israel’s highly effective missile system. Ellwood is wrong. This is the last thing we should do.

The UK faces a very different air defence dilemma than Israel. For one, the UK is 11 times bigger. There are 75 widely dispersed UK cities with a population greater than 100,000; Israel has 15 such cities concentrated in the centre of the country. The UK is also located on the western extremity of Europe, affording it both strategic depth and allied protection against attacks from the east. Israel has recognised since 1949 that it lacks any strategic depth.

Crucially, the UK faces a very different type of air threat than Israel. Iron Dome was originally designed to counter waves of short-range rockets fired against Israeli cities by Hamas and Hezbollah. It has now evolved to deal with drones. The UK does not face a similar rocket threat. The type of cheap, slow-moving drones fired at Israel and used in Ukraine would take many hours to reach the UK, giving ample time to get our defences in order together with our Nato allies. Russian ballistic missiles similar to those used by Iran this week cannot reach the UK. Russia would also be unwise firing ballistic missiles at a nuclear-armed state.

In truth, the main air threat against the UK remains the same as it was during the Cold War, albeit at a lesser scale: long-range Russian cruise missiles fired by aircraft, ships or submarines from the north. These missiles are designed to implement Russia’s well-known strategy, as seen in Ukraine, to attack key political, military, economic, transport, or communications targets to deter, defeat, dissuade, or dishearten its opponent.

The UK’s ability to deal with these air threats has reduced dramatically since the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, we lack the layered air defence system to comprehensively defend the UK from the renewed Russian missile threat. A senior UK officer told Parliament in February this is a recognised operational risk.

UK capability to deal with these missiles is not all bad. Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers will be upgraded over the next decade. The Royal Air Force will soon take possession of new Wedgetail surveillance aircraft. RAF Typhoon and Lightning II jets are formidable air-to-air assets. In 2021, the British Army took possession of the advanced medium-range Sky Sabre system, which incorporates Israeli know-how. The UK has formed a Missile Defence Centre, is upgrading its shore-based radars, and is collaborating with allies on new detection and interception technologies. The accession of Finland and Sweden to Nato also complicates Russia missile planning.

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The Ministry of Defence, however, acknowledged last year that it still needed to ‘step up’ its efforts to deliver integrated air and missile defence for the UK. This will mean further investment in sensors, command and control, data links and the offensive systems that can destroy the ships, aircraft, and submarines of any adversary before they launch missiles against the UK. Or, in defence slang, destroying the archers before they can loose their arrows. It will mean investment in the resilience of critical infrastructure, dispersal of vital assets, and hardening of key UK bases as part of a nascent National Defence Plan. As a senior expert at the Rusi think tank noted this week, this also means ‘more missile ammunition and funded flying hours’ for the RAF to practice air defence against cruise missiles before they get anywhere near the UK.

Defending every square inch of UK is both militarily impracticable, and would be financially ruinous. The vast majority of Iranian missiles and drones were shot down before they reached Israeli airspace. This is where the balance of air defence investment should be, combined with additional Sky Sabre systems to deal with, in the parlance, any ‘leakers’ heading towards particularly vulnerable civilian or military locations. These systems could also be upgraded with longer-range missiles or sensors.

Targeting any enemy offensively while shoring up our own defences will make any air attack less likely to succeed, also contributing to deterrence by denial by changing an adversary’s risk-reward calculation. This will be a wiser investment than in Iron Dome, a system focused on an unlikely threat to the UK.

What happened to the Glasgow I love?

The perception of Glasgow still held by outsiders – that it’s all tenement blocks and stabbings, that the only food on offer is gussied up cholesterol and that its football divide is less about sport and more a continuation of the thirty years’ war – has always inspired resistance from those who know the city.

As someone from Glasgow who has since left, I’ve always felt duty bound to put up a bravura defence of my city when it’s brought into disrepute. Have these people not heard of the artistic heritage of Kelvingrove and the Burrell; the academic renown of Glasgow’s universities, the architectural bequest of our status as the Empire’s second city; or the culinary heights scaled by places like the Ubiquitous Chip?

But walking down Sauchiehall Street recently, past the charred remnants of Mackintosh’s School of Art and the graffitied empty husks of Marks and Spencer, Watt Brothers department store and British Home Stores, it was hard not to feel a twinge of embarrassment about all those Scouse-like displays of hyper localism I’d mounted when the Dear Green Place was being traduced.

Brutally put, Glasgow, especially in the city centre, is becoming the sort of dump people always believed it was. Prosperity and vibrancy seem to be retreating to enclaves like the West End and Shawlands, while the historic heart of it is increasingly left to twist in the wind.

The city’s council – led by the SNP – point to a series of mitigating factors. Covid is increasingly the crutch they rely on. Working from home – a consequence of the Scottish government’s controlling instincts during the pandemic – has delivered a seemingly perennial knock to weekly footfall in the city centre. Counterproductively, the same council wanted to extend parking charges to 10 p.m. seven days a week, until it was warned off by local businesses.

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A bumpy journey on Glasgow’s pot-holed roads is a bone rattling indictment of the decline of the public realm. Stuart Robertson, director of the Charles Rennie MacIntosh Society,  recently said that Sauchiehall Street looks as though it had been ‘bombed’. 

Indeed, in some parts of the city, where listed buildings stand in the way of some breezeblock modern development, fires seem to coincidentally start. The Old College Bar, perhaps one of the city’s oldest pubs, went up in smoke in May 2021, mere months after an attempt was made to build a new residential development on it.

This week, the India Buildings – a reminder of Glasgow’s increasingly distant patrician past – had to be demolished by the council because of the derelict state it had been allowed to fall into. Until recently, the Egyptian Halls – designed by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson – on Union Street in the city centre were concealed behind scaffolding and illegal advertising hoardings for 15 years.

The visible decline of your hometown is made even more galling by the excuses of its alleged custodians.

Glasgow has an acute issue with rats. A recent report found the city had the most pest callouts of any city in Scotland and the city’s GMB union convener has claimed infestations have left certain districts a no-go zone for binmen. Susan Aitken, the council leader, once breezily insisted all cities have rats and that Glasgow’s issues stem from the ‘neglect’ of the Thatcher era.

Research by the Tax Payers’ Alliance has found that the number of officials in Glasgow City Council being paid six figures a year has reportedly doubled in the past year. This is hardly good value for money and quite the look for a leadership continually pleading poverty. 

The SNP have devised various vacuous city strategies and the concept of a ‘Golden Z’ to revitalise the city centre. Scottish Labour, the coming thing, have alighted on metro-mayors to knock urban Scotland out of its collective funk. Lots of Caledonian Andy Burnhams popping up is a nice idea in concept, but does a country the size of Scotland need another tier of politician on top of 32 local authorities, a devolved parliament and Westminster?

Either way, Glasgow is withering away in front of us thanks to the SNP’s disastrous rule.

Ukraine’s plight is getting more desperate by the day

Driving into the bomb-damaged eastern Ukrainian town of Kostiantynivka you can hear the impacts from the big Russian guns and bombs. Block by block they are blowing apart a small workers town just to the east called Chasiv Yar.

On the wall of a destroyed building a Ukrainian soldier had vented his frustration. ‘We are not asking too much, we just need artillery shells and aviation,’ the graffiti reads. ‘[The] rest we do ourselves.’ But even that sentiment is now starting to feel dated. A more accurate depiction of how Ukrainian frontline soldiers feel was probably the large phallus that had been spray-painted over the top of the cri de coeur.

At first blush, it can be easy to miss just how desperate Kyiv’s plight has become. Many Ukrainian soldiers still repeat that mantra that they are strong, that they will win, and that Moscow will pay for its crimes.

I talked to Dmitro in Izyum, a town that has become a caravanserai on the road from Kharkiv to the Donbas. He had been given a couple of days off to get treatment for an eye infection. ‘We are thankful to the West of course,’ he said. ‘But we need more.’

Dmitro mans a 105 mm US-made Howitzer which has a range of about seven miles. He showed me a photo of the gun. ‘Our equipment is better than the Russians” he said. ‘My gun is as accurate as a sniper rifle. But we are running out of ammunition.’ I asked Dmitro what would happen if Ukraine didn’t get more supplies. ‘There will be a stalemate,’ he said. ‘The war will continue for another ten years.’

But even that view – broadly in line with predictions by western military analysts at the beginning of the year – is now beginning to look optimistic. In a grim assessment, General Oleksandr Syrski, Ukraine’s top commander, recently wrote on the social media site Telegram: ‘The situation on the eastern front has significantly worsened in recent days.’ The fear now is that, as spring turns to summer, the Russians will ratchet up the pressure until the Ukrainian lines begin to buckle. And at that point advances could come quickly.

Broadly speaking there are three major problems Ukraine must overcome if it is to halt the Russians. The first is that it needs ammunition. Ukrainian commanders are using drones to make up for the lack of artillery shells but that is merely slowing the pace of Moscow’s advance. Ukraine’s air defence, meanwhile, is running low on missiles. As its defensive umbrella begins to fail, Russia has been able to inflict major damage on Ukraine’s power generation capacity.

The second is that the Ukrainians need more strongpoints and fortifications. As I travelled the country on a 10-day tour of the east I saw fresh trenches and command posts, but, with a 600-mile front line, completing those works will take time.

And the third and thorniest issue is a lack of manpower. A new law has came into effect that brings the minimum age that a Ukrainian can be mobilised down to 25 from 27. But the military is still woefully short of men. The result is that veterans who have been on the front line for more than two years, and in some cases longer, are not being rotated out.

In Pokrovsk, a transport hub which the Russians have in their sights, I spoke to two soldiers who had taken part in the defence of Avdiivka, Ukraine’s most heavily fortified town that fell in February after a four-month battle. One of them was Oleg, 54, a machine gunner’s assistant. ‘It’s too much,’ he said. ‘Families are beginning to fall apart. We have been on the frontline too long and never get to see our wives or children.’ Andrii, from Lviv, was more bitter. ‘They have left us with almost nothing to fight with,’ he said. ‘It’s like asking a man to take on a tank with a pistol.’

As we talked in the main square of Pokrovsk, a veteran hobbled by on crutches. One of his lower legs was missing. Nearby women were selling vegetables. A few dozen yards away a man took out a saxophone and began to play. ‘I am a music teacher and I live about 40 miles away,’ the saxophonist said. ‘I come here and play for a few hours a week. It’s my contribution to the war effort.’

But such gestures, while they may be heart-warming, count for little on the larger military chessboard. According to the latest western analysis, the Russian army is almost back to pre-war strength after its heavy losses in early 2022. Ukraine’s military, by contrast, is seriously depleted. ‘Best case the Ukrainians will lose a bit of land this year,’ a western analyst told me in Kyiv. ‘Worst case they will get swept away by the Russians.’

If Ukraine does fall under Moscow’s writ – either by conquest or a forced and unfavourable settlement – what happens next? The Kremlin is nursing a fierce grievance against the West, and will have a battle-hardened and replenished army, and an economy retooled to support a military push. ‘If we don’t stop them here, they will keep heading West,’ Dmitro said. ‘Surely the West understands that.’

Scrapping replays could be the beginning of the end for the FA Cup

Is time running out for the oldest knock-out tournament of them all? The FA cup‘s obituary has been written a few times in recent years but the much-loved competition has somehow survived. But, with the latest downgrade imposed by the game’s authorities, its status as a major footballing competition and treasured cultural artefact could be in real jeopardy.

From next year, in response to the latest engorgement of the Champion’s League and the calendar war between Uefa and Fifa and the domestic leagues, the FA has announced that not only will there be no replays, but that the final, the traditional culmination of the football season and, once, a truly national event, will be rescheduled, yanked forward to allow a longer summer break. 

The loss of replay revenue will hit the small clubs hard (they have been promised £33 million in recompense) but it’s the abandonment of the end of season date for the final that might be the bigger blow. The prestigious and usually sun-kissed finale of the season trumped the leagues’ climax, if not perhaps in overall sporting significance then certainly in cultural significance. More than a sporting event, cup final day was a unifying national experience, like St. George’s day or the Queen’s official birthday.

But this fresh devaluation is simply the latest step in a long, sad decline. You would need to be getting on a bit to recall the halcyon days when FA cup ties were every bit as important as league games, and more so for many clubs. And you could plan your whole day around the final, as the BBC clearly expected with their 7-hour marathon build-up. Anyone remember the FA Cup final fan competition ‘It’s a Knockout’?

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Determining when exactly the rot established itself is difficult but the first knock was perhaps the advent of regular live TV football. Until the early 1980s, the FA cup final was one of about only half a dozen games a year that were shown live. So starved were we of live footie that I recall as a boy running outside to fetch in my brother to watch an Open University programme on hooliganism which featured a few snippets of action.

Another blow was the decision to use Wembley for semi-finals, which first happened in 1991 and robbed the final of much of its magic. Previously, for many players, an FA or League Cup final was their one chance of playing at the then the holy of holies. And in those pre-premiership days it was a realistic ambition for clubs quite far down the pyramid – three second division clubs won the FA cup between 1973 and 1980. When the semis, play offs and various other naff tournaments (the Sherpa Van trophy?) were granted access to Wembley the currency was devalued.

In any case, Wembley was no longer really Wembley. The demolition of the towers and rebuild of 2007 produced a gleaming, modern, superficially impressive but essentially dull arena barely distinguishable from dozens of others around the world. As a certain Diego Maradona lamented at the time, ‘why couldn’t they just remodel it?’.

Then there was the pressure successfully applied to Manchester United to withdraw from the tournament and join the inaugural Club World Cup tournament in Brazil in the vain hope that sucking up to Fifa would give England a better shout at hosting the 2006 World Cup. It was a clear indication of shifting priorities amongst football’s ruling elite.

But, despite the dodgy stewardship, the FA Cup was in trouble as soon as English football’s gold rush years began attracting players, coaches and owners from around the globe for whom history and traditions meant little. Managers, who could be sacked on a whim, were put into a position where staking their best assets in games without much bearing on their future career prospects made little sense. Suddenly, for the top clubs, it became acceptable to ‘field the kids’ and cup tie victories were seen as more Pyrrhic than glorious. Giant killings aren’t fun when the giants have lost interest.

The Premiership and probably the Championship too are no longer, in any meaningful sense, English leagues. The ‘clubs’ are now simply corporate entities inhabiting the shells of what were once proud local institutions. It’s a ruthless world where sentiment, nostalgia and a respect for tradition are increasingly irrelevant. For the elite, the FA cup has become a bit of a nuisance.

With such a weak defence at the top of the pyramid it is hard to see much of a fight being sustained against the powerful twin-pronged attack of Uefa and Fifa pushing for calendar space for a 32-team Club World Cup and the ‘Swiss style’ Champions’ league. Domestic cup competitions and replays are on the hit list with only one of the former and none of the latter to be tolerated. France has already surrendered.

But what about the fans? It’s a fair bet that the majority, especially of clubs lower down the pyramid (729 teams compete in the FA cup), oppose the supranational ambitions of the governing bodies. Many would like to take back control of the game’s most treasured assets, starting perhaps with a restitution of the FA cup’s prestige and privileges. Perhaps English football needs its own version of Brexit.

The CofE’s female clergy muddle is not sustainable

It’s thirty years since the first women were ordained as priests of the Church of England. For ten years, there have been women bishops too. Well, at least one aspect of the Church’s reform is done and dusted. 

Cue hollow laughter from those acquainted with the strange intricacy and agony surrounding this seemingly simple reform. In reality it was a Pyrrhic victory for the liberals that left them deeply demoralised. Not being much of a feminist (or a traditionalist), I was slow to tune in to this story. But its dark fascination gradually drew me, like an ecclesiastical car crash.

What happened is this: opponents of the change were allowed to stay in place. More than stay in place: they were allowed to form a structure of their own, with their own bishops. At first these were known as ‘flying bishops’, as they were not confined to a particular area, but could oversee parishes scattered in various dioceses. That began to sound like an inappropriately quirky euphemism for a depressing stalemate.

This arrangement was beyond unusual. Institutions do not generally allow internal dissent to bed down. Maybe its architects supposed that it was an emergency measure that would fade away in a decade or so. Instead, the traditionalists settled down deeper, in four-poster style. The desire to reunite the Church around a single episcopal structure was declared to be unanglican, in effect heretical. Candidates for ordination have to state their agreement with the policy.

What really interests me is the subtle psychological trap into which female clergy were cornered. Having gained the right to be ordained, even unto episcopacy, should they complain that the Church remained full of sexism? Such complaints made them sound ungrateful, whingy and secular. And because they were not allowed to complain about the fundamental structural issue, their complaints felt weak, thin, resentful, beside-the-point. It sounds sexist to say it, but they had been trapped into nagging. The alternative was to raise the stakes, and sound like ball-breaking harridans, demanding the ejection of the traditionalists. They were trapped between two sexist tropes.

I’ve written on the subject a few times over the years, but last year I found myself dropping journalistic neutrality. My thoughts were sharpened by the division over homosexuality. The conservative evangelicals, realising that the Church is slowly opting for gay blessings and probably gay marriage, are demanding the same arrangement that traditionalists have. And I realised that, if this happens, the Church of England is over. A divided episcopate – different bishops for those of different views – must be fought tooth and nail.

I have been invited to say a few words at a conference in London this weekend. It is run by the campaigning group WATCH (Women and the Church). I’m sure that my audience isn’t the heckling sort, but I expect there might be a few murmurs of disquiet when I say my piece. The campaign for women clergy’s rights has been misguided, I will say. It has been a gift to the traditionalists. Every time WATCH complains of discrimination, some traditionalists feel a little more secure, for, in their view, women seem to be importing the ways of the world into the holy realm of religion. 

The campaign must therefore leave rights-talk aside and focus entirely on Church unity. It must say that a church needs unity, and in the Church of England this is the function of the bishops: to be a united force, to uphold the same teaching. The Church was therefore mistaken when it authorised the current disunity. Instead of echoing secular identity politics, liberals must seize the religious high-ground from the traditionalists, and treat the unity of the Church (meaning the Church of England, not the Anglican Communion, and not some even vaguer global entity) as a sacred matter. 

Reversing the error of thirty years ago will be contentious. Dare one argue that the majority view should be more assertive, that minority rights should be curtailed? It doesn’t sound very liberal. But it will be good for the image of liberal Anglicans. We are willing to be the nasty party of the Church, if theological integrity demands it. Some things matter more than niceness.

Israel’s attack on Iran was perfectly calibrated

Today, there have been reports of explosions in Isfahan, in central Iran, in what is presumed to be a strike by Israel. The world had been waiting for Israel’s promised retaliation after Iran launched an unprecedented attack at Israel directly from its own territory, using 300 missiles and drones. Despite the hysterical commentary that Israel is trying to drag the United States and its allies into war, its strikes in Iran appear to have been carefully calibrated to avoid escalation. After all, Israel has plenty of experience operating in Iran, and particularly Isfahan.

In January 2023, the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, launched a drone attack on an Iranian military facility in the heart of Isfahan. Iranian officials downplayed the event, saying there was little damage and that Israel’s quadcopter drones had been downed. Israel frequently uses quadcopter drones to attack Iranian regime facilities. Quadcopters were reportedly used by Israel to similarly target a centrifuge production centre in Karaj. Quadcopters also struck a military drone facility near Kermanshah in 2022. Iran did not retaliate.

Fast forward to April 2024, and American media outlets, citing US officials, are reporting that this time Israel used missiles against the Islamic Republic. This would mark the first time Israel launched a strike using long-distance aircraft with missiles at Iran’s territory since 1979. But the use of missiles was contradicted by Iranian reports, which suggested quadcopters were used. It may be that the leadership in Tehran was, at least initially, trying to minimise last night’s event, as previous drone attacks, which were launched from inside Iran, have not prompted a reaction from Iran.

The reaction was muted during Friday Prayers in Tehran as well on April 19. The secretariat of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top policymaking body when there is deliberation over sensitive files, also denied an emergency meeting was being held after earlier reports suggested otherwise. Some Iranian media did not even mention Israel’s complicity in the events. State television was filled with quiet scenes and serene music trying to keep up appearances that all was well. The leadership in Tehran was trying to downplay public expectations of a response.

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Israel’s exact target remains unclear at the time of writing. Fars News suggested ‘three explosions’ were heard around the eighth Shekari air base in Isfahan. The choice to focus on this base was notable as Iran has two militaries, the Artesh, or its regular army, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The eighth Shekari air base is affiliated with the Artesh. Concentrating on the Artesh rather than the IRGC may have been a way to find an off-ramp for Tehran, despite the IRGC presenting more of a threat to Israel. The IRGC holds greater significance, clout, and resources in the Iranian system than the Artesh. That may also reduce the risk for retaliation against Israel, given that many hawkish voices in Iran’s military establishment are associated with the IRGC.

This retaliation by Israel also took place during a symbolic week for the Islamic Republic. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei turned 85 on April 19. This may have been a signal from the Jewish state to Khamenei that it has the ability to strike deep inside Iran at a time when he is ageing and hoping to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic after he passes away. This past week was also national army day in Iran, which the eighth Shekari air base takes part in. After Iran targeted the Nevatim air base in Israel on April 13, this would in essence even the score.

Israel has also underlined that it can do more damage in a limited precision missile strike than Iran could do with over 300 missiles and drones. This sends a signal to Tehran that its air defence system is inferior to Israel’s layered structure and shows that Israel has the capability to do more harm. This is especially the case given the panoply of sensitive nuclear, military, and defence industry facilities in Isfahan.

In the end, the recent bombast from Iranian officials pledging an immediate riposte if Israel struck Iran stands in contrast to the regime’s muted reaction now. Iran’s leaders believed they had created a ‘new equation’ after attacking Israel directly for the first time. But the Jewish state’s response on Thursday night has sent a message that it can hit back while not alienating its allies in the international community who have been pressing for de-escalation. Iran standing down, at least for now, indicates it has understood this message at a time when the regime is deeply unpopular at home.

Is Georgia’s future with Europe, or Russia?

On Wednesday, Georgia’s government came one step closer to realising its desire to embed the country deeper within Russia’s sphere of influence. A year after mass protests forced them to pull the plug on a controversial ‘foreign agents’ law, the Kremlin-sympathetic ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party is once again trying to force this ‘Russian-style’ legislation through parliament. 

While the bill was undergoing its first reading in parliament, 20,000 Georgians turned out onto the streets to demonstrate. Several thousands protested in Tbilisi alone. Shouts of ‘No to the Russian law’ rang out alongside renditions of the Georgian national anthem and ‘Ode to Joy’, the EU’s official song. Once again, like last year, riot police were deployed. They chased and beat protestors and made numerous arrests.

This time, unlike last year, when the sheer numbers and anger of the protestors forced legislators to withdraw the bill, the GD were determined to persevere. The bill was reintroduced to parliament at the beginning of April in a move that surprised MPs. It passed its first reading despite being boycotted by opposition MPs. The votes of 83 GD MPs were enough to push it through Tbilisi’s 150-seat parliament.

The bill, dubbed by its critics as the ‘Russia bill’, would require any independent NGO or media organisation to register as an ‘organisation pursuing the interests of a foreign power’ if more than 20 per cent of its funding comes from abroad. It mirrors legislation introduced gradually by Moscow since 2012, allowing the Kremlin to crack down on anyone dissenting against the state – hence the name. Those who oppose the Georgian bill are concerned that their version could similarly be used to crack down on freedom of speech and criticism of the government in the country. Georgia’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, insists that the law would boost the financial transparency of NGOs funded by Western institutions. But Georgians are painfully aware that this is just a convenient excuse. The country’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, voted independently of the government, and branded it ‘a Russian strategy of destabilisation’ that ‘contradicted the will of the population’. 

Tina Bokuchava, the parliamentary chair of United National Movement (UNM), Georgia’s leading opposition party, told The Spectator that the bill was an ‘orchestrated attempt to sabotage relations with Brussels’ by Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD’s oligarch chairman and one of the country’s richest men. ‘EU membership would offer an economic lifeline to a country whose economy has been blighted by high unemployment and immigration in recent years. But Ivanishvili has been unnerved by Brussels’ demands that Georgia start paring back oligarch influence as a pre-condition of membership’, she said. The founder of UNM and former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, remains in a prison hospital, following a suspected poisoning attempt after being locked up on questionable charges, including embezzlement.

The bill will still have to pass a second and third reading in parliament, and in theory Zurabishvili retains the right to veto it. But as GD holds the majority in the legislature, Georgian law allows them to vote down any presidential veto without the support of the opposition. It seems highly likely, therefore, that the bill will successfully pass.

The crux of the issue around this bill goes deep and reflects the struggle many former Soviet states have faced in the years since the USSR collapsed in 1991. In recent decades, Georgia, along with countries such as Ukraine and Moldova, have welcomed the progressive and liberal benefits offered to them by closer ties to Europe. Their populations have little interest in maintaining close ties to Moscow.

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While this struggle is violently playing out in real time on the fields of Ukraine, in Georgia’s case it is unfolding in a more furtive, quieter fashion. In December, Georgia was finally offered candidate status by the EU, on a number of conditions. They were told they must reform their judicial and electoral systems, reduce political polarisation, improve press freedom and curtail the oligarchy that exists in the country. Only then could membership talks formally begin. Under the GD, that is very unlikely to happen. Although the party nominally supports accession to Europe, their desire to re-establish closer links with Russia puts that in jeopardy. 

In response to Wednesday’s vote, the EU condemned the law as ‘not in line with EU core norms and values’, and said it would ‘negatively impact’ the country’s accession into the bloc. The US also felt compelled to condemn the vote, calling the legislation ‘Kremlin-inspired’ and warning that it would damage freedom of expression.

In October, Georgia will hold parliamentary elections – a crucial democratic test for the country. Questions will abound over the degree to which Russian interference will influence the vote. No polling has been conducted in the country since the re-introduction of the ‘foreign influence’ bill, but voting intentions from December have GD in the lead with 36 points. The Victory Platform opposition coalition, to which UNM belongs, received only 21 points.

It remains to be seen whether GD will force this censorious bill through before October’s vote. What is certain, however, is that with every step it takes through Tbilisi’s parliament, it will steer Georgia further away from the EU and closer into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.

Watch: Sturgeon reacts after husband charged in police probe

Might this be the worst week of 2024 for the Nats so far? Hapless Humza Yousaf demonstrated extraordinary indecision over the Cass review, Patrick Harvie’s barmy army helped ditch a Scottish government green pledge and, to top it all off, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband has been charged with embezzlement. You couldn’t make it up.

The long-running police probe into the SNP’s finances reared its head again yesterday, when the party’s former chief executive was rearrested and charged. And, not long after the announcement went out, it emerged that Sturgeon’s husband had hung up his yellow coat and resigned his membership of the Scottish National party. An eventful few hours, to say the least.

So what now for the SNP? As Operation Branchform pushes on, the Dear Leader told journalists today that ‘it’s incredibly difficult’. Sturgeon told reporters firmly to ‘give my neighbours some peace’, before quipping: ‘I’m still quite a new driver so please try not to distract me when I’m driving away.’ After over eight years at the top of the SNP, she’ll know a thing or two about car crashes…

This afternoon, Yousaf spoke out about the ‘shock’ in the party, telling reporters he had first heard of the charges ‘when the police made a statement’. ‘This a serious development,’ he went on, adding:

[It’s] a really serious and concerning matter. All of those people who have known Peter Murrell for a number of years within the SNP and indeed across Scottish politics will be shocked.

Watch the full clip here: 

We’re better off with Hamas in Qatar, than out

The news that Qatar is ‘re-evaluating’ its role as mediator in the ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, amid claims by the Qatari Prime Minister that its efforts are being ‘misused for narrow political interests’, will have been met with consternation in many western and Middle Eastern capitals. Qatar’s potential withdrawal comes at a time when talks to secure a truce and the release of the hostages still being held in Gaza have stalled. A ground assault into the final Hamas stronghold of Rafah looks likely to be the next chapter in a gruelling war. 

Should Qatar cease its mediation efforts, this might also spell the end of the West’s backchannel with Hamas. Prior to 2012, speaking with senior figures in Hamas – which governs the more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – was extremely difficult. Decades of conflict with Israel had led to a leadership under constant threat of assassination by Israel’s intelligence services, and fearful of being out in the open. Egypt had been complaining about the practical problems of sharing a border with an area governed by people who were reluctant to meet you or even speak on the phone, lest they be wiped out by an Israeli strike.

There were also fears that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s self-exiled leader, was considering choosing Iran or Lebanon for Hamas’s political bureau, where western governments would have no oversight or control over them. The United States proposed that Qatar host Hamas’s top team in its capital Doha, a country with the largest US military base in the Middle East and the headquarters of Centcom, which has command authority over US forces right across the Middle East and West/Central Asia. In Doha, the Americans could monitor Hamas leaders and establish a backchannel of communication with its governing bodies and its even more secretive military wing, the al-Qassam brigades – headed by the notorious Yahya Sinwar. Haniyeh was persuaded to choose Doha over Tehran for Hamas’s political headquarters, bringing him into the orbit of western intelligence services.

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Much like Washington’s Occidental Grill restaurant during the Cuban missile crisis (the venue for secret talks between the chief of Soviet intelligence in the US and an ABC news correspondent acting as a negotiator for the Kennedy White House), Doha has become critically important since the 7 October massacre. The four-day Gaza truce back in November 2023, brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, which saw 105 civilian hostages released by Hamas, would have been very difficult to achieve without Hamas being hosted there.

Backchannels between deadly rivals have a long history. Richard Nixon conducted backdoor negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control through his long-time aide Robert Ellsworth without informing his own secretary of state, the British government held secret talks with the IRA as early as 1972, Spain ran negotiations with the Basque separatist movement through an independent organisation in Switzerland, and the then-newly elected President Obama dispatched Jake Sullivan, chief foreign policy adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the Port of Muscat in Oman to negotiate secret concessions that laid the groundwork for the Iran nuclear deal. 

Some Israeli officials and US politicians have said that Qatar is not doing enough to wring concessions from Hamas – in the hope that Qatari mediators would pressure the terrorist group by threatening to expel its leaders from Doha or close its bank accounts. What would happen if the Qataris gave Hamas the order of the boot and the back channel was cancelled? Given David Barnea, the current head of Mossad, has vowed to ‘put our hands on them wherever they are’, Haniyeh and Hamas’s political bureau would likely flee to Tehran to try to escape Israeli vengeance, seeking shelter under the protective wing of their Iranian patron. Lebanon will be a much less appealing location following Israel’s successful drone strike on Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas official living in the Lebanese capital Beirut, earlier this year. The targeted killing, in a dense suburb dominated by Hezbollah, showed that outside of the Doha backchannel, nowhere is safe for Hamas officials. 

Once the Hamas leadership is ensconced in Tehran, the question would then be: who do the US and Israel speak with to get to them? Iran would control the flow of information, while intelligence operations to keep an eye on Haniyeh and others would prove very tough to pull off in Iran’s hostile police state. There would almost certainly be further delays to negotiations on recovering those hostages still left alive in Gaza, agreements on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza would be parked, and there would be no chance of even a temporary ceasefire being agreed until lines of communication could be reestablished.

The consequences of cutting off mediation efforts with Hamas at this stage are so dire, both for regional stability and for the hostages languishing in Hamas bunkers, that Qatar’s threat to pull the plug on the whole arrangement is most likely a negotiating ploy to force progress in the negotiations. William Burns, the CIA director, has put the blame for the impasse squarely on Hamas intransigence after they rejected what he called a ‘far-reaching proposal’. The risk of losing their safe haven in Doha may help to concentrate minds in Hamas’s upper echelons. Whether Qatar’s threat is a ruse to restart talks, or a genuine storm-off by the hosts in exasperation at offstage sniping, the West’s backchannel with Hamas is a reminder of the inescapable need to talk to our enemies, no matter how repugnant we find them.

Will Israel continue its strikes on Iran?

The reported Israeli strike on an Iranian air installation near the city of Isfahan in central Iran appears to have been the most significant of a series of attacks carried out by Israel in the course of last night. While the full picture is still emerging, there are indications that an additional strike of some kind took place south of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. A third strike took place on a position of the Syrian army in Sweida, a majority Druze province close to the Syria-Israel border, according to a number of Syrian opposition sources.

The strike on Sweida is business as usual in terms of Israel’s ongoing campaign against Iranian entrenchment in Syria. The Isfahan strike, however, and to a lesser extent the apparent strike on Baghdad constitute a significant escalation. Attacks on Iranian regime facilities on Iranian soil have been attributed to Israel in the past. Operations against drone production facilities in the Isfahan area took place in May 2021 and January 2023. An additional strike on a drone factory in the Kermanshah area was carried out in February 2022.

But while most observers concluded that Israel was responsible for those operations, there was no obvious sequencing of the type that characterised last night’s attack. This strike came as a clear response to the massive, but almost entirely thwarted Iranian drone and missile assault on multiple sites in Israel of 13 April.

The Iranian authorities seem keen now to draw a line under the process of escalation. Official Iranian media sought to downplay the significance of the attack, saying that a number of ‘quadcopters’ launched from within Iran had been shot down in the Isfahan area. The limited dimensions of the attack seem to make such a de-escalation from the very tense atmosphere of the last week likely.

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So what may be learned from the Israeli response to the 13 April attacks? And what will happen next?  

Israel appears to have wished to remind the Iranian regime that it possesses an asset on the ground which the Iranians cannot match or counter: namely a network, clearly involving local partners, which is able to organise successful attacks on Iranian soil. The S-300 batteries, a sophisticated air defence system provided by Russia to Iran, is deployed in the Isfahan area. Israel evidently wanted to demonstrate that while Iran was unable to penetrate Israel’s air defences, it can activate the means to get past those of Iran at will.  

The question, however, is whether this modest and not entirely novel display of Israeli capacities should be seen as an adequate response to the 13 April attacks. There is no doubt that its limited nature is, in part, the product of the Israeli government’s awareness of US determination to avoid escalation to open war in the Middle East at the present time. But this is not the heart of the matter.  

It is important to remember the series of events that led to the current crisis. On 1 April, Israel signalled a clear intention to change its modus operandi regarding Iran’s campaign against it. The killing of IRGC/Quds Force General Mohammed Reza Zahedi indicated an Israeli decision that the previous accepted rule according to which Israel would focus its responses on Iran’s proxies, rather than their Iranian patron, no longer applied.

This reflected a conviction held widely in Israel’s defence establishment that Iran is the real sovereign in the land area between the Iraq-Iran border and Syria and Lebanon’s borders with Israel. They view the ‘states’ of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as today largely fictions, with Iran either in effective control of the government (Iraq, Lebanon) or possessing freedom of operation (Syria).

From within this large area of control (and elsewhere), Iran is pursuing a strategy intended to lead to the slow bleeding to death of the Jewish state, via the activation of Islamist proxy armies. The killing of Zahedi was an announcement that Israel would now not only strike at the clients, but also directly at the patrons, including the most senior among them, where they think they are most safe.

Iran’s drone and missile attack of 13 April was an attempt to shock Israel into abandoning this new approach. Iran finds the previous arrangement comfortable and wishes to get back to it. The message of the 13 April action was ‘look how far we’re prepared to escalate if Israel starts targeting our senior personnel’. These attacks were not a Pearl Harbor-style declaration of open warfare. Rather they were, as former Centcom Commander General Kenneth McKenzie called them, an attempt to ‘escalate in order to de-escalate.’

The real test will come in the weeks and months ahead. Will we see actions comparable in scale and nature to that of the killing of Mohammed Reza Zahedi? If so, it will indicate that Israel has rejected Teheran’s 13 April message and, having quietly demonstrated its abilities to penetrate Iran’s air defences, intends to continue its strategy of including Iranian facilities and Iranian senior personnel in its circle of retribution. If no such actions occur, then Iran may conclude that its 13 April escalation was a success, producing the desired result.

There is, of course, a much larger question surrounding all this: namely, why are western countries acquiescing to a process whereby Iran appears to be slowly swallowing up the Middle East? With its proxies and clients, Teheran is now in control of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. It is able to disrupt shipping on a daily basis on a key global maritime trade route (the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden), and it has, via Hamas and Islamic Jihad, largely achieved ownership of the Palestinian cause. But in the round of escalation that began on 1 April with the killing of Zahedi, the final word remains to be said.  

It’s not over yet between Israel and Iran

Is that it? This is the immediate and understandable reaction in some quarters to the news that Israel has carried out a series of limited air strikes against Iran. Explosions were reported in the sky over the cities of Isfahan and Tabriz. Details are still sketchy but US officials were quick to brief that Israel was behind the attacks. The Israelis have made no public comment: it is official policy never to confirm or deny such military action. The Iranian government, which had promised a ‘massive and harsh response’ to ‘even the tiniest invasion’ was quick to play down the scale of the attack, indicating there was no ‘immediate’ plan for retaliation.

Israel has carried out a strike, but it is small enough for the Iranians to brush it off. The consensus view is that this allows both sides to save face and avoid further escalation. It is tempting as an analysis of events, but somewhat premature.

Firstly, it is still not clear whether this is Israel’s full response to Iran’s direct attack on its territory last Saturday, or merely the beginning of a series of Israel reprisals. So far, the Israeli government has played its cards close to its chest, reserving the right to do what serves its national interests, and remaining resolute in ignoring widespread international pressure, not least from Washington, to hold back from attacking Iran directly.

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Second, Israel’s targeting of the central city of Isfahan is something that Tehran will not take lightly (whatever the regime says publicly). The city is of huge strategic importance, and hosts key facilities for the Iranian nuclear programme, as well as other weapons factories and a major airbase. Israel’s drone strikes show it can attack deep into Iran, and at will. This message will not be lost on the already jittery Tehran regime, which is nervous about internal security. It may suit their purposes for the moment to play down Israel’s incursion but behind the scenes there will be fury and embarrassment. What further consequences might flow are hard to predict.

This latest attack marks a new and dangerous phase in the seven-month long Gaza war. Iran and Israel are now confronting each other openly in a way that breaks the established rules in the Middle East, under which conflict between these two bitter enemies takes place through proxies. It brings with it new and unpredictable dangers that one wrong move by either side could lead to catastrophic consequences. Take last Saturday’s attack by Iran when it fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel – this was claimed to be in response to an Israeli strike at an Iranian consular building in Syria on 1 April. Firing missiles directly into Israel was a first for Iran: a brazen challenge to Israel because was the first strike on Israeli territory by an enemy state in more than thirty years.

The Israeli response is another worrying first in its own way: Israel often carries out targeted assassinations on Iranian targets but always under the cover of official deniability, crucially allowing all sides to step back from the brink and prevent things from getting out of hand. This time is different: the Israelis are determined to send a clear and unambiguous message to Iran about their capacity to strike the Tehran regime at its heart.

There are mini wars breaking out everywhere across the Middle East. Thousands of people have been displaced on Israel’s border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire with Hezbollah are now routine. Neighbouring countries, including Iraq, Syria and Jordan, have suffered collateral damage of one kind or other. The frontline of this war is becoming increasingly hard to pin down.

It is a given that a broader conflict would be a disaster for the region and the world, yet no one quite appears able to stop the major protagonists from edging ever closer to one. The Middle East is cursed by far too many leaders who are not thinking too clearly. This makes them irrational and dangerous. Breathing a huge sigh of relief that Israel’s strike on Iran is not as bad as might have been feared is both naive and complacent. The Middle East is on fire.

Israel’s warning to Iran

Symbolism is important. Israel’s overnight missile attack against Iran was a warning to the ayatollahs residing in Tehran that it can hit any target, wherever and whenever it wants.

The missile is believed to have struck a military airfield near Isfahan, a city in central Iran, which is also the location of a major missile production complex and several nuclear facilities.

The messaging here was simple: in the future nothing will be off the table – including Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The fact that the attack took place on the 85th birthday of Iran’s ailing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei should not be overlooked either, given that it was the diplomatic equivalent of a two fingered salute.

Israel was also keen to demonstrate, not just to the US, but also to the UK and every other country calling for restraint, that it, and no one else, will decide how Israel responds to hostile threats.

The latest round in what the former British ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher has described as ‘high stakes poker’ began when an Israeli missile struck the Iranian consulate annex in Damascus and killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – including the senior commander Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. 


Iran’s response was to send more than 300 drones and missiles in an act so ‘telegraphed’ – to use a boxing term – that Israel and its allies managed to shoot down 99 per cent of them before they could cause any real damage.

While Iran might have convinced some of its most loyal supporters that it would not be cowed by what it refers to as the Zionist state, in reality the Iranian leadership has fooled no one.

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The act was a symbolic gesture designed to rally its discontented citizens, many of whom are no doubt wondering why the Islamic Republic wants to get involved in a shooting war with Israel it can’t win or afford, when inflation is running at an unsustainable 40 per cent and salaries are around £250 a month.

Little wonder then that Tehran has tried to spin the latest Israeli missile attack as being so insignificant that it would not be worth their time responding.

But like all conflicts, the potential for miscalculation is always high, as President Vladimir Putin found to his costs when he invaded Ukraine two years ago and assumed that Kyiv would be under Russian rule within three days.

Following the Israeli missile strike, Fletcher told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that:

‘We don’t know how much of an escalation this is for now. Clearly Iran is starting to signal that it is not necessarily a major escalation. They are playing it down. And of course Israel could have chosen to do something more dramatic.’

Israel, he added,  is ‘clearly saying’ to Iran that it can ‘dial it up’ and that nuclear sites are not off-limits, despite Iran attempting to signal in the last few days ‘you don’t go near the nuclear sites.’

It is instructive to think that just a few days ago Israel was facing increasing international isolation following the death of seven humanitarian aid workers mistakenly killed in a botched Israeli air strike.

Today, the same Israeli government has shown its enemies that when push comes to shove, the US, the world’s only real military super power, will come to its aid, along with the UK and France. And perhaps, more importantly, so will Jordan and Saudi Arabia, two conservative Sunni states which are keen to have normal relations with Israel.

Why do Lib Dems want to crack down on smoking but legalise cannabis?

Whether it is tuition fees or local development, the Lib Dems are generally not known for their consistency. Trust me, I campaigned for them during the coalition years. This week, things took an almost surreal turn. Party leader Sir Ed Davey, along with his deputy and health spokesperson Daisy Cooper and three other colleagues, voted in favour of Rishi Sunak’s age-dependent tobacco and vapes ban.

That might seem odd enough from supposed liberals – whatever happened to personal choice and adult informed consent? However, Davey, Cooper and co. are also MPs from a party that supports the legalisation of cannabis. That party’s 2019 manifesto read:

‘Liberal Democrats will take a different approach, and reform access to cannabis through a regulated cannabis market in UK, with a robust approach to licensing, drawing on emerging evidence on models from the US and Canada.’

Davey was deputy leader heading into the election and that is the manifesto he and the rest of his MPs campaigned on. There has been no public revoking of the above policy in the years since. The whole thing is highly contradictory.

As it happens, some hardy liberal souls in Davey’s party did not march through the ‘Aye’ lobby, declining to vote at all. Amongst them were former leader Tim Farron and justice and home affairs spokesperson Alistair Carmichael. However, the leader and his health spokesperson have made their point. Speaking during Tuesday’s debate in the House of Commons, Cooper said:

‘The Government proposals on vapes are an absolute no-brainer and are consistent with Liberal Democrat party policy that was adopted at our conference last year, including the ban on single-use vapes on environmental grounds.’

Hmmm. Perhaps in these turbulent political times we should just be grateful that the party remains consistently inconsistent. One might argue that there is evidence of health benefits to cannabis that does not exist for tobacco or vapes. The 2019 manifesto does assert that the party’s ‘approach will support and encourage more clinical trials of cannabis for medicinal use to establish a clear evidence base.’ However, that is only part of the case made by the Lib Dems for its cannabis policy.

Voting for the ban is still odd given that one policy increases personal choice and the other limits it. Attempting to explain the party’s position, a spokesperson commented:

‘Liberal Democrat policies always have people’s freedom and well-being at their heart, and are based on the evidence of what works. We are consistent on that, whether it’s tackling cancer through public health measures or reforming outdated laws that cause young people so much harm.’

As it happens, I have next to no interest in either cannabis, vapes or cigarettes. Sorry, I’m rather dull. But I do believe in freedom of choice, and it seems impossible to me that you can coherently support allowing one and banning the other, however contort yourself on health grounds.

Whatever the individual reasons each MP had for voting or not, the incident demonstrates the tension in the Lib Dems between the liberal elements of the party its more social democratic, statist wing.

Oddly, Davey is generally considered to be from that more classically liberal faction and his liberalism is, in my limited personal experience, profound and sincere. Perhaps the party has polling suggesting the ban is popular. Perhaps the nagging urge to ban things you don’t like proved just too hard to resist. (It should be noted that Davey tragically lost both his parents to cancer, although this was not linked to smoking.)

The rift within the Lib Dems on these issues goes beyond the green benches. One of the party’s councillors, Simon McGrath, raised the issue on Twitter and told me his party’s stance is ‘a classic illustration of the problems of voting for something now that won’t come until for a number of years. If they had had to vote on all the practical details about how the ban would work, I suspect they would have seen the absurdity.’

The Lib Dems do often have the luxury of advocating both for the absurd and things that they will never have to implement. They can vote on ‘vibes’ not substance, knowing that someone else will usually have to sort it out. Although, as a former cabinet minister, Sir Ed knows the difficulties that occur when his party does have to put things into place and should probably have learnt that it is worth thinking these things through a bit. Because there can be little doubt that this tobacco and vapes policy, with its arbitrary age restriction that will afford one set of adults more choice than another, will have huge implementation problems. The Lib Dem leadership better hope that the polls don’t narrow to the point where their presence is required in a government that has to put the ban into practice.

Since 2010, the Liberal Democrats have been taunted for being inconsistent and principle free. The party leader being in favour of one commonly smoked substance but not another does not seem a to be great way to go about fixing that.

Sunak targets Britain’s ‘sick note culture’

Rishi Sunak has returned to one of his pet bugbears: getting the unemployed back into work. His speech to the Centre for Social Justice this morning was peppered with his favourite facts about the post-pandemic welfare crisis embroiling Britain.

The number on long-term sickness benefits has jumped by a third since Covid and now stands at an eye-watering 2.8 million. Those claiming personal independence payments has doubled from 2,200 new awards a month in 2019 to 5,300 in 2023. Spending on benefits for people of working age with a disability or health condition has duly increased by almost two-thirds to £69 billion. He said, bluntly, that Britain ‘cannot afford’ the current system which is ‘not fair on taxpayers.’

His remedy is, in part, to end Britain’s ‘sick note culture’ by making it harder to get fit notes from doctors. A new system will therefore be trialed in parts of the country to see if the existing system of GPs’ referrals should be replaced by specialist teams linked to the benefits system. This was the line that led the newspapers this morning, prompting Labour to claim that it was nothing new.

Alison McGovern, Labour’s acting shadow work and pensions secretary, said ahead of Sunak’s address that ‘Today’s announcement proves that this failed government has run out of ideas, announcing the same minor alternation to fit notes that we’ve heard them try before.’

Yet this was a chunkier and more thoughtful speech than some might have been expected. Sunak unveiled a broader range of schemes than what had been previously trailed. New policies included accelerating the final rollout of Universal Credit, increasing sanctions and changing the rules to to ensure someone working less than half of a full-time week will have to look for more work. Reforms to disability benefit will be unveiled in a Green Paper next week.

Sunak’s tone was balanced too, reflecting the passion with which he regards the subject. He stressed the work being done to tackle those who commit benefits fraud, arguing it should be treated with the same gravity as tax fraud. But the Prime Minister also said repeatedly that he did not want to demonise those on benefits, instead emphasising the moral element of these reforms.

‘If you just cared about costs, you can just freeze benefits’ he said, arguing welfare reform is not just about making economies. In the subsequent Q&A, he declined the chance to frame the debate as a clash of generational values, when asked if this was a problem specifically with younger Britons.

The key question is how much of this will start to take effect before the next election. Much like the small boat crossings or NHS waiting times, the welfare crisis is an issue which has ballooned over the course of this parliament and which looks likely to be resolved in years, not months.

Sunak made an eye-catching manifesto pledge this morning, promising that in the next parliament he will legislate so that anyone on benefits for 12 months who does not comply with conditions set by their work coach will have their claim closed and benefits removed entirely.

But how likely is it that he is going to be in government to enact it? Given the current state of the polls, the beneficiaries of the hard work currently being undertaken in Whitehall is likely to be Labour.

Rayner’s eldest child was registered at husband’s home

It’s been a busy time for police investigations across the country and Manchester is no exception. As the curious case of Angela Rayner’s tax affairs trundles on, another development has now come to light. It turns out that the Labour MP’s eldest son from a previous relationship was registered to live at a different address from the one at which Rayner herself insists she stayed. With more information comes more questions…

Police are digging into whether or not the Labour MP has mispaid capital gains tax over the sale of her council house in 2015. Starmer’s second-in-command has been adamant that despite marrying then-husband Mark Rayner in 2010, the newlyweds lived apart for five years. The couple’s two children were registered at their father’s Lowndes Lane property while Rayner claimed her Vicarage Road council house was her main home. But according to the august record that is the electoral roll, the deputy Labour leader’s eldest son was registered at his stepfather’s address — rather than at his mother’s house. And never mind freshly unearthed documents — Lowndes Lane neighbours can vouch for the older son’s presence after complaining about his, er, rather incessant drumming. ‘It drove me to tears,’ one recalled. Everyone starts somewhere…

In another twist, the Labour party has admitted that Rayner’s selection papers for her 2014 nomination — which would have noted her main address at the time — no longer exist thanks to dastardly data protection rules. For her part, the shadow levelling up secretary is firm that she has done nothing wrong. The Labour party is adamant too that the revelations do ‘not contradict anything’ in their deputy leader’s statement, adding: ‘The rules were followed at all times.’

The plot thickens…

MPs need a proper HR service

The most damning bit of the lurid Mark Menzies case is that the Conservatives had been aware of the allegations for three months before they story broke this week – but only stripped him of the whip yesterday. It’s not a particular surprise, though: for years it has been clear that the whips office holds conflicting responsibilities of persuading MPs to vote as well as disciplinary or pastoral work. Something needs to change.

Parliament does have a very small HR system, though many MPs don’t know about it, much as many MPs don’t know about the help that the parliamentary wellbeing service can give them, including treatment for mental illness. Neither of these services are adequate, though. We have reached a stage where there needs to be an acknowledgement that the job of an MP is sufficiently pressured and demanding that not everyone is up to that life, and so there needs to be proper screening of candidates at an early stage, much as there is for other lines of work, like aviation. Then, there does need to be an HR and wellbeing structure in place that is commensurate with the demands on MPs, rather than the current setup which would be inadequate even for quite gentle jobs. Being an MP is not a gentle occupation, and no amount of changes to sitting hours to make them ‘family friendly’ is really going to change that. Some people are manifestly too vulnerable to cope with life even before they are selected, while others deteriorate while in the job as the demands of life spread between two parts of the UK take their toll. Both need more support.

Because the whips are not suited to running pastoral care, parliament must take responsibility for setting up an HR system that is proactive in training MPs when they first arrive and as they continue to serve, a system that provides regular appraisals for MPs and their staff, and that offers confidential support. At the moment, none of these things exist properly. There is a small amount of orientation training for new members after an election, and then they’re on their own. Parliament should be treated more like the sort of hostile environment that journalists receive special training before they can cover conflicts.

In my book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, I also suggested that an HR system be responsible for conducting appraisals with MPs’ staff so that young researchers are not stuck in what can become an extremely toxic personal fiefdom run by a member who has no idea about management at all.

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None of this is straightforward and simple, though. There are real risks with setting up a properly independent human resources system in parliament: just look at how much MPs resent Ipsa, the independent body that was set up in the wake of expenses scandal and which was supposed to make their remuneration transparent and simple. Ipsa has managed to raise members’ pay to a respectable level so that it is now on a par with the salary of a headteacher at a normal comprehensive school: this seems reasonable given the responsibilities of the average MP.

But most MPs would argue that despite being entirely dedicated to their pay and resourcing, this organisation has little insight into how parliamentary life actually works, and has become absurdly bureaucratic. They don’t respect it, and the same could end up being true of an HR body if it was badly-designed and didn’t involve parliamentarians and former politicians properly.

Similarly, if candidates had to go through psychometric tests and other assessments before even standing for parliament, who would resource this? Currently wannabe MPs stump up thousands of pounds of their own cash just to get picked by a local party, and then even more on their actual election campaign. The parties are unlikely to want to fund something that would weed out dynamic but unstable activists from standing – and there would be a huge debate about what ‘unsuitable’ actually looks like.

It has only been ten years since Gavin Barwell managed to repeal legislation which barred people who had been sectioned from continuing as MPs. We do not want to end up in a situation where someone with anxiety and depression which they are managing perfectly well is automatically prevented from standing for parliament because of a tick-box assessment.

We have reached the stage, though, where the number of personal scandals is so great and the number of MPs who are very unwell (not necessarily publicly) even greater that something needs to change. It will need great care to avoid a solution that ends up being a whole new problem, but MPs and the public deserve far better than the current mess.

Peter Murrell’s re-arrest has plunged the SNP into crisis

There is what can only be described as a mood of despair in SNP circles following the news that the former party chief executive Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, has been re-arrested and charged with ’embezzlement of funds from the Scottish National party’. It is the latest shocking twist in the long-running investigation into SNP fund-raising and finances called Operation Branchform. Mr Murrell has now resigned from the party.

He was first arrested ‘as a suspect’ in April last year but was then released without charge. At the time, a £110,000 Niesmann and Bischoff campervan was seized by police from outside Mr Murrell’s mother’s Dunfermline home. SNP headquarters in Edinburgh was also raided and a number of items removed, while a blue forensics tent was erected outside the Sturgeon family home in Uddingston near Glasgow. That image has blighted the SNP ever since.

The Crown Office has renewed its customary contempt of court warning to press and public not to speculate about the nature of the investigation or the charges. Social media keyboard warriors beware. But we already knew from the former chief constable of Scotland, Sir Iain Livingstone, in a BBC interview last August that Operation Branchform had evolved from a narrow issue of party fund-raising into what he described as a complex investigation into ‘fraud or potential embezzlement’.

Livingstone had been responding to complaints from senior former SNP figures about what they regarded as excessive time being taken to bring the police investigation to a conclusion. Well now it has been. Party officials can perhaps console themselves that there can at least be no more speculation and comment on the affair until Mr Murrell has his day in court – if indeed the prosecution goes that far. Mr Murrell is, of course, innocent until proven guilty.

Operation Branchform began life nearly three years ago as an apparently mundane affair. It arose from a complaint in July 2021 from a nationalist activist, Sean Clerkin, about the use of £600,000 raised by the SNP in donations for an independence referendum that never took place. Mr Clerkin, and others who made similar complaints to police, argued that the cash was ring-fenced for a referendum campaign and should not have been recycled into general SNP party expenditure.

Nicola Sturgeon dismissed any suggestion of irregularities. She and party officials argued that the money was used quite properly to promote the SNP’s overall political objectives, which include a manifesto commitment to securing a repeat referendum, or Indyref2 as it is known. ‘All sums raised for independence campaigning,’ said an SNP spokesman at the time, ‘will be spent on independence campaigning.’

But it is fair to say that the party hierarchy failed to take the matter sufficiently seriously, at least initially. Operation Branchform just kept growing like an uncontrollable weed in the SNP backyard. Ms Sturgeon was herself arrested in June last year and released without charge, as was the former party treasurer, Colin Beattie. The former first minister went on to make an emotional plea to the media at an impromptu news conference in the Holyrood parliament on 18 June insisting, ‘I am certain I’ve done nothing wrong’. Many believed her and still do. Nicola Sturgeon has not been re-arrested and there is no suggestion that she has been involved in any wrongdoing.

But the investigation ground on relentlessly with collateral damage to the fortunes of the SNP. Party fundraising has been seriously affected and the SNP has lost about a third of its members in the period since Sturgeon sensationally resigned as first minister in February last year. 

Current first minister Humza Yousaf freely admits that the SNP has suffered electoral fallout from Operation Branchform. The affair was seen as a major factor in the SNP’s crushing defeat in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election last October. The fear now is that this metastasising scandal could overshadow the SNP’s forthcoming general election campaign. There are few more damaging negatives for a political party than the taint of criminality.

The sensational charging of the former chief executive could not have come at a worse moment for Yousaf. The First Minister is under fire over the chaotic introduction of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act and for his equivocation over the Cass Report on gender identity services for young people. Only yesterday, the Scottish government suffered withering criticism from opposition parties and environmental campaigners after it announced the scrapping of its supposedly ‘world leading’ targets for reducing greenhouse gase emissions. In the latest Norstat opinion poll, only 29 per cent of even SNP voters said that Yousaf was doing a good job.

Before Mr Murrell’s re-arrest, the opinion polls were suggesting that the SNP could lose more than half its seats in the general election. It is now anyone’s guess what could happen. It could be an extinction level event for the First Minister and could plunge the party into another leadership election.

It has been a catastrophic year for the Scottish National party and for the leader known to his critics as ‘Humza Useless’. But whatever his failings, the First Minister cannot be held to blame for the latest twist in the Operation Branchform affair. He has been dealt a very poor hand by his predecessors. Even a political genius would have been hard pushed to manage what is arguably now the greatest crisis in SNP history.

Two bets for Ayr

There is plenty of competitive racing at Ayr over the next two days, quite apart from tomorrow’s Coral Scottish Grand National. With some decent prize money on offer too, it is not surprising that the quality of the cards is high.

The Coral Scottish Champion Hurdle (tomorrow, 2.25 p.m.), unlike its English counterpart at the Cheltenham Festival, is a handicap and, as such, there are plenty of horses in with a chance of landing the £56,000-plus prize for the winner.

Dan Skelton’s L’Eau du Sud is understandably at the top of the market after two big runs in his last two races, notably when runner-up last time out in the BetMGM County Handicap Hurdle at the Festival. However, odds of 4-1 or less are unappealing, especially as he is creeping up the handicap too.

I feel guilty about deserting Cracking Rhapsody as he did this column a big favour when winning the bet365 Morebattle Hurdle at Kelso last month, but tomorrow’s contest looks more competitive and he, too, is up in the ratings.

On balance, I am going to put up a horse at the bottom of the weights who is actually 8lbs out of the handicap proper, which is never ideal. SALSADA had nearly a year off the track, presumably because of a setback, but he has now had three runs in March to get him fit for this contest. I suspect this has been his major target for some time.

Brian Ellison’s seven-year-old gelding was fifth in this race last year on ground too quick for him but tomorrow’s ground with cut in it should be ideal. Claimer Dylan Johnston will take a useful 5 lbs off so take a chance and back Salsada each way at 20-1 with bet365 paying four places.

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I have put up two horses for the Scottish Grand National (tomorrow, 3.35 p.m.) and with mixed results so far. Git Maker has virtually halved in price after being put up at 14-1. However, I regret to say Twoshotsoftequila is a non-runner, which is annoying because Brian Hughes, who gets on well with the horse, had been booked for the ride earlier in the week and the horse had been well backed too.

Willie Mullins brings over no less than six horses for the Scottish National as he tries to land the British jump trainers’ championship, while the improving Inis Oirr looks sure to run a big race for trainer Lucinda Russell. However, if Git Maker has recovered from his Festival exertions, he is very much the one for me.

Finally, I have a fancy for today’s racing: GLEN CANNEL has been described in the past by his trainer, Laura Morgan, as a ‘gorgeous horse’. He was weak last season but, as a six-year-old gelding, he has strengthen up and could make a decent novice chaser next season.

Glen Cannel has been third is his two runs over hurdles this year and with Morgan’s yard in fine form – two winners from just five runners over the past fortnight – today could be this horse’s day in the winner’s enclosure.

However, Glen Cannel has been backed overnight into favourite in the GS Group ‘Hands & Heels’ Handicap Hurdle (5 p.m.) so the suggestion is two points win – rather than the usual 1 point each way – at 7-2 with bet365.

My Randox Grand National horses ran disappointingly last weekend but it was still a very profitable weekend for followers of this column’s tips. Arizona Cardinal’s gutsy victory in the Topham Chase (put up at 16-1 although he won at 20-1), plus a couple of other placed horses, means a profit of well over 50 points to a 1 point stake since the start of the jumps’ season, with just one weekend to go.

Next weekend I will be taking a close look at the Sandown card highlighted by the bet365 Gold Cup.

Pending:

2 points win Glen Cannel at 7-2 for the GS Group “Hands & Heels” Handicap Hurdle.

1 point each way Salsada at 20-1 for the Scottish Champion Hurdle, 1/5^th odds, 4 places. 

1 point each way Git Maker at 14-1 for the Scottish Grand National, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. 

1 point each way Twoshotsoftequila at 25-1 for the Scottish Grand National, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. 

1 point each way Threeunderthrufive at 20-1 for the bet365 Gold Cup, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. 

1 point each way Desertmore House at 25-1 for the bet365 Gold Cup, 1/5^th odds, 4 places. 

Settled bets from last weekend: + 15.2 points.

1 point each way Your Darling at 16-1 for the Topham Chase, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Arizona Cardinal at 16-1 for the Topham Chase, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. 1^st. + 19.2 points.

1 point each way Might I at 18-1 for the William Hill Handicap Hurdle, 1/5^th odds, 6 places. 6^th. + 2.6 points.

1 point each way Mahler Mission at 20-1 for the Randox Grand National, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Vanillier at 16-1 for the Randox Grand National, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Panda Boy at 40-1 for the Randox Grand National, 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Libberty Hunter at 12-1 for the Maghull Novices’ Chase, 1/5^th odds, 3 places. 3^rd. +1.4 points.

2023-4 jump seasons to date: + 53.81 points.

2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 14 of the past 16 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 475 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a ‘point’ is your chosen regular stake).

Will Sunak’s sick note crackdown get Brits back to work?

Alongside the Prime Minister’s speech on welfare today, the Department for Work and Pensions quietly released updated forecasts. The numbers are stark: DWP expects there to be 3.96 million working-age claimants by 2028-29, a rise from 2.8 million in 2023-24. Meanwhile the number of working-age people receiving disability benefits is forecast to rise to 1.16 million – that’s 160,000 more claimants than was expected just six months ago. These are the numbers Rishi Sunak must grapple with as he sets out his welfare reform agenda. 

Back in 2020, then chancellor Rishi Sunak had days to design the furlough scheme. Once lockdown became mandatory in spring 2020, it was a race against the clock to figure out how to protect against mass unemployment while still keeping the incentive for people to return to work when it was legal to do.

Throughout Covid, furlough was envied by countries around the world, with even officials in the United States quietly wishing they could copy what Sunak had come up with. But Sunak wasn’t so sure. The scheme was successful in what it was designed to do: keep unemployment near record lows, making it easy for workers to stay on payroll and get back to work on day one of reopening. But with furlough repeatedly extended – not for weeks, but for eighteen months – the then-Chancellor was acutely aware of a potential risk: a rise in worklessness.

Today – years later – Prime Minister Sunak is trying to address this very real consequence, as he delivers a welfare reform speech which includes more measures to get people back to work.

The drive to keep people in work – and make that work pay – has been a theme for Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. The last few fiscal statements have honed in incentives: removing the cap on the lifetime allowance for pensions, making full expensing for business investment permanent, and now a total of 4p taken off employee National Insurance (which the government says it would like to abolish completely in the long-term). 

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But the sticking point has been benefits: while more resources have been directed towards helping people back into work, the fear is that far too little has been done to address the millions of working-age people who are not currently in work. Ministers like to tout Britain’s low headline unemployment rate, which sat at 4.2 per cent between last December and this February, but this number only includes people actively seeking employment. It does not include the millions of Britons who have stopped looking for work. This is how Britain has simultaneously low unemployment figures, yet 2.8 million people registered as ‘long-term sick’ and 5.6 million people on some kind of out-of-work benefit.

What about their future? Are they to be abandoned to a workless life, or can they be engaged? The Prime Minister’s message today is that, with all the innovations (even just in the past few years) to be able to work more flexibly, there should be a type of job that suits more potential workers – a shift, he explains, so ‘the default becomes what work you can do, not what you can’t’. In a bid to tackle the 11 million sick notes issued in the UK last year, Sunak today announces a shift from GPs signing people off work to ‘specialist work and health professionals’ who have ‘dedicated time’ to figure out the needs of sick workers, and whether a full sign-off from work is really the best course of action. 

Sunak is touching today on the delicate issue of mental health: something he says he would ‘never dismiss or downplay’ but also must not immediately prohibit sufferers from the workforce when there is a ‘growing body of evidence that good work can actually improve mental and physical health’. Since the pandemic, reports in mental health struggles have surged (unsurprisingly so, after lockdowns). The Office for National Statistics has revealed that 53 per cent of people registered inactive with long-term sickness at the start of last year reported depression, bad nerves or anxiety as an ailment. After speaking to welfare advisors, 80 per cent were deemed as too unwell to work at all. 

This is what Sunak wants to rectify: that a mental health diagnosis should not (almost) immediately take someone away from their office or colleagues, especially if this further isolates them.

But will today’s measures be enough? Almost certainly not. In addition to today’s updated forecasts from DWP, Michael Simmons pointed out on Coffee House earlier this week, the number of people deemed ‘economically inactive’ rose by a staggering 150,000 in the last three months, up to 9.4 million. One minister estimates that at least five to six million of those people are prime candidates to get into some kind of employment, but right now it seems numbers are continuing to go in the wrong direction. Capacity remains an issue, but within the NHS and job centres. With people not being seen for months on end, it makes it increasingly likely that they will fall out of the workforce altogether.

As I wrote for the magazine earlier this year, the problem is not work-shy Britain: the UK had a record-high employment rate before the pandemic hit. A combination of faulty services and disincentives has made it much harder for people to get back to work. The Prime Minister’s decision to talk about the moral imperative of getting Britain working is a necessary first step to fixing the work crisis – but as far as solutions go, very little has been announced so far that is likely to meaningfully change the trajectory of those leaving work.