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Does Labour care about free speech on campus?
Universities fought tooth and nail against plans to impose fines if they failed to uphold freedom of speech. That proposal – contained in last year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – was one of the few things the Tory government could point to as a success. But under Labour the plan has been shelved. It’s a good day for universities; a bad day for anyone who cares about free speech on campus.
This bleak episode neatly sums up Labour’s attitude to higher education
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that the ministerial order, which was required to bring into force the relevant parts of the new law, would be delayed. She told the Commons, with obvious pleasure, she was ready to ‘consider options, including repeal.’ In short, the Act is dead.
This matters a lot. If activated, the new legislation would have explicitly protected students and staff from being disadvantaged because of their ideas or opinions; made it illegal to discriminate on ideological grounds in the provision of university spaces, such as meeting rooms; protected the right to invite controversial outside speakers; and made universities potentially liable in damages to anyone whose free speech was infringed.
Put another way, it would have greatly reduced the wiggle-room currently available for university apparatchiks to tell those with awkward views to put up or shut up – or to allow coteries within colleges to make life so uncomfortable for them that they either became isolated or left in disgust.
It would also have made it much harder for universities to exercise discreet control over which outside speakers might find themselves invited by academics and student societies. Instead of sheltering, as at present, behind HR clichés, such as the need to ensure all their students and staff felt safe, or the principle that conflict ought to be avoided, college authorities would have had to engage actively with the issues of free speech involved. If they did not, they would have faced serious legal and financial sanctions difficulties.
As it is, however, the educational blob need not be worried. People in universities will continue to be protected only by the existing largely platitudinous duty imposed under 1986 legislation to protect ‘freedom of speech within the law’, a prescription lacking both precision and teeth.
The result is already fairly predictable. Those with controversial views – the gender-critical, the aggressively conservative or the strongly pro-Israel – will continue to find life on campus hard. Although some university teachers have succeeded in legal claims against their institutions after being forced out on the basis of their expressed views, employment law provides only limited protection for them; broadly, if universities get the procedures right, they have little to fear unless the claimant can produce a slam-dunk case of discrimination in respect of philosophical views protected under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Employment law, of course, will do little to protect students.
You get the impression that none of this will unduly bother Phillipson or Keir Starmer. Her excuse for ditching the freedom of speech legislation was that it would be ‘burdensome on providers.’ A charitable interpretation is that this is a convenient fig-leaf for a decision taken on other grounds. Depressingly, however, it is probably quite true. Phillipson is a managerialist. She is concerned with making sure the right controls are present, the correct forms filled in, and that the orderly production of graduates continues. That way, everything fits together: she will then probably be able to announce in due course that the other body she recently created, Skills England, has fulfilled its quota.
As for free speech within universities, is Phillipson actually against it? Almost certainly not. It’s just that she doesn’t seem that interested in defending it. Unless it can be harnessed to some buzz-phrase like innovation or transferable skills, Labour sees it as an irrelevance; an aspect of the culture war which, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, she no doubt longs to be able to announce is over.
This bleak episode neatly sums up Labour’s attitude to higher education. For all their faults, the Tories realised that academia had to be shaken up and the dead hand of the academic establishment dealt with. In a nice reversal of roles, Phillipson has shown herself to be deeply reactionary, frightened of change and inclined to appease a complacent senior management. Come to think of it, that’s rather the attitude of Keir Starmer himself. Phillipson, depressingly, makes for a perfect fit in his programme of faux radicalism combined with the appeasement of managerial mediocrity.
Could Kamala Harris end the war on weed?
Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ new hope for keeping Agent Orange out of the Oval Office. It’s probably for the best. Many younger, more progressive voters saw president Joe Biden as a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone era. Among other things, Biden was an old-school drug warrior who co-wrote the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which made the penalty for handling crack rocks a hundred times more severe than powder cocaine; the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill, which massively expanded the prison-industrial complex; and, in 2002, he proposed the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, which would have held party organisers liable for drugs consumed on their premises (this had the side-effect of keeping safety teams off-site, as doing otherwise would implicitly admit that their guests swaying to techno with pacifiers in their mouths were indeed illicitly inebriated).
Donald Trump’s marijuana stance is more ambiguous
But recently Biden seemed to have lightened up, at least when it comes to cannabis: in May, he announced plans to downgrade it from its strict Schedule I, the same category as heroin, to the less restrictive Schedule III. However, this is still yet to catch up to nearly half of America, which has already lifted the ban on a state level. With Biden gone, could Harris finally end the war on weed?
It would be an easy vote-winner, especially among younger voters among whom Biden’s popularity plummeted over the war in Gaza: 68 per cent of young Americans saw his presidency as a failure, according to a CNN poll back in April. But when it comes to pot, the majority of Democrat voters and a substantial – 42 per cent according to a recent Pew poll – portion of Republicans back full legalisation. Third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already added it to his platform.
In 2018, there were still more arrests for marijuana in the United States than every violent crime put together. Being arrested can lead to a criminal record, prison, broken families, being evicted or deported, and losing your job, welfare, and even your right to vote. On average, this was three-and-a-half times likelier to happen to black Americans than whites – and in Pickens County, Georgia, nearly a hundred times more likely. After all, who’s going to pull over a little old white lady?
As San Francisco’s former district attorney who oversaw nearly 2,000 marijuana cases, Harris might appear an unlikely reformer. But five years ago, the ex-prosecutor admitted smoking grass in her wayward youth. In doing so, she joined stoned statesmen like Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, George Bush and David Cameron; unlike Bill Clinton, she happily inhaled. Since her admission, she’s consistently held that the drug should be taken off the naughty list, and backed the relevant legislation. ‘I think it gives a lot of people joy,’ she said. ‘And we need more joy in the world.’
Someone cynical might say that Kamala sensed which way the wind was blowing and scrambled to cover herself. Having experienced the justice system myself, it doesn’t quite sit right with me that someone who inflicted that on others while laughing off her own herbal indiscretions now uses reform for political clout.
But people should be allowed to change, and if Harris follows through on what are now her purported beliefs, does it really matter? She could even shrewdly leverage her past to her advantage. After all, cops are best-placed to see the failures of the drug war. There’s even a whole organisation – the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, formerly Law Enforcement Against Prohibition – of cops and ex-cops, judges, prosecutors and so on, actively working for drug reform.
Donald Trump’s marijuana stance is more ambiguous. While he’s expressed some rather extreme positions, such as marching drug dealers to the gallows and sending special ops to assassinate cartel heads in Mexico (seemingly basing his foreign policy on the movie Sicario), when it comes to cannabis he doesn’t seem to care much either way, rather letting the states decide.
As it stands, state-by-state legalisation is a bit of a mess. What’s considered legitimate entrepreneurial activity in Colorado can leave you rotting in prison next door in Kansas. Growing in one state then selling in another is therefore an attractive proposition for gangsters; the Mexican cartels and Chinese triads staff their clandestine plantations with trafficked migrant workers and settle scores with firearms like cowboys in the Old West. Meanwhile, federal prohibition means it’s difficult for legitimate marijuana businesses to open bank accounts, making them cash-only and an easy mark for armed hold-ups. As of 2023, three-quarters of America’s weed industry was still underground.
Still, there’s been some encouraging signs so far. There’s been no obvious surge of pot-induced psychosis in those states where it has been legalised, and neither have the denizens of such states partaken in fentanyl or other narcotics any more than usual.
Should the next president of the United States legalise cannabis nationwide, it could have ripple effects across the globe. The US imposed prohibition on many countries, such as Nepal and Cambodia, threatening to withhold much-needed aid unless they stopped red-eyed beatniks wandering their streets. The Nepalese are particularly incensed that the Americans forbade it for them but are now permitting it for themselves. As for the UK, lawmakers may be encouraged to take bolder stands instead of hiding behind a ‘tough-on-crime’ agenda that’s brought our prisons to crisis point.
How Labour plans to justify its tax hike
Oh, the suspense. It seems that we will have to wait until next week to discover the details of the £20 billion ‘black hole’ which chancellor Rachel Reeves has supposedly discovered in the public finances. Don’t get too excited, though. The revelation will be no greater a surprise than the ending of James Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic (spoiler alert: a large ship hits an iceberg and sinks). As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out before the election and has done so again: the state of the UK government’s finances are not exactly a secret – they are already open to anyone who cares to examine them. You do not need a Treasury pass to access them.
The conceit that the government has uncovered a black hole since taking office is nothing more than a wheeze to justify planned tax rises
The conceit that the government has uncovered a black hole since taking office is nothing more than a wheeze to justify planned tax rises which Labour did not want to share with us in its manifesto. It is a carefully-prepared display. Shadow minister without portfolio Nick Thomas-Symonds started putting about the possibility that the public finances might be in a worse state than thought during the last days of the election campaign. Rachel Reeves repeated the allegation on her first day in her new office, and then Keir Starmer repeated the claim at PMQs this week – the story has gradually made its way up Labour’s food chain, in other words. It is not very original, either. George Osborne used the same wheeze when he became chancellor, telling MPs in June 2010 that the public finances were in a worse state than the incoming government had believed – to protests from the then ex-chancellor Alistair Darling.
That does not mean there won’t genuinely be a black hole in the public finances soon, however – it is just that it will be a black hole of the government’s own making.
Last Sunday, Reeves hinted that she could be minded to grant 5.5 per cent pay rises to public sector workers, as recommended by pay review bodies. However, there was no provision for above-inflation pay rises in Labour’s ‘fully-costed’ manifesto. What would they cost? There were 468,693 full time equivalent teachers working in England in 2023, with median earnings of £43,801. A 5.5 per cent pay rise would – given that the Consumer Prices Index currently stands at 2 per cent – amount to a real-terms rise of 3.5 per cent. Therefore, the real-terms cost of an across-the-board pay rise would come to £718 million.
As for nurses, there are 363,226 of them in England earning median pay of £36,158. A 5.5 per cent pay rise for them would come with a real-terms cost of £459 million. Then there are 138,604 doctors on mean earnings of £77,147. A real-terms pay rise of 3.5 per cent for them would add another £372 million to public spending. Junior doctors, though, are demanding 35 per cent and Labour has said it wants to settle their dispute, so that cost of a pay settlement there is likely to be a lot greater.
We are up to a black hole of over £1.5 billion before we even get around to considering pay rises for civil servants, teaching assistants, police officers and all the rest. This would be entirely of Labour’s making. The government’s efforts to blame the need for tax rises on the Conservatives may well fall flat.
Prince Harry will never win his war on the tabloids
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, according to the old adage; and so it stands that someone who you find generally objectionable can also, occasionally, be correct. Many people who would not count themselves fans of Prince Harry would find it hard not to sympathise with his ongoing campaign against more scurrilous elements of the tabloid press. As a new ITV documentary, Tabloids On Trial, suggests, the media’s actions amounted to a horrendous invasion of privacy for Harry and many others in the public eye over a period of years. Yet, as ever, it is considerably harder to sympathise with him than it is the other victims, purely because of the manner in which he conducts himself.
A taste of this comes early on in the documentary, in which the prince pugnaciously declares: ‘This is a David vs Goliath situation…the Davids are the claimants and the Goliaths are this vast media enterprise.’
“When you’re vindicated it proves you weren’t being paranoid”
— ITV News (@itvnews) July 24, 2024
Prince Harry says he experienced the same paranoia as his mother Princess Diana.@BeccaBarry's exclusive interview features in Tabloids on Trial on ITV1 at 9pm on Thursday.
Read more here: https://t.co/w0oO0UXal5 pic.twitter.com/y0k0UXI4Ep
Few would regard Prince Harry as a poor, put-upon figure, scrabbling about in his Montecito mansion to make ends meet. So immediately the usual self-delusion and grandiosity is in play, a sense compounded when he says: ‘I don’t think there is anyone in the world who is better suited and placed to see this through than myself.’
Harry is in danger of becoming monomaniacally fixated on an issue that shows no signs of ever being resolved to his satisfaction
From a publicity perspective, this is undoubtedly true. Harry’s many, many legal cases against various media organisations have attracted worldwide attention. They continue to do so, in a way that the likes of Hugh Grant and Charlotte Church – both interviewed in the programme, both understandably angry about the whole-scale invasion of their privacy – cannot.
Yet Grant and Church are also more straightforwardly sympathetic figures. Harry, especially in his post-Britain, post-working royal phase, cannot simply claim that he is a wronged victim of the media, trying to lead a blameless private life with his family. Such figures do not open their hearts and homes to Netflix, nor do they publish sensational biographies in which they dish the dirt on all around them. Tabloids on Trial – which clearly, and justifiably, regarded the centrepiece interview between Rebecca Barry and Harry as its selling point – offers a sympathetic account of his travails, creating a feeling of intimacy by frequently filming him speaking directly into the camera. Yet it is also telling that Barry, without going full Frost/Nixon on the Duke of Sussex, dared to ask him some more penetrating questions than the kid-gloved likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tom Bradby ever did.
Was it fair, for instance, to suggest that there was an element of payback involved in a quest that makes Captain Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick look like a harmless pleasure cruise? Harry blinked, as if surprised, and stressed that the press themselves were retaliating against him for his effrontery in exposing their chicanery.
He was also very swift to stress that his mother had been hacked and that her paranoia regarding the press was fully justified: ‘I think paranoia is a very interesting word, but when you’re vindicated, it proves you weren’t paranoid.’
It’s hard not to see this as a barbed allusion to Prince William’s 2021 statement that Diana had ‘fear, paranoia and isolation’ in her life, albeit as the result of the BBC and Martin Bashir’s actions in forging documents in order to obtain a revelatory interview from her. Even from afar, the feud still continues.
Towards the end of the conversation, Harry, who has promised a high-profile case against the Sun next year, was asked about his wider relations with his estranged relatives. With unintentional bathos, he remarked, of his apparently interminable legal wranglings, ‘it would be nice if we did it as a family’. It’s as if intensive High Court cases were a bonding experience akin to going out for a picnic, but he is at least resolute in his own determination: ‘For me, the mission continues.’
The evil press were firmly blamed for the estrangement that has occurred rather than any actions of him or his wife. There was a minor revelation when Harry said: ‘I won’t bring my wife back to this country’, citing his fear of knife or acid attacks if Meghan was to return here, perhaps bearing the latest produce from her America Riviera Orchard sideline. Ridicule is more likely.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for a man who is clearly deeply troubled and unhappy, and whose determination to keep fighting increasingly expensive and emotionally demanding court cases increasingly seems like a quixotic and self-indulgent quest.
Harry may thrive on the publicity, the battles and the attention that his undeniably righteous anger deserves. But, on this evidence, he is in severe danger of becoming monomaniacally fixated on an issue that shows no signs of ever being resolved to his satisfaction.
Joanna Cherry blasts SNP’s ‘culture of hate’
Another day, another drama – and this time it’s the SNP in the spotlight. Ex-Edinburgh MP Joanna Cherry has taken to the august pages of Scotland’s only pro-indy newspaper, the National, to urge her party to take a long hard look at itself after its electoral wipe-out this month. Though she has insisted she ‘intends to remain a member of the SNP’, Cherry has pulled no punches in her criticism of her colleagues. It’s quite the read…
Blasting the ‘culture of hate’ that the party has ‘allowed to flourish…against those who dare to disagree’, Cherry has lamented the ‘”no debate” mantra’ coursing through the current iteration of the party. Going on, she raged:
I find it profoundly depressing to see where we are now. The positivity is gone and some people within our movement feel they have licence to attack those with whom they disagree in the most unpleasant terms. No wonder we are putting voters off. Back in 2014 had I foreseen the level of abuse and harassment I would have to endure as an SNP MP, simply for daring to question the direction the party was taking, I would never have left my legal career to enter elected politics.
The SNP needs urgently to address what has gone wrong and what led to this huge drop in our vote, or we will suffer another rout at the 2026 Holyrood election. I don’t sense any great appetite on the part of the leadership of the party to do this properly… The party also needs to look at its internal culture and the poison that has been allowed to spread because of the “no debate” mantra that was imported from identity politics and allowed to seep through the party into everything we do. Sadly, this culture has also damaged our parliament and other public institutions. It is not just the SNP which needs reform.
Ouch. And Cherry didn’t stop there. Nodding to internal politics that she claims are to blame for changing party rules to work against her, the nationalist politician added:
I would have liked the opportunity to be part of an SNP government but as everyone knows, the SNP’s rules were changed in 2020 to make it as difficult as possible for me to make the move from Westminster to Holyrood. I will be pleased if recent reports are correct, and that petty and unprecedented rule change is consigned to the dustbin of history. But without reforming the NEC and some serious changes at the heart of our party that sort of convenient rule tinkering can easily happen again at another time for other reasons. I could not countenance standing for Holyrood as an SNP candidate unless the party addresses the culture of bullying and harassment of those who dare to put forward ideas or question policy. I know many women (and some men) who feel the same.
Talk about scathing…
The SNP ended up with just nine seats in the general election – a spectacular fall from grace after winning in all bar three of Scotland’s constituencies in 2015. The 2026 Holyrood poll is less than two years away and with a number of disgruntled ex-MPs milling around, nationalist MSPs are getting increasingly worried about their own futures in the party. Will the infighting worsen? Watch this space…
There is nothing new about the £20bn ‘black hole’
Labour’s pro-growth reforms were fun while they lasted. Now here come the tax rises. That’s not quite how Rachel Reeves will convey the findings of the Treasury audit she plans to announce on Monday – but hikes are probably going to be the next step in filling in what the Chancellor will claim is a £20 billion hole in the public finances.
This multi-billion pound ‘discovery’ is the latest addition to Labour’s narrative, which has been building since before the election. The party wants to claim that when it discovers what’s really been going on inside government, its fiscal decisions will become even more difficult – and this could include some painful (but necessary) tax rises. But there has always been an outstanding problem with this narrative: thanks to a rigorous – and public – assessment of fiscal events by the Office for Budget Responsibility, there is very little left to unearth.
The latest assessment, which was carried out less than five months ago, pointed to the departmental spending holes which are about to be presented as shocking information. Not even the headline figure is new: the Institute for Fiscal Studies has been pointing to roughly a £20 billion black hole for months (along with a great many other spending gaps, including in Labour’s manifesto). Former chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s fiscal statements both this year and last suggested that there would be big public spending cuts in the new parliament so he could both lower taxes and meet his financial targets. Bodies such as the OBR have been highlighting this trade-off since it began. It’s a conundrum, yes – but it’s by no means new.
This Treasury audit is odd to begin with: having made the role of the OBR such a big part of the election campaign, it is strange that one of Reeves’s first moves would be to get the Treasury to carry out what the independent OBR is meant to do. (In response to Liz Truss sidelining the body when she announced her infamous mini-Budget, Labour is granting greater powers to the forecaster so it’s required to assess all major fiscal events.) The argument is that this audit offers a broader view of the public finances, uncovering departmental weakness and funding gaps. But it does not tell us anything new about how much cash there is to spend. Those figures were known to the Labour party when it was writing its manifesto and going into an election. The situation is the same today as it was pre-election.
This puts Labour in a tricky spot, not least because the party was so vague about what it would do on tax during the campaign. It wanted to stick to talking about the Tory tax cuts on National Insurance – but did not want to go near the multi-billion-pound black hole that was already on full display.
This ‘conspiracy of silence’, as the IFS dubbed it, was not just carried out by Labour. The Tories were keeping it quiet, too. As Michael Saunders from Oxford Economics points out in his latest newsletter, no one really thought the Tories were going to stick to their spending plans – and cut £20 billion from government spending – if they had won the election either:
They were probably not intended to be implemented and the Conservative government did not lay out detailed plans to achieve them. Rather, the purpose of the existing spending totals appears to have been to show a path by which the fiscal rules could be met with the tax cuts announced in late 2023 and early 2024. In practice, it’s likely that a Conservative government would have added to the spending totals while, as has often been the case, pencilling in restraint in future years to meet the fiscal rules, which focus on the deficit and change in debt ratio five years ahead.
It’s another good example of how flawed the fiscal rules are. While they are, in theory, designed to get debt falling as a percentage of GDP in the medium term, what they actually do is allow politicians to pretend they will make the tough decisions in five years’ time, spending wildly as they do so. Reeves will benefit from this as Hunt did – but early indicators suggest she wants to find even more cash, including for above-inflation public sector pay raises. These are estimated to cost roughly £3.5 billion, if granted for teachers and health staff.
It’s thought that Labour is looking at changes to capital gains tax, possibly inheritance tax, and rolling back certain tax reliefs to raise more revenue. The party certainly has a mandate to make changes – but can it really claim, if it hikes taxes, that the decision was taken in the face of surprising circumstances? All the important information was at Reeves’s fingertips long before the election was called. Not wanting to talk about it during an election is one thing – but suggesting it is new information is quite another.
France descends into chaos on the Olympics’ opening day
France’s Olympics could not have got off to a worse start. Hundreds of thousands of train passengers have been left stranded after the country’s high-speed rail lines were targeted by a series of suspicious fires. Rail company SNCF says it’s a ‘massive attack aimed at paralysing the network’, with security services suggesting this morning that the far left may have been behind the attack. Whoever is to blame, one thing is clear: France’s president Emmanuel Macron will be furious. The world’s eyes are on Paris tonight as the opening ceremony gets underway. Macron wanted them to see France at its best; instead, they will see a country in chaos.
The man behind tonight’s opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics is Thomas Jolly. True to his surname, the theatre director promises a stunning show that will surprise and thrill. Above all, the ceremony will be a ‘celebration of cultural, linguistic, religious and sexual diversity in France’.
No one can argue that France is diverse, but is there much to celebrate? There once was.
The last great global event France hosted was the football World Cup in 1998 and, for the first time in their history, the French won the tournament. It was a gloriously diverse team. They were dubbed ‘black-blanc-beur’ (beur is a colloquial word denoting someone born in France of North African heritage, such as Zinedine Zidane, the star of the 1998 triumph). More than one million French partied in the Champs-Elysées after the 3-0 thrashing of Brazil in the final.
It was the high point of what the French call vivre-ensemble, or ‘live together’; a favourite phrase of politicians at the time, today it is rarely heard.
‘Live together’ began to die out a decade ago. In June 2016, France hosted the European football championships and to coincide with the event the sports sociologist William Gasparini reflected on that 1998 victory. In his view, it was a time when the West brimmed with confidence, the ‘end of history’, as we were told. ‘Unemployment was falling, the economy was performing well and France was winning,’ explained Gasparini. The euphoria evaporated in the new millennium.
Gasparini cited the 9/11 attack in 2001 as a significant factor in the deterioration of vivre-ensemble because some French began to regard their Muslim fellow citizens with suspicion.
In his 2004 book, The War for Muslim Minds, France’s leading expert on Islamism, Gilles Kepel, contrasted the hospitality of Britain in granting asylum to figures from the Islamic world to the intransigence of France. ‘What French officials fear is that the social malaise felt by Muslims in the suburbs of major cities…will be expressed as religious extremism, leading eventually to violence and terrorism,’ wrote Kepel.
This fear has been realised, not because France began granting asylum to radicals but because of the emergence of the internet. Kepel pinpoints the launch of YouTube in 2005 as a seminal moment in the re-Islamification of some young European Muslims. Extremists used the site to proselytise and propagandise, and the results have been dramatic.
A major survey in 2020 reported that three quarters of French Muslims under 25 placed Islamic law over Republican law; among the over 35s, this figure fell to a quarter.
Asked in 2016 if France could ever return to the vivre-ensemble of 1998, Gasparini replied: ‘I don’t think we can go back on this enchanted interlude…we are now in a France that is in doubt’.
The following month, in Nice, an Islamist in a 19-ton truck murdered 86 people who were celebrating Bastille Day. That was the last of the large-scale massacres in France, but since then there have been many more Islamist attacks, including the murder of two school teachers.
Far from being a country of vivre-ensemble, France has become a nation where its citizens live ‘face to face’. Those are the words of the former minister of foreign affairs, Gérard Collomb, uttered when he resigned his post in 2018.
It was meant as a warning to French president Emmanuel Macron, but Collomb’s cri du cœur went unheeded. Worse, through his indifference and incompetence, the president has stirred anger among another demographic afflicted by a similar ‘social malaise’ to that experienced by many French Muslims in the inner cities. These are the ‘proles’ in the provinces, the yellow vests who demonstrated their discontent on the street in 2018 and then at the ballot box last month.
This is the bitter reality of France today; a country with deep and dangerous fractures
In the Europeans elections this summer, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally triumphed in 93 per cent of the country’s municipalities and in 96 out of 101 departements. Only the cities offered any resistance; here the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) did well, campaigning on little else than the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. This appealed to Progressives and also Muslims, 62 per cent of whom voted for LFI in the European elections.
The National Rally also dominated the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections and would have won a majority of seats in the second round but for a hastily concocted ‘cordon sanitaire’ by Macron’s centrists and the bourgeoise left.
According to the historian of French Institutions, Philippe Fabry, the cordon sanitaire is ‘no longer ideological, it is sociological’, a revival of the class contempt that characterised the last years of Louis XVI’s reign: ‘The nobility of the Republic is refusing to allow the people to intrude into their place of life and power,’ was how he described Macron’s strategy to Le Figaro this week.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the collapse of France’s multicultural myth more than two op-eds published during the recent parliamentary elections: one was signed by 80 prominent Muslims and it urged people not to vote for the National Rally because of their ‘racism’. The other was backed by 100 notables, many from France’s Jewish community, and urged people not to vote for the left-wing New Popular Front because, they said, it was a ‘threat’ to Jews.
This is the bitter reality of France today; a country with deep and dangerous fractures. This won’t, of course, be on display this evening. We’ll be treated to Macron’s version of France, a Progressive Utopia. If pipe dreaming was an Olympic event, Macron would win gold.
Age is just a number for 25-1 Ascot tip
Take a bow, SUMMERGHAND. Trainer David O’Meara’s gallant old warrior will be participating in his 100th race tomorrow when he contests the Moet & Chandon International Stakes over seven furlongs (Ascot, 3 p.m.).
The achievements of this gelding are remarkable since he made his racecourse debut at Doncaster in May 2017. He has won 17 of his 99 starts and amassed more than £624,000 in prize money. Those victories, all of them over six furlongs, include the Unibet Stewards’ Cup at Glorious Goodwood in 2020 and the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup in 2022.
At the height of his powers, Summerghand was running off an official mark of 113 whereas tomorrow, aged ten, he will be running off just 91. That’s quite a drop considering all the evidence is that he still retains plenty of ability.
Last time out, earlier this month and at odds of 22-1, Summerghand was third to Aalto in the seven-furlong bet365 Bunbury Cup at Newmarket, with the unlucky-in-running Carrytheone just a place behind him in fourth. Aalto and Carrytheone will re-oppose tomorrow when they will both be close to the head of the market yet, despite being better off at the weights, Summerghand can be backed at far bigger prices. It’s a fact of life that most punters don’t like putting their money on old horses because they think, often irrationally, that they are too slow.
However, with Tom Marquand in the saddle and hoping that age is just a number, back Summerghand each way at 25-1 with bet365, BetVictor, Betfred, Ladbrokes or Coral, all offering five places. It’s not just a sentimental bet because he represents value in an open contest.
Unfortunately, my ante-post bet in the race, The Wizard of Eye, who was backed into 4-1 favouritism for this contest last weekend, is a non runner after bruising a foot. It’s not a serious setback and the horse should be back on the racetrack next month but, of course, it’s less than ideal for those of us who backed him at 12-1 earlier this month.
This is a red-hot contest for a prize of more than £77,000 to the winner. Carrytheone is a likely winner but his style of running, being held up in big fields, means he is always likely to encounter traffic problems so 5-1 is too short for a horse that does not win that often.
I had expected to tip Orazio in tomorrow’s race. He was another unlucky loser last time out, this time in the Wokingham Stakes at Royal Ascot. However, on Monday, after the five-day declarations, Orazio was trading at 14-1 but now he is a top priced 6-1. Given the horse has disappointed plenty of times in big-field handicaps and would prefer softer ground, I am going to swerve him too at his current odds.
Instead, I will go in double-handed with FRESH, who is a horse with plenty of decent course and distance form. James Fanshawe’s horse has dropped to a nice mark of 91 and he should go well tomorrow for up-and-coming young jockey Billy Loughnane, who is riding the seven-year-old gelding for the first time. Back Fresh each way at 11-1 with William Hill, offering five places.
The big race tomorrow, in terms of class horses, is the Group 1 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Qipco Stakes (Ascot, 3.40 p.m.) over a distance of a mile and a half and for a first prize of more than £700,000.
Auguste Rodin is the right favourite because he is brilliant at his best but two of his last six runs have been shockers, including when he was a distant last of the ten runners in this race a year ago. In short, he’s not one to rely upon which makes it attractive finding something against him each way.
I think that Middle Earth will appreciate the likely fast-run race tomorrow and will therefore run better than he did in the slowly-run Hardwicke Stakes at Royal Ascot last month. Sunway ran well when runner-up in the Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby and is described by his talented trainer David Menuisier as ‘potentially, the best I have trained’.
However, the seemingly rock-solid alternative to the favourite is the Charlie Appleby trained REBEL’S ROMANCE who, like Auguste Rodin, is officially rated on a lofty mark of 123.
Rebel’s Romance has done most of his running abroad but he is high class and this race has clearly been his target for some time. He comes into the contest on a potential five-timer and he will appreciate the fast ground. Back him each way at 4-1 with Coral, paying three places.
Next week I will turn my attention to the final two days of Glorious Goodwood which, if the weather forecast is correct, will certainly be living up to its name this year.
Pending:
1 point each way Summerghand at 25-1 for the International Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.
1 point each way Fresh at 11-1 for the International Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.
1 point each way The Wizard of Eye at 12-1 for the International Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. Non runner.
1 point each way Rebel’s Romance at 4-1 for the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Qipco Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Blue For You at 16-1 for the Coral Golden Mile, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Ghostwriter at 20-1 for the Juddmonte Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
Last weekend:
1 point each way Kyle Of Lochalsh at 9-2 for the Mettal UK Handicap, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places. 3rd. – 0.1 points.
2024 flat season running total + 12.4 points.
2023-4 jumps season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 15 of the past 17 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 517 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a ‘point’ is your chosen regular stake).
Who are the Olympics for?
For the first time since its first race in 1903, the Tour de France didn’t finish in Paris this year. The world’s best cyclists, Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, were banished to the south coast after a gruelling three-week race, received by a small crowd as they struggled into the Place Masséna in Nice. Their achievements were purposefully overshadowed by Emmanuel Macron’s political folly: the largest opening ceremony in the history of the Olympic Games.
Macron has commandeered the Games as part of his unending mission to save France. He seeks political unity to ‘showcase the entire France’ at the Games but his left-wing opponents accuse him of hiding behind a concocted ‘Olympic truce’. Macron has insisted on the ceremony being larger than any before it. The political messages are usually inescapable: Beijing advertised its autocratic efficiency, London was a twee tribute to British liberalism, and Rio a carnival to distract from the government’s corruption scandal. But once the ceremonies were done, the Games could begin.
This is not the case for Paris. Macron has ordered that an armada of 160 barges will carry 10,000 athletes down the Seine followed by a festival at Trocadéro. To do this the government sealed off much of the centre of Paris, installing 44,000 security barriers which locals need QR codes to enter. Officials claim 300,000 fans will line the banks of the Seine. In reality many locals have fled. Waiters stand outside empty bistrots to lure customers, and taxi drivers moan that their takings halved overnight. Even worse for the Games themselves, more than a million tickets remain unsold.
British Olympians are reduced to flogging Quorn and Weetabix on the telly
As a result, the Paris Olympics has grown into a political spectacle that detracts from the achievement of the athletes. Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics and a Parisian, wanted the Games to celebrate the participation of sport as much as the winning. The ethos was best expressed in the last Paris Olympics a century ago where Scottish missionary Eric Liddell took gold in the 400m – a feat immortalised by Chariots of Fire. There was already a creeping professionalism among athletes in games, but that mattered little – after all the ancient Greek Olympians were trained professionals – as Coubertin’s aim to ‘exalt the individual athlete’ remained. The greater the political noise around the Games, the more it risks turning into an exhibition rather than a competition.
More recently the Olympics have been captured by endless sponsorships and corporate deals. In the four years to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the International Olympic committee made $7.6 billion. Many Japanese were apprehensive of hosting the games during the pandemic, but in spite of the public’s disillusionment the Games went ahead. They were too big to fail. The head of Japan’s organising committee tried to save face: ‘The essence of the Games will remain the same.’ But it was a lie. Athletes competed under restrictions in front of empty stadiums making events boring and bureaucratic, the resulting TV viewership was 27 per cent less than Rio 2016. Even viewers locked in their homes considered it a soulless spectacle and watched something else.
The IOC’s obsession with money has led to the neglect of athletes. David Wallechinsky, a historian of the Olympics, says that for the IOC, ‘television is the priority’, not athletes. Broadcast makes up two-thirds of the committee’s revenue and the IOC says it reinvests 90 per cent into sport, but little of the money makes its way to the athletes. It’s bad enough that athletes are housed in grotty Olympic villages and made to sleep on cardboard beds. Recently retired American sprinter Allyson Felix said that she used to think the ‘Games were so much about the competition’. By the Tokyo Games, however, ‘I got where we fall in the grand scheme of this ginormous thing that makes a ton of money – the athletes don’t see that money.’ That’s why we see British Olympians reduced to flogging Quorn and Weetabix on the telly.
If the IOC is not there for the athletes, then who is it for? Even the integrity of the sport also seems of secondary importance. It declined to investigate the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned drug seven months before the Tokyo Games. The World Anti-Doping Agency had accepted Chinese officials’ explanation at face value that the drug came from a contaminated kitchen at the athletes hotel. Three of these swimmers went on to win golds. The doubt over the doping is unfair on all the competing athletes, the winners included, and sets a dangerous precedent. If the IOC’s judgment can lapse on such a large accusation, more countries will dope their athletes. The IOC doesn’t mind. Its main interest is keeping countries and sponsors happy and its coffers full.
Other Olympics had their faults: Montreal in 1976 ran 720 per cent over budget, almost bankrupting the city, and the Americans and Soviets boycotted each other’s Games in 1980 and 1984. But they were still memorable Games with memorable events and memorable athletes.
It shouldn’t be hard for the Parisian Games to be spectacular. Its venues include beach volleyball in front of the Eiffel Tower, as well as archery, cycling and athletic events at Les Invalides. But Macron’s antics and the IOC’s greediness are harming de Coubertin’s Olympic ideals, and the integrity of sport itself.
Macron’s Olympic delusion
All the world’s a stage and the Olympic Games in Paris is the greatest stage of all for the comedian president. Emmanuel Macron declared a political truce amidst the political nervous breakdown of France, so that his show could go on. The opening ceremony spectacle last night culminated in Macron declaring the Games open and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. The president ordered Thomas Jolly, his personally selected director, to outdo London 2012. Off stage, France is in crisis.
France doesn’t have a real government. There’s no calculus showing how one might even be possible in a fractured new National Assembly of more than a dozen factions who loathe each other. The left and the right are plotting an opportunistic adventure to lower the pension age. Extreme greens are attacking the police to stop the construction of agricultural reservoirs. Gangs rule the cités. Tant pis. The Olympics has bought Macron time to indulge his narcissism and distract attention from his colossal political miscalculations and the threats posed by its consequences to the credit of France.
France doesn’t have a real government
Like Alfred E. Neuman in the Mad comics remembered by baby boomers like me, Macron’s motto is, ‘What, me worry?’ Grinning just like Neuman under a phalanx of cameras, he was all bonhomie visiting athletes in the Olympic Village on Tuesday and declaiming to international journalists at the Elysée the day before.
The few intrepid journalists who dared to breach Macron’s virtual reality force field by asking serious questions were abruptly dismissed. Macron held his line. None of this political impasse matters for the moment. All that matters is the Games, and the bordello will get sorted out later, was the message. Crisis, what crisis? Even by the exceptional standards of insouciance common to the French elite, this was a remarkable example of either self-belief, or just a superb performance. But if Macron is rattled, it doesn’t show. Someone asked him last week if he would resign. Never, was his response.
At the final meeting of the ministerial council before he accepted the resignation of his government, which lost its relative majority thanks to the president’s decision to dissolve the Assembly, he was reported to have said that he regrets nothing. It’s an established French sentiment since Edith Piaf, the Bourbons and before.
Macron says he will return to the political dossiers in mid-August after the Games, but everyone knows this isn’t serious because France will be on holiday (even the lefties have holiday homes). The problems are thus shunted to the September rentrée, which is when we can expect trouble.
For now, the atmosphere remains explosive. Signs on French level crossings warn that one train may conceal another; so it will be in Paris, where one crisis – the absence of a functioning government – hides another: the clown show in the National Assembly where, even without a government, trouble lurks for Macron.
The nightmare for the president’s outnumbered centre is the opportunistic alliance of left and right – who share in common a disinterest in France’s colossal debt and deficit – to reverse Macron’s pension reforms imposed by decree. What might this cost? €100 billion? €200 billion? French government sovereign bonds have already deteriorated against German bonds since Macron’s hissy fit. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ultra-left leader of La France Insoumise, talks of strikes and mobilisations. The National Rally see an opportunity for revenge on the president. This left-right axis is united only in its loathing for Macron, which is a powerful unifying force.
A serious question arises whether Macron’s Olympic strategy can be successfully executed against known and unforeseen security threats. A purported Hamas video on Wednesday warning of an Olympics massacre has been attributed to Russian disinformation, but the threat is real. Thousands of suspects are under surveillance and an unknown number have been detained.
The atmosphere in France remains explosive
After colossal cavilling, the 2012 Games in London turned out to be a triumph and probably the last time anyone felt proud to be a Londoner. London back then was an open city. The Queen joined in the fun. Beaming Muslim girls in London 2012 hijabs welcomed guests to the Olympic Park. They were probably the best Games ever.
Perhaps the mood will change in Paris when the Games start, but the city, locked down out of view of the Olympic cameras with fencing and QR codes last week, has had the feel of a prison. The capital is largely deserted. Hundreds of thousands of tickets are unsold. Hotel and airline bookings have collapsed. Parisians who can have fled to the Île de Rey.
This is not, however, what the world will see, through the lens of Macron. The Olympics, for all its faults, is the quintessential global spectacle and Macron is the executive producer with ambitions to produce an epic. The star drama student who married his teacher has ordered the French to produce the largest television spectacle in history, starring himself naturally. But is this a comedy or a tragedy? There are elements of both.
The look and feel of the presentation of the Games has been an obsession of Macron, as will have been the staging of his cameos. He’s wallowing in the attention. He has demanded that the images France sends to the world are beautiful. French excellence and aesthetics ‘will impress the most jaded,’ we are promised. Whether Macron can do the same, we will see.
The Games has been an obsession of Macron
The supporting cast of Macron today, and until August 11 when the Games end, includes the singer Celine Dion, who is not Taylor Swift but will do; 100 heads of state and government; 10,000 athletes; 45,000 police at a cost that is not yet possible accurately to calculate; and, in prime time tonight, a parade of nations on the river past the Eiffel Tower. I guess more than €10 billion (£8.4 billion) is being spent on the entire production, if it’s possible to add it all up.
Macron has not fulfilled his promise to swim in the Seine to prove it is safe, but we will soon find out if the river is: any latent e-coli will be thoroughly whipped up today by his flotilla of 100 boats. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, did go in, but she was careful to keep her head above water. You can hardly blame her. The uncomfortable reality is that the Seine, like French polity, has become completely toxic. An open sewer. Une fosse septique.
The parliament created by Macron’s tantrum and crazed alliance with the left is an embarrassment containing deplorables including an Antifa activist, loopy greens, superannuated communists and unscrupulous rabble rousers. The so-called extreme right look like adults in comparison.
From the vile to the merely offensive, there were the unseemly scenes in the Assembly last week during the swearing in of new members. Those on the left ignored tradition and refused to shake hands with the youngest member, who traditionally administers the oath, a newly-elected National Rally deputy. It was a graceless insult, not just to a parliamentary colleague but to the more than ten million voters who supported his party.
Despite Macron’s self-declared Olympic truce, political manoeuvres continue in Paris. The disintegrating, incoherent New Popular Front alliance of socialists, greens and communists on Wednesday repeated their demand to form a minority government and even proposed a candidate for prime minister, Lucie Castets, a functionary who works for the City of Paris. She’s unknown to the public. She’s not going to be prime minister. Still, who is she? An obscure bean counter, blob leftist and inevitably a graduate of the École National d’Administration. She’s never been elected to anything. She’s finance chief in Paris, a city whose debts are forecast to soar to €9 billion (£7.5 billion) by 2026.
While Mélenchon has demanded the keys to the government, meanwhile, his own political faction is now rated the most unpopular party of France by 79 per cent of voters. His pretension to a mandate is absurd.
So, let’s enjoy the Macron show, hope that nobody gets hurt and at least look for some humour. Athletes have been posting pictures of their cardboard beds in the Olympic village complaining they are insufficiently robust for the extra-athletic activities for which many of them are renowned. In London, I note, there were no similar complaints and athletes were given free condoms.
Will Paris out-perform London? Let the Games begin. Citius, Altius, Fortius.
My encounter with ‘the godfather of British blues’
Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Otis Rush, gave these legends a new audience this side of the Atlantic. BB King is said to have remarked that, were it not for Mayall, ‘a lot of us black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before.’
Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, founded in the early Sixties, was a carousel for some of the world’s most notable blues and rock musicians, many of whom went on to greatness. Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce left the Bluesbreakers to form Cream; and Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie departed to form Fleetwood Mac. The Rolling Stones recruited Mick Taylor as their lead guitarist from the Bluesbreakers after they fired Brian Jones.
I sat down with Mayall in a café before one of his shows at a small theatre in St Albans, during an anniversary tour to celebrate his 80th birthday. The interview never appeared in print: I was a student at the time, and after unsuccessfully hawking it around various places, it was left on the cutting floor. After his death, I’ve dug it back up.
John Mayall was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, on 29 November 1933. It was in the family home where the seeds of his success were sown. His father, Murray Mayall, a clerk, amateur jazz guitarist and music enthusiast, impressed on the young Mayall the importance of the genre that would come to define his life: ‘The blues was the music that I grew up listening to. It was in the house. It all came from my father’s record collection.’ His ‘first love’, he told me, were boogie-woogie piano players, like Albert Ammons, who inspired Mayall to teach himself to play the piano, before he moved on to learn the ukulele, harmonica and electric guitar. He did three years of national service, before going to art school and qualifying as a graphic designer.
He looked back on this time fondly: ‘It was an age of young people who were discovering black American music. Prior to that it was New Orleans jazz and it was time for a change, and it was very exciting to see all these bands coming in. Many of them are still around today.’
He formed his first band, the Powerhouse Four, in 1956 and later joined Blues Syndicate before Alexis Korner, the notable British bluesman, persuaded Mayall, then 30, to move to London in 1963. Korner, another big name in the British blues scene, helped Mayall make contacts in the capital. By 1963, Mayall’s outfit was billed as the Bluesbreakers. In 1965 he recruited Eric Clapton, who had just left the Yardbirds, and recorded what would become Mayall’s most revered body of work: the debut LP, Blues Breakers (Rolling Stone ranked it 195 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list in 2003.) The cover features a young Clapton reading Beano on the cover and led to his ‘guitar god’ status.
After Clapton left in 1966, this was followed up by A Hard Road, featuring a young Peter Green in Clapton’s shoes. (For anyone interested in just how exciting this incarnation was, listen to the three live recordings available from 1967). Green later left, taking Mayall’s rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood with him to form Fleetwood Mac. Mick Taylor then stepped into Green’s shoes before later leaving for the Rolling Stones. Encouraged by his success in the US, Mayall left Britain for Laurel Canyon in California in 1969 where he paused the Bluesbreakers for the next decade; drinking heavily replaced making music.
Clapton later reflected that Mayall had ‘run an incredibly great school for musicians’, a sentiment echoed by Taylor (‘There’s no better way to learn how to play blues guitar than playing with John Mayall.’) Was Mayall aware that these young guitarists would become such masters of their crafts when he first came across them? ‘As a bandleader you know these things,’ he told me. ‘You know what sort of player you are looking for, and it becomes very easy for you. It always has been easy for me. All bandleaders will tell you the same thing. It is an instinctual thing… These musicians are all very special to me’.
The moniker, ‘godfather of British Blues’ was, however, not one that sat easy with Mayall. ‘I don’t have a choice in the title,’ he said. ‘It has been given to me – it is a label that has been applied to me over the years and kept on.’ When I pressed him on this, he conceded that his role as a bandleader meant he had played a godfather role to many young players. ‘I was a bandleader, and I have always been a bandleader. So that’s the role of what a bandleader does. You just provide the right framework for them to play, and that’s all you can do. It is something you don’t think about with the right people, it just blends together naturally.’
‘I was a bandleader, and I have always been a bandleader
He told me that he didn’t maintain much in the way of relations with his former bandmates. ‘Unless they come see me on tour, then it is very unlikely they will come see me.’ One musician he mentioned specifically who he hadn’t seen for a long time was Peter Green. The Fleetwood Mac founder, who died in 2020, was one of rock’s first and most famous casualties. After suffering an acid-induced breakdown in the late 1960s he disappeared from the limelight and spent decades in and out of mental institutions before a small-time comeback in the late 1990s which continued for a decade or so. ‘He doesn’t communicate with anybody,’ Mayall said. ‘I haven’t any idea what he is doing. It’s troubling but it has been going on for years. It all happened decades ago. There is a limit to how long you can mourn. His greatest work was in the Sixties and it will always be remembered.’ Fast forward to 2020, just before the pandemic struck and five months before Green himself died, Mayall paid tribute to his old guitarist at the London Palladium as part of an all-star tribute concert organised by Mick Fleetwood to celebrate Green’s music.
One of the questions I asked Mayall was whether he was concerned at the blues’ declining popularity. Mayall, who is due to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year, was, in fact, optimistic. There’s ‘lots of hope’ for the blues still, he reflected. ‘It is very encouraging that there are so many young people playing instruments now. Just look around you – people are responding to the blues all over the world.’ The widely commercial success of blues-based musicians around today, such as Joe Bonamassa (who paid tribute to Mayall earlier this week: ‘Rest in peace my friend’) and John Mayer, suggests he wasn’t wrong.
Staying on the road was what kept Mayall alive, he told me. ‘The music is a revitalising thing. It is very invigorating and if you play with the right people, it is a great thrill… I like being on the road, it’s what I do. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t enjoy it. The music comes out of the enjoyment of playing.’
As the interview wrapped up, I tried to get something meaningful out of him in my naive young hack fashion (he’d been pretty grouchy throughout; I’d be, too, talking with a twenty-something trainee). How did he want people to view him within the blues canon? ‘Just to be remembered,’ he said. ‘And for people to listen to my body of work, because it is the story of a life.’
Well, he certainly succeeded in that.
It’s better to be quick than clever
What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly?
No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly.
You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the builder who comes round the morning you ring him? These are the modern saints – the hyper-efficient deities who put to shame that other friend who only ever rings when they want something out of you; or the plumber you have to ring three times and only ever rings back to say he isn’t coming after all.
Acting fast and slow is completely different to Thinking, Fast and Slow – the name of the 2011 bestseller by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died in March. Kahneman cleverly divided the mind into two different kinds of thinking: System 1, which is fast and instinctive; System 2 is slow, meticulous and logical.
It’s all very well to be a genius thinker, using both systems. But genius thought is nothing if it isn’t turned into action pronto.
Some of the brightest people I’ve met are also the most useless at actually doing something with their genius thoughts. When I worked on the Daily Telegraph, I once commissioned a gifted classicist, the head of an Oxford college, to write a piece about the state of British universities.
I called him at 10 a.m. and asked him if he could get the 1,000-word piece to me by 5 p.m.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry’, the polite don said. ‘I can’t work that fast. I could certainly get it to you in three months.’
That don was very apologetic about his slowness. But the worst sort of clever people think there’s some virtue in being slow. Because they’re working on what they think of as a masterpiece, they ask for three extensions to their deadline. The best drives out the good.
I know journalists who can write 1,000 words in half an hour – and the article is as gripping as the ones by the academics who take three months to write about the same topic. In journalism, you’ve got to be better than someone who is faster than you; and faster than someone who is better than you.
You can see the division between fast- and slow-movers in every aspect of life. Take private enterprise on the internet: Amazon, say, which delivers to your door in an astonishingly quick time. Then compare that with anything to do with the government: a new driving licence, a new passport or useful new legislation – always agonisingly slow.
Narcissists will work at lightning speed to promote themselves – and drag their heels when it comes to doing something for anyone else
Uber is quick because you can see, at a glance on your phone, how long it’s taken you to get somewhere and the route they’ve taken. Black cabs are slow because the slower they go, the more they earn – and you don’t get an email showing you the tortuously elongated route they chose for you. The same selfish principle applies to the slowest creature on earth – the train-driver ambling down the platform to get into the cab of your delayed train.
Emails are a great diversionary device for slow-movers. They can say, ‘I’ll get back to you on that one’ or ‘I’ll have a think’ and know they need never do either. The superquick genius always prefers the phone to email – he gets an immediate response and doesn’t have to play email ping pong for weeks.
Quickness of action varies with different tasks. So narcissists will work at lightning speed to promote themselves – and drag their heels when it comes to doing something for anyone else.
‘Can you make it down to the TV studio to talk about yourself, Mr Shapps?’
‘Yes! I can be there in five minutes!’
‘Any chance you can pick up a pint of milk on the way, Mr Shapps?’
‘Afraid that might be a bit tricky.’
In the same way that narcissists tend to be late to meet you, they are slow to do things for you. Your time isn’t as important as theirs. Guilt, kindness and a conscience mean altruistic people tend to do things more quickly. Their fear of letting people down accelerates their actions.
We all have an individual, in-built level of speed – or slowness – for most tasks. Imagine you’ve got a tiny domestic task to do – let’s say the bulb that needs changing in the hall. The superquick change it without even thinking. The medium-quick leave it till they’ve come back to a dark hall several times. The terminally slow think, ‘Well, I’m only ever in the hall for two seconds at a time. I can get along without it.’
Speed of action doesn’t always relate to altruistic efficiency. No one walks quicker round London than poor benighted drug addicts tracking down their next fix.
Otherwise, though, if you can arrange your life only to deal with the quick people, life is heaven. Depending on the selfish snails is pure hell – in slow motion.
The enduring appeal of Snoop Dogg
I’m in Provence for my annual jaunt to the land of bulls, Pernod and lavender. All over our small French village, fever for the Jeux Olympiques ‘24 builds: the Olympic rings hang in the window of the Pharmacie and the Papeterie, in the Cafe du Commerce on the Rue General de Galle the television blares all day with adverts for the opening ceremony set to Celine Dion’s I’m Alive, the Mistral blows the Olympic buntinghung over the Mairie high into the cloudless sky. So far, so normale.
One thing, however, seems rather off. Snoop Dogg, the American rapper and notorious connoisseur of large joints, will be carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Seine Saint Denis on Friday ahead of the grand opening ceremony that evening. Sorry, what? His fellow torch bearers are decidedly French: actress, comedian and model Laetitia Casta, rapper MC Solaar and journalist and Saint-Denis local Mohamed Bouhafsi. Yes, Ukrainian pole vaulter Sergey Bubka is also carrying the torch but he’s an accomplished sportsman. But what is the Dogg Father doing in the line up? As neither a sportsman, a Frenchman or a standard-bearer for French culture, I’m rather confused.
For readers of these pages unfamiliar with Snoop Dogg’s oeuvre, voila a potted version. Born in California’s notoriously dangerous Compton neighbourhood, Snoop Dogg (real name: Calvin Broadus, 52), came to prominence for a distinctive brand of G-Funk that emerged out of Gangsta rap. His debut LP, Doggystyle, released in 1993, secured his position as one of the leading lights of his generation of rappers. Under the vigilance of fellow rapper Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg produced hits such as ‘Bitch Please’, ‘Gin and Juice’ and – my personal favourite in relation to his Olympic torch duties– ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’. But his corpus extends beyond music. Variously a director of pornographic films, sometime chef and Martha Stewart collaborator and youth-sport philanthropist, Snoop Dogg has shown himself to be a polymath of the highest order. His most recent incarnation is as a sports presenter for American network NBC, for which he will front nightly coverage of the Olympics live from the Trocadero. If his coverage of the Tokyo Olympics was anything to go by, viewers can expect a decidedly wildcard take on events. I, for one, can’t wait.
French opinion on Snoop Dogg’s high profile at their national moment of glory – or, redemption, given recent electoral events – is rather less generous. When his appearance was announced two days ago, newspaper Le Parisien ran with the headline ‘MC Solaar, Laetita Casta et… Snoop Dogg’ while regional news outlet Ouest France describes the rapper’s high profile as ‘un peu special et pour le moins inedit’, for which read utterly bonkers. On X, Snoop Dogg’s video of himself standing outside the Hotel de Ville dressed in the Ralph Lauren American Olympic uniform has been liked 43 thousand times proving that NBC and the Olympic committee are onto something.
But the location of the Olympic village in Paris’s famously deprived quartier of Seine Saint-Denis provides some clues to the rapper’s high profile at the games. At the cornerstone of the French Olympic bid was the promise of regeneration of an area that has proved to be the epicentre of a vast amount of political unrest: witness the riots in nearby Clichy-Sous-Bois in 2005 for which Chirac called a state of national emergency, and, more recently, the 2023 riots following the shooting of Arab teenager Nahel Merzouk. Investment in Seine Saint-Denis stands at 4.5 billion euros, with the creation of a new aquatic park and the promise of improved social housing for an area where nearly a third of the population live in poverty and social housing stands at 40 per cent.
Finding a celebrity – French or otherwise – who can project the image of triumph from the crucible of urban deprivation was never going to be easy, but, as the Olympic committee must have figured, it had to be someone starry enough to unite the disparate factions of the Olympic demographic, from the ‘bobos’ to the disenfranchised inhabitants of the HLMs. The facts of Snoop Dogg’s enormous success are intimately connected to place; in his case Compton, but a loyalty that is somewhat translatable to the Parisians of Seine Saint-Denis. Slowly, I have come to see that his appearance is nothing short of a masterstroke. Certainly, far better than Bradley Cooper, who apparently turned down the chance to carry the flame.
Ultimately, nothing about Snoop Dogg should surprise us. He may engage in some local rap with his fellow musician MC Solaar, he may just choose to be a walking symbol of Franco-American amity or he may simply light his spliff from the Olympic torch. Whatever happens, it’s bound to be the ‘Shiznit’.
Ousted Reform candidate chases Farage for £8,500
Reform has managed to get 5 MPs elected, take 14 per cent of the vote share and outdo any other UK political party on campaign video views on Twitter – but it’s not all looking rosy for Nigel Farage right now. Before Farage decided he was going to stand in the election, Reform UK selected one Tony Mack to contest the Clacton-on-Sea seat. But Mack was quickly ousted when Nige chose to run – and it turns out he wasn’t all that happy about the decision.
Mack has now handed Farage a staggering £8,500 bill which the former candidate claims is compensation he is due for his short-lived election campaign. The ex-candidate has insisted that Farage promised to ‘pay [him] back every f***ing penny’ – of costs incurred from many months of campaigning, and the Reform UK leader’s ‘unauthorised’ use of Mack’s web domain. Oh dear…
And beyond the bill, Mack seems intent on sticking the boot in. ‘I fear for the future of Reform unless it is democratised’, he fumed, adding: ‘I also fear for the future of a movement like that when it is led by a man who cannot keep his promises. Where does that leave his constituents, or supporters who have invested their faith in Reform to deliver the kind of change that is needed?’ He’s certainly not pulling any punches…
Mack is not the first Reform member to criticise the party. Back on 11 July, Farage made Richard Tice deputy leader of the party, replacing co-deputies Ben Habib and David Bull. Habib was a little miffed – ‘I have long held concerns about the control of the party and the decision making processes’, he raged afterwards – while Bull was, er, absolutely delighted. You win some, you lose some, eh?
Are we really experiencing more ‘extreme’ weather?
The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor Justin Rowlatt on the BBC website. As well as experiencing more really hot days, ‘its observations suggest there has been an increase in the number of really wet days too, such as the prolonged and heavy rain Storm Babet brought to wide areas of the country in October last year.’ He comments: ‘The UK’s shifting climate represents a dangerous upheaval for our ecosystems as well as our infrastructure’. And in case we still haven’t got it, he adds: ‘Climate change has already made more extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, storms, and drought, more frequent and stronger in many parts of the world.’
But how much of this is really true, and how much of it – were BBC Verify minded to undertake a fair analysis of this output – is hyperbole? The State of the UK Climate Report 2023 is published today in the International Journal of Climatology, and you can read it for yourself here. But for those without the time to do this, this is what it says on the specific matters raised by Rowlatt and the BBC. Firstly, those ‘extremely high temperatures’. As far as 2023 was concerned, it turns out that actually they were rather thin on the ground. The highest temperature measured anywhere in the UK in 2023 was 33ºC in Faversham, Kent, which the report notes is rather modest by the standards of recent years. Nevertheless, it is true to say that there is an increasing trend in the frequency of hot weather in Britain. In the decade from 2014 to 23 there were 2.5 times as many days per year with temperatures exceeding 28ºC somewhere in Britain as there were during the years 1961 to 1990. There were 3.6 times as many days per year with temperatures over 32ºC.
This is consistent with the long-term trend in mean temperatures, which have also resulted in fewer very cold days. In the decade from 2014 to 2023, there were on average 17 fewer days of air frost per year than during 1961 to 1990. It is not very satisfactory comparing a ten-year period with a 30-year one, given the natural variability in the weather, but year-on-year graphs appear to confirm that Britain is experiencing more hot weather and less cold weather. That is something that needs to be borne in mind when the BBC and others claim climate change is causing more ‘extreme’ weather. The rise in extreme hot weather is balanced out by a fall in extreme cold weather.
What about the claimed rise in ‘really wet days’? The State of the Climate Report does state that overall Britain is becoming wetter, with overall rainfall ten per cent higher from 2014 to 2023 than between 1961 and 1990. But then rainfall fluctuated quite a lot decade on decade prior to the 1960s. The year 2023 was the seventh wettest year in England and Wales in a series going back to 1766. The wettest, by the way, was 1767. But ‘really wet days’? The report states that there has been a ‘slight increase in heavy rainfall across the UK in recent decades’. There are a number of metrics used to measure heavy rainfall, such as the average number of days a year with rain exceeding 10mm, the number of days when rainfall exceeds the 99th percentile, etc. All seem to tell a similar story: there was a strong upward trend in the frequency of heavy rain in Britain between the 1960s and the beginning of this century, but with little or no trend since then (figure 49 shows this).
As for the claim that the world is seeing more frequent and stronger storms – made by Rowlatt in the global rather than specifically UK context – what does the UK State of the Climate Report say about that? By recent standards, last year was a relatively stormy year. However, the frequently-made claim that Britain saw a ‘record’ number of storms last winter is based on a meaningless metric: the number of named storms. There is no consistent definition of a named storm other than that someone in the UK or Ireland Met Office’s has decided it warrants a name. Moreover, the naming of storms only began in 2015 – so not even the 1987 hurricane had a name. But the State of the Climate Report does present data on extreme wind speeds measured in the UK – namely the number of days per year on which gusts of over 40, 50, and 60 knots have been recorded somewhere in the UK. This data shows a very clear downward trend since 1990 [fig 60]. There is also data showing that mean wind speeds have been falling in Britain since 1970 – a trend that echoes that in many parts of the world. That is not very good for Ed Miliband’s wind turbines, but it is not consistent with a claim that Britain is becoming more stormy.
So, yes, we are seeing more hot weather and we are seeing more rainfall overall. But no, we are not being battered by biblical downpours or extreme weather of all kinds.
Don’t rush to judgement on the Manchester Airport police video
A video of an armed police officer kicking and stamping on a man’s head has plunged Greater Manchester Police (GMP), the country’s second largest force, into crisis. The incident at Manchester Airport on Tuesday night has led to widespread condemnation. Protestors have gathered outside Rochdale police station, with some in the crowd chanting: ‘GMP shame on you’.
The footage showed a uniformed officer holding a Taser over a man lying on the floor before kicking him twice
An officer has been suspended and the force has referred itself to the policing watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Feelings are understandably running high locally, but investigators must be allowed time to assess the available evidence before the rush to judgment.
The footage showed a uniformed officer holding a Taser over a man lying on the floor before kicking him twice as his colleagues shout at onlookers to stand back. In the clip, a man can be heard shouting ‘stop kicking people’.
Significantly, the events preceding this scene were not included in the video that went viral. The force itself acknowledged that the footage circulating online was ‘truly shocking’, but added that firearms officers had been subjected to a ‘violent assault’ while trying to make an arrest. They were taken to hospital for treatment. A female officer suffered a broken nose. Four men were later arrested on suspicion of assault and affray; all have since been bailed.
Reaction to the events has been swift. Reform MP Lee Anderson said on X/Twitter: ‘The vast majority of decent Brits would applaud this type of policing. We are sick of the namby pamby approach. Time to back our boys in blue.’
Manchester Airport last night This can not go unchallenged. This is absolutely brutal and disgusting. Make this go viral
— Imam Ibrahim M Noonan of AMA Ireland & NI (@ImamNoonan) July 24, 2024
These officers need to be fired pic.twitter.com/OyVkQapnbV
But Anderson is mistaken to think that most Brits are automatically on the police’s side. Multiple recent scandals have rocked the public’s faith in policing.
Anderson is not the only one who is wide of the mark when it comes to jumping to conclusions. Dal Babu, a former chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, said he thought that racism had ‘played a significant part’ in the incident. What evidence does he have to make such a claim? Not enough. Only the independent investigators have all the video footage, including police bodyworn video and CCTV images. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, made a telling remark. He said his initial reaction on seeing the footage was that it was ‘very disturbing’, but after looking at the ‘full footage’ the situation was ‘not clear cut’. That surely is the point. The investigators should be allowed to do their job and come to their findings based on all the facts. A few – admittedly very disturbing – images doing the rounds online are insufficient grounds on which to reach definitive conclusions.
This controversy could not have come at a worse time for Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police. Just days ago, an independent report concluded that vulnerable women in custody were unnecessarily strip-searched, denied period products and treated like ‘meat’ by police officers. The report found officers were ‘using their power unwisely, unnecessarily, and sometimes unlawfully’.
GMP was placed in special measures between 2020 and 2022 after inspectors found the force had failed to record a fifth of all reported crimes. Yet Watson has attracted praise for his back-to-basics approach which appeared to be bearing fruit: arrests are up, crime down and more investigations solved. This latest furore means he now has his work cut out rebuilding trust in the force.
The policing watchdog has confirmed that it is investigating the level of force used in the airport incident and that its inquiry will be ‘thorough and robust’. It must also be swift in publishing its findings. Until then, everyone else would be wise to keep their counsel.
Could these be the online comments of young Kemi Badenoch?
The Tory leadership battle is now underway with the traditional first act: to identify a frontrunner and start blowing poison darts. Kemi Badenoch is the frontrunner and famously combative. She’s in her early 40s. So it must stand to reason that she’d have let off steam in a chatroom somewhere, surely?
This is where it gets interesting. In Westminster, a link is being shared over WhatsApp between candidate teams, MPs and general Westminster watchers of ‘Naijablog’ a blog about Nigeria, where a below-the-line commentator by the name of ‘Kemi’ had plenty to say – and plenty bones to pick. The comments are direct, sometimes rude, often confrontational, making off-colour jokes and taking no prisoners. In other words, sounding very much like a certain Kemi Badenoch who was then studying for a postgrad at Birkbeck. Here is a selection of the fruitier comments from the user called ‘Kemi’:
- On Diane Abbott (original blog here). ‘Abbot is a racist hypocrite. She spent years lambasting people for sending their kids to private school, and then turned round and did exactly the same thing. She had to admit on TV that her decision was indefensible. She also made a claim that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” in her local hospital in east London were unsuitable as nurses because they had “never met a black person before”. Can you imagine if someone had said the reverse, that black skinned, people were unsuitable as nurses if they had never met a white person before?’
- On Britain’s colonial legacy in Nigeria (blog here). [Comments she disputed in italics].
- “Nigeria for centuries was a country entirely based on culture and tradition,” ‘UTTER BULLSHIT. Nigeria has only existed as a country for 93 years. Not for centuries. It was made up of many kingdoms with many different cultures and traditions imbibed from all over africa and the middle east. Our culture and traditions like that of many other countries, changed regularly and even before the Brits came, our history records complaints by the ever vocal elders about how we were losing our culture.’
- “One which held greater respect for people over things.” ‘COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT. We bought and sold our people, friends, families and our enemies as chattels. Our rulers sold them to Europeans for guns and broken mirrors. HOW IS THAT A CULTURE THAT VALUES PEOPLE OVER THINGS? Go and read A History of the Yoruba Peoples. Or, if that is too big for you, go read Chinua Achebe’s “Things fall Apart” anything even.’
- “one which put age before power!” ‘Not really, although it definitely put age over common sense and STILL DOES. This is why we are continuously ruled and bullied by a succession of old fools. It was colonized. Like many countries, such as India, South Africa and Ghana which are all doing MUCH better than Nigeria.’
- “stripped of its culture” ‘Such as human sacrifices, the creation of outcast tribes like the osu and the killing of twins’
- “and now has started building up its new way” ‘Which explains why the country is much worse than it was 30 years ago and has just had the most fraudulent elections ever held. Otherwise, I doubt anybody can list 10 things or even 5 good things that the British stripped us of. i.e. things which by 1960 we had been stripped of. The truth is that we LOST and THREW away our culture. Stop blaming others for the state of our country. Give this colonisation argument a rest!’
- Defending Thai women who marry Westerners for security, not love (link here) ‘Those Thai women do not love the husbands but the security of the relationships, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, people should not flatter themselves to think that there is any genuine feeling or affection involved. Look at the wife of Ken Bigley for instance. As soon as her husband had been captured in Iraq, she packed her bags (and no doubt all the family treasures) and moved back to Thailand ages before he lost his head! No desperate pleas in front of the camera like all the normal English wives who truly cared whether their husbands lived or died. Transactional relationships have their place. As everyone: caveat emptors, innit?’
- On Nigerian women who put up with philandering husbands (blog here) She responded to a blog about a road rage incident in Nigeria where one driver says he was told “how dare you do that – I am a married woman!” The blog author asks of his commentators: ‘Do Nigerian men really only learn respect for women when they are married? If not, why do some Nigerian women think this?’
‘Kemi’ replies: ‘That is why Nigerian men tend to be more philandering than most. Because they know the stupid bush goat they have at home is too scared to become single or divorced and lose the “respect” she associates with her status. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: many Nigerian women believe Mrs. is better than Dr. as a title.’
- Why it’s not insulting to call out an idiot (link here). ‘A person who cannot think or reason is an idiot. It is only an insult when used to someone who is clearly not an idiot. To call an honest man a thief is an insult. To call an armed robber a thief is NOT an insult.’
- On politeness (link here). ‘Most of the people who changed the world, for good were notoriously rude. It was the bad people, Idi Amin, Hitler etc who were charming and respectful. People like you would have been defending them that they were good people because they had good manners. Robert Mugabe was also once known for his good manners!! Meanwhile, the scientists and philosophers who gave us the advanced world we take for granted were famously anti-social to the point of misanthropy. People even think Einstein and Newton might have had Asperger Syndrome. Had Einstein been a Nigerian no doubt he would have died a clerk in the patent office because some buffoon of a superior would have decided that he was rude and had no respect.’
So is this Kemi Badenoch? The author of Naijablog, “Jeremy”, describes the then Tory candidate Kemi Adegoke as “my former sparring partner” which suggests she was known to him as a commentator in the early days when very few left comments. Also this was 2006-2009, when people were far less guarded about their digital footprint and would not have really thought about the phenomenon of digital archivists trawling back over their juvenilia.
And were it Badenoch, is it damning? Or even damaging to a leadership bid? That’s trickier. How much of the above comments would the average voter, let alone the average Conservative member, really disagree with? That’s the slight problem about this as an attack dossier: it is possible to rotten-cherry-pick words to claim (for example) that she hates Nigerian women or somehow praised Hitler. But a click on the link to see the context and all of that fades away.
‘Revealed: Kemi actually means the stuff she says’ is hardly the most incriminating headline. ‘This is dirty tricks from rivals,’ says a Badenoch ally of the dossier. Mr S has anyway asked her office for comment. We’ll publish a reply if one arrives…
Reform beat Tories among younger voters
These days when it rains for the Tories, it pours. Now it transpires that more voters under the age of 30 backed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK than the Conservatives this election – with experts convinced that recent years of economic instability is pushing younger voters away from the two largest parties. How curious…
Over 35,000 voters were surveyed by YouGov – with the pollster finding that of those aged between 18 and 30 years old, 9.5 per cent backed the Farage-founded group with just 8 per cent turning to the Tories. While it’s more bad news for Rishi Sunak’s boys in blue, Reform can’t quite claim victory among Gen-Zers yet. During the election campaign, Farage claimed that there was a notable ‘awakening in a younger generation who have had enough of being dictated to’. But while Reform outperformed the Tories in this age group, it seems the, er, Green party actually beat both groups – with 18 per cent of the under-30s supporting the eco-zealots. Good heavens…
Reform’s leader certainly saw rather striking social media success amongst Generation Z. Over the election campaign Farage received over 39 billion views on Twitter – with his Eminem-inspired videos a rather popular highlight. Meanwhile Sunak amassed just five billion views with the Tory party itself racking up a mere three billion video views – despite, as Mr S revealed in June, members trying to engage voters with some rather odd anti-Reform attack ads…
Pre-election, ex-PM Sunak was warned that his party faced a ‘ticking time bomb’ with its support projected to plummet amongst younger voters. Now that has come to pass, potential leadership candidates will have to consider how to address their dwindling youth base – particularly after analysis this week found that one in six Tory voters are likely to die before the next election. Will a rightward shift woo first-time Reform supporters back, or should the Conservatives be looking towards the centre-ground to win over younger voters? That’s one for the next Tory leader to decide…
We will miss 1p and 2p coins when they’re gone
It doesn’t buy anything anymore. It is not enough to put into a charity box, and it just takes up space in your pocket or a purse. On one level, it will save us all a lot of trouble when one penny and two penny coins finally become extinct. The Treasury has told the Royal Mint not to make any new ones this year; and although there are plenty behind a sofa somewhere, this means they could eventually vanish completely. We will miss them when they are gone.
Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor, is keener on increasing government budgets than reducing them. One cut that may well be made, however, is scrapping the smaller coins. Indeed, over the next few years, we may stop minting new coins completely. There are an estimated 27 billion of them in circulation, so they will still be around for a while. But like clamshell phones or typewriters they will gradually fade away. True, it is always good for the government to save some money. Plus, with inflation, and the rise of contactless payments, we use cash far less than we used to – and we use the virtually worthless penny and two penny coins least of all.
However, there are big problems with getting rid of them completely. First, the poor rely on cash far more than the affluent. Of the three million households that still rely on cash for day-to-day transactions, the vast majority are from lower income-households, according to the Financial Conduct Authority. The less cash there is available, the harder poor families will find it to get by.
Second, dropping cash makes us far too vulnerable to a collapse of computer systems, such as the Microsoft outage last week. If the contactless systems go down, then we may all have to rely on cash again.
Finally, getting rid of small coins will inevitably fuel inflation. For many retailers, 99p, £1.99 and so on were a barrier they were reluctant to cross. If those pennies don’t exist anymore then you might as well round up the price to something far larger. The one penny coin may not seem very useful right now, but we will miss it more than we realise when it is gone.
Will Britain let Keir Starmer govern?
A few weeks after Keir Starmer’s landslide, it may not seem like Britain is a conservative country. The left has won an enormous victory and started to push forward on its agenda. Policies are being announced: today Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, says the government will start building offshore wind turbines. But, as Labour settles into government, there are signs it may be already be getting bogged down by an institutional and cultural conservatism that has long held Britain back from doing things.
Threats to Starmer’s ‘change’ are starting to emerge. The arsenal deployed against Tory plans over the years – from endless consultations to judicial reviews and human rights challenges – now threatens Labour plans. ECHR-driven lawfare could apparently be waged against proposed planning reform and adding VAT to private school fees. Even if these reviews and legal obstacle fail, they would add delay and costs to the decisions Labour promised in its manifesto. It points to a cross-governmental, cross-party problem. Britain, fundamentally, has become bad at dealing with change.
There is a culture of risk aversion
Among think tanks and policy wonks, it has become an almost constant lament. Britain cannot get anything done. Infrastructure and our inability to build is the most obvious example. Projects like HS2 are announced, consulted on, scaled back, and overrun on costs, eventually becoming an expensive shadow of what was first envisaged. Across the country, there are dozens of projects – road, rail, power generation – that have been kicked around for decades without a shovel hitting the ground. It seems a uniquely British problem, with other countries having half the hassle and costs.
In the mid-2000s, Tony Blair’s government announced plans to expand Heathrow. At almost the same time, the Polish government started to explore plans to build a new airport for Warsaw. With a new government, the Heathrow discussions are back under consideration – meanwhile, the Poles have just started digging, with the first flights hoped for in 2028. By then, we might have concluded our next set of consultations.
With building, the immediate causes are apparent. We’ve created a planning system driven by local vetoes and a political culture that incentivises objection. Where the costs are obvious and localised, they seem to outweigh the incremental national benefits of these things happening. This then flows into local government, as councillors and MPs are incentivised to join the side of the blockers. The problem is that it is a broader cultural issue pushing against change. Britain is becoming almost allergic to getting things done.
Our state capacity is bogged down in the idea that things must move slowly. Reviewing and consulting are more important than deciding. Processes are preferred over outcomes. Governments of every political persuasion say they’ll fix it, but can’t. Much of the Covid enquiry highlighted how slow even emergency decision-making was, and how much institutional resistance had to be overcome.
Part of this is the instinct to add regulation to fix a problem, rather than to remove it. For decades, Britain liked to blame our overbearing state on the EU, but post-Brexit, we have seen how much of it is homegrown. There are very few people in politics who are instinctively pro-regulation. Instead, there are many who get persuaded by the good of individual measures – banning scary-looking knives that are already illegal, pushing small venues into having anti-terror plans – without thinking of the cumulative effect. This flows into the government’s decision-making, with each action loaded with extra consultations and rules in support of some tangential aim.
Beyond that, there is a culture of risk aversion in Whitehall and beyond. While Silicon Valley start-ups might have an ethos of ‘move fast and break stuff’, our state has the opposite view. Wasting effort or having a negative impact is seen as detrimental, both to government and individual careers, so it is better to advise inaction. The consequences of that are harder to identify and pin on individuals.
This only persists, however, because it aligns with what a lot of voters want, too. A strong streak of individualism now runs through British politics and our interactions with the state. Not only do we not want our views spoiled or building work in our backyard, but we also expect to be listened to when we object. Consultations and court cases only happen because people bring them and interact with them, and they hope to win. It is not even about being compensated. Priti Patel dismissed the plan to pay her constituents for allowing pylons nearby as ‘bribes’. The only solution? The project could not go ahead!
Wherever there is change or development, the British seem reticent. Where once we were the country of industrialisation, urbanisation and building, from canals to Concorde, there is now little desire to get stuff done. The country has become reluctant to take a calculated risk, too scared of adverse consequences and less interested in the upsides. Whitehall’s infrastructure and attitudes have not come from nowhere, but are the result of a public desire to regulate, consult, proceed with caution, and, if possible, block.
Britain is dominated by a kind of conservatism, not in the political sense but in its character. It has made us sclerotic and process-driven, more focused on satisfying ‘various stakeholders’ than getting a decision made and implemented. To succeed, governments must be able to change things. Sometimes this will create losers. Sometimes things will fail. Cumulatively, however, the cost of caution is worse. Governments need to do things, and we as a population need to be more comfortable, maybe happy, with that.