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Tall tales of the Golden East: the fabulous fabrications of two 20th-century con artists
Have literary deceit and spiritual self-invention ever been this entertaining? The question arises on almost every page of this galloping exposé of two men who were exceedingly relaxed about not telling the truth throughout their professional lives. They would have called it ‘storytelling’. Those who questioned the reliability of their often outlandish claims were dismissed as academic nonentities.
One minute Ikbal’s journey across the Middle East was 15,000 miles, the next it was 25,000 miles
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was the great-grandson of Jan Fishan Khan, a 19th-century Arab nobleman who had supported the British in Afghanistan and been rewarded with an Indian title, palace and pension. Ikbal failed to finish his medical studies at Edinburgh, married a Scottish woman and decided to make his name by the pen. Despite being a son of colonial India who had never set foot in Afghanistan, he claimed to be an Afghan insider who could help the British navigate the final chapters of the Great Game in Central Asia.
In the winter of 1920-21, Ikbal wrote a series of alarmist accounts of the Russian penetration of Afghanistan for the British press. He reported on (non-existent) Bolshevik roads and railways, blithely unconcerned by the towering mountain passes they supposedly traversed. The British representative in Kabul confirmed that Ikbal had never been to Afghanistan – but he had been spotted several times in London. A photograph in the Field purporting to reveal a Bolshevik outpost turned out to be nothing of the sort. The relevant men were loyal Indian soldiers. The India Office, on the receiving end of what Nile Green calls an ‘epistolary assault’ from Ikbal requesting all manner of jobs, sinecures and zany schemes, reckoned he was ‘a bit of a liar’.
Published in 1928, Ikbal’s first book, Westward to Mecca, was a self-mythologising travelogue that made the adventures of Voltaire’s Candide look tame stuff. His fabrications in The Golden East, his next book, seemed so pervasive it was difficult to know whether the journey described happened at all. He claimed to have been pursued by knife-throwing Senegalese soldiers in Syria, whom he had only evaded by leaping out of an upstairs window, turning a neat somersault and shouting back at his assailants: ‘Come on, you black sons of Shaitan!’ There was a romantic liaison in Kuwait, a near gunfight in Turkey, and on it went. One minute his trek across the Middle East was 15,000 miles; the next, after officialdom again rebuffed his insistent petitions for work, it became 25,000 miles. Writer’s block was never an issue. Between 1932 and 1934, he published 12 books, taking in Sufism, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Quran and a biography of the Prophet.
Undeterred by rejection, he continued to dash off letters to prime ministers, secretaries of state, India Office mandarins and newspaper editors. By 1941, he had found a short-lived berth at the ministry of information as a wartime propagandist – a prelude to working for Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell) at the BBC.
In the post-war years of imperial demise, Ikbal’s currency diminished. But his legacy lived on spectacularly through his son Idries, who, after initial forays into magic and the occult, became a widely revered purveyor of a rebranded Sufism for the West.
Published in 1964, with a foreword by Robert Graves, The Sufis was Idries’s break-out book, catering to a new-found appetite for easily digestible pick-and-mix spiritual enlightenment. Adapting his product to the American market, he published a series of booklets on Sufism containing next to nothing about Islam and in which neither the Prophet Mohammed nor the Quran made an appearance. It was historically untenable but commercially sensational.
Using his celebrity Sufi status as an endorsement, he next persuaded the community of Gurdjieffians at Coombe Springs, complete with their Edwardian villa and seven acres of gardens in Kingston upon Thames, that he was the long-awaited Sufi master from Afghanistan, sent by the ‘Hidden Directorate’ to enlighten the West. Asked where he had learnt such good English, the man who had grown up in London suburbia replied that he had read Shakespeare in a cave. In 1966, Idries insisted that the Gurdjieffians sign over the property to his new foundation. A couple of months later he sold Coombe Springs to a developer for £100,000, a staggering sum at a time when a starter home cost £2,000. Up went 28 luxury homes and off went Idries to purchase Langton House, an eight-bedroom regency mansion near Tunbridge Wells.
Like his father, he was prolific – the author of more than three dozen books, described caustically by Gore Vidal as ‘a great deal harder to read than they were to write’. But the public disagreed, lapping up his titles, which continued to multiply – like the many pseudonyms he used to praise Idries Shah.
In 1967, he was drawn into the controversy surrounding a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by his brother Omar Ali-Shah and Robert Graves. Omar claimed the rendering was based on the world’s oldest manuscript, conveniently held by his own family in Afghanistan for 800 years. A distinguished Edinburgh academic carefully rubbished this; the promised manuscript never materialised – and, notwithstanding a spirited defence by Doris Lessing, a follower of Idries, Omar’s stock fell. Idries responded with an aggressive publicity campaign, emphasising his royal Afghan and Sufi lineage and noting that the controversy had driven up his book sales in America.
The literary fabulists père et fils would doubtless have dismissed Green’s forensic study of high-level deceit and hucksterism as pathetic pedantry. Readers will make up their own minds – and have tremendous fun along the way.
Making the fur fly: Mary and the Rabbit Dream, by Noémi Kiss-Deáki
Mary Toft seems to be having something of a moment. The English 18th-century peasant who stunned society with her claim to have given birth to rabbits has been the focus of a suite of recent books, including Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft, or the Rabbit Queen (2019) and Karen Harvey’s The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder (2020). There was even a nod to Toft in the 2018 film The Favourite. Queen Anne, played by Olivia Coleman, had 17 rabbits, one for every child she’d miscarried – a reference to Toft’s 17 ‘miraculous’ rabbit births.
It’s not hard to see why Toft’s grotesque story still captivates us. In 1726, a poor young woman in Godalming – then a small rural town – was reported to have given birth to a rabbit and, over the next few months, repeated the feat more than a dozen times. Fantastically, many people believed her; she was examined by the best doctors and ‘man-midwives’ of the day, including those close to George I, and became something of a national sensation. The story of Toft – the ‘pretended rabbit-breeder’ – circulated in newspapers and satirical pamphlets and even received the honour of being immortalised by William Hogarth.
Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream is the latest rendition of the tale. Instead of the innuendoes and salacious details favoured by the wits of the time (who spent much time in the press exploring the punning possibilities of cuniculus, meaning rabbit, and cunnus, meaning vulva), this debut novel addresses the realities of Toft’s life. It doesn’t begin in the examining room, with the soft hands of society doctors, but in the fields, where Mary and her sister-in-law are ‘very poor, very tired’ and desperate for any escape from their ‘harsh and miserable’ life. While Mary chases a rabbit, desperate to catch and eat it, the duchess on the nearby estate fritters away her money on clothes for her pet monkey.
Kiss-Deáki writes in simple, declarative sentences which seem almost studiedly naive – as though this were a fairy tale told by the lowliest character. She builds to a point where the story is less about a faux-medical marvel and more about power – about who gets to tell their own story and who gets buffeted by the desires of everyone else. In this telling, Kiss-Deáki gives new life to the oft-repeated tale and invigorates it with sympathy and humanity.
The hunt for the next Messi: Godwin, by Joseph O’Neill, reviewed
Those who remember Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel Netherland, which featured a multicultural cricket club and was set in post 9/11 Manhattan, will assume they know what they’re getting with Godwin, which purports to be about the hunt for the next Messi.
A video file of an African teenager with legendary ball skills is circulating far from his homeland, wherever that may be. All that Mark Wolfe, ‘a blond, rangy man in his late thirties’ who works for a technical writing co-operative, needs to do is to help his half-brother, Geoff, a hapless young football agent, track down ‘Godwin’ – if indeed that is the boy’s real name. ‘True, I don’t know much about the soccer business; but, with all due respect, if someone like Geoff is the competition, how hard can the business be?’ is Mark’s view on what he is told is an industry worth $3 billion for Premiership TV rights alone. Or, as Geoff, who talks as if he has swallowed an urban dictionary, puts it: ‘Billion, blud.’
This premise, a literary first for an era when ‘very, very rich entities’ lubricate every aspect of the beautiful game, would make for an action-packed adventure story with a strong moralistic bent that uses football as a metaphor for global capitalism and neo-colonial exploitation. Since the 1990s, agents have mined Africa for ‘raw talent… that was potentially more precious than over-processed European talent’, writes O’Neill. And, indeed, Mark duly embarks on hunting for Godwin with the help of a semi-retired French talent scout. Digital geolocation technology reveals that the video was shot in a stadium somewhere in Benin, on the Gulf of Guinea. It’s all very Heart of Darkness.
But there is more to the book than football. Long before Mark sets off, we meet his co-protagonist and colleague, Lakesha Williams, an African-American woman who helps to run the Group, which was set up according to the principles of the original Rochdale Society. I’m reminded of Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End in the ensuing workplace satire, which doubles up as a metaphor for American democracy. (The book is set, pointedly, in 2015. ‘In Paris they have just gunned down a roomful of cartoonists. Our new year seems as rotten as the one gone by. How long can this go on for? When will it end?’ Mark wonders.)
The juxtaposition between office politics and neocolonial footballing largesse can feel far-fetched, but O’Neill is too good a craftsman not to score with the closing section, which delivers one of the most satisfying endings I’ve read in a long while.
Why Joni Mitchell sounded different from the start
What makes Joni Mitchell’s music special? The lyrics alone put her on 20th-century music’s Mount Rushmore, alongside her cultural mirror Bob Dylan and her brief lover Leonard Cohen. But for me it’s her phrasing, her tunings and her sense of time. Decades on, her music remains endlessly surprising. Think a line is going in a certain direction? Think again, as Mitchell bends it away; or shifts key; or arcs her voice into its celestial sphere, only to suddenly plummet, like a plane in turbulence. And yet the swerves feel somehow right, inevitable.
Enlisting the help of jazz greats from Wayne Shorter to Herbie Hancock, Mitchell invented her own musical grammar: one of conversational fluency, perhaps best articulated with the bassist Jaco Pastorious, the pulsing voice behind Mitchell’s mid-to-late 1970s masterpieces Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.
She arcs her voice into its celestial sphere, only to suddenly plummet, like a plane in turbulence
There was something faintly miraculous about Mitchell from the start. In 1942, Myrtle Maguerite visited a fortune teller in the small town of Alberta, Canada and was told that she would be wed within a month and have a child within a year. Given that most young men were abroad at war, this seemed unlikely. Yet, two weeks later, Myrtle met and married Bill Anderson, an airman, and within a year Roberta Joan Anderson – Joni, as she would name herself – was born.
Never one to be outdone, Mitchell had Lazarus beat: she learnt to walk not twice but three times, overcoming a bout of polio as a nine year-old that left her bedbound for a year, and again after a brain aneurysm in 2015. The polio forced a permanent weakness into her left hand, such that when she picked up a guitar a few years later, she found she couldn’t reach the traditional chords. And so she devised alternative tunings and what she calls ‘chords of inquiry’: unresolved chords whose song hangs like a question mark in the air. From the off, Mitchell sounded different.
Rebirth, resilience, reinvention: all come through strongly in the music critic Ann Powers’s Travelling. ‘This is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell,’ the author insists, before giving us a largely chronological, thematic account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell. She also gives us an autobiography of Ann Powers, and a biography of the North American mind in the 2020s.
We follow Mitchell from Canada to Detroit to New York to the ‘boys’ club’ of Laurel Canyon, moving on whenever the net of domesticity closes in. The early years have Mitchell marrying undeniable talent with a less observed knack for using others to her advantage. Her sense of her own exceptionalism runs through the book – ‘she was about as modest as Mussolini,’ according to the (hardly shy) David Crosby – but she backed it up with a string of innovative records that took her from late 1960s folkie to ‘confessional’ icon to jazz frontiersman.
We see her ill-fated marriage to Chuck Mitchell; a string of famous lovers-cum-collaborators, from Cohen and Crosby to Graham Nash and James Taylor; her decade-long marriage to the musician Larry Klein and their productive if difficult 1980s; the critical resurrection of her career in the mid-1990s with the Grammy-winning Turbulent Indigo; and her late-life reclusiveness, illness and partial recovery. Along the way Powers explores such sidetracks as the cult of the child in 1960s California, the feminist ‘reclamation of sadness’, and popular music’s legacy machine. The picture that emerges of Mitchell is almost a trope: an artist so committed to her work, she struggles to commit to others. The curiosity that fires the music fires a desire to keep moving.
Powers writes beautifully on the texture of music, particularly jazz, and her book hits many memorable notes, such as on the ‘humid, thick, seductive’ sound of Hejira, the broader influence of Miles Davis, and the link between Mitchell’s painting and her music-making.
However, Powers’s grasp of Mitchell’s self-fashioning rubs up against her own politics, and can lead to some confusing positions. She is frustrated at the way Mitchell, and women in general, were trapped by ‘femininity’ in the 1970s, yet also ‘a little bit angry at Joni for trying to genius her way beyond gender’ and not displaying more female solidarity – despite also dismissing ‘womankind’ as a category: ‘As if that…even really existed.’
True to our time, Powers pays significant attention to racial politics – sometimes illuminating, given Mitchell’s ‘strong identification with black men’, sometimes deeply reductive – and displays her own credentials by self-flagellating over her ‘dance moves while drunk’. But she avoids other equally important glosses on the music, even when Mitchell herself has repeatedly discussed them. The most obvious of these is the effect on Mitchell, aged 21, of putting her baby daughter up for adoption – an event which changed the course of her life, influenced her art (by her own admission) and, some argue, even made the songs possible. But on this subject, Powers (herself a mother by adoption) is suddenly coy: ‘None of this is for me to really say’; ‘every adoption story is different… I would not pry’.
Powers has no qualms about prying into other areas. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that she is trying to protect Mitchell on some questions and out her on others. It makes for a book of uneven rhythm, rich in insight, but one that, like a Joni Mitchell song, conceals even as it confesses.
Seven Labour MPs lose the whip
In the end, the great two-child benefit cap revolt proved to be somewhat underwhelming. The measure was always likely to fail given Labour’s mammoth majority of 172, with the government winning the vote by 363 votes to 103. Only seven of Keir Starmer’s MPs defied the entreaties of the Labour whips to vote in favour of the SNP’s amendment to the King’s Speech to scrap the policy. Their names are a handy ‘who’s who’ guide to the Labour left awkward squad: Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Imran Hussain, Rebecca Long Bailey, Zarah Sultana and ring-leader John McDonnell.
All seven have tonight had the whip suspended for six months, before it is then reviewed. Sultana subsequently tweeted:
I have been informed by the Chief Whip & the Labour party leadership that the whip has been withdrawn from me for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which would lift 330,000 children out of poverty. I will always stand up for the most vulnerable in our society.
The lack of rebels, combined with the fact that they can all be neatly pigeonholed as ‘Corbynite’, makes this a relatively easy decision for the Whips’ Office to take. It might perhaps have been harder if Rosie Duffield – Labour’s leading advocate of single-sex spaces – had been able to attend parliament tonight as she intended to vote against the measure. In the event, she has been paired owing to her illness with Covid. Her absence prevents a difficult choice for Chief Whip Alan Campbell, all too conscious of Duffield’s status among feminists wary of Starmer’s views on self-identification.
Tonight’s vote is the earliest backbench rebellion faced by a new government since 1945. It invites comparisons too with the 1997 vote on lone-parent benefit which was treated as a test of strength by Tony Blair’s incoming government. That ended up causing resentment on the backbenches among MPs, put off by the whips’ heavy handed tactics. But by opting for immediate, lengthy suspensions – the so-called ‘Admiral Byng treatment’ – party managers will hope that they have rid Labour of its most likely trouble-makers and sent out a warning pour encourager les autres.
The short-term challenge for the government may come if ministers subsequently choose to scrap the cap in the autumn: will these suspensions then be revoked? Longer term, the risk is encouraging a bunker attitude, in which the instinct is to suppress parliamentary criticism, rather than reflect on it. Given the Labour leadership’s mistakes over the Gaza vote last autumn, such an attitude could prove costly at some point in the years ahead.
Farage in diversity stand-off with Commons bosses
It’s a red letter day for Nigel Farage. The former Ukip leader entered parliament this month at the eighth attempt of trying and today delivered his maiden speech to fellow MPs. In an address that mixed wit and wisdom, Farage observed the custom of paying tribute to a member’s predecessor by saying of Giles Watling that he was a ‘jolly nice chap’ despite ‘having nothing even vaguely conservative about him.’ But there is one Commons convention that Mr S understands he will not be observing.
All MPs are invited attend inclusion and diversity training by the House of Commons, with newly elected members offered a place on seminars titled ‘Behaviour Code: Why it matters’ as part of their induction programme. While this training is not mandatory, MPs are encouraged by parliamentary bosses to sign up to these programmes in a move to provide what they call ‘an inclusive working environment.’ It’s all part of a push to clamp down on misdemeanours in Westminster, with the late, great octogenarian Betty Boothroyd once being advised to take sexual harassment training or reportedly face the risk of expulsion from the Lords.
When asked, the House of Commons media team declined to provide an on-the-record statement today. But Steerpike understands that Farage is the only one of the Reform party’s five-man band who is yet to undertake such seminars, with the likelihood of him conceding in the ‘diversity stand-off’ being about as probable as his leadership of the ‘Rejoin’ movement.
Still, if he is forced to throw in the towel, Mr S just hopes he livestreams his training for all the nation to enjoy…
Watch: Farage makes maiden speech in Commons
To the House of Commons, where today Reform’s Nigel Farage made his maiden speech after returning from Milwaukee’s RNC. Attempting a number of times to gain access to the Commons, Farage was successful on his eighth shot this election – and this afternoon’s speech shows he’s wasting no time getting down to business.
In his characteristically caustic fashion, Farage was quick to hit out at his parliamentary colleagues – taking special care to focus on Labour’s lefty lot. ‘This is very much a Remainers parliament,’ Farage proclaimed, before adding cynically: ‘I suspect in many cases it’s really a rejoiners parliament.’ Oo er. With prominent leavers from Jacob Rees-Mogg to Penny Mordaunt losing their seats at the election, Nige does have a point. According to Mr S’s notes, Starmer’s cabinet is almost totally united in having supported the Remain campaign back in 2016 – and Sir Keir Starmer has certainly been quick to talk about a ‘reset’ in EU relations…
Flanked by Red Wall rottweiler Lee Anderson and deputy party leader Richard Tice, Farage went on:
Perhaps the Labour party might want to reflect themselves on the last period of Labour government, where we had home secretaries like David Blunkett far, far to the right of the shadow home secretary today. You came to Britain illegally during the last Labour government, your feet didn’t touch the sides, you were gone, you were out.
He continued:
In the last year of the Labour government, from 2009-10, 50,000 people who came here illegally were deported. Now, none of that happens anymore. It didn’t happen under 14 years of the Conservatives, and clearly isn’t going to happen under this Labour government.
Calling for a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Reform UK leader told the Chamber that the ECHR had ‘now completely outlived its usefulness’. Touting his plan as the solution for our migration woes, Farage told MPs that this would be the only way Britain would be able to stop the boats.
‘Let’s face it,’ Labour’s Lola McEvoy admitted when Farage finished up, ‘that was quite a polished contribution that he’s had 21 years to prepare for – so thank you to him.’ ‘Fair point!’ Farage shouted back. Talk about good-spirited debate, eh?
Nige has helpfully clipped his maiden speech for Twitter. You can watch it here:
Streeting hammers Tories on NHS
We know that the NHS is broken: Wes Streeting announced that it was now the official policy of this government when he entered the Department of Health and Social Care. Today he had a chance to elaborate on just what exactly he thought was broken – and of course to point the finger at who was responsible.
It was his first departmental questions in the House of Commons, and like every other incoming Secretary of State, Streeting made sure he laid on the ‘Tories broke this’ line as thickly as cream on a scone. Pointing to shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins, he described the hospital building programme:
I once again say to the Opposition that they handed over an entirely fictional timetable and an unfounded programme. The hon. Lady might not know because she was not there immediately prior to the election, but the shadow Secretary of State, who is sitting right next to her, knows exactly where the bodies are buried in the department, where the unexploded bombs are, and exactly the degree to which this timetable and the funding were not as set out by the previous government.
He was talking about building new hospitals, but he then told Lib Dem health spokesperson Daisy Cooper that ‘the condition of the whole NHS estate is poor’ and that the backlog in maintenance was £11.6 billion, adding ‘that [this]is the legacy of the last Conservative government’.
Streeting also said that the quality of maternity care was one of the things that kept him awake at night, while his colleague Andrew Gwynne claimed there would be an announcement on social care reform soon (though he also did not deny the reports that there would be a cross-party commission on the long-term reform, which will make it even more long-term by delaying a decision). Karin Smyth, another health minister, referred to the ‘disaster of the past 14 years’ when it came to waiting lists.
As for those trying to fight that ‘disaster’ narrative, Atkins used her two topical questions to ask about the junior doctor pay negotiations, and about puberty blockers. She firstly suggested that Streeting had described the BMA’s 35 per cent pay rise demand as ‘reasonable’ – which he hadn’t, and then asked whether the Labour government would offer ‘certainty’ on puberty blockers.
On the latter, Streeting made clear that ‘we are wholeheartedly committed to the full implementation of the Cass review’. Neither of these questions were particularly difficult for him. This is in part because this is the stage where the government can blame its predecessors for the state of the NHS, and also because the Conservatives hadn’t really worked out what their own stance on the health service was by the end of their time in government. So it’s even harder to provide a counter narrative from opposition – for now at least.
Huw Edwards got £40,000 pay rise despite suspension
Back to the BBC, which these days is better at being in the news than making it. The six-figure salary list for 2023-24 has been published and with it come some quite interesting revelations. Top earner Gary Lineker received £1.35 million, while Radio 2 presenter Zoe Ball isn’t too far behind on £950,000. Big names including Greg James, Stephen Nolan and Fiona Bruce saw their salaries increase while politicos Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Robinson also made the list.
But, most interestingly, Mr S notices that Huw Edwards saw his salary rise by a colossal £40,000 last year – despite not having worked for most of the last 12 months. Edwards was suspended by the BBC in July 2023 after the presenter was found to be at the centre of a sex scandal, facing allegations that he had solicited explicit images from a young man. He resigned from the Beeb in April this year, citing medical reasons. However today’s figures show that the newsreader earned a whopping £480,000 between March 2023 and April 2024 – earning him the accolade of the BBC’s third highest-earning presenter.
The Beeb has defended Edwards’s salary rise, stating that it is ‘normal BBC policy’ to remain on the payroll while suspended. When quizzed on whether the ex-newsreader had been paid off, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie denied there was any settlement payment. He continued:
No-one wants to waste a pound but we need to act proportionately and fairly and I think that’s what we did. Prior to any breaking of the (Edwards) story, people do get pay rises for extended responsibility and more hours’ work. So that’s fairly normal, and that’s what resulted in the change.
Alright for some…
Will president Biden pardon Hunter?
After President Biden announced he would be standing down on Sunday evening, it’s been all go in the White House. But while speculation about the next Democrat nominee continues, there is a separate side plot that Mr S is rather interested in – involving Biden’s son.
Robert Hunter Biden has spent a fair amount of time in the limelight over the years, for scandals both personal – crack cocaine use, infidelity and a two-year relationship with his late brother’s wife – and professional, with his dealings in China and Ukraine. Last month, the eldest son of the US president was found guilty of lying about his drug use when purchasing a handgun and was convicted of all the charges against him – which could result in a jail sentence of up to 25 years. Hunter has been keeping a rather low profile since then, but after Biden’s rather significant weekend announcement, he has decided to put his head above the parapet. In a statement about his father’s decision not to seek a second term on Sunday, Hunter said:
Over a lifetime I have witnessed him absorb the pain of countless everyday Americans who he’s given his personal phone number to, because he wanted them to call him when they were hurting. When their last hopes were slipping through their hands. That unconditional love has been his North Star as a President, and as a parent.
How sweet. But is there more here than meets the eye? Alongside his criminal conviction, Hunter is facing a separate federal indictment which alleges he has evaded $1.4 million worth of tax, with the trial set to start in September. Under Article II of the US Constitution, a president can grant a pardon for a federal crime – but back in June, President Biden maintained that he would not pardon Hunter, vowing to respect the jury’s decision. However now that the President is stepping down, might he U-turn on that promise?
Hunter’s gun charge sentencing will be no later than 9 October, giving the President a short window to change his mind if his son has to serve prison time. Perhaps he’s considering it – he’s certainly been spending more time with his son, with NBC News reporting that Hunter has been joining White House meetings with his father much to the surprise of the President’s aides. Their relationship may become more important than ever in the coming months…
There is certainly precedent for pardoning your own family. In 2001, on his very last day in office, Bill Clinton pardoned his brother Roger for a 1985 cocaine possession conviction he served a year in prison for. Clinton’s pardon cleared Roger’s criminal record, although he would go on to be arrested for reckless driving under the influence less than a month later. And, oddly, Trump’s own run-in with the law could play to Hunter’s advantage. Last Monday, Trump’s classified case was dismissed after the judge ruled the special counsel had no legal authority. Clearly the President’s son has been paying attention to this turn of events – on Thursday he asked a federal judge to throw his cases out on the same grounds.
Hunter’s fate hasn’t been sealed yet, so he might not need his father to bail him out. But if he does receive a sentence, might President Biden’s last act in office be to pardon his eldest son? Watch this space…
Biden’s legacy is in Harris’s hands
Joe Biden did the honourable thing. It took dire polls and home truths from donors and allies, but the President finally admitted that his political race is over.
Biden was trailing Donald Trump in the swing states – in some cases with a wide margin – and was showing little sign of being able to close the gap. On course for defeat, Biden made his decision in the interests of his party and country, but also his legacy.
Biden’s legacy could go one of two ways. Like almost every US president, his tenure has included both major successes and significant failures. While some of his major achievements, such as record job growth and regenerating industry, are secure; others, such as landmark climate change legislation and enabling the defence of Ukraine, would be vulnerable in a Trump presidency. Ironically, Biden’s legacy among everyone but his Maga enemies will be defined by the election from which he has just withdrawn.
Currently, the central pillar of Biden’s reputation is that he led the electorate away from a second Trump term. Although the Trump of 2017 to 2020 now appears a relatively benign figure, his four years included such things as the longest government shutdown in US history, his deadly promotion of misinformation about Covid-19, and the nuclear standoff with North Korea. If Trump were to return to the White House a mere one election later, Biden’s presidency would become little more than a hiatus between the chaos of Trump’s first term and the extremism of his second.
Given Trump’s consistent unpopularity (he lost the popular vote in both presidential elections, and his party underperformed in the two midterms), a Republican victory in November could be blamed on Biden’s stubborn refusal to accept legitimate concerns about his age and mental fitness earlier in the race. Unless his successor wins the election, Biden will be unable to shake the suggestion that he left too little time for them to campaign.
A Democrat defeat would also highlight the Biden administration’s inability or unwillingness to groom a capable heir. Vice President Kamala Harris, who Biden quickly endorsed on Sunday, has been repeatedly hindered by him. She was given a near-impossible brief – managing the crisis on the southern border – and only gained stature when the White House needed a woman to make the case against the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion.
The President performed a global service when he beat Trump in 2020. As he belatedly realised, his enduring reputation depends on whether his successor can repeat the trick.
Liz Kendall promises a game-changer on welfare
Seven Labour MPs had the whip suspended after voting against the two-child benefit cap, but this is a small taste of what awaits Labour. In her first major, Liz Kendall has set herself a target of hitting an 80 per cent employment rate – bolder than anything the Tories ever shot for. It is higher not only than today’s 72 per cent but (far) higher than the all-time, pre-lockdown record of 74 per cent. It is precisely the right target, for economic and social reasons. But it is one that can only be achieved via serious, game-changing welfare reform.
The new Work and Pensions Secretary has inherited a full-blown welfare crisis, with the number on disability benefits set to rise by 1,000 a day, every day, for the next four years. So how will she change it? She promises a white paper and ‘fundamental reform’. It is certainly needed. Official figures show 5.6 million (!) on out-of-work benefits, which works out as 20 per cent of working-age adults in Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham and 25 per cent in Blackpool. This is a staggering economic and moral failure which any self-respecting progressive government would seek to remedy.
The difficult questions start now. Will she proceed with Mel Stride’s plan to tighten welfare criteria? The Tories saw this as quite controversial: making it harder for mental health claimants to sign up, etc. Will Labour now proceed with tough-love reforms that even the Tories feared to implement? The two-child row has diverted attention from the cull. Sooner or later, backbenchers will realise this controversial crackdown is baked into the current fiscal plans - and the OBR says it will save £3 billion. So if the Tory Work Capability Assessment reform is dropped, she’ll need to find £3 billion by the time of the Autumn Statement.
My guess is that Kendall has no choice but to ratchet up welfare reform by several more notches: certainly if she stands any chance of hitting her 80 per cent target. The below graph shows DWP braced for a surge in the working-age welfare roll even after the Stride reforms: unaffordable both economically and socially. This is the ghost of Christmas future and suggests that the spending power of a Starmer government will be crippled without serious (and politically painful) welfare reform.
The Tories saw this coming, but realised they were out of time. Their 2010 welfare reform agenda was intended to tackle unemployment but the 2024 problem is how the welfare system is discombobulated by mental health complaints (a trend that predates Covid). Welfare needs to be redesigned to adjust for this effect. Kendall nodded to this when she said that ‘the current system – of DWP, JobCentres and other employment support – is almost entirely designed to address the problems of yesterday’.
There is no end of problems for today. How to means-test disability payments (PIPs) and stop them going to anyone, regardless of wealth? How to stop the system where GPs sign people on to welfare to get them out of the system and making repeat visits to the surgery asking for it? How to stop the system where those whose request is rejected then just appeal – and usually win? Kendall’s white paper could obviously ask these questions. But the risk now is that she surrounds herself with the kind of pressure groups who have spent the last 14 years campaigning against welfare reform and will not have many ideas how to respond to (or even recognise) this crisis. .
Much of what Starmer promises (stable inflation, lowering immigration, living standards recovering) was expected to happen anyway - but not an employment surge. The OBR expects employment rate to stay flat for years. Raising the employment rate even by a single percentage point takes a huge effort. The Tory ‘jobs miracle’ (achieved by tax cuts for the low-paid and all-out welfare reform) saw a lift from 70 per cent to 76 per cent. To look at the below chart - the employment level over the last half-century - is to see how tough the 80 per cent target is.
To achieve this would be a triumph of progressive politics, a feat comparable to the creation of the welfare state. Tories say that the 80 per cent target has been plucked from the air and is demonstrably unachievable. In her speech, Kendall dedicates her department to achieving it.
So as a starting point, she will have to go full-steam ahead with Mel Stride's green paper on disability allowance. New PIP claims are now at 70,000 a month, double pre-lockdown levels. The below chart shows a full picture that is not even published by the DWP (the data was extracted and released by the OBR). It suggests that things had become so bad that 4,000 people claimed sickness benefit every day. About a quarter are expected to succeed: now and the for the foreseeable. This is the calamity that Kendall has to avert.
Importantly, she has not given a deadline for this 80 per cent target. ‘I am under no illusions how big a change this will be,’ she said in her speech. A nod, perhaps, to the fact that the coming welfare battles will likely be the toughest Keir Starmer has to fight. The two-child row will be just the start.
Labour will struggle with its plan to get Britain back to work
Liz Kendall wants Britain to get back to work. The Work and Pensions Secretary has unveiled a target for the country to reach an 80 per cent employment rate. But hold on: that ‘ambition’, as the government is calling it, is completely unrealistic. Labour’s plan to reverse the dire labour market and drive up Britain’s employment rate seems certain to fall short of its ambitious target.
Spending on sickness and disability benefits is set to increase by £30 billion over the next five years
Britain is the only country in the G7 whose employment rate has still not returned to pre-pandemic levels: 2.8 million people are out of work because of ill health or disability; one in eight young people are not in education, employment or work. Spending on sickness and disability benefits is set to increase by £30 billion over the next five years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Something needs to change; that much is clear. But getting 80 per cent of Brits into work seems impossible. The UK has never come close to that rate over the last 50 years. The UK’s employment rate has fluctuated significantly over the decades. Back in 1971, it was 71 per cent; it went down to 63 per cent in 1983; and then, apart from a dip in the recession of the early 1990s, it climbed steadily to reach an all-time high just before the pandemic of 76 per cent. But it has never got closer than that to Labour’s pie-in-the-sky 80 per cent figure.
In reality, all the Labour government is doing is setting itself up to fail. It is very hard to understand how the UK is going to find an extra four per cent of people to shift into employment. It would probably have to adopt some radical measures, not least considering closing some universities, and forcing a few retirees back into the office.
What Labour appear to have failed to realise fully is that the country’s real problem is not generating jobs. The UK has generally been pretty good at doing just that. The trouble is that the jobs we do create are not especially productive, and are not very well paid. The new government keeps announcing targets as if all that was needed was for a minister to make a statement and it will suddenly happen. In a way, it is admirable that Keir Starmer’s administration is setting out the standards by which it will later be judged. But, come election time, it’s a decision it is likely to regret.
After Biden, the deluge
Remember that $230 million ‘humanitarian pier’ that the Americans moored off the coast of Gaza? It was announced with great fanfare in Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. But earlier this month, the White House quietly mothballed the project. It had not been built to withstand inclement weather, you see, so sections of the causeway broke off and washed up among the sunbathers on Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach. During the first week in which the pier had been operational, three-quarters of the aid it delivered had been stolen by unspecified Palestinians on the way to a UN warehouse.
Who would have thought that the administration responsible for the chaotic Afghan withdrawal would botch this project too? But if the pier succeeded in one way, it was in providing us with a metaphor for much of Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
Biden’s appeasement of Iran has led the regime to become more powerful than ever. It is now just a week or two from producing enough fissile material for a bomb, as Antony Blinken confessed in Aspen last week, and has learned that it can attack Israel with huge force and expect the free world to restrict itself to defence. He failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, and his limited support for Kyiv has locked the country in a cycle of degradation. The war in Gaza – which could have been over long ago had the White House shown some leadership – wears on. Across the world, autocracies, terrorists and troublemakers have learned to see the United States as a gorgon identifying as a runt.
Israel has moved Biden’s passions powerfully ever since his father instilled in him the belief that it was a profoundly just response to the Holocaust. So it is his legacy regarding the Jewish state that best provides the historical yardstick by which Biden can be measured.
In the months since 7 October, commentators like me have vented our frustration often with the increasingly decrepit leader of the free world. There was the time he withheld shipments of arms, then released them, then got dragged into an unseemly row with Benjamin Netanyahu. There was the relentless, public finger-wagging at America’s supposed ally, including during his State of the Union address, eroding the perception of unity and emboldening the enemy. There was the one-track desire for a hostage deal, the surest way to make your opponent withhold it. There was the escalating rhetoric, beginning with suggestions that the Jewish state had gone ‘over the top’ and ending with accusing it of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ when the very weaponry his country was providing was designed for maximum precision.
Yet the most infuriating part was that interspersed with these missteps, blunders and examples of unfairness were expressions of true support for Jerusalem. Biden was sharply critical of the ‘outrageous’ International Criminal Court’s pursuit of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, ultimately allowed deliveries of vital armaments to continue and, in the aftermath of the October pogroms, moved two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean, deterring Hezbollah and Iran. Let’s not forget the international military coalition he assembled to defend the Jewish state from more than 300 projectiles last April. Without Biden, that night could have been very dark.
These are profound gestures of allyship. They are indicative of a lifetime of support for Israel that Biden’s erratic handling of the Gaza war can by no means eclipse. He commenced his career in the Senate in 1973, against the backdrop of the Yom Kippur War; Israel’s leader at the time, Golda Meir, famously told the young senator that the secret to her people’s courage was that ‘we have no place to go’, an observation that clearly stayed with him. But his support for the Jewish state was not just principled, it relied on a fulsome understanding of America’s global strategic needs. In 1986, when he was a senator for Delaware, he remarked: ‘Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.’
His heart has always ended up in the right place. Despite his difficult relationship with Netanyahu – he famously scrawled on an old photograph of the two men, ‘Bibi, I love you, but I don’t agree with a damn thing you had to say’ – he always retained a commitment to the country, insisting as recently as last year: ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist and I am a Zionist’.
Contrast this with Biden’s expected successor, Kamala Harris. She was the first senior member of the administration to demand an ‘immediate ceasefire’. In March, with the debate about Rafah dominating the headlines, she insisted that it was impossible to move the civilians from the city. ‘I have studied the maps’, she told ABC. ‘There’s nowhere for those folks to go.’ A million people were then evacuated to an expanded safe zone in central Gaza in ten days. Oops.
Harris is not even the worst. In November, the representative for the swing state of Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, abstained in a vote for Israel’s right to exist, while the lunatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously wept when funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system was approved. Whether she shed a tear for the 1,200 Israeli civilians who were butchered on 7 October is unknown. These women, and their fellow members of the progressive ‘Squad’, no longer stand a chance of getting on the ticket at the Democratic convention in August, but in Harris they will find a more sympathetic figure than President Biden. Come November, Americans may find themselves with a nightmare choice between an orange ogre who threatens to subvert the norms of liberal democracy and roll out a shamefully isolationist foreign policy, particularly in Ukraine, and a radical progressive proxy who will sell one of their greatest allies down the river.
Biden, by contrast, is a Democrat of the old school. Humanitarian pier or no humanitarian pier, appeasement or no appeasement, Afghan withdrawal or no Afghan withdrawal, we disregard the strengths of his legacy at our peril. When he was bad, he was bad. But with Kamala Harris and worse waiting in the wings, we may miss the old man when he’s gone.
Miliband will need natural gas to hit net zero
Three weeks into the new Labour government and it is already becoming clear where some of its weaknesses lie – none more so than Ed Miliband’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid, save consumers money and boost the economy with many thousands of ‘well-paid green jobs’. Today the Royal Academy of Engineering weighs in with its own assessment of Miliband’s chances. Its verdict? That even if the government wants to decarbonise the grid, Britain is going to have to invest in new gas plants – and ‘unabated’ ones (i.e. not fitted with carbon capture and storage CCS technology) at that.
Even in an optimistic scenario, the Academy thinks that in 2030 we will still need gas plants to be operating a quarter of the time. In order to fully decarbonise the grid we would need to invest in long-term energy storage, most likely using hydrogen stored in sub-sea caverns. But that is certainly not going to happen over the next six years, given that the technology to generate and store green hydrogen isn’t yet operational on a commercial scale anywhere.
The lack of viable and affordable energy storage is not likely to be the only problem standing in Miliband’s way. The grid itself needs a huge overhaul to cope with the different generation patterns of renewable energy. As the Academy puts it:
The value from energy generation comes from being able to use it – there are few benefits in rushing to build new generation without considering how and when it can be connected to the grid in a stable and resilient way.
Trouble is, there is already a queue of 700 gigawatts-worth of renewable energy waiting to be connected to the grid. Moreover, to build new transmission lines in Britain has in the past taken typically 14 years. Even if we were to emulate Sweden, where an acceleration in the planning system has brought it the build time down to between five and six years, we would still be struggling to reconfigure the grid by the end of this decade.
In other words, Miliband isn’t going to be hitting his target. But we might excuse him that if he managed to bring down bills by switching from gas to renewables. What chance of success there? The Academy doesn’t weigh in on that prospect, merely saying that it is impossible to predict gas prices many years ahead. Nor is it possible to predict the prices of the metals required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels. Nor future interest rates, which are big drivers of the cost of renewable energy.
There is one guide to the cost of a renewables-heavy electricity grid, though. Denmark already generates 57 per cent of its electricity from wind, twice as much as Britain. But it also happens to have the highest domestic electricity prices in the world, at the equivalent of 42 pence per kilowatt-hour in 2022, compared with 30.7 pence in Britain.
What about the promise of green jobs? Forget it. Proponents of net zero like to describe it as a ‘race’, but the only race Britain is winning is the one to set legally binding targets to reduce emissions. The race that China, the US and others are more concerned about is the one to dominate the market in manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels and other kit which will be needed to decarbonise the grid. There are green jobs aplenty, but most are in China, which manufactures, for example, 80 percent of the world’s solar panels.
What chance Britain suddenly finding some way of catching up? Miliband has promised us a green revolution without, it seems, much idea of how to make it happen. As the Royal Academy of Engineering points out, the UK is producing just 3,500 graduates a year in electric and electronic engineering – and the number has halved since 2006.
Watch Lionel Shriver discuss Ed Miliband on SpectatorTV:
Nadine Dorries takes aim at Emily Maitlis’s ‘cosy “centrist” podcast’
Another day, another drama – only this time it’s not MPs in the spotlight. Now politician-turned-pundit Nadine Dorries has taken aim at journalist Emily Maitlis and her ‘cosy “centrist” podcast’ The News Agents. In a scathing attack laid out in the fine pages of the Daily Mail, Dorries slams Maitlis’s ‘neurotic’ perspective of politics, her obsession with ‘remaining “relevant”‘ and her, um, ‘orange permatan’. Ouch.
The former cabinet minister described how she had been invited on Maitlis’ podcast only to be asked, charmingly, whether she was ‘unhinged’. ‘I had no particular desire to be on The News Agents,’ Dorries fumed, continuing: ‘I won’t tolerate being spoken to like that by a woman with an orange permatan to rival Donald Trump’s.’ The ex-culture secretary went on to share her reflections from Channel 4’s election night show where Maitlis had seemed shocked that Dorries and ex-SNP MP Mhairi Black could be friendly towards each other despite their views. ‘The penny dropped,’ Nads said. ‘Maitlis truly believes that people with differing political opinions should be consumed by them to such an irrational degree that they hate each other, and don’t refrain from showing it.’
But Dorries wasn’t finished there: ‘Maitlis lives much of her life online,’ the commentator wrote, ‘She is happy to retweet random people who praise her “phenomenal journalism”, but I’m not sure how phenomenal it really is.’ Evidencing her case, the Boris Johnson ally pointed to how ‘this week, she confidently told her 600,000 Twitter followers that president Joe Biden “will continue in the role until November”. This, as an official correction swiftly pointed out, was rubbish: if Biden stays on he will remain president until his successor takes up the role in January.’
Mr S is not overly surprised at Dorries’ conclusion that ‘accuracy is perhaps not always Maitlis’s main concern’. Steerpike has been keeping track of claims made on The News Agents podcast – and has found a number of them are not always spot on.
Take, for example, the podcast’s inability to understand Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, which led to Scottish listeners venting on Twitter about the ‘ill-informed’ discussions and ‘woeful lack of engagement‘ with events north of the border. Or the hosts’ unwillingness to challenge Layla Moran’s claim that families ‘pay extortionate amounts of money particularly to entities connected to the Israeli security forces’ to leave Gaza. Or the podcast’s suggestion that the SNP ceasefire motion put forward in February this year didn’t call for the release of hostages from Gaza, unlike Labour’s.
Most notably, the podcast rather struggled to cover the police raid on SNP HQ and Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon’s home. During the hysteria, false reports claimed the former first minister’s garden was being dug up after images appeared of garden equipment being moved. Mr S contacted someone at the scene who confirmed that was not the case. The three ex-BBC journalists who make up The News Agents were not quite as quick-witted. Instead, they released a podcast episode entitled ‘Why are the police digging up Nicola Sturgeon’s garden?’ in which they discussed exactly that. Later, they quietly changed the title of the episode in the hope no one would notice, er, such a glaring journalistic error. Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh?
SNP leader convinced party in ‘strong position’ for 2026
To Scotland, where First Minister John Swinney appears to be trying to make a career for himself as a spin doctor. The leader of the Nats has a new tactic to win back support for his beleaguered party – convince voters that, contrary to their daily experiences, his party has actually been, er, ‘formidable’ over the 17 years it has clung onto power in Holyrood. During a trip to Aberdeenshire, the FM also suggested that the SNP’s bad press is down to a lack of ‘appreciation’ of all it has achieved. Pull the other one…
The Nats saw dozens of Westminster MPs ousted at the election – and lost their place as the third largest party in Westminster. Swinney the spinner, however, described the rather catastrophic demise of his group as being a mere ‘setback’ to the SNP, and believes his party remains in a ‘strong position’ for the 2026 Holyrood election. Good heavens.
Away from fantasyland, Swinney’s former colleagues are not quite as optimistic as the First Minister. In fact, in a growing civil war that looks set to engulf the party, many veteran SNP politicians have called for the FM to stand down. Former deputy leader Jim Sillars has said the nationalist group will ‘not recover’ if Honest John stays put, while health secretary Alex Neil has warned the Nats are headed for ‘another rout’ in 2026 if he doesn’t go. Ex-MP and former party treasurer Douglas Chapman has called for for a ‘fresh start’ without Swinney at the helm, while former Edinburgh politician Joanna Cherry has slammed her party for its ‘problem of misogyny’.
Meanwhile, the SNP has been left with a rather large money problem post-election – as Mr S wrote this month – with less MPs and no donations from, um, living donors coming in. It’s not looking rosy for the secessionists – and if they continue to deny reality, things will only get worse…
What will Labour do about Iran?
Labour isn’t typically known for offering a more hawkish foreign policy platform than the Conservatives, but at the last election there was an exception: Iran.
Yvette Cooper and David Lammy have spoken in strong terms about toughening up Britain’s approach to Iran
George Robertson, the former defence secretary and Nato secretary general leading the government’s defence review, has described Tehran as part of the ‘deadly quartet’ of nations working together to challenge the Western-led global order.
Both Yvette Cooper and David Lammy have also previously spoken in strong terms about toughening up Britain’s approach to Iran. With the Home Office and Foreign Office on board, Sir Keir Starmer has the chance to enact a true cross-governmental strategy for combating this rising threat. But will he live up to the tough rhetoric?
There is no disputing the growing danger that the Islamic Republic poses to the UK and its allies. Much like Russia, Iran illustrates that a small and ramshackle economy is no barrier to being a strategic threat when a despotic government is prepared to hurl resources at the military.
Iranian forces are already in conflict with the West across several theatres including Ukraine, where it has supplied hundreds of surface-to-surface missiles and drones (such as Mohajer-6 and the Shahed kamikaze variant) to Russia.
These, alongside the Iranian trainers accompanying them, have been critical to Vladimir Putin’s sustained and devastating assault on Kyiv’s energy supplies and infrastructure. In return, the Kremlin has provided Russian Su-35 fighters, helicopters and sophisticated air defence systems, which Tehran hopes can intercept potential Israeli and US missiles.
Iran also threatens two of the world’s most important trade chokepoints, and has not been shy about applying pressure to destabilise global supply chains.
First, there’s the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. For good reason is it described as the world’s most important oil chokepoint: 30 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade crude oil passes through the Strait, along with 20 per cent of global Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) trade; in many cases there are no alternative means of bringing these volumes to market.
Earlier this year, Iranian commandos seized the MSC Aries, a Portuguese registered container ship, within international waters in the Strait, and since 2019, Iran has engaged in heightened naval action against European, American, and Israeli shipping in the Strait.
Since November, Tehran’s proxies in Yemen, the Houthis, have also been waging a sustained campaign against shipping in the Red Sea – a critical conduit for 30 per cent of the world’s container traffic.
Houthi militants have launched over 70 attacks on merchant vessels, causing global trade disruption and costly rerouting. As of end March 2024, volume of traffic passing through the Red Sea had fallen by half, and the much longer route via the Cape of Good Hope has seen a 100 per cent increase in traffic. One analysis forecasts global shipping prices could double, with dire consequences for inflation.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – the fundamentalist praetorian guard of Iran’s regime – has channelled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of funding, supply of weapons and training to militia groups in Gaza, Iraq, and Lebanon as part of its strategy to draw a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel.
Nor has Tehran shrunk from attempting operations on our own soil. Counter-terrorism police revealed last year that 15 plots by Iran to either kidnap or kill British or UK-based individuals had been foiled by police or the security services.
The regime has been targeting its internal enemies, dissidents, and Farsi news organisations in the UK. MI5 fears it may start targeting other UK-based individuals in response to the war in Gaza.
In opposition, Labour were quick to call out the Conservatives for their alleged pusillanimity on Iran, especially its refusal to follow America’s lead and proscribe the IRGC. Cooper has promised to change the law to make it easier to outlaw such groups, while Lammy has previously raised concerns about Tehran’s nuclear programme.
But talk is cheap, especially when not in office, and it remains to be seen whether the government will follow through on its tough stance. It will certainly meet official resistance; a previous push to proscribe the IRGC was killed by the Foreign Office, which feared damaging diplomatic relations with Tehran.
Such attitudes belong in the past. We are already in combat with Iran and her proxies across multiple fronts – and the situation could get much hotter still. Hezbollah has amassed in Lebanon a huge rocket arsenal, and it would be foolish to bet against open conflict with Israel sooner rather than later.
Should that happen, the situation could rapidly devolve into a much broader, multi-theatre conflict across the Middle East, especially if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Ministers should start preparing immediately – including for the possibility of allied operations against Iran itself. A showdown with Iran may be coming soon and Labour’s strong words will be sorely tested.
Why Labour should avoid Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes
During the election campaign, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made bold promises – no increases to Income Tax, National Insurance, or VAT. She also sought to echo the ‘prudence’ mantra of her predecessor as chancellor Gordon Brown, though his tenure was marked by significant spending increases rather than prudent restraint.
True to form, over the weekend Reeves indicated the government could accept recommendations for above-inflation pay increases, of about 5.5 per cent, for NHS workers and teachers. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that a similar pay hike across public sector professions would cost about £10 billion, requiring more taxation or borrowing. This comes amid other ambitious plans for restructuring and investment, which will all cost even more money.
Stealth taxes, such as failing to adjust income tax thresholds for inflation or tweaking capital and inheritance taxes, are Reeves’s most likely choice
But the public finances are in a precarious state. The tax burden is the highest it has been in seventy years. This year, Tax Freedom Day – the day of the year when the average person in the UK has earned enough to pay all the taxes demanded of them, and finally gets to earn for themselves – fell on 10 June, the latest since records began. Add on the burden of government borrowing and it is 20 July. On present projections of government spending plans and projections from the Office of Budget Responsibility, the Adam Smith Institute calculates that by the next election we will all be paying another two weeks’ worth of tax.
That is crippling, but there is little room for manoeuvre in the public finances. And government spending (even wasteful spending) is notoriously hard to cut, so further tax hikes are seen as inevitable. But if the government does decide to raise taxes to fund its plans, the challenge lies in what taxes they choose to raise. That is because all taxes have unintended consequences, usually bad ones, and taxes invariably damage one group of people or another – and the economy and growth in general.
Tax rises are unpopular, so governments naturally plump for ones that do not show so much. Stealth taxes, such as failing to adjust income tax thresholds for inflation or tweaking capital and inheritance taxes, are therefore Reeves’s most likely choice. But while stealth taxes may be politically easy, they can be extremely damaging. Gordon Brown’s stealth tweak of an obscure pensions tax, for example, ripped £2 billion a year out of people’s savings, made pensioners poorer and hit investment.
As I find in a timely new book, An Introduction to Taxation for Institute of Economic Affairs, some taxes are much more damaging than others. Higher taxes on struggling businesses, for example, like rises in employer national insurance, would be extremely harmful, because they are ultimately borne by consumers and workers, not just business owners. Higher capital gains taxes – another option Reeves has left open – would further distort saving and investment decisions, driving investment abroad and hitting UK productivity.
If the government is going to raise taxes, it should instead focus on shifting the tax burden away from productive activities like work, saving, and investment, and onto harmful things such as pollution and environmental degradation.
And more fundamentally, we need a comprehensive reassessment of the UK’s tax system: its purpose, level, the types of taxes, and their overall effects. Simplification and increased transparency should be key objectives, making the system easier (and cheaper) for individuals and businesses to understand and comply with.
Sadly, politicians rarely make bold, principled reforms until they have run out of other options. The political reality is that the new government’s tax policies will be a delicate balancing act. Reeves must navigate the competing demands of funding a ravenous public sector, maintaining her electoral promises, and trying not to do too much damage to future economic prosperity. But again, the reality is that she and her team will face intense pressure to eke out all possible revenue sources, even at the expense of squeezing the UK’s economic recovery.
But if tax rises are coming, they really must be carefully focused, on the things that are less damaging to growth, and not on the businesses, employment, saving and investment that are the only things that will get us out of the debt we are in.
Real fiscal success would require a clear-eyed assessment of the trade-offs involved, a willingness to make difficult choices, and a steadfast commitment to policies that prioritize economic recovery and growth. Anything less risks compromising the UK’s growth and competitiveness.
It is a challenge, but the opportunity to reform the fiscal landscape has never been greater. With realistic, principled leadership, Reeves could chart a course that takes the UK on its way to sustainable long-term growth, while still upholding the values of fairness and equity that her party has long stood for.
President Kamala could spell trouble for Israel – but good news for Ukraine
In the two days since Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris as the Democratic party nominee, much attention has been devoted to the mechanics of Biden’s decision, which close advisers or family members may have convinced him to pull out and how the entire episode will shake up the race. But with Harris the strong favourite to become the Democratic’s presidential nominee, it’s worth asking what president Harris could mean for other countries, not least the United State’s allies – and enemies.
The VP is tougher on Israel than Biden for the way it’s prosecuting its war on Hamas
Does Harris have a foreign policy agenda, let alone a foreign policy philosophy? It’s a difficult question to answer, because Harris is in many ways the opposite of Joe Biden on the international stage. Biden has been around for a half-century, has a huge rolodex of foreign leaders on his desk and fancies himself an international relations aficionado. Harris, meanwhile, is a relative newcomer on the national stage. She served one six-year term in the United States Senate before running for president herself in the 2020 cycle (where she lost) and joining the Biden ticket. Her work in the Senate focused on criminal justice issues given her role on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Foreign policy or national security played only a minor role. As vice president, she was tasked with finding a way to decrease illegal migration from Central America to the U.S.. And as a top cabinet member, Harris was privy to all the closely-held national security conversations; she was reportedly the last person in the room before Biden decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
For the most part, foreign policy hasn’t taken up much of her time. Even so, there are nuggets of information embedded in her voting record and policy speeches that offer a few clues about where she stands on certain issues.
Broadly speaking, Harris can’t be considered a liberal internationalist in the mould of Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power. She isn’t a neoconservative like George W. Bush or a hard-power primacist like Dick Cheney. Nor can she be called a realist like Brent Scowcroft or Henry Kissinger.
Harris, frankly, is hard to pigeon-hole. Where she stands depends on which region of the world we’re talking about.
Like her boss, Biden, Harris isn’t all that enthusiastic about bringing the U.S. deeper into the Middle East and views the use of U.S. military force warily. In 2018, after Trump bombed Syrian military facilities in retaliation for the Syrian government attacking civilians with chemical weapons, Harris questioned what ‘legal rationale’ the White House employed to justify U.S. action.
A year later, when Trump tweeted that U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Syria (in the end, they weren’t), Harris criticised Trump’s decision-making style without necessarily opposing his call to pull out. She was a vocal supporter of the Iran nuclear deal that temporarily capped Tehran’s enrichment work in exchange for U.S. sanctions relief; argued that Trump’s killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 risked provoking another war in the Middle East; and she sponsored legislation days after Soleimani’s assassination that prohibited U.S. military force against Iran without congressional approval.
On the war in Gaza, Harris has been out front on the urgent need for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas even before Biden formally floated a draft agreement in May. Rhetorically at least, the VP is tougher on Israel than Biden is for the way it’s prosecuting its war against Hamas. While she has been careful not to stray from Biden’s policy of supporting Israel’s right to strike Hamas militarily, there’s no question that the humanitarian calamity inside Gaza has had deep impressions on her. During remarks this March, Harris was blunt: ‘People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane and our common humanity compels us to act.’
Harris even suggested that the U.S. wasn’t ruling out consequences if Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a full-scale invasion of Rafah, which was crammed with refugees.
On Ukraine, Harris is a hawk. Her views are identical to Biden’s. She has met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky multiple times, and in each encounter reiterated Washington’s full military, economic and diplomatic backing against Russia. If she talks about the prospects of a negotiated settlement to the war, Harris does so in a way that basically rules out a diplomatic process to that end: only Ukraine’s maximalist terms and Zelensky’s so-called ‘just peace’ are acceptable. Of course, Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s incentive to cooperate in such a scheme are virtually nonexistent.
On China, Harris is conventional. During international conferences and foreign trips to Asian capitals, the vice president reiterates the standard line that could come from any U.S. policymaker these days: China is a revisionist power seeking to dominate its smaller neighbours, is violating the international rules-based order and is deliberately making Washington’s goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific harder to accomplish. She blasted China’s ‘bullying’ behaviour in the South China Sea and reinforced that the U.S. will support Taiwan’s defence needs. China is likely to view a hypothetical president Harris largely the same way it views a hypothetical president Trump: as a loss either way.
Anyone looking for a Kamala Harris foreign policy doctrine should stop wasting their time. She simply hasn’t been immersed in the issues long enough to have one.