The schism that could tear Israel apart

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is looking increasing precarious as international opposition grows. When I went to Friday night dinner at my in-law’s last week, everyone was gripped by the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to remove state funding from Orthodox Yeshivas, unless they break their 76-year practice of refusing to enlist in the military.

The court ruled that as of 1 April, ultra-Orthodox schools will no longer receive any state funds unless they allow their students to serve in the IDF, as all other Jewish Israelis must do. 

This marks the end of the uneasy status quo that’s existed since the formation of Israel. Back in 1947, the then chairman of the Jewish Agency, David Ben Gurion wrote a letter to Haredi representatives reassuring them that his new state would allow a separate education system for the ultra-Orthodox society. In 1949, as Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion officially exempted yeshiva students from military service. Ben-Gurion later regretted it. 

This has always caused resentment among the broader population. The dispute has become particularly contentions in recent years as the ultra-Orthodox, who tend to have much larger families, have grown in population compared to secular Israelis. 

Since 7 October there has been growing anger from all parts of secular society at their continuing exemption. As one columnist in the liberal newspaper Haaretz put it, the issue ‘is not about taxes that can be increased or decreased. It is not about a budget that can be given or cancelled, this is an irreversible and eternal thing’; for most Israelis the chance of dying in the military or having your child die is an unavoidable risk of citizenship, but ‘the ultra-Orthodox are exempt from this death’.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

The response from leaders of the Haredim usually fails to help their case: rather than focus on more prosaic objections to their enlistment, they put forward theological arguments that carry increasingly little weight. 

Aryed Deri, leader of the Shas party, which represents the Mizrachi ultra-Orthodox, lamented that it was ‘precisely in the days when the people of Israel need the mercy of heaven in the south and in the north’ that the court adopts this ‘offensive attitude towards the Torah scholars on whom the world stands’. 

Deri went on to call the ruling ‘a sign of Cain’ and ‘an unprecedented’ insult against the ultra-Orthodox by the Jewish state.

According to one article in Yeded Na’im, the newspaper of the Lithuanian Haredim, while it is the role of secular Jews fighting in the IDF to preserve ‘the Israeli people’, the ultra-orthodox had the role of preserving ‘the Jewish people, which is the most important, most existential role’.

Last November one Rabbi went so far as to say that the ultra-Orthodox should be grateful to the IDF in the same way that they were grateful to the bin men ‘who collect the garbage every morning’.

These statements have not endeared the ultra-Orthodox to the broader Israeli public – and they obscure the real and growing division between the attitudes of rabbis and political leaders and the wider Haredi community. 

According to polling by the Viterbi Center, between 2012 and 2018 found that only one tenth of ultra-Orthodox believed their military exemption should end – but a new poll conducted after the October attacks found that number had increased to 22 per cent.

Today you can see videos on social media of Haredi in uniform being applauded in their communities. According to Dr Nechumi Yaffe of Tel Aviv University, ‘They used to not let a soldier in uniform enter the synagogue’, but ‘now they do’.

All this spells more bad news for Netanyahu. Protecting the ultra-Orthodox from enlistment was one of the pins holding his fragile coalition together. The court ruling has taken this away from him. 

Bibi had previously argued that those yeshiva students who had not yet received a call up to enlist should continue to receive funding, that the court’s decision would lead to the closing of hundreds of schools, and called for a 30 days’ grace period to formulate a new law to manage the transition from ultra-Orthodox exemption to service. 

Now he is attempting to pass emergency legislation to extend the exemption, but the court ruling has made his grip on power even more precarious. The crowd of over ten thousand who camped outside the Knesset in the most recent protest included the families of the remaining hostages, secular Israelis angry at his attempts to maintain the ultra-Orthodox exemption, and people of diverse politics who just hate Bibi. 

In an attempt to get the emergency legislation through the Knesset, Netanyahu has apparently been in negotiation with Palestinian MKs to persuade them to abstain from the vote. This desperate measure perfectly encapsulates the bind Bibi is in: already dependent on the ultra-Orthodox and the religious right, he is now forced to make overtures to the Arab parties in order to survive. 

The ruling has made a bad situation even worse for Bibi, and it will have massive and unexpected ramifications in terms of Israeli politics, not merely in terms of topping the Netanyahu government, but by expanding a secular-religious rupture in Israeli society that hasn’t been seen before.

What’s going on with Spain’s Golden Visas?

Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, wants to abolish the country’s ‘Golden Visa’ scheme, according to which non-EU citizens automatically receive residency for three years if they purchase property worth at least €500,000 (£429,000). Sanchez hopes that doing so will help tackle the cost-of-living crisis and soaring rental prices in the country’s biggest cities. It’s unlikely to do either. It might, however, have unintended positive effects in other areas. 

Golden Visas were introduced by Spain’s then-Conservative government in 2013, as a way of stimulating foreign investment after the economic crisis. They can also be acquired by non-EU citizens who invest at least a million euros (£855,000) in Spanish shares or two million euros (£1.7 million) in the country’s public debt – two routes to residency that Sanchez proposes to leave open. But 94 per cent of Golden Visas awarded since 2013 have been pegged to high-end property purchases, which the Socialist leader claims is pricing Spaniards out of the market; affordable housing, he announced on X earlier this week, is a ‘constitutional right and not a mere speculative business’. Spain thus hopes to follow France, Portugal and Ireland, all of which have recently banned or tweaked comparable initiatives. 

Sanchez seems to think that half a million-euro properties are ‘affordable’ for the majority of Spaniards; but according to the property portal Idealista, less than 0.1 per cent of homes purchased in Spain between 2013 and November 2022 were part of the Golden Visa scheme. Scrapping the initiative will therefore only affect a tiny portion of sales at the high end of the market. A spokesperson for Idealista called the proposed ban on Golden Visas ‘yet another misdiagnosis’ by Sanchez’s Socialist-led government.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

The proposal also misses its intended target in another way. Because you’re not required to be a resident in Spain in order to purchase a house (you just need a Spanish ID number and bank account), foreign investors who plan to use property as a money-maker without ever setting foot in the country can continue to do so. For such investors, whether high-net-worth individuals or not, gaining permission to live and work in Spain is irrelevant, an offer that will never be taken up. According to the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International, the top two beneficiaries of Spain’s Golden Visa scheme have been Chinese and Russian nationals, who between them hold well over half (3,871) of the 6,200 automatic residencies granted since 2013. One wonders how many of these wealthy individuals fall into the permanently-absent-landlord category.  

Golden Visa applicants might, of course, be interested in securing residency abroad for reasons that have nothing to do with culture and lifestyle: tax evasion and money laundering may be among the less benign motivations. In recent years, Transparency International has led the campaign against ‘citizenship by investment’ (CBI) initiatives on this basis, claiming that they don’t encourage ‘genuine investment or migration – but [serve] corrupt interests’. The EU adopts a similar stance: in early 2022, MEPs called for a blanket ban on CBIs, on the grounds that they’re ‘objectionable from an ethical, legal and economic point of view, and pose several serious security risks’.

The standard objection to banning Golden Visas centres on the supposedly off-putting message sent to legitimate foreign investors, who in Spain’s case are said to make substantial contributions to the economy. But this objection is misleading in two respects. First, it confuses a ban on automatic residency with hostility to foreign investment. There is nothing to stop wealthy individuals continuing to purchase property in Spain, for whatever purpose they choose: a cancellation of Golden Visas would only mean that, if the house is actually for them, they’ll have to take the normal, bureaucracy-laden route to residency. And secondly, hardly any statistics exist to demonstrate the extent to which owners of Golden Visa properties benefit their local communities, let alone the national economy. But given that such houses account for less than one per cent of those sold in Spain, can that impact really be so great? If these houses are sitting empty most of the time or being used for nefarious purposes, they are benefitting no-one but their owners.

On a more personal note, I have little sympathy for one class of prospective buyers who would be affected by Sanchez’s proposed measure – namely, those who are looking for an easy way into Spain. Securing a permit to live and work in a foreign country is almost a rite of passage for most expats. I speak from experience when I say it’s a difficult and frustrating process, but perhaps it should be: the reams of forms and photocopies of forms, appointments with omnipotent bureaucrats, linguistic challenges and a vast range of cultural nuances that tell you a lot about the country in which you’re starting afresh. As a Brit in Spain, you have to deal with all those things eventually, so taking a costly shortcut won’t benefit you in the long run. Sanchez’s proposed ban on Golden Visas won’t make a dent in the property market, but it might deter fraudsters and democratise the residency process. 

Watch: Tory tax protestors target Rayner in Teesside

Try as she might to duck questions on her tax affairs, the issue just keeps following Angela Rayner around — literally. On a campaign event today in Teesside, the deputy Labour leader was met by three men in high-vis jackets, one of whom was later identified as local Tory councillor John Coulson who took part in the protest alongside other Conservative councillors. The men were carrying an ominous black banner that read: ‘Angela Rayner Tax Dodger?’ Where Rayner walked around Yarm, her unexpected guests went too. In fact, so hot on Rayner’s tail were the protestors that the shadow levelling up secretary eventually had to leg it out the back of a pub she’d just walked into. Not like Labour to about turn…

The stunt follows weeks of speculation about whether Rayner avoided capital gains tax on her council house and broke electoral law, while the deputy Labour leader has refused to make her tax details public. Only hours before the visit, Tory MP Jill Mortimer had blasted the shadow levelling up secretary as a ‘hypocrite’ and ‘nasty truth twister’ when she revealed Rayner had demanded Mortimer publish her tax details for ‘transparency’ in 2020. And, at the weekend, the Mail on Sunday published a host of photos and social media evidence that shows the deputy Labour leader relaxing at her husband’s property — a different house from the one she told authorities was her main residence.

Sir Keir Starmer has defended his deputy, despite not having seen the legal advice she received on the matter himself — while shadow foreign secretary David Lammy attempted to excuse his colleague on the BBC by accusing her critics of unfairly targeting ‘this northern woman’. Hm. The last time Mr S checked, the north of England has the same laws as the south…

Watch the full clip here: 

Labour overtakes SNP in polls for first time

Uh oh. Today brings tidings of misery for hapless Humza Yousaf as a new poll reveals that support for Labour has overtaken the SNP for the first time since the 2014 indyref. The YouGov survey sees Labour on 33 per cent, up a point since October last year, while support for the Nats has gone down by two points to 31 per cent. How the mighty fall…

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has been narrowing the gap between the two parties for the last year, with the resignation, police probe and arrest of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon providing a helping hand. Meanwhile support for independence has stagnated, with ‘yes’ stuck at six points behind ‘no’.

And it’s not good news for the Scottish Tories either, who have dropped by six points to a mere 14 per cent — something that will rather concern party leader Douglas Ross who promised his party ‘a really good general election’. Splitting the right-wing vote, the Reform party could see support grow north of the border, with the poll showing Richard Tice’s party gaining five points to seven per cent. 

Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act has generated a rather large amount of online hate so far — for, em, itself — and the social media furore has extended into this week while the Daily Record finds that downloads of the SNP’s independence white papers have fallen dramatically from over 78,000 for the first document to around 3,000 for one of the latest publications. Meanwhile, news broke yesterday of the First Minister’s brother-in-law being charged for extortion and abduction after a man fell out of a window in Dundee and died. All that combined with the latest polling, it’s been a rather glib week for hapless Humza, and it’s only Wednesday…

Sadiq Khan’s Ulez has spectacularly backfired

What was that about Sadiq Khan’s expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) supposedly helping to reduce our dependence on cars and clean up the air? As well as the stick of charges of non-compliant vehicles, Khan has rolled out a very large carrot: £121 million of funds to help motorists ‘transition to greener alternatives’. That includes £49 million worth of scrappage grants for cars, at £2,000 a time, and £72 million worth of scrappage payments for vans and minibuses. According to City Hall in a press release last October, the whole package has resulted in 80,000 fewer motorists driving around London.

So London’s streets are presumably now much less congested than they were before Ulez was brought in? Er, not quite. According to the sat nav maker TomTom, congestion last year was actually worse than it was before Ulez and the pandemic. In 2023, motorists spent an average of 45 per cent of their journey time stuck in jams, up from 37 per cent in 2019. If there really are fewer motorists using cars around London – and on past records it is not unreasonable to be sceptical of data presented by the mayor’s office – there have clearly been other changes which have impacted on journey times, for example from low traffic neighbourhoods.

Transport for London’s own statistics refute the idea that there has been a shift towards greener forms of transport since Ulez was introduced. While road traffic has recovered to within 5 per cent of the level it was prior to the pandemic, bus and tube usage is still 20 per cent lower than it was. Obviously, Ulez isn’t the only factor at play there. The pandemic led to a collapse in public transport use, as we were told to stay at home and avoid it, and helped cause a permanent shift in work patterns. Rush hours are a lot quieter now, especially on Fridays, when Khan recently lifted peak travel restrictions to try to encourage people back to tubes and buses.

But the fact that road traffic levels have recovered faster than public transport use suggests that changes in work patterns have hampered a shift to ‘greener travel’. When people do leave their homes, whether for work, leisure or shopping, it seems they are more inclined to do so by car. Indeed, the kind of jobs which cannot be done from home – such as nursing, caring or building trades – tend also to be the ones which are hard to do by public transport.

Sadiq Khan promised cleaner air and less traffic. The first might well have been achieved – although air pollution levels have been falling sharply for the past 70 years, and the more polluting, older vehicles would have steadily been removed from the roads, Ulez or no Ulez. But it is a lot more difficult for the Mayor to claim that he has cut traffic – on the contrary, in some ways it appears now to be worse.

The ten candidates dropped by Reform

Reform UK’s election campaign hasn’t got off to the best start. Richard Tice’s party has already had to drop ten prospective parliamentary candidates after some rather unsavoury social media posts were highlighted by media organisations and campaign groups. The Reform leader has since said that his party had published its candidate list early so that outside organisations could help vet them and that he welcomes the ‘extra scrutiny’. It does, however, raise rather serious questions about the quality of his own vetting processes…

Here is the full list of the candidates ditched so far:

Ian Harris

Harris, a self-proclaimed ‘pastafarian’, is a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He fell out with the DVLA in 2015 after he insisted he should be allowed to wear a colander on his head in his driving licence photo, comparing it to Muslim women wearing a hijab. An account run by Harris was found to have liked tweets by former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson and former British National Party leader Nick Griffin. And, as it happens, Reform leader may have inadvertently safeguarded himself against a future rebellion by ditching Harris. Among the former candidate’s liked tweets were several attacks on Tice himself — including one by Robinson which read: ‘F*** Reform under his leadership. It’s establishment run.’ A narrow miss…

Amodio Amato

The Mail on Sunday uncovered a number of offensive social media posts by Amato — including his description of London as an ‘Islamic State’ and a post that said there would be a ‘Muslim army run by Sadiq Khan’. Amato has also said the First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, is ‘most certainly a Hamas terrorist supporter’. But, as his comments were caught too late, his name remains on the ballot paper for the Woodfield ward at the Stevenage Borough Council elections this May. Unlucky…

Jonathan Kay

Kay, who was the party’s South Ribble candidate, was dropped by Tice’s party after remarks he had made online in 2019 came to light. He claimed that Africans had IQs ‘among the lowest in the world’ and that Muslims ‘never coexist with others’. Kay was dropped by the party after campaign group Hope Not Hate discovered his posts. 

Mick Greenhough 

The Reform candidate for Orpington was ditched by Tice after he was found to have tweeted last year that ‘the only solution’ was to ‘remove the Muslims from our territory’. Four years previously, Greenhough had also posted on Twitter that Ashkenazi Jews were a ‘problem’ and had ‘caused the world massive misery’. Greenhough’s comments were also discovered by Hope Not Hate, and he was removed from Reform’s candidate list soon after. 

Peter Addis

Sir David Attenborough should be ‘killed off’, Addis had said on social media, and the former Reform candidate for South Shropshire also called Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, a ‘slag’ and a ‘trollop’. The fridge engineer was found to have written rather vulgarly that anal sex ‘is where brown babies come from’ and was banned from Facebook for 30 days after using a racist term to describe Chinese people. Since being dropped by Reform UK, Addis has apologised but says that people take his remarks ‘literally, when it’s a joke. It’s just being silly really.’

Benjamin ‘Beau’ Dade

Formerly Reform’s candidate for South Swindon, Dade was dropped after Hope Not Hate revealed that he had written an article for the Mallard in 2022 about deporting ‘millions’ of British citizens to ‘rid itself of the foreign plague we have been diseased with’. He called for ‘millions of foreigners and their dependants’ to be removed from the country and advocated for ‘some form of purge’ of civil servants who were ‘corrupted by traitors’. Dade added: ‘The reality of this policy will inevitably be messy. Whole families crying and shrieking and being violent and destructive when they are being detained.’ Lovely…

Ginny Ball

Ball was Reform’s candidate for Rutland and Stamford before it emerged that she had told British-born BBC radio presenter Nihal Arthanayake on Twitter to ‘emigrate to a black-only country’ and suggested that British media personality Shola Mos-Shogbamimu should be deported. And Ball waded into the Elgin Marbles debate to air her view that the UK should, er, ‘give all immigrants back to their countries’. Mr S isn’t much clearer about where Ball stands on the Marbles themselves though…

Nick Davies

Davies, the prospective parliamentary candidate for North East Bedfordshire, resigned from Reform UK after the party ‘spoke to him about the content of his social media’. One image featured pictures of Saqid Khan and, um, Adolf Hitler with the text: ‘Evil doesn’t die. It reinvents itself’. Davies was also found to have to referred to immigrants as an ‘invasion’, calling them a ‘silent army housed in hotels’. 

David Carpin

Reform’s former prospective parliamentary candidate for Henley-on-Thames was dropped by Tice after — you guessed it — his social media posts came to light. Carpin had compared transgender and non-binary people to Hitler, called gay pride a ‘sin’ and replaced stars in the European flag with swastikas. He posted an collage of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, transgender TikToker Dylan Mulvaney, non-binary singer Sam Smith and Hitler under text reading: ‘Room is completely engulfed in flames, you can only save ONE…’.

Tice fired Carpin when live on air and warned that ‘people need to learn lesson from that’, adding: ‘You’ve got freedom of expression, that’s the joy of being in a democracy like ours but I’ve also got my freedom of choice as to who is going to be my candidate.’ 

Roger Hoe

Once Reform’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Beverley and Holderness, Hoe was ditched by the party for his social media posts. He has circulated rather questionable posts online, alongside a number of conspiracy theories — including those about the World Economic Forum, chemtrails and the Russian war in Ukraine. Oh dear.

An unimpressed Tice has since issued a warning to his candidates, telling them: ‘For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to have a glass on a Friday night then don’t use social media.’ The Reform leader went on:

If it’s not sensible, if someone lets us down hereafter then, frankly, if it is inappropriate, if it is unacceptable, then we’re going to part company. You can have your freedom of speech, your freedom of expression. That doesn’t mean you have the right to represent Reform UK as a parliamentary candidate — because that’s our choice.

That’s them told.

But a number of Reform’s remaining candidates have already attracted media attention. Some have shared Covid conspiracies and outlandish ‘Great Reset’ theories that may cause voters to question their credibility. And then there’s the strange case of Iris Leask, the party’s candidate for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, who has rather bafflingly called for meat-eaters to turn cannibal and the human race to be ‘obliterated’. That’s one way of wiping out your competition, at least…

But now that ten candidates have gone, will the ones that remain heed Tice’s warnings? Or will Reform be forced to drop more candidates? Watch this space…

Hamas has all but won

It would be hard to imagine that almost exactly six months after October 7, I would find myself saying this, but Israel is either on a path to defeat or has lost the war already.

The way in which the Jewish state – the regional military superpower, enjoying huge military support from the global superpower – is being forced to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is a cautionary tale for the West. It is often correctly said that Israel is on the frontline of the struggle against jihadism. Well, pay attention: the collapse of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which after the October atrocities was the most justified imaginable, is a harbinger of what may lie ahead.

Let’s look at the facts on the ground. At the height of the war, there were hundreds of thousands of troops in Gaza. This week, however, almost all Israeli forces were withdrawn, leaving behind only 1,000 combat troops from the Nahal Brigade. They are deployed only along the narrow Netzarim corridor, which bisects Gaza from east to west to prevent Hamas creeping north. The southern portion of the Strip, from Rafah on the Egyptian border to Khan Yunis – where the 98^th commando division sacrificed many lives to root out Hamas and pursue a fruitless search for its leader, Yahya Sinwar – has been abandoned to the jihadis. And there remain pockets of Hamas in the north.

The official Israeli line is that all this is simply a regrouping tactic to prepare for a future invasion of Rafah, which is backed by most Israelis. This is not out of some bloodlust: Israel understands that without taking Rafah, Hamas will simply return and repeat October 7. In the words of a senior Israeli politician, you can’t extinguish 80 per cent of a fire.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

In a desperate attempt to steady his restive coalition and calm the voting public, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have set a date for the Rafah operation, once the troops are ready. But few people believe him. It is now very difficult to see how this can ever take place.

With Hamas once again taking control of the south, Israel would need to pull hundreds of thousands of reserves away from their families once again and re-conquer that territory before driving down towards Rafah. In fact, now that the troops have left, the jihadis are already returning.

Just hours after the exhausted men of the 98^th division pulled out of Khan Yunis, a barrage of rockets was fired at Israel from the freshly vacated town. This is a hint of the scale of the challenge that the withdrawal has created.

Once the south was secured again, the IDF would need to evacuate the 1.4 million people Hamas is using as a human  shield from Rafah and direct them to a safe zone in the coastal area, which would also require construction. With the cooperation of which aid agency exactly? And with which international allies? The Biden administration has now set its face openly against a Rafah invasion, and even if manoeuvres are delayed until November, the nature of Donald Trump’s support remains an open question. It is true that the Americans sent thousands of bombs and a fleet of F-35 fighter planes to Israel a few weeks ago, but this was an order that had been placed years before. It forms no guarantee of future provisions. The war, with its relentless propaganda from the other side, has made supporting Israel more toxic than it has ever been.

After six months of blood and tears, what is the result? Huge destruction in Gaza and the partial conquest of the north. But more than 130 hostages remain in captivity and Hamas, while degraded, is far from destroyed. At least four battalions remain operational in Rafah and Sinwar is still at large. As I type, Israeli families are altering their everyday plans for fear of a retaliation from Tehran to the recent IDF operation in Syria, which killed a senior Iranian terrorist. Hezbollah, with the largest missile arsenal in the region, continues to rain rockets on the Jewish state and dig in for a future war, and tens of thousands of Israelis are displaced from the northern border, living in hotels at the taxpayer’s expense. Gaza lies in ruins; Israel is hated around the world.

This was never about revenge, nor about provoking a regional confrontation. The aim of the war, which Israel never wanted, was to eliminate a genocidal threat on its border. On October 7, it was given no choice. Yet now the gains are being thrown away. For this so many families gave the lives of their sons?

The West must take heed. The epicentre of the other side’s strategy is in Tehran. Last week, the Ayatollah Khamenei held a meeting with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, during which he made the starkest of statements. ‘We have, so far, successfully won the media and PR wars, and have managed to change public opinion across the globe,’ he said. ‘We must continue with this.’ You have to hand it to the jihadists: they never keep their strategy a secret. That’s what makes it even more appalling.

For six months, commentators like me have been constantly warning that Hamas’s strategy is to manipulate public opinion so that Israel’s hands are tied before victory is secured. It does so, we repeated, by excluding numbers of Palestinian combatant dead in its death tolls, which are parroted by journalists and politicians alike. It does so by censoring the footage that comes out of Gaza, allowing the world to see only images of suffering civilians, never suffering terrorists. It does so by relying upon the relationship it has built up over many years with international aid agencies, the United Nations and the global media, all of whom are congenitally biased towards the Palestinians. In the West, we have swallowed this whole.

The counter-narrative – that Israel is taking all possible measures to protect innocent life, that it has been facing an existential war that can only end with the destruction of Hamas if any peace is to be won, that it is on the frontline of the struggle between the free world and jihadism – has been drowned out. The results can be seen in the hundreds of thousands taking to the streets, in the natural assumption in the minds of the public that Israel is perpetrating a ‘genocide’.

Preposterously, this can also be seen in Washington. President Biden himself has begun parroting Hamas’s casualty figures and levelling wild accusations against Israel, accusing it of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ and going ‘over the top’. In recent weeks, there have been a number of attacks on Israel from the Democrats, who now expend almost no energy criticising Hamas. The shift began with the President’s State of the Union address, which in its section on the Middle East focused exclusively on Israel’s conduct. Also came Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s demands for regime change in Jerusalem, followed by the American abstention at the United Nations, which allowed a hostile resolution to be passed.

On Monday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller ruled out support for a Rafah attack under any circumstances. Staunch friends of the Jewish state, including Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Susan Wild, have all called on the United States to withdraw shipments of arms and ammunition. Even Representative Josh Gottheimer, one of Israel’s most committed supporters, has been voicing criticism over the tragic strike on the aid convoy last week.

From the point of view of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, this is a dream come true. His strategy – to resist Israel’s assault until the international community tied its hands – is working wonderfully. What motivation has he to release any hostages now? What leverage is left to the Israelis?

According to reports, Sinwar’s messianic tendencies are now in full flow as he revels in ecstasy underground. This weird trait of his used to be described as ‘pathological or out of touch with reality.’ It now seems anything but.

To be fair to the Americans, beleaguered Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t made things easy. Far from it. His power rests on the far-right members of his coalition, who have vetoed both attempts to secure more aid for Gaza and any plan for the governance of the Strip that would involve Palestinian forces. On Thursday, a searing telephone conversation with President Biden caused Netanyahu to allow supplies to pass through the Erez crossing and authorise shipments directly from the port of Ashdod, both measures which his far-right bedfellows had blocked. But this is too little, too late. The Americans have been tearing their hair out while demanding better planning from the Israelis, but political deadlock continues to paralyse Jerusalem.

It is true that the IDF – which has fought bravely and effectively, losing relatively few soldiers and keeping civilian casualties relatively low – has been allowing 200 aid trucks a day into the Strip. This is more than was provided before the war (though domestic production has been severely reduced during the hostilities). But specific shipments, of flour for instance, have become snarled up in political brinkmanship. And without a plan for ‘the day after’, the distribution of aid has been chaotic.

A proposal from the defence establishment – which involved the West Bank intelligence chief Majed Faraj selecting 6,000 Fatah men from Gaza for training in Jordan to enable them to secure the Strip – was vetoed by Netanyahu, under pressure from his extremist flank. This was an imperfect solution, but at least it was a solution. Without it, there is a power vacuum which can only be filled by terrorists. The sporadic Hamas attacks even in the north are testament to the fragility of the IDF’s domination when it has no local component. The contrast between the impressive armed forces and their woeful political masters has never looked so stark.

Even this seems outdated now. Netanyahu promised ‘total victory’, saying it was ‘only a step away’. As the troops come home, Hamas celebrates and anti-government protesters take to the streets of Israel in increasing numbers, these words ring especially hollow. Whether the catastrophic political divisions ushered in by Netanyahu led Hamas to launch October 7 is unknown. But it is certain that Israel’s enemies are looking at the rallies on the streets of Tel Aviv and sharpening their knives.

For the West, however, it is the big picture that is of crucial importance. Whatever our frustrations with the appalling administration in Jerusalem, the way in which Washington and London have played out their hostilities in public – and have now apparently deprived Israel of victory – sends a dangerous signal to the world. Whether seen from Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang or Rafah, the message is clear: we may be more powerful than our enemies, but we no longer possess the resilience to stand up to them. Our allies see this equally clearly. Saudi Arabia would only sign a peace accord with Israel if a meaningful American defence pact was on the table. Will they trust such a deal now?

We need to open our eyes, and fast. The war in Gaza is not about Netanyahu. It is not even about Israel in itself. It is about the future of the West. For you and me and our families, the outlook has never looked more dangerous.

Why has Will Wragg resigned the Tory whip?

Six days after his involvement in the honeytrap sexting scandal was revealed, Will Wragg has now resigned the Tory whip. It follows his decision on Monday night to quit his roles as vice chairman of the 1922 committee and the public administration select committee. Wragg had previously announced in late 2022 that he would be standing down at the next election meaning he looks likely to sit out his last few months in parliament sitting as an independent. A statement from the whips’ office made clear that Wragg was ‘voluntarily relinquishing’ the whip.

So, why now? Within government there is a sense that the initially supportive reaction of Wragg was somewhat misjudged. Jeremy Hunt praised the Hazel Grove MP as ‘courageous’ on the Friday morning’s media round, the day after the Times broke the news of Wragg’s involvement in the phishing attack. Friends of Wragg agreed that he was a ‘victim’ in this, with Charles Walker telling the BBC that he ‘had been subject to a sting operation by a very clever and manipulative operator.’ Walker said that ‘that there’s a lot of compassion out there’ adding ‘I’m not excusing what Will has done, but I do think that he is a victim in this along with all the others.’

Yet this week, the mood has appeared to harden against Wragg. Following his resignation of the whip, party chairman Richard Holden told Sky that it is ‘the right thing to have done’ and that ‘It’s quite clear his career in public life is at an end.’ Within some quarters, there was irritation that Wragg was a distraction from the Tory attacks on Angela Rayner’s tax affairs. It is hoped that Wragg’s resignation will take the heat out of the affair for the Conservatives, even if he ‘voluntarily’ quit rather than having the whip removed. An example of this was offered by Rishi Sunak’s phone-in on LBC today. The Prime Minister easily brushed off criticism about why he allowed Wragg to resign by saying ‘People can judge me if they want to judge me on that, that’s fine, I accept that’ before turning the question to the ‘weakness’ of Starmer over the Rayner saga.

Wragg’s continued presence in the parliamentary party also risked becoming a factional issue for Sunak. He was one of the first to call for Boris Johnson to quit over partygate and was equally quick to demand that Liz Truss resign after the mini-Budget, even mocking her ‘deep state’ claims at a liaison committee meeting last month. It is therefore unsurprising that Johnson’s allies like Andrea Jenkyns, Sir Conor Burns, Lord Goldsmith and Nadine Dorries have led the public Tory criticism of Wragg since the scandal broke. Dorries has been particularly vocal, tweeting yesterday afternoon that ‘Wragg still has the whip because No.10 are terrified of what he could reveal if they remove it – the pack of cards may come tumbling down.’

With Wragg’s resignation of the party whip, Downing Street hope that it will draw a line under this affair, allow them to continue landing attacks on Rayner while avoiding the nightmare of yet another by-election involving Tory sleaze.

Why New Zealand is cracking down on immigration

The government of New Zealand this week tightened the country’s working visa rules in order to stem historically high numbers of international migrants making their way to the South Seas.

Immigration minister Erica Stanford said that the changes will allow businesses to make greater use of local workers while still attracting high-skill migrants where there are skill shortages. ‘Getting our immigration settings right is critical to this government’s plan to rebuild the economy,’ she says.

The new rules have also been billed as protecting migrants from exploitation. But at least part of the political story is about the way New Zealand’s infrastructure seems to be groaning in response to the surging number of international newcomers since the end of the country’s famously severe Covid restrictions.

On almost any given year up until 2020, New Zealand comfortably processed around 120,000 migrant arrivals, including thousands of younger Brits taking advantage of a working holiday scheme that allows thousands from both places to live and work in either country. In the wake of a new trade deal between the countries, the period covered by the scheme increased to three years and the age of eligibility put up to 35.

In the year to last June, however, the number of migrants of all stripes nearly doubled to almost 200,000. This in a nation of just 5.1 million souls.

Much of this surge is to do with the abrupt easing of draconian restrictions introduced during the pandemic. Flush with the conceit that Covid could yet be kept at permanent bay on the watch of former prime minister Jacinda Ardern, the country slammed shut its maritime borders in 2020.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

While the raising of the drawbridge hardly put paid to the virus over the long-term, it did halt the annual stream of foreign workers upon which New Zealand increasingly relies. The restrictions soon led to unprecedented labour shortages and very low unemployment.

A massive volte-face by Ardern’s administration followed. The last Labour government ended its term in parliamentary office by pulling out all the policy stops to entice international workers back to the South Seas.

Now the new conservative coalition government of Christopher Luxon, which took office just before Christmas, feels its predecessor’s pitch has been bit too successful. As the immigration minister said this week, the new imperative will be for resident Kiwis to be ‘put to the front of the line for jobs where there are no skills shortages’.

But that’s not the only line political leaders are worried about. An ever-growing queue of locals looking for property also has to be kept in mind. This is difficult enough to politically manage at the best of times, the last thing political leaders want or need is a limitless flood of new arrivals fanning inflation and re-heating a property market that burned white-hot in the late 2010s.

Only in the past 18 months or so has New Zealand housing market fully lost its dubious reputation for leaving pretty much every other comparable nation in the shade.

There are diplomatic considerations as well. New Zealand, an export-led nation, lives or dies by negotiating free-trade agreements for getting its primary products into the globally lucrative markets of North America, East Asia and Europe. Typically, these deals involve — or at any rate encourage — additional political sweeteners such as improved migrant-access provisions of the sort Brits can now take advantage of.

Until Britain’s accession to the old EEC in 1973, trading frozen meat and dairy products with the UK was the cornerstone of the New Zealand economy. And economic migrants from the much-romanticised ‘old country’ have long enjoyed a special welcome mat, too, in a land where one in every 20 residents is still British-born.

Speaking of which – in English, that is – language has also been highlighted as a related problem. The new government now says it will be more rigorous in requiring greater levels of English proficiency from applicants for the three-year-long temporary work visa that was introduced at the fag end of Covid. Not surprisingly, the left-leaning opposition, in particular the Green party, has seized upon this as a particularly egregious case of ‘dog-whistle politics’ against non-Anglophones.

It may be that yet another policy tweak of some sort is ultimately needed in the coming year or so. In the meantime, would-be migrants from the old country should continue to check their visa privilege.

It’s time for Ronaldo to retire

All good things must come to an end, and that surely now ought to include the footballing career of Cristiano Ronaldo, who disgraced himself again on Monday after being sent off for appearing to stamp on and elbow an opponent in his team Al-Nassr’s Saudi Super Cup defeat by Al-Hilal. He then seemed to come close to hitting the referee. This debacle comes hard on the heels of him making an obscene gesture to fans after a game in February. Yes, he’s still scoring goals, at a low level of football, but as a global sporting icon, he’s in danger of becoming an embarrassment.

If Ronaldo were 19 his recent behaviour would certainly invite censure but it would be larded with plenty of mitigating sympathy about his youth, disadvantaged background and the extraordinary pressure placed on young players today. But Ronaldo is 39, a good 20 years older than the young players he ought to be setting an example for. At the moment, the only example he is setting is one of Olympian arrogance and a rather vicious petulance.

Why is Ronaldo still playing? Fame? Surely not. He’s one of the most recognisable faces on the planet – members of lost tribes in the jungles of South America are probably aware of him. Fortune? Maybe, but he must be approaching tech titan levels of wealth by now. Or is he hanging on in pursuit of the holy grail of strikers – 1,000 career goals. Ronaldo has 885 and could probably get close in another three seasons.

I suspect all of these things play their part but the overarching reason is simply his character, and thus his destiny. Ronaldo just loves being Ronaldo, the greatest player (once possibly true, but now in his mind) on the planet. He appears to have an almost pathological craving for an audience and a need to be at the centre of the story – preferably through his football, but failing that through controversy.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

He’s an incorrigible show-off. He reminds me of children from my childhood who would ride no hands on chopper bikes to impress their peers, or boy racers doing handbrake turns in a car park. Or Tony Manero from Saturday Night Fever who comes alive on the dance floor and lives for thrilling the crowd with the one thing he can do brilliantly. Take away the stage from these one-trick show ponies and they would have little left. They would shrivel.

This is all sounding a bit harsh, I know. A few outbursts of late career petulance doesn’t erase two decades of achievement. And Ronaldo has had a truly amazing career. The way he has maintained the fitness levels of a triathlete and with it Greek god musculature, and scored hatfuls of goals at every club he’s ever played at, has been phenomenal.

He’s never been a favourite player of mine (too wasteful – he had a one in 72 success rate for free kicks at Juventus) but his dedication to his sport does inspire admiration. And if the accusation that he plays for himself rather than the team is hard to refute, at least he is his own man, he has stayed true to his (flawed) self. And there is goodness in there: witness his refusal to have a single tattoo on his body, to enable him to donate blood. 

But the last few years have not been good. His return to Manchester Utd yielded goals for Ronaldo but no improvement overall for the team. Off the pitch, there was more bad news than good, and Ronaldo somehow managed the near impossible, tarnishing his reputation at the club where he made his name and where he was considered almost a deity. Going public (Piers Morgan) with what sounded like trivial complaints was graceless – especially when contrasted with the quiet dignity of his manager Erik Ten Hag in response. 

The Saudi adventure has been an underwhelming affair too. Ronaldo may have trousered almost unimaginable amounts of money, but he hasn’t done much to elevate what has been described as a retirement league. His club Al-Nassr has average crowds of 20,000 and while a few other ageing stars have been attracted and the games are screened worldwide, it’s still nowhere near being a contender for serious footballing attention.

Ronaldo is aiming to play in Euro 2024 for Portugal and has even said he hopes to feature in the 2026 World Cup (that would be his sixth). But there are plenty who believe Portugal play better without him. It is entirely possible he won’t be selected for the tournament in Germany this summer and even if he is, that he won’t feature much or make much impact – as happened in Qatar two years ago.

That would be degrading, especially if the ‘Messi’ taunts he’s faced in Saudi recently follow him to Germany. Much better to call it a day while the warm glow of his best days still gives off some heat. At present he’s heading for irrelevance, and worse, in danger of becoming a bit of a bore.

The Cass report and the unforgivable puberty blockers scandal

Children who identify as transgender have been let down badly by an NHS that succumbed to an activist lobby.

That is the obvious conclusion to make after Dr Hilary Cass published her final report this morning as part of the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People.

In her report, Cass suggests that there is a serious lack of evidence about the long-term impact puberty blockers and other cross-sex hormones are having on children.

While the original rationale for puberty blockers was to give children ‘time to think’ about transitioning, the report dismantles this argument, pointing out that the ‘vast majority’ of children move from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones, and:

‘there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development.’

Despite this, the report says researchers could find no evidence that puberty blockers improved children’s body dysmorphia or body image.

Cass concludes that most young people should not be going down the medical route if they have gender-related distress, adding that for young people ‘for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems such as family breakdown, barriers to participation in school life or social activities, bullying and minority stress.’

She argues that the treatment of children with ‘gender-related distress’ should be ‘more closely aligned with usual NHS clinical practice that considers the young person holistically’.

The days of NHS England handing out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children – some of whom had complex needs – is hopefully behind us. These children need support, not unquestioning affirmation. The stakes are enormous, as Cass indicates.

The medicalisation of children who might simply have been distressed by the idea of puberty and growing up is a scandal of epic proportions. Never before have doctors told children they could press pause on puberty, and never before have children – or in some cases, their parents – demanded it.

Of course, not all children who were caught up in this mess were prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones – many more were ‘socially transitioned’. That could mean children wearing clothes normally worn by the opposite sex, or changing their name, perhaps colouring their hair, and then demanding that everyone uses a different pronoun for them.

Cass discussed social transitioning in her interim report two years ago. It was ‘not a neutral act’, she said, but an active intervention that ‘may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning.’ These are actions with consequences, and she now adds:

‘When families/carers are making decisions about social transition of pre-pubertal children, services should ensure that they can be seen as early as possibleby a clinical professional with relevant experience.’ [my emphasis]

This may mean that school policies on social transitioning need updating. Much attention has been given to the outrageous decisions of schools to keep parents in the dark about their children transitioning. One mother from the West Country, for example, told the Telegraph that she only discovered her daughter had been allowed to change gender at school when teachers called her ‘he’ at a parents’ evening. In other cases, however, parents are very much aware of what is going on and may even be driving their children’s cross-sex identification. Those cases may cause an even bigger headache for policy makers, who have placed a large emphasis on the view of parents.

When a distinguished former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health makes these recommendations, lessons need to be learned, and not just by the NHS. The doctors, teachers, parents – and indeed politicians – who facilitated this outrage need to wake up to the damage that is being done to the next generation. This is not a drill; children are still being harmed.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

This report focuses on NHS services which, quite frankly, are already broken. But private practice cannot be ignored either.

This sector desperately needs reining in, but the travel seems to be in the opposite direction. In January, the Care Quality Commission approved yet another private gender clinic that can prescribe hormones to those over the age of 16.  GenderGP – another private clinic – is unrepentant on this. Responding to updated NHS specifications, the clinic announced that it would ‘continue to provide puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones to patients who need them.’

The Cass report relays the concerns of the Multi-Professional Review Group, established in 2021 following concerns about the Gender Identity Development Service. The MPRG noted the number of children who had commenced private puberty blockers and pointed out that:

‘Private providers do not follow the prescribing, administration and investigation/ monitoring protocols agreed and followed by the NHS.’

The law needs to step in and prevent giving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children distressed about their bodies – whoever is footing the bill. That should mean all young people under the age of 18. Sixteen is too young for treatment. If it is illegal to sell cigarettes or fireworks to 16- and 17-year-olds, then surely the same restrictions should apply to drugs that can disrupt their development and leave their bodies with permanent damage.

Overseas clinics are hardly likely to change their ways in response to UK laws, however. In the United States the elevation of ‘transgender youth’ seems to have become a matter of faith within the Democratic party. Last month, Joe Biden proclaimed that the US Department of Justice has, ‘taken action to push back against extreme and un-American State laws targeting transgender youth and their families.’ The man appears to have lost the plot.

Cass wisely recommends that:

‘The Department of Health and Social Care should work with the General Pharmaceutical Council to define the dispensing responsibilities of pharmacists of private prescriptions and consider other statutory solutions that would prevent inappropriate overseas prescribing.’

We need to protect British children from Biden’s folly. It is already illegal to take British girls overseas for female genital mutilation. Perhaps those who source puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones from elsewhere in the world for children need dealing with in a similar way?

With a general election looming, Rishi Sunak has a choice. He can do what is right and expedite legislation to protect children or prevaricate and leave it to his successor. Keir Starmer struggles to define a woman; would he really have the bottle to stand up the LGBTQ+ activists within his party and tell them that children are more important than their luxury beliefs about gender identity? The time to act is now.

Can conscription save Germany’s armed forces?

Could compulsory military service soon be reintroduced in Germany? Since becoming defence minister at the beginning of last year, Boris Pistorius has grappled with the challenge of how to rejuvenate Germany’s dwindling armed forces. He increasingly appears convinced that conscription is the answer to his problems.

Last week, Pistorius dropped the latest hint that a plan for the reintroduction of conscription was around the corner. Compulsory military service ‘of some kind’ was currently being ‘considered’ by the ministry of defence, he said. While Pistorius stressed a decision would not be taken immediately, and would require the support of parliament, reports suggest he has given the ministry until the end of the month to present him with options of what a new conscription model could look like.

Pistorius is a man in a hurry. According to Der Spiegel, the defence minister wants to present his plan for military service before the federal election, due to be held by the end of October next year. He has been looking to Scandinavia for inspiration, making trips to both Sweden and Norway in March and paying particular attention to how both countries conscript their fighting age populations. Sweden’s model – where around 100,000 18-year-olds are screened each year and just the most suitable 5 per cent or so serve for 12 months – is said to be most appealing to him. His aim, according to sources in the ministry of defence, is to resurrect some form of military service capable of making a ‘scalable, threat-adapted contribution to national resilience’.

The defence minister has been mulling over the idea of conscription for some time now. Until 2011, German men were subject to conscription, requiring them to serve in the military or civil defence forces for six months. In December Pistorius called the decision to scrap this policy a ‘mistake’ but later insisted he was not advocating for the reintroduction of compulsory military service. Now he appears to be moving towards the idea of conscription once again.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, and subsequent breakdown of relations with Kyiv’s Nato allies, brought home to politicians in Berlin the neglected state of Germany’s army and defence capabilities. Not long after becoming chancellor, Olaf Scholz pledged to increase the number of troops to 203,000 by 2031. But with the German armed forces currently at approximately 182,000 – a drop of around 1,000 since last year – it is difficult to see how those numbers can be bolstered without the reintroduction of some form of military service. 

In 2011, when conscription was dropped, approximately 31,000 conscripts between the ages of 18 and 25 had completed at least six months of military service, while the armed forces employed around 188,000 professional soldiers. Since then, the forces have struggled with recruitment: potential applicants are put off by the lengthy bureaucracy of applying and the restrictions it places on their lifestyles. Germany’s lawmakers have acknowledged that compulsory military service directly boosted the number of professional troops the country had, as a portion of conscripts would choose to continue with the armed forces.

Pistorius’s desire to potentially reintroduce military service is just one part of his grand plan to overhaul Germany’s armed forces and defences. Over the past year he has become a single-issue politician, banging the drum for making Germany ‘war ready’ in the face of increasing aggression from Russia. 

The defence secretary has announced several headline reforms to the structure of the armed forces. Over the next six months, the armed forces’ foreign and domestic operations will be merged under one ‘Bundeswehr operational command’. He has also ordered the creation of a new cyber warfare branch to sit alongside the army, navy and air force. In a move to modernise Germany’s defence capabilities, it will concentrate on electronic warfare, cyber operations, reconnaissance and electronic infrastructure protection. 

Pistorius is hoping these reforms will streamline the armed forces and improve their ability to respond to threats, both domestic and foreign. But despite his noble intentions, as the defence minister is already finding out, tackling issues created by several decades of chronic underfunding is no walk in the park. 

‘We are defending our country and our allies,’ Pistorius has said. Once his plans have borne fruit, ‘no one should even entertain the idea of ​​attacking us’. The defence minister, the most popular of Scholz’s cabinet with the German public, can certainly talk the talk. But that is just the easy part – Pistorius still has to prove that he can also walk the walk.

The problem with MrBeast

Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast, is the world’s most successful YouTuber. More than 250 million people follow his channel. His videos are mostly absurd challenges involving obscene amounts of cash generated from his YouTube advertising revenue. In one video, he eats $100,000 worth of gold leaf ice cream; in another, he pays a participant $10,000 a day to see how long they’re willing to live in a supermarket. His most popular video, a remake of the Korean survival horror TV show Squid Game, has over half a billion views. 

Donaldson and his team of friends don’t just squander this money, they also run Beast Philanthropy, which, according to its website, ‘will provide life-changing grants, assistance, and both monetary and non-monetary gifts to individuals and families.’ Many of the organisation’s projects take place in Africa. Donaldson and his team build schools and wells in countries like Zambia, Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

Last year, Donaldson and his team released a video entitled ‘1,000 Blind People See For The First Time’, in which the YouTuber paid for cataract surgery for patients around the globe. The video, which was supposed to be uplifting, led some to question the ethical implications of charity as public spectacle. Donaldson, his critics argued, wasn’t really interested in helping these poor souls see again. He was more interested in being seen as a good guy, a social media Mother Teresa. 

In my opinion, such criticisms were ridiculous. Donaldson appears to be a decent individual, a hardworking young man who has managed to build an empire for him and his friends. He understands the importance of maintaining a positive image. He believes in doing good while having fun. He rarely if ever uses profanity in his videos, appears to be loved by his staff, and brings joy to tens of millions of people around the world on a regular basis.

There seems almost nothing negative that can be said about Donaldson – well, almost nothing. You see, Donaldson has a sponsorship deal with Western Union, an international money transfer firm that was established way back in 1851. Today, the company operates in 200 different countries and territories across thr world.

In his most recent video, where Donaldson and his mates camp on a deserted island for seven days, he spends two of the 22 minutes waxing lyrical about Western Union. As a long-time fan, I find that a bit odd and disappointing. Let me explain why.

Over a billion people live in Africa and around a third of these people don’t have a bank account – many have Western Union accounts instead, using the company to receive money from family members abroad. Western Union is the undisputed king of the remittance market, which facilitates up to one in five dollars sent globally and controls around 40 per cent of all remittance payouts on the continent. In Algeria, nearly 80 per cent of remittances are sent via Western Union; in Namibia, half of all money coming into the country is sent through the company. 

You might think this is a good thing for the continent, and in some ways it is. Western Union gives Africans access to financial services that otherwise aren’t available to them. But Western Union has also faced allegations of engaging in anti-competitive practices. A 2014 report by the Overseas Development Institute revealed that Western Union artificially increases its fees for money transfers on the continent, resulting in what is known as an ‘Africa charge’ of 8 per cent.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

In certain regions, according to the report, these fees can reach as high as 10 per cent or more. Furthermore, Western Union has also faced criticism for its use of exclusivity agreements with banks in recipient countries, which restrict competition and allow the company to charge inflated fees. This benefits the American multinational, but, as the authors noted, has harmed remittance senders and recipients. In other words, Western Union hurts the very people Donaldson wants to help.

More recently, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, explored the many ways in which Western Union benefited questionable politicians in Africa. For example, there’s Jean-Pierre Bemba, the former vice president of the Congo who has been linked with war crimes. Two decades ago, Bemba and 1,500 Congolese troops took part in a conflict in the nearby Central African Republic. His soldiers were allegedly responsible for the deaths of civilians and the sexual assault of women and girls as young as ten. After being arrested, Bemba and four aides reportedly transferred over $429,000 via Western Union. Much of this money was said to have been used to bribe witnesses.

It’s possible that Donaldson knows nothing about Western Union’s shady past. After all, the Bemba incident is from many years ago, when Donaldson was just a wee lad. Moreover, he’s a ridiculously busy man. Between being buried alive and Ubering people around in decommissioned tanks, it’s unlikely that he spends his time reading about war crimes and the possible exploitation of poor people in Africa. However, in more recent times, Western Union has been found guilty of turning a blind eye to criminals using its services to launder cash and commit fraud. In February, the multinational was sued for earning interest on failed transfers. In short, Western Union has a very questionable reputation. 

Considering he is worth at least $100 million, one assumes that Donaldson doesn’t need the money from his Western Union partnership. So why partner with a multinational that stains his otherwise impeccable brand image?

Confessions of an egg snatcher

April is nesting season and with it comes egg collectors, an illegal band of very specialised and, in some ways, very British of criminals. Many would consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. Most see their crime as a hobby, ignoring the effects of stealing a clutch of eggs and thus accelerating the species decline in a particular location. The thieves are certainly expert birders; they are able to recognise the nests of particular birds and know when to attempt their raids and where best to launch their raids.

But though knowledgeable, they are despised across the birding community. The thieves themselves are not just ornithological anoraks. Some use social media to share information and brag about their daring, descending cliff faces like the man in black delivering Milk Tray (for those who remember the ads). There have been injuries and even deaths during these nest raids.

There is often little reward. Older egg snatchers know not to exhibit their collections, keeping them neatly labelled and stored in secret. Police raids have uncovered vast arrays of eggs in basements and cellars, out of sight from fellow collectors.

The crime of disturbing nests may have declined with tougher sentences – including prison terms – but there was a time when egg collecting was seen as a regular country pursuit. As a young boy, my parents would take me and my brothers away from our East London home to spend much of the summer at my grandmother’s pub in rural Staffordshire. Some of the regulars at The Red Lion in Cotes Heath would encourage my growing interest in the countryside by taking me fishing or to watch the local pack of foxhounds being exercised. When my parents bought me The Observer’s Book of Bird Eggs (for those who remember them, Observer’s books were pocket sized volumes on subjects as diverse as steam locomotives to old English churches) the locals started bringing me bird eggs.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

I marvelled at the sizes, shapes and colours of these delicate objects which introduced me to species of birds from pipits to peregrines. I was too young to appreciate the damage it caused to breeding but it did nurture my interests. There are many conservationists who started off collecting eggs before realising the error of their ways. Nowadays there is such a thing as the National Wildlife Crime Unit, which runs Operation Easter so that police can share information about egg snatchers.

Despite the decline of cottage collectors, there are growing numbers of those who seek out the eggs of birds of prey. These are then hatched for chicks and sold on for falconry at a healthy sum. Police say this is an expanding market overseas, particularly the Middle East. Funny to think that somewhere in the Arabian deserts is a peregrine falcon, bought by some shady sheikh for an exorbitant fee, that’s a distant cousin of those Staffordshire eggs I had as a boy.

Thank goodness pubs shut at 11

A group of four stagger out of a pub in Britain at around 11.20 on a Thursday night. The search begins for somewhere to have one more drink without a £20 entry fee. Men on doors say no by shaking their heads. Pubs show their appetite for more visitors by turning their lights up a little brighter than an exploding sun. There are bars open, but the mark-up on a glass of white seems out of sync with the occasion and the bank balance. Half an hour’s increasingly muted search ends halfway across the other side of town. Nothing is open. Google maps is opened. Everyone mutters goodbye.

Some of us younger Brits have become agitated at how early everything shuts. Pubs open after midnight are extremely rare all across the country. It is true that a trip to anywhere else will sharpen the rage. New York is the city that never sleeps. French restaurants serve three-course meals at 11 p.m. You can find an open bar in a small Spanish town still serving at 3 a.m.

But it wouldn’t be a good thing over here. Have you been in a pub at 1.a.m? Hardly anyone is there. Those who are, well, they’re talking above things like the aural range of dogs. The stomach is at capacity with pints. A negroni would be nice, but you are in a Greene King, sir.

The economist Paul Anthony Samuelson came up with the concept of revealed preferences. The basic idea is that people’s habits show what they really want. You can’t trust what they say they want. If there was a real demand for late night pubs, there would be more of them. Really, we all know that getting the bus home at 11, after a few, is a pleasure. Scrambling for an Uber on 3 per cent phone battery induces a howl of despair.

Lots of people think it would be great to go for a meal after some drinks as well, if only restaurants were open for a quick bite at 10.30ish. This is a false economy. Your mouth will be too dulled to taste anything worth paying a decent whack for. If you have been drinking for over two hours, you will feel too full. The chefs, at the tail-end of a gruelling shift, will be cooking with resentment. In the morning, the bill will sting. Keep bagels at home.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

There are, of course, late night options: a club (go on, how much do you want to carry on the night?), a trip to someone’s flat, or it’s carriages. If the night is fun, you should commit. True, clubs are usually too sticky and expensive. But a detour to someone else’s for cheaper booze, a music speaker, and perhaps the treat of an indoor cigarette, is usually the right call.

If we were given late-night pubs, it would be carnage for two weeks, and then we would shun them. Those who did frequent them could not be trusted with that sudden licence. Berlin has something called Späties: offies with a staggeringly good selection of beers and pleasant seating areas outside to sit and drink with friends. They are never, ever closed.

Yet they are hardly ever busy either. They are a useful backstop. If they were introduced to Britain, A&E workers would look back fondly at the pandemic. Perhaps there should be small exemptions for Fridays and Saturdays, where pubs could be open until 1.a.m. to prevent an unnecessary stamp on the hand. During the week, any pub that closes before 11 p.m. should have its licence revoked.

Nimbys may have dented Britain’s productivity, quietened the last sparks of architectural energy, and condemned the young to perpetual renting. But on pubs they might be doing us a favour. This is good for me, I tell myself as the barman rings the bell. Those that groan don’t really want another.

Will Netanyahu still attack Rafah?

The decision by Israel to withdraw its forces from the devastated city of Khan Younis could portend a battle for the control of Gaza. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces, the prize in the war against Hamas is the capture of the southern city of Rafah, a sprawling, tented enclave bulging with up to 1.4 million displaced and desperate Palestinians. Given that much of Gaza is now in ruins, there is almost nowhere left for the Palestinians trapped inside the city to flee. It is almost universally accepted that any assault would end in a bloodbath. 

It’s for this reason that Washington has repeatedly warned Israel that if the attack goes ahead, the US could begin to place restrictions on how weapons supplied to the IDF are used ­– a move which could severely restrict future operations. The decision by the IDF to withdraw from the devastated city of Khan Younis – once home to 400,000 Palestinians – initially offered a fleeting hope that a ceasefire might be forthcoming. But it has since emerged that the withdrawal was a tactical rather than a strategic decision, possibly orchestrated to appease the US in the wake of the tragic killing of seven aid workers employed by the World Central Kitchen.

The war in Gaza is not over. The killing will undoubtedly continue for many more months.

Just hours after the Khan Younis withdrawal announcement, IDF Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said that the military is ‘far from stopping’ its operations in Gaza.‘We will not leave any Hamas brigades active – in any part of the Gaza strip. We have plans and will act when we decide,’ he said. Netanyahu finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being squeezed by both the US and the far-right members of his own government – on whom his political survival now rests. 

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, warned on Monday that ‘if the prime minister decides to end the war without launching an extensive attack on Rafah to defeat Hamas, he will not have a mandate to continue serving as prime minister.’ Netanyahu has confirmed that he will attack Rafah, and that he has a date for the operation in mind. While that announcement might appease his far-right government allies, it will do little to improve relations with the United States.

The pressure on the Israeli government is now mounting and Mr Netanyahu has been urged to halt the planned offensive in a joint statement signed by Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, French President Emmanuel Macron and Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Writing in France’s Le Monde newspaper, they warned the plan would have ‘dangerous consequences’ and ‘threaten regional escalation’. They wrote: ‘The war in Gaza and the catastrophic humanitarian suffering it is causing must end now.’

War fighting is costly and exhausting in both blood and treasure. Troops, even those on the ‘winning’ side, need to rest and recuperate. Vehicles need to be fixed and ammunition supplies need to be replenished. While Israel claims to have killed more than 13,000 Hamas fighters, IDF casualties (although comparatively lower) are still significant. To date, 260 IDF personnel have been killed since the conflict in Gaza began and over 3,000 have been wounded – many seriously. Four members of the IDF were killed last week after being ambushed by Hamas gunmen who emerged from a tunnel in a destroyed building and opened fire at troops carrying out a patrol along the IDF’s logistics route in Khan Younis. The Hamas fighters apparently managed to flee back into the tunnel. While tragic, the deaths of the four IDF soldiers also demonstrates that despite six months of fighting which has left much of Gaza destroyed, Hamas still has the capability to plan and mount costly attacks. Any assault on Rafah is unlikely to be a one-sided contest.

The Israel-Hamas war erupted with Palestinian terror group Hamas carrying out an unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7^th, killing some 1,200 people and taking another 253 hostages, some half of whom are still held. Since the start of the war, more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. These figures cannot be verified and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed more than 13,000 terrorists in Gaza and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel over the same period. An assault on Rafah would add significantly to that death toll and leave Israel further isolated on the global stage.

If the assault on Rafah goes ahead then what? Will Mr Netanyahu claim ‘mission accomplished’? At some point a political solution will need to be found, and the Israeli Prime Minister could do worse than to heed the wise words of former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger, an avowed supporter of Israel, who told the Today programme: ‘This [the war in Gaza] is fundamentally a political issue. There is not a military solution. You cannot kill all the terrorists without creating far more than you began with, and without a political strategy you are not going to succeed.’

The decision by Israel to withdraw its forces from the devastated city of Khan Younis could portend a battle for the control of Gaza. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces, the prize in the war against Hamas is the capture of the southern city of Rafah, a sprawling, tented enclave bulging with up to 1.4 million displaced and desperate Palestinians. Given that much of Gaza is now in ruins, there is almost nowhere left for the Palestinians trapped inside the city to flee. It is almost universally accepted that any assault would end in a bloodbath.

It’s for this reason that Washington has repeatedly warned Israel that if the attack goes ahead, the US could begin to place restrictions on how weapons supplied to the IDF are used ­– a move which could severely restrict future operations. The decision by the IDF to withdraw from the devastated city of Khan Younis – once home to 400,000 Palestinians – initially offered a fleeting hope that a ceasefire might be forthcoming. But it has since emerged that the withdrawal was a tactical rather than a strategic decision, possibly orchestrated to appease the US in the wake of the tragic killing of seven aid workers employed by the World Central Kitchen.

The war in Gaza is not over. The killing will undoubtedly continue for many more months.

Just hours after the Khan Younis withdrawal announcement, IDF Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said that the military is ‘far from stopping’ its operations in Gaza.‘We will not leave any Hamas brigades active – in any part of the Gaza strip. We have plans and will act when we decide,’ he said. Netanyahu finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being squeezed by both the US and the far-right members of his own government – on whom his political survival now rests.

Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, warned on Monday that ‘if the prime minister decides to end the war without launching an extensive attack on Rafah to defeat Hamas, he will not have a mandate to continue serving as prime minister.’ Netanyahu has confirmed that he will attack Rafah, and that he has a date for the operation in mind. While that announcement might appease his far-right government allies, it will do little to improve relations with the United States.

The pressure on the Israeli government is now mounting and Mr Netanyahu has been urged to halt the planned offensive in a joint statement signed by Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, French President Emmanuel Macron and Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Writing in France’s Le Monde newspaper, they warned the plan would have ‘dangerous consequences’ and ‘threaten regional escalation’. They wrote: ‘The war in Gaza and the catastrophic humanitarian suffering it is causing must end now.’

War fighting is costly and exhausting in both blood and treasure. Troops, even those on the ‘winning’ side, need to rest and recuperate. Vehicles need to be fixed and ammunition supplies need to be replenished. While Israel claims to have killed more than 13,000 Hamas fighters, IDF casualties (although comparatively lower) are still significant. To date, 260 IDF personnel have been killed since the conflict in Gaza began and over 3,000 have been wounded – many seriously. Four members of the IDF were killed last week after being ambushed by Hamas gunmen who emerged from a tunnel in a destroyed building and opened fire at troops carrying out a patrol along the IDF’s logistics route in Khan Younis. The Hamas fighters apparently managed to flee back into the tunnel. While tragic, the deaths of the four IDF soldiers also demonstrates that despite six months of fighting which has left much of Gaza destroyed, Hamas still has the capability to plan and mount costly attacks. Any assault on Rafah is unlikely to be a one-sided contest.

The Israel-Hamas war erupted with Palestinian terror group Hamas carrying out an unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7^th, killing some 1,200 people and taking another 253 hostages, some half of whom are still held. Since the start of the war, more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. These figures cannot be verified and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed more than 13,000 terrorists in Gaza and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel over the same period. An assault on Rafah would add significantly to that death toll and leave Israel further isolated on the global stage.

If the assault on Rafah goes ahead, then what? Will Mr Netanyahu claim ‘mission accomplished’? At some point a political solution will need to be found, and the Israeli Prime Minister could do worse than to heed the wise words of former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger, an avowed supporter of Israel, who told the Today programme: ‘This [the war in Gaza] is fundamentally a political issue. There is not a military solution. You cannot kill all the terrorists without creating far more than you began with, and without a political strategy you are not going to succeed.’

Iran’s four options for revenge against Israel

I recently returned from a trip to the south east Syrian province of Deir al Zur, where I witnessed Kurdish and American soldiers in a tense face-off against Iranian and proxy forces along the Euphrates River line. After making my way home to Jerusalem via Iraq, Jordan and northern Israel, I had hoped for a couple of days respite from the Middle East and its attentions.

No such luck. A terse message arrived in my community WhatsApp group: ‘The Home Front Command has this evening updated the list of required items, in an article at its national emergency portal. In contrast to the previous list, the current list includes food and water in accordance with the needs of the household. It remains subject to change.’

A day after I left Deir al Zur for the Syrian border, on 26 March, an Israeli air raid on Iranian targets in the province killed 16 Revolutionary Guardsmen (IRGC).  The attack was part of an ongoing Israeli bombing campaign in Syria that used to be called the ‘war between wars’ in Israel. No one calls it that anymore: since October 7th, we are no longer ‘between wars’. 

The outbreak of war in Gaza and the efforts of Iranian client militias to strike at Israel from Lebanon and Syria has led to a sharp intensification of Israel’s bombing campaign against these forces. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant is known for wanting to take a particularly hard line against Iran’s efforts to advance and consolidate its area of control in Syria. Iran seeks a contiguous path through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea and the border with Israel. Jerusalem is engaged in an ongoing effort to disrupt and frustrate this ambition.  

On 1 April, the Israeli campaign against Iran in Syria took a further sharp escalatory turn. The killing of IRGC Quds Force Brigadier-General Mohammed Reza Zahedi, along with two other Quds Force generals and nine additional personnel, was probably the most vicious blow for Iran’s proxy warfare capability since the US killed former Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani on the road from Baghdad Airport on 3 January, 2020. Zahedi, a veteran IRGC operator, was the commander of Iran’s proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. The attack came just a day after Zahedi’s arrival in Damascus – Israeli intelligence capacity in the Syrian capital is clearly very advanced.

Zahedi is not the first senior IRGC commander to die at the hands of Israel in Syria since October. Sayyid Reeza Mousavi, a senior Quds Force officer, was killed in a strike on his south Damascus home on Christmas Day. Sadegh Omidzadegh, an IRGC general who ran the Quds Force’s intelligence operations in Syria, was killed along with four other senior Iranian officials, in an Israeli airstrike on the Mezzeh district of Damascus. Neither of these men, however, nor any of the other Iranians killed on Syrian soil since October 2023 held the stature, influence and power of Zahedi.  

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

The Iranians have unsurprisingly vowed revenge. ‘We will make them regret this crime and other similar ones with the help of God,’  was the response of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei . ‘No move by any enemy against our sacred system goes unanswered,’ IRGC head Hossein Salami said in a televised speech over the weekend. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy militia, said that the killing of Zahedi marked a ‘turning point’ in the current conflict on Friday. Yesterday, in  another speech, Nasrallah said: ‘The Americans and Israelis recognise that the Iranian response to the attack on the Iranian consulate is coming.’ Ramadan ends today: the period has always been one of heightened antagonism between Israel and Iran.

Tehran has essentially four broad options. It could hit an Israeli or Jewish facility overseas using either Iranian state forces (option one), or proxies (option two). In 1992, IRGC and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives struck at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. In 1994, 85 people were killed at the Amia Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, in a car bombing organised once again by the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah. Since then, Iran has attempted attacks on Israeli diplomatic facilities and personnel on many occasions, in India in 2012 and 2021, in Georgia in 2012, in Azerbaijan in 2023, without notable success.  

Then there’s the third option: Tehran could also direct its proxies to strike Israel directly . Just a week ago, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (a group of Iran-supported Shia proxy militias) claimed responsibility for the launch of a suicide drone at a target in the southern Israeli city of Eilat. Eilat has also been targeted by the Houthis, Teheran’s clients in Yemen. The Houthis succeeded in penetrating Israeli airspace for the first time on 24 March, when a ballistic missile landed north of Eilat. Finally, Iran could strike Israeli soil directly (option four). It is the most risky option for Teheran, and would be likely to precipitate open war between the regime and Israel.  

Tehran will consider all four options carefully. It has failed to retaliate in kind for a number of high profile assassinations of its operatives in recent years Soleimani’s death in 2020, the killing of nuclear supremo Mohsen Fakhrizadeh outside Teheran in the same year, and the killing of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008 all went without serious retribution. A failure to respond, or staging too small a response, risks conveying a message of weakness.  

Iran usually favours using proxies over staging direct attacks. In an unkind formulation common in Israel, Teheran is prepared to ‘fight to the last Arab’. (Iranians are obviously Persian, unlike their Arab proxies.) Tehran will also know that open conflict with Israel might well eventually draw in the United States. Because of all this, the Iranian response to General Zahedi’s demise will most likely not be a direct Iranian attack on Israel. Either way, I’ve stocked up on bottled water and tinned tuna. Just in case.  

Cameron prefers charm to offensive in Blinken love-in

‘I come here with no intention to lecture anybody’. David Cameron’s line mid-press conference summed up the Foreign Secretary’s approach on his trip stateside. Appearing alongside his counterpart Anthony Blinken, Cameron emphasised the extent to which Britain and America are acting in lockstep on Ukraine, Gaza and other various crises. ‘In a time of danger like this international affairs, close alliances really matter’ he said.

Cameron’s trepidation is understandable: he is due to have meetings later today with skeptical congressional leaders on giving further aid to Ukraine. On his last visit to Washington, Cameron suggested that to not provide further funds risked ‘replicating weakness displayed against Hitler in the 1930s’; comments which prompted a mixed reaction from hostile Republicans. This time, he was at pains to insist ‘it is not for foreign politicians to tell legislators in another country what to do’, with his arguments explicitly couched in terms of America’s own self-interest.

‘I think it is up to the interests of US security that Putin fails in his illegal invasion’ he continued, noting that hostile actors in Tehran, Pyongyang and Beijing looking at how the US stands by its Ukrainian allies. This has been a theme of Cameron’s visit this week. Ahead of his dinner with Donald Trump, the former Prime Minister argued that America should stand by Ukraine to ‘show that borders matter’ – a Trumpian argument if ever there was one.

Blinken was happy to echo Cameron’s fighting talk on Ukraine. The Secretary of State even argued that the major beneficiary of American military aid was actually the American labour market, owing to increased investment in domestic munitions factories. On Gaza, both men walked the line between support for Israel with criticism of excesses like last week’s attack on seven aid workers. Both even ‘committed news’. Blinken conceded that the US does not have a day for a potential Israeli operation in Rafah in southern Gaza. Instead he stressed that the opposite is true because the two nations are expected to hold talks next week on alternatives for a Rafah operation.

Cameron meanwhile revealed that he has had reviewed updated legal advice on whether Israel is breaking humanitarian law. ‘The latest assessment leaves our position on export licences unchanged’ he said. ‘This is consistent with the advice that I and other ministers have received and as ever we will keep the position under review.’ But, he added, ‘Let me be clear though, we continue to have grave concerns around the humanitarian access issue in Gaza, both for the period that was assessed and subsequently.’

The main fun though for the assembled journalists was Cameron being asked about his dinner with Donald Trump, given his previous disobliging remarks about the president. Unsurprisingly, the former premier opted not to address these and repeatedly insisted that he would not go into what was said at the pair’s dinner. He instead turned the question around by focusing on increased Nato spending, pointing out that the number of countries hitting their two per cent target has risen from three in 2014 ‘when I was chairing the Nato conference’ to twenty now.

Diplomatic and discreet, it was the kind of answer which showed why Rishi Sunak chose to bring him back as Foreign Secretary last November.

Listen to today’s Coffee House Shots with Katy Balls, Freddy Gray and the FT’s Lucy Fisher:

Poland’s MBA scandal has exposed our credentialling culture

In February 2024, Poland’s Anti-Corruption Bureau opened an investigation into the ‘Collegium Humanum Warsaw Management University’, a ‘Private Management School’ opened in 2018 by a man now (for legal reasons) referred to only as Paweł C. That same month, Paweł C was detained by the Public Prosecutor’s Office on suspicion of issuing diplomas in exchange for personal financial gain. Today, the desire for the appearance of wisdom is often greater than the desire for wisdom itself.

The Collegium Humanum website boasts of offering ‘prestigious degrees’, including cut-price three-month MBA programmes marketing themselves with the words ‘save 6,200 zlotys and almost a year of studies’. A political scandal has emerged in Poland centred around the fast-tracking of nominees for the boards of state-run companies with the use of the Collegium Humanum three-month MBA.

The ACB investigation has also revealed that the Collegium Humanum offered degrees for other programmes which involved no classes or examinations at all, and put on online examinations without demanding proof of identity. (Nobody has yet been accused of buying a diploma outright.) The ACB has also questioned the Director of the Polish Accreditation Committee. They say that he requested and received 450,000 zlotys (£90,000) for the accreditation of the Collegium Humanum.

The background to this story is a 2016 regulation stipulating that each candidate for a seat on the ‘supervisory board’ of a state-run company should have some combination of a series of credentials – usually a mix of an academic degree, a professional qualification (like in accounting), an MBA diploma, or a result in one of the state examinations offered to candidates for the boards of state-run enterprises. Prior to this reform, the state examination was required for all but those holding PhDs in law or economics, or those holding professional qualifications in certain subjects. But following it, the fast-track MBA became the preferred route to plum positions on state company boards.A later deregulation of postgraduate education removed government oversight over the content of postgraduate degrees, and placed it in the hands of individual institutions.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

In the UK, MBA diplomas are regulated and accredited similarly to masters degrees, but in Poland, MBA studies can be administered like postgraduate diplomas. This means that the many excellent institutions in Poland offering standard 2-year MBAs – including public ones like the Warsaw School of Economics, and private Business Schools such as Koźmiński University, which enrols a total of around 8,000 students – have been joined by… other options. Collegium Humanum had a student body of some 25,000 while employing around 80 members of academic staff.

Poland has an interesting relationship with academic credentials. Unlike in the UK, almost all students take masters degrees, and many go on to PhD studies as well. Where in the UK it may well be the name of the University which opens doors, in Poland it is the possession of the credential itself which matters. Polish society suffers from a kind of credential inflation – and after the transition to a free-market economy in the 1990s, the country combined its pursuit of a Western-style capitalist dream with a traditional respect for academic diplomas – giving rise to a love affair with the MBA. At the same time, the old, post-communist mistrust of the establishment, and lack of faith that systems could ever deliver for individuals, still haunts Poland today.

The Collegium Humanum scandal is particularly embarrassing for Poland’s previous government, which prided itself on standing up to the influence of the elites in the interests of the ordinary voter, while passing reforms which appear to have offered fast-tracked access to state company boards. Every level of government is affected, with Collegium Humanum diplomas popping up on the CVs of local councillors from almost every party across Poland. The brother of the former head of state-run energy company Orlen (and Director of the State Forests Office in Gdansk) Bartłomiej Obajtek is also on the list of notable people who received diplomas from the Collegium Humanum, as is Antoni Duda – director of Poland’s state railway cargo company, and uncle to Poland’s President.

The scandal has an international dimension too, as Collegium Humanum diplomas were allegedly accredited by partner institutions abroad. International partnerships appear to have been part of a wider branding campaign which also included wooing celebrities and sports stars with degrees, and securing top places in newspaper rankings published by titles owned by Polska Press (acquired by Orlen in 2020). On 27 March, the Polish government placed a moratorium on recommending candidates with a Collegium Humanum diploma for state-run company boards, and on 8 April the Minister of Education froze the institution’s access to 18 million zlotys (£3.6 million) in state scholarships – so a swift crackdown is on the horizon. 

The example of Collegium Humanum looks extreme in its naked opportunism, but it would seem to point to a broader problem of over-reliance on credentials as a proxy for skill, and the blurring of the lines between academic accreditation (useful as that can be) and business acumen. Only the truly skilled will be able to find a way out of this crisis.

What’s the truth about Sure Start?

Labour, unsurprisingly, is crowing about a paper published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies claiming that Tony Blair’s Sure Start centres improved the GCSE results of children from low-income families a decade after attending the centres. Children who lived within 2.5 km of a Sure Start Centre before 5, it finds, went on to score an extra 0.8 in their grades at GCSEs compared with children who lived further away.

At their peak in 2010-11 there were 3,500 Sure Start centres, intended as ‘one-stop shops’ where parents could access healthcare, parenting support, early learning, childcare, as well as research employment opportunities for themselves. After 2010 the incoming coalition concentrated its efforts elsewhere, with the result that between 2010 and 2022 funding fell by two thirds and 1340 centres closed.

Gordon Brown is among the New Labour figures citing the IFS research today and calling for a new programme of Sure Start Centres if Labour wins the election, saying ‘the wilful destruction of Sure Start and the reductions of children’s benefits after 2010 has set back opportunities for millions of children’s futures’.

It would be surprising if Sure Start, which was consuming £2.5 billion by Labour’s last year in government, had achieved nothing in improving the prospects for children. Yet there is something unsatisfactory about the IFS research. For one thing it admits that it is lacking data as to which children actually attended Sure Start centres. Instead, it uses how close children lived to one of the centres as a proxy. But of course, not all children who lived within 2.5 km of a centre attended it – while many children who lived more than 2.5 km from one did attend one.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The real reason J.K. Rowling’s critics hate her

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Will Iran seize this moment for revolution?

Jawad Iqbal

Will Khamenei accept that its over?

Moreover, there are plenty of other factors as to what might have influenced children’s performance at GCSEs a decade after they had attended a Sure Start centre – one of which, for example, might be the Pupil Premium introduced by the coalition government in 2011. As with Sure Start centres, this programme – which offered extra resources for schools – was focused on areas with high levels of deprivation, so will have benefited many of the same children who lived near Sure Start centres.

The summary of the IFS report, and the reporting of it, concentrates on the GCSE results of children who lived near Sure Start centres. Yet the study also looks at those children’s developmental progress and educational attainment at ages 5, 7 and 11. Interestingly, the IFS can find no statistically significant improvement in developmental scores among 5-year-olds who lived close to Sure Start centres – i.e. the age at which you might expect children to be showing the greatest advancement. The ‘Sure Start’ effect only seems to have kicked in at age 7, before peaking at age 11 – by which point children had been at school for six years. Can you really attribute that to Sure Start centres – or to other policies which targeted schools in similar, deprived areas?

One of the criticisms of Sure Start is that they sometimes failed to reach the most deprived pupils, while middle-class children were often beneficiaries of their services. A National Evaluation of Sure Start in 2005 found that children from the most deprived backgrounds were doing less well in areas with a Sure Start centres, while parents of less deprived children were using the services more. That is one of the reasons why the coalition, after 2010, chose to concentrate resources elsewhere.

The IFS report will be jumped on by Labour, but it does nothing to contradict the finding of that early evaluation. The failure to find any improvement in the development of 5-year-olds who lived near Sure Start Centres rather undermines the claims this report makes.