Why can police sue for being asked to do their jobs?

I can’t imagine being confronted with the body of someone who has jumped to their death: limbs splayed in ways that shouldn’t be possible, clothes shredded by velocity and tarmac, the bloodied remains of a face. The idea is appalling. So I have every sympathy for the police officers who saw just that at the Grenfell Tower fire and are currently seeking damages in the High Court. But while they have my sympathy, I happen to think that their case is bad news for the rest of us. 

Thirty-three officers are suing 12 different parties, including the Met police commissioner and Kensington and Chelsea council, for ‘psychiatric injuries’. Over a hundred firefighters have already received a total of £20 million in a similar legal action. Their argument is essentially that the fire should never have happened and that dealing with its consequences was so traumatic that they have been left struggling to work. Well, no one would disagree that the fire was an appalling tragedy, one that seems avoidable. Most will agree too that being confronted with that degree of human suffering will have had profound effects on those involved.

No, the thing I can’t work out is why the emergency services’ exposure to distress is considered a legal wrong. Isn’t this precisely the point of the police and firefighters, to place themselves in often appalling situations for the good of others? When your job is to save lives, the risk is you’ll witness death. Car crashes, murders, stabbings, explosions, suicides – these are the horrors of modern human existence and they are horrors that police surely accept when they sign up to the job. 

The causes of such things – be they accident, negligence or malice – will have very little bearing on the suffering that they create. Yet the outcome of civil cases hinges on such questions. The firefighters’ union that settled last month went after the management company and the manufacturers of Grenfell’s cladding, arguing that they were guilty of negligence. But who would they sue if a freak gust of wind tipped a perfectly road-legal lorry into a young family? Clearing up such a mess would no doubt cause severe psychological harm. 

The response from those in favour of such civil cases is that the difference lies in whether the harm could have been reasonably avoided. Yet plenty of things the police witness are avoidable. Does that mean they’re entitled to a cash settlement? Are the absent fathers of gangland killers to have their savings accounts emptied by police who witness the aftermath of their child’s machete rampage?

You can accept this argument while still believing that serious wrongs were committed at Grenfell. It seems obvious that there were failures at the council, the management company, those involved in the tower’s refurb and even in the fire service’s command team in giving that infamous ‘stay put’ order to residents. Instead, what I’m arguing is that civil litigation – in pursuit of hefty financial settlement – is not the way to address those wrongs. 

Considerable amounts of public money, taxes paid by relatives of those who died, is being sought. It doesn’t seem right, especially when many of those relatives believe the Met and fire service failed them. Louise Taylor, a solicitor acting on behalf of the officers at the High Court, said: ‘My clients… sustained significant psychiatric injuries – some of which are life-changing and permanent – due to their involvement with the Grenfell tragedy, in which they risked their lives.’ I have no doubt that this is true. It may well also be true that the law entitles them to financial damages because of their psychological suffering (although we may never see a ruling, the case is currently on pause as the parties attempt to settle out of court). If it is lawful, so much the worse for the law. 

Such cases make it difficult for those who run emergency services to ask employees to do their jobs. Ambulance staff were held back during the first London Bridge terror attack for fear that they too might be attacked by the terrorists. Police and members of the public were left to administer first aid while paramedics waited beyond the cordon. The subsequent inquest found that at least one victim could have been saved if that order hadn’t been given. Surely it would have been better to offer paramedics a choice and ask if they would be willing to undergo such risks – protected, of course, by armed police – in order to save the lives of others. I imagine many would. I would also hazard a guess, but have no way of knowing, that fear of legal retribution affected the decision to hold back paramedics.

Incidentally, an off-duty Australian nurse, Kirsty Boden, was having dinner with friends that night around London Bridge. When she heard of the attack, she told friends: ‘I’m a nurse, I have to go and help’. Kirsty was stabbed to death while trying to save the life of another – a testament to the bravery of first responders and a hero who really deserves her own memorial. Wouldn’t it have been better if specialist terror-trained paramedics, supported by police, had been there to help?

Instead, we seem to be entering a more litigious era, one in which tragedy becomes industry for lawyers and unions. We should resist this. It is for the criminal courts alone to adjudicate wrongdoing in such cases. The CPS is set to make a decision on whether it will prosecute those involved in Grenfell this summer, once the painfully slow inquiry concludes. In the meantime, individual police officers and firefighters should be helped with their obvious and understandable suffering. What they should not be allowed to do is redefine the strains of the job so that heroism becomes actionable harm. 

Did we really need Warsi and Baddiel’s podcast?

Podcast fever continues to dominate the political airwaves. The rewards for success are enormous and popular podcasters are able to fill concert halls around the county by delivering a couple of hours of chitchat to willing punters. Since the running costs are minimal, the profits are vast. This explains the gold-rush of media darlings and former politicians thronging into the digital space. Often the shows are billed as acrimonious punch-ups between sworn enemies like George Osborne and Ed Balls or Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. But the presence of a microphone seems to sweeten the mood and to turn animosity into peace and harmony. Listeners are likely to feel cheated. 

The latest bidders for podcast glory are the former comedian David Baddiel and the life peer Sayeeda Warsi, who poses as the scourge of Islamophobia within the Tory ranks. One clear advantage of their new show, A Muslim and a Jew Go There, is that it features their voices, and not their faces. Baddiel has been described on Twitter as looking like ‘a wet thumb dipped in cigarette ash’ while Warsi wears the immoveable scowl of someone who has just handed a winning scratch card to a racist. 

They begin their first podcast by trying to out-victim each other. Baddiel says that he was twice attacked by skinheads while he was growing up. Warsi recalls an annual fight between rival ethnic groups at the school gate. They endured verbal abuse too. Warsi’s headmaster barked at her, ‘you’re making me sick. It’s not the mosque,’ when she sang hymns without a proper display of reverence towards Christianity. Baddiel was accused by his athletics coach of intentionally tripping another runner because he was ‘a Jew’, although he heard the slur second hand after it was conveyed to him by another Jewish pupil. Neither quote a more recent instance of racism. 

The love-in continues with smarmy expressions of inter-faith appreciation. Warsi assures Baddiel that she studied Bible stories at school and that she’s a pal of the Chief Rabbi who invited her to dinner at his house. Baddiel gives a reciprocal hug to Islam by offering this scholarly comment about Muslims who ‘curse all Jews’. Referring to the Old Testament, Baddiel explains that it was Moses who first condemned the Jews in this way and that his censure was aimed at a minority of doubters who set up a golden calf in his absence and started to worship it without his authority. Baddiel alleges that Muslims who ‘curse the Jews’ are knowingly quoting Moses and that their criticism is limited to Jews who venerate statues of livestock. Do Muslims really believe that? It seems unlikely. The atmosphere of love and affection is broken by Warsi who tells Baddiel that, despite his Jewish heritage, he looks to her like a typical white male. This is a time-honoured anti-Semitic insult which Baddiel is well prepared for. He tactfully informs Warsi that Jews have long been accused of entryism and of conspiring to take control by ‘passing’ as members of the governing class. 

Then they turn to London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, whom they both adore. ‘He’s a friend to the Jewish community,’ says Baddiel. ‘And he’s really great in the LGBT space as well,’ adds Warsi. Discussing Lee Anderson’s comments about Islamism, Baddiel praises Warsi for highlighting anti-Muslim sentiment in the Tory party. ‘It’s your gig… It’s finally landed. The thing you’ve been talking about for a while,’ he tells her. She basks in his flattery. ‘I didn’t set out to be an Islamophobia activist. It kind of found me,’ she says, as if fanning the blushes from her cheeks. Baddiel mentions a recent poll suggesting that Islamism is considered ‘a threat to the British way of life’ by 58 per cent of Tory party members. ‘When the membership has been falling,’ replies Warsi complacently, ‘then I’m sorry, I’m not going to get obsessed with what a tiny minority think.’ 

Recent fears about Islamism crystallised last month when the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ was projected onto the side of parliament. Warsi, who witnessed the scene, gives her assessment of the mood on the street. ‘That crowd was actually in really good spirits… it was all pretty much good-natured,’ she says. But Baddiel has reservations. ‘I felt a bit vulnerable seeing it projected onto parliament.’ He then revises his stance and calls the phrase ‘a statement of tribal identity’ like the claim made by football supporters that their team is ‘the greatest football team the world has ever seen’. Many Jews would not support that innocuous interpretation. Even gentiles know that ‘from the river to the sea’ is a call to resume the Holocaust. But Baddiel’s softball statement is endorsed by Warsi who claims that the phrase is used to promote ‘equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in the lands between the river and the sea.’ She adds that the phrase ‘has a nice rhythm to it’. Baddiel agrees, and the pair spend a few moments composing a popular song with ‘from the river to the sea’ as the refrain. After this bizarre exchange they discuss potential winners of their ‘gold medal for racism’. They overlook the protestors who illuminated parliament with calls for genocide and instead they hand the laurels to the Conservative party. 

Centrist podcasters often talk about ‘broken politics’ and the gulf between voters and the Westminster elite. The love-in between Baddiel and Warsi suggests that the gap is growing wider. A new podcast, Electoral Dysfunction, sets out to tackle this problem head on. It features Labour’s Jess Phillips, Ruth Davidson (former head of the Scottish Conservatives), and Beth Rigby of Sky News who moderates the discussion while throwing in a few gossipy details of her own. She gushingly recalls meeting Davidson for the first time in 2017. ‘I totally fan-girled you,’ she says. Davidson talks about the social taxonomy of lesbianism. ‘There are cat lesbians and dog lesbians and I’m very much a dog lesbian,’ Phillips chips in, ‘there are so many lesbians with cats in my constituency that it’s a no-go area. We call them the clitorati.’ Rigby mentions that she’s proud of her ‘stocky legs’ which she maintains with an arduous keep-fit regime. Thirty years ago she had a boyfriend who commented on her athletic build. ‘He used to call me a pit-pony and neigh in my ear. We broke up.’ Her fellow guests latch onto the ‘neighing boyfriend’ and demand to hear further details. And they refuse to drop the subject until Rigby has vocalised his pony impersonation. ‘Neigh-hey-hey’ she whinnies. Is this how we mend our broken politics? Maybe. Their show is currently the most popular political podcast in the country.

A river-side chat with Paul Whitehouse

The words ‘immersive experience’ have always suggested, to me, a rather strained hour or two smiling patiently at unemployed actors pretending to be ghosts or personages from the olden days or, if I’m really lucky, chocolatiers who are not called Willy Wonka for legal reasons. In fact, all the publicity for the ‘Fish and Feast with Paul Whitehouse’ seemed designed to raise my blood pressure: it was not just ‘with’ the comedian and actor, but ‘expertly curated’ by him and included a session with a ‘wild cooking expert’. Animals, plants, and the man of Borneo can reasonably be called wild; cooking is in the other column with swimming and camping.

This particular ‘immersive experience’ is a spin-off from Gone Fishing, the television series Paul Whitehouse presents with Bob Mortimer. The programme is an odd mixture of the staged – the ugly dog doesn’t even belong to either of them! – and the genuine: its charm is entirely reliant on the friendship between the two men.

‘It totally came out of real life,’ Paul says, ‘Bob wanted to go fishing with me for years and we never got round to it. Then he had his heart problem, I said come fishing. We came here, we came back… And one day I went, “Bob, you know what, we’ve made each other laugh, we’ve marvelled at the Timeless Wonder of the English Countryside.” We might as well get paid for doing this. “Well, there are many hoops to jump through before that happens… But yeah.”’

Even before then, Paul was visiting the river Test with his father: one of the first things he bought when he became successful 30 years ago was a half-rod (the right to fish alternate weeks) on the Test as a birthday present for the man who had taught him to fish. ‘It’s close to my heart because of that slice of history, with Bob and my dad. And,’ he lowers his voice to a whisper, ‘I think it’s illegal, but there’s a little bit of my dad in the river.’

I begin to realise that ‘curating’ is something more than irritating marketing jargon. Paul is passionate about the Test, fishermansplaining its unique ecology – the only time he seems annoyed is when I tell him I grew up in Wiltshire, so already know what a chalk stream is – and the political campaign to stop its ‘gin-clear’ waters being polluted by storm overflows. Led, he tells me, by his friend, the river keeper from Broadlands, Lord Mountbatten’s estate – ‘You don’t imagine river keepers manning the barricades, seizing control of the means of production – but hats off to them’. Southern Water reversed its plan to discharge into the river.

We arrive at the riverbank on a crisp January morning and start what Paul calls, with a cough of embarrassment, his ‘masterclass’. (There is a fishing pro on hand as well, who does not once contradict Paul.) We are catching brown trout – or, at a pinch, grayling – with a fly; this is more than sticking a hook on a line and hoping for the best (which is the only fishing I have ever done before) and involves flicking an artificial fly lightly on to the surface of the water, mimicking the flies on which the trout (or grayling) feed. The water carries the fly downstream past the waiting fish, which ignores it; and then you pull back the line, whip it behind you and flick again.

‘It might sound like bollocks, but I really don’t mind whether I catch anything or not anymore. I really don’t. But fishing gives you a reason to be by the river, which is compelling and beguiling.’

You start to pay more attention. I have only been casting for an hour, but I can see which parts of the river are slower and which faster, where the weeds are, where each individual fish – the stream genuinely is ‘gin-clear’, that wasn’t just a line to give us an appetite for the ‘wild’ gin-cured trout gravadlax – is watching flies go by; I am much more conscious of my surroundings – where that oak that my line might get caught in is, where the birds which might spook the fish are flying – than I ever am on a walk. After the fishing pro has shown me how he casts a line and changed the fly for a better one, I start to think I’m getting the hang of it.

And Paul is right – it really doesn’t matter if you catch anything. Even if you do, you’ll have to put it back: the only possible reason for catching a fish is so that you have something to pose with in a photo. Since I’m a married man, I have no urgent need of a photo of me holding a fish, for the dating apps, so even that is not much of a reason.

But I have a reason to be by the river. I can almost feel my blood pressure lowering, as I watch the fly float downstream with almost as much lazy disinterest as the trout. My hook gets caught in weeds again. Annoying, as I thought I knew how to avoid them now. I raise the rod to pull the slack out; and then the line starts moving upstream. Weeds, I reason to myself, do not move upstream.

Paul notices the same from further down the riverbank. He canters up and tells me that I’ve hooked a beautiful big grayling. ‘That looks a cracker! Don’t put too much pressure on it!’  I immediately let out some slack. ‘No, don’t let go!’ Too much slack. The fishing pro is wading out with a net, but the grayling has got away. Paul is thoughtful. ‘What I hadn’t done is explained to you, in my master class, what to do if you caught anything. I didn’t think in a million years you would actually hook one.’ It might sound like bollocks, but I really don’t mind.

For the chance to join Paul Whitehouse ‘Originals by GetYourGuide’ experience, entrants can enter via an exclusive free raffle. Ticket availability is limited. 

Tottenham have betrayed their fans

For as long as anyone can remember, Tottenham Hotspur have offered half price season tickets for pensioners. No longer. This has been scrapped from the beginning of next season. Those already enjoying the 50 per cent concession in the vain hope they will live long enough to see the team win a trophy again will see their annual discount reduced, in phases, to 25 per cent. And only if they sit in certain allocated sections of the ground. For those of us approaching our golden years, we don’t even get that. The discount has been discontinued.

The price of a standard season ticket is going up too, by 6 per cent. It means that in many sections of the ground, the cost has broken through the £1,000 barrier. And that is not even for the most expensive seats. The club maintains this rise is necessary to cover soaring costs. Yet in 2022/23, Spurs had the eighth biggest revenue in world football. Almost all of our direct competitors have won league titles and Champions League trophies in the past couple of decades. We haven’t won the league since 1961, the year before I was born, and have never won the Champions League. We can only boast one league cup win this century. 

Fans of other clubs find it baffling that Tottenham can charge some of the highest ticket prices in the Premier League and that we fans are still prepared to pay over the odds for an underperforming team. There’s a simple reason. The club can charge as much as it likes because people are prepared to pay it and people are prepared to pay it because they reckon one day it may just pay off.

Six per cent seems an excessive hike but the club have pointed out that there has only been one increase in season ticket prices in the five years. In that time, it moved to its state-of-the-art stadium, and that previous hike was only 1.5 per cent. The extra £50 or so on admission next season can be made up, you might think, by simply not buying yet another new replica shirt or ditching the expensive match programme.

What is most irksome, however, it that older fans are being pushed to one side by a club that seems hell bent on appealing to a younger market – note the recently introduced appearance in the stands before games of a DJ who acts as if he’s at an Ibiza foam party when he’s actually performing for a few hundred early arrivals and bands playing in the bars after games to keep the young ‘uns in the ground for longer.

Other clubs have various arrangements for their veteran supporters – rather grandly known as ‘legacy fans’ – and none seem to have discarded them so blatantly. Noticeably, Spurs chose Budget day to announce it.

Reducing the discount for seniors would have been bad enough but getting rid of it entirely for those approaching that age sends out the message that they don’t really want so many old people mucking up their demographics. So, after more than 40 years of having a season ticket, and at 61 years old, I can no longer look forward to a price reduction to see me through to my final years of endlessly waiting for something exciting to happen.

In the patronising email accompanying this season’s renewal notice, Tottenham’s PR machine claimed there are now four times as many over-65s at games than there used to be. One assumes that’s partly because the old ground only held 32,000 and the new one 62,000, partly due to an ageing population and partly because the high cost of entrance, travel, programmes, food and drink is easier to afford for cash rich pensioners who have paid off their mortgage than it is young bucks with growing families paying for housing, university fees and the like.

Under Daniel Levy’s stewardship, the club makes money and quite a lot of it, not just from football but from having the stadium used for everything from F1 Kart Racing to NLF American Football and Beyonce concerts. Ending the discounts for large numbers of its more mature supporters will enable the club to make more money while freeing up space for younger fans who are more likely to buy merchandise and stay longer in the ground after the game, which will make them even more.

But it’s an insult to the thousands of regular attendees who have grown old watching this club over the decades. I reckon I’ve visibly aged a few years every time we’ve struggled to break through a low block defence, gone one down after 35 seconds or lost at home to West Ham. As one of the club’s most respected older fans, Alan Fisher, wrote in his Tottenham on my Mind blog:

The decision to limit the number of senior concessions and the amount of the discount is disgraceful, a shameful, offhand disregard of decades of loyalty that impacts longstanding supporters, the people who have been there the longest. Good times and bad. Thick and thin. Thanks for your support. Crap football? We were there. Endless stick from fans of our London rivals? We kept coming. Now pay for it or sod off.

There have already been murmurings of discontent on social media. Supporter groups are set to make representations to the club over this issue which may or may not see some backing down under the guise of ‘we’re listening to you and are prepared to blah blah blah’. But, if they do, we’ll be left asking: why didn’t they consult the fans before making this crass announcement? Perhaps it’s because they can do what they like, we’ll still turn up. It’s the hope that kills.

Picture agencies ‘kill’ royal photo over editing fears 

Kensington Palace made headlines on Sunday night — but not in the way officials hoped. A photo that was meant to quell conspiracies about Kate Middleton’s absence from public life on health grounds has only spurred further speculation as to what is really going on with the Princess of Wales. The picture showing Kate surrounded by her three young children was released this morning, in a nod to the Cambridge’s annual Mother’s Day tradition. It appeared on William and Kate’s official Instagram page and was used by a number of outlets, including Sky News and the BBC, which excitedly published the ‘first official photo’ of the Princess of Wales since she underwent abdominal surgery in January.

On closer inspection, however, queries were raised about the royal photo. A number of eagle-eyed observers noticed on social media that picture looks doctored, with Prince Louis’s right hand appearing to, er, lack fingers. And now at least three international photo agencies have issued a ‘kill’ order to retract the image from their systems. Associated Press has issued a statement on its website, noting that ‘at closer inspection, it appears that the source has manipulated the image’. 

A royal source told the Daily Mail that the photo hadn’t been digitally edited, but this hasn’t convinced the picture agencies. On Monday morning, Kensington Palace released a statement on Twitter/X, which appears to have been written by Kate: ‘Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.’

But after weeks of speculation about the Princess’s whereabouts, this latest development will only add to the growing list of #Katespiracy rumours…

UAE media deal hangs in the balance

The next three days could have major consequences for the British media landscape. On Monday, Ofcom will deliver its findings to Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, on the proposed acquisition by the UAE-backed RedBird IMI of the Telegraph and Spectator titles. Then on Wednesday, Baroness Stowell’s amendment to the Digital Markets Bill is being debated in the House of Lords. If passed, this would give parliament a veto on foreign states owning UK media outlets. 

Ofcom’s report will examine the impact of the deal on the need for accurate presentation of news and free expression of opinion in newspapers. Lucy Frazer has repeatedly stressed throughout the process that she is unable to comment on proceedings, insisting that her role is ‘quasi-judicial’. However after Ofcom delivers its report, she will have to decide whether she wants to launch an in-depth investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority which could last until October.

That process could well be overtaken by events in parliament. Tina Stowell has this afternoon written to Labour peers, urging them to back her amendment on Wednesday afternoon. In her letter she cites media reports suggesting that the Labour frontbench in the Upper House intend to abstain from voting, ‘giving Labour backbenchers the freedom to vote for the amendment without defying the whip. I am therefore writing to Labour peers directly seeking your support in the Content Lobby [the Lords’ Aye Lobby].’ It comes after Thangham Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, warned of ‘legitimate public interest concerns’ over the sale back in January.

In her letter, Stowell goes on to say that she has had ‘a collective commitment of support from the Lib Dems and support from a significant number of crossbenchers’ alongside ‘a positive response from many Conservative colleagues on my own benches.’ In the Commons, Robert Jenrick’s letter backing Stowell has the support of more than 100 MPs from five different parties. Two parliamentary debates have recently been triggered by the proposed RedBird sale. Both were notable for the near-unanimity of opinion against foreign state ownership of the press.

Ministers and the Whips’ Office now have to decide whether to continue resisting Stowell’s amendment. If they do accept it, the amendment would likely ‘kibosh’ the RedBird IMI deal, in the words of one government source. An almighty row has gone on behind the scenes in Whitehall, with various Tory MPs of different camps over whether to support or oppose the deal. Some fear legal action if the deal is blocked; others favour a long drawn-out process lasting until the election.

Pope Francis’s unhelpful Ukraine comments

Pope Francis has made a statement on the Ukraine war that has sparked fury among many of Kyiv’s supporters. Asked by a Swiss television interviewer whether the Ukraine should ‘raise the white flag’ Francis replied, ‘When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate,’ adding that he believed that ‘the stronger one is the one who… thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag.’ 

After a storm of criticism, the Vatican press service put out a clarification. ‘Pope Francis is not asking Ukraine to surrender but rather calling for a ceasefire and the courage of negotiation,’ insisted Vatican spokesman office Matteo Bruni, reminding people that Francis had recently spoken of his ‘deep affection for the martyred Ukrainian people’ and called for a ‘diplomatic solution in search of a just and lasting peace.’

Unfortunately, Francis’s conflation of negotiation and surrender is profoundly unhelpful. And by framing his words in the context of Ukraine’s ‘defeat’ is specially offensive and counter-productive. ‘The biggest heartbreak of this decade is progressive Polish Catholics finding out, to their utter horror, that the “liberal hope for a renewal of the Church” Pope Francis is the Kremlin’s useful idiot,’ wrote Jakub Jaraczewski of Democracy Reporting International on X. Poland’s foreign minister Radek Sikorsky more respectfully enquired why His Holiness had not directed his remarks at Russia instead of Ukraine. 

Sikorsky is entirely correct – Francis was wrong to suggest that the onus was on the Ukrainians to give up on their defence and not on the Kremlin to cease and desist their aggression. Yet the Pope has raised a crucial question: the Ukraine war will end, inevitably, with some kind of negotiation. The only alternative to negotiation would be a total defeat of Russia in the same way that Germany and Japan were totally defeated and then occupied in 1945. Not even the most enthusiastic supporters of Kyiv’s war effort suggest marching on Moscow to topple the Putin regime. 

So the question is not whether there will eventually be a deal, but on what the terms of that deal will be. Currently, Ukraine fights on in the hope of decisively changing the power balance on the battlefield in order to negotiate from a position of strength. To that end, President Zelensky has announced a conscription campaign to mobilise another half a million troops for the front line. Many of those newly mobilised are reluctant to go, as shown by footage of press-gang style violence used by recruiters on the streets of Ukraine’s cities. Many of these conscripts will die. 

What will they die for? As Russian continues to press its advance past the Donbas town of Avdiivka, the answer is easy: they are defending their country against invasion. But what if Russia announces a ceasefire? Or Ukraine somehow turns the tide of the war and begins to advance back into Donbas territories occupied by Moscow? There the answer becomes more complicated. Officially, the Ukrainian government’s war aim remains to liberate every scrap of territory lost to Russia since 2014 – including Donbas and Crimea. But what if the remaining population of those territories do not wish to be liberated or to live under Ukrainian rule? Since 2014 millions of people have fled Donbas and Crimea, and since 2022 the occupation authorities have systematically arrested and terrorised pro-Ukrainian residents. The occupied regions have, effectively, been ethnically cleansed. 

The sad reality is that partition of Ukraine has already happened – and like the partition of India in 1947 it was bloody, unjust and violent. Does Kyiv truly intend to spend blood and treasure to forcibly reconquer those territories and try to restore the prewar status quo? If so, they will have to fight the estimated 130,000 former Ukrainian citizens from the Donbas who have been fighting on the Russian side. 

Does that mean that Kyiv should just raise the white flag and surrender, as Pope Francis appeared to suggest? The answer is no – chiefly because despite lip service from Vladimir Putin to the idea of a ceasefire there is no real indication that the Kremlin is willing to any compromises in the cause of peace. That stubbornness can only really be changed by force – but not in the form of tiny advances on the more or less static line of control but through drone strikes deep inside Russia that have been taking out oil refineries, gas pipelines, battleships, arms factories and military aircraft on a nearly daily basis this year. The Russian naval base of Sevastopol has effectively been put out of action, and the Black Sea fleet has lost half of its main battleships. Though estimates vary, up to 100,000 Russians have been slaughtered. Russia’s appetite for such punishment is not limitless. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has offered to act as an honest broker in ceasefire talks, and US officials have, reportedly, opened back channels to discuss the eventual shape of such a ceasefire. As Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro write in the influential US journal Foreign Affairs this week, ‘No negotiations yet – but It’s time to talk about talking.’

Blessed are the peacemakers. But Pope Francis was addressing the wrong side. It’s Putin who can end this war tomorrow by coming to the negotiating table, not Zelensky. And by framing the only end to the conflict as a Ukrainian surrender, the Pope has instead likely prolonged the conflict rather than helped to end it. 

Leaked Sturgeon video becomes focus of SNP police probe

As yet another day passes, the good people of Scotland remain in suspense about the outcome of the police probe into the SNP. The three-year long investigation — which has seen multiple arrests, the impounding of a £110,000 campervan, a military-style raid of SNP HQ and the construction of a rather large forensic tent outside the Dear Leader’s own home  — has still not concluded. 

In fact, witnesses are being interviewed for the, er, fourth time as police attempt to get to the bottom of fraud claims relating to purchases of a £95,000 electric Jaguar to gardening equipment and women’s razors. 

And it now transpires that there is one very particular line of questioning that the police are focusing their efforts on. Witnesses are being quizzed about a leaked video from a meeting Nicola Sturgeon had with her national executive committee back in 2021. The secret footage shows the former FM lecturing SNP apparatchiks to be ‘very careful’ about suggesting there were ‘any problems’ with the accounts, claiming SNP finances have ‘never been stronger’. The angry tirade came the party’s finance and audit committee suffered three resignations after a transparency row broke out. But the police are reportedly interested in what party members took from Sturgeon’s outburst, with questions being asked about how much Sturgeon actually knew of the accounts — or whether her blow-up was all bluster.

One source told the Sunday Mail that:

[The police] want to get to the bottom of whether it is proof she had access to and did, in fact, access accounting information or whether she was merely speaking to what she believed to be the case about the accounts.

How curious…

The police investigation remains a rather large thorn in Humza Yousaf’s side. The new First Minister narrowly won the leadership contest on the basis that he was the continuity candidate — which was not quite the blessing Yousaf might have hoped for. He has had to deal with the poisoned chalice ever since, with the vast majority of his premiership overshadowed by Operation Branchform. Police Scotland told Mr S that the investigation remains ‘ongoing’ — but for how much longer they couldn’t say. With the SNP on course to lose 20 seats at the election after last year’s events, Yousaf will surely be hoping it gets cleared up sharpish… 

Watch the leaked footage here:

UCL is harming itself by pandering to China

We have suspected for some time that UK universities were supping with the devil when they relied on legions of foreign, especially Chinese, students to balance the books. Last week the mask slipped spectacularly at University College London. 

Some months ago a Chinese student complained of ‘horrible provocation’ when Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor dealing with human behaviours, asked a seminar class of whom about a quarter were Chinese, to criticise statistics suggesting that China had one of the world’s biggest modern slavery problems. The case escalated. She was leant on to lay off China in favour of, say, India so that Chinese students would not feel ‘singled out’. She refused, citing academic freedom. The result was all too predictable. Her course went to someone else, and she is now subject to a formal complaint of anti-Chinese bias (not unrelated, one suspects, to previous episodes when two Chinese students she had caught cheating red-handed were sent down).

The only thing that can be said in favour of UCL is that it was honest. Dr Shipworth’s departmental head, no doubt having consulted senior administrators, bluntly told her that he was transferring her class because her teaching had been provocative, and that owing to ‘perceived bias’ Chinese students ‘are not having a good experience at UCL, and that the reputation and future recruitment of our courses is being damaged.’ Since the story has come to light, UCL has put out the following statement:

We are proud to have a thriving and diverse student community, with the brightest minds from the UK and more than 150 other countries, choosing to study and research here. We also have a long tradition of safeguarding freedom of speech and are committed to upholding the rights of our staff and students to facilitate debate and exercise their academic freedom of enquiry. While it would not be appropriate to comment on individual cases, the issues raised in this article are clearly concerning and we are working to establish what has happened.

There’s no need to labour the obvious. This is terrible not only for academic freedom but for the idea of a university. UCL appears to be implying, by this incident, that it will channel the direction of academic enquiry to keep sales buoyant and the marketing managers happy. It is a racing certainty that, if they are not already doing so, other academics will now take the hint: the education students receive will be with one eye on avoiding offence to the high-paying foreign customer base. UK parents with university age children, you have been warned. 

It also, ironically, shows how UCL has slipped. Founded in 1826 to provide top-quality education to those let down by the ancient universities, as late as 2006 the institution still had some of its old radical pizzazz. That year, with some fanfare, it promoted an international jamboree to mark ‘a place in British intellectual history’ for John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century champion of academic and personal freedom whose aims were similar to UCL’s, on his bicentenary. Understandably his memory was one argument Dr Shipworth invoked on this occasion when pressing for her own intellectual freedom. The answer from her head of department, a senior professor? A telling email: ‘I would be pleased to continue this discussion in person… note that I am an economist and modeller and I have no idea who J.S. Mill is.’ How are the mighty fallen.

But the problems run deeper. For one thing, it’s all very well to opt for a quiet life by allowing a student body that pays the bills indirectly to call the shots over what is taught. But it won’t be long before other foreign student bodies – say Indian or West African – catch on to this exercise in academic appeasement. Will UCL in the next few years have to tailor its courses to avoiding offence to any group, something which will even more closely constrict research and academic enquiry?

Secondly, even on a cynical financial footing UCL could well be riding for a fall. Its business model, shared with a worrying number of other colleges, amounts to scooping in ever-increasing numbers of foreigners prepared to stump up serious money (up to £40,000) for a prestigious UK degree. This has worked up to now, but to a large extent only because UCL is historically high in the official league tables of UK universities that many students and government scholarship bodies rely on in choosing foreign institutions. Unfortunately, a reputation for providing an education that is designed not to offend, however good for next year’s recruitment figures, may in the long term lead to a precipitous drop. 

This should to worry UCL. The market it has chosen to enter may give large gains. But it is an unforgiving one, and there are plenty of competitors in Australia, Canada, and the US that will be delighted to poach business from schools whose standards seem to be slipping towards a simple pandering to student satisfaction. The worst of all worlds would be a UCL that in, say, ten years has lost not only the assured far eastern income stream that it assumed would keep it afloat but the prestige it needs to encourage good students in the future. 

It need not be that way. A bit of rigour can actually work wonders. For first-class students and also for the would-be employers, whose views increasingly matter, a university’s willingness to challenge students and fail those who do not measure up (or cheat) indicates a degree worth having. This is the kind of quality that UCL should be going for. If that involves standing up for teaching that offends the odd interest group, then so be it.

Sunday shows round-up: Labour refuses to rule out cuts to public services

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has been clear that Labour will stick to the same fiscal rules as the Tories if elected, and also that they don’t want to raise taxes. Laura Kuenssberg asked Reeves to confirm that this might mean Labour would be forced to make cuts to some public services. Reeves said that the finances a Labour government will inherit would be ‘the worst since the second world war’, but would not confirm that Labour would make spending cuts. She promised an ‘initial injection of cash’ into public services, and said Labour would do a spending review quickly if elected.

Health Secretary defends government’s new interpretation of extremism

Communities Secretary Michael Gove will outlaw individuals and groups who ‘undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy’ this week, as part of a new expanded definition of extremism. On Sky News this morning, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins defended the new policy, telling Trevor Phillips that we should not allow views contrary to the UK’s values to ‘percolate through society’. Trevor Phillips questioned whether the new approach might impinge on the country’s commitment to free speech. Atkins agreed that there needed to be a balance between ‘freedom of speech but also the right of citizens to go about their daily lives.’

Chef Fearnley-Whittingstall: nothing is being done to tackle the obesity crisis

When questioned by Kuenssberg on the continuing struggles of the NHS, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins placed an emphasis on increasing productivity in the service. Sitting on Kuenssberg’s panel, chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall pointed out that obesity is the leading factor in poor health, and constitutes ‘the single biggest cost to the NHS’. He claimed that many agencies such as the Food Foundation have suggested policies the government could adopt to reduce obesity, and the government hasn’t acted on any of them. Atkins said she would be setting out a prevention strategy, and defended the government’s action in other areas, such as creating a smoke free generation by gradually banning tobacco. 

Reeves: ‘everything in our manifesto will be fully funded’

Laura Kuenssberg pointed out to Rachel Reeves that after the government adopted Labour’s plan to abolish the ‘non-dom’ tax status, there is a £2 billion hole in Labour’s plans to pay for breakfast clubs in schools, and create extra appointments in the NHS. Reeves repeated her comments from last week that it was ‘utterly humiliating’ for the government to have taken this long to close the ‘non-dom’ tax loophole, but she wouldn’t say where she would find the money that had been lost from her plans. Reeves said she was going through government documents to ‘identify the funding stream’. Kuenssberg suggested that although Starmer was asking for a May election, Labour were not ready for government yet. Reeves said that people would want to know that she was doing her job carefully, and not ‘plucking numbers out of the air’. 

Director of the IFS: big cuts are coming post-election

Finally, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Trevor Phillips that the baseline numbers being used in both Labour and Conservative plans implied substantial cuts to public services. Johnson said neither Reeves nor Hunt wanted to admit the necessity of making cuts, raising taxes, or borrowing more.

Why is Macron suddenly pro-Ukraine? Fear of Le Pen

Its an old ruse to deploy foreign policy for domestic purposes. France has a long history in that vein. General de Gaulle was adept at using popular domestic anti-Americanism on the world stage to embarrass pro-Nato political forces at home; François Mitterrand exploited the early 1980s Euromissile crisis with the Soviet Union to humiliate and isolate the French Communist party. Emmanuel Macron’s startling declaration that the West should not rule out putting troops on the ground in Ukraine is less a Damascene conversion than a strategy to stymy the Rassemblement National’s runaway 10 point poll lead for June’s EU elections.

A charitable soul might characterise President Macron’s support for Ukraine over the last two years as patchy. Whereas the US and Britain were supporting Ukraine before the Russian invasion, Macron refused even to accept Anglo-American intelligence that an invasion would take place, then blaming France’s director of military intelligence, whom he duly sacked. There followed the misguided and fruitless ‘negotiations’ with Putin and numerous declarations that France was avoiding escalation by denying Ukraine tanks or long-range artillery. This was interspersed with repeated injunctions not to ‘humiliate’ Russia. The upshot is that French military support for Ukraine is ranked around 15th, way behind the USA, Germany and the UK, according to the respected German Kiel Institute.

So why has President Macron suddenly swerved to paint himself as the West’s champion of support for Ukraine? There are three reasons. First, to fill the vacuum left by both the US and the UK’s leaders’ absorption with forthcoming elections. Second, to revert to his old ideal of melding a European defence community as platform for the European elections. Finally, and most importantly, to embarrass the Rassemblement National in the European elections, not to mention their predicted victory in the 2027 presidentials.

In his 2017 presidential victory speech, Emmanuel Macron publicly committed to eliminating the reasons why nearly 11 million votes were cast for the Rassemblement National. Five years later that number had risen to 13.3 million or 40 per cent of voters. Macron’s boast has failed. There is much to suggest that the President’s late conversion to support for Ukraine and his now war-mongering anti-Putinism is merely for domestic reasons to isolate the pro-Russian RN and France Insoumise before the EU elections in June.

The RN leads Macron on every count of voter concerns: immigration, law and order, cost of living, national identity, EU reform. Except for one: Ukraine. For the moment a majority of French opinion backs support for Kiev. And Macron wishes to flush out the RN by using that old revolutionary tactic of painting it asle parti de l’étranger – a fifth column for Putin’s Russia.

Here he has some justification. Until it recently paid off its loan, the RN was beholden to a Russian-Czech bank. ‘You are speaking to your banker when you speak about Russia’, Macron goaded Marine Le Pen in 2022. All through that year Marine Le Pen publicly called for the lifting of sanctions against Russia which, she claimed, would have ‘cataclysmic consequences for the cost of living for the French’. Marine Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto proposed a Franco-Russian alliance.  

Things came to a head in parliament last month; Marine Le Pen fell into the trap with a question to the Prime Minister criticising Macron’s troops-to-Ukraine quip. Gabriel Attal retorted acidly: ‘Madame Le Pen, you were defending a military alliance with Russia only two years ago.’ And then to add: ‘There is reason to ask whether Vladimir Putin’s troops are not already in our country. I am talking about you and your troops Mme Le Pen’.

Since then Macron has doubled down on his new-found international bellicosity by stating that there were ‘no limits’ to French support for Kiev. His strategy continues to unfold. A parliamentary vote is scheduled next week on the new Franco-Ukrainian security pact. While there is no constitutional need to seek parliamentary approval for something in the President’s purview, it is designed to flush out the RN.

Macron’s motive for this sabre-rattling is fear of abject humiliation at the European elections, when the EU is the only area on which the President has unambiguously nailed his colours over the last seven years. Losing to the RN would be doubly bitter.

But Macron should beware using inflammatory international language to fight domestic battles. His alter ego, the equally young French president turned emperor, Napoléon III, calculated on using a diplomatic incident in 1870 to garner domestic support by humiliating Prussia. A worse outcome could not have been countenanced.

Irish voters have refused to erase the family

It’s not been a particularly good weekend for the political establishment in Ireland. Two constitutional changes have been rejected by the electorate, despite being backed by all the mainstream parties – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour, Greens, Sinn Fein – plus the usual pundits and something called the National Women’s Council (a quango which is meant to represent women but somehow doesn’t). The state broadcaster, RTE, which finds itself in a similar position to the BBC after the Brexit vote, is curiously subdued about the outcome.

Voters were given the option to, as the Guardian put it, ‘modernise the Irish constitution’ in line with the referendums of 2015 and 2018 which approved same sex marriage and abortion and ‘underscored Ireland’s secular, liberal transformation’, and said no, thanks all the same. 

The clauses under review, very characteristic of Eamon De Valera’s 1937 constitution and described by the government as ‘outdated’, declared that ‘the state recognises the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent to and superior to all positive law’ and ‘the state pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of marriage, on which the family is founded, and to protect it against attack.’ The government wanted to qualify the bit about the family to say: ‘whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships’ and to omit the bit about the family being founded on marriage. You can see the direction of travel.

The other element of Article 41 that the government wanted to amend was about the place of women in the home. De Valera’s constitution declared that, ‘in particular, the state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’; and ‘the state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’. Nothing there about obliging women to stay at home, and indeed has never had the smallest effect on working women, but the government wanted the gender neutral alternative: ‘the state recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision’. Quite a difference.

The government had billed the referendum for International Women’s Day as an opportunity to embed equality and inclusivity in the constitution. Funnily enough, lots of women took the opportunity to vote against removing the sole reference to mothers in the constitution.

The victory is all the more striking when you consider who was in favour, and who against. Actually, it would save time to simply say who was against because the entire establishment was in favour of the change. That is, a tiny party called Aontu, led by Peadar Toibin, who broke away from Sinn Fein on account of his opposition to abortion; a former justice minister, Michael McDowell, a barrister and law professor who had particular fun with the bit about ‘other durable relationships’ as a viable alternative to marriage; a few independent parliamentarians; and a steely, pretty barrister called Maria Steen. 

Her encounter with the leader of (the notionally conservative) Fianna Fail party, Micheál Martin on the Prime Time television programme was one of the highlights of the campaign. He tried to patronise her by telling her what a modern family is, and repeated the line that the constitution was outdated. She responded, unanswerably, that ‘it’s hard to see how something that reflects the lived reality of women in Ireland today can be described as “outdated” because the reality is that the majority of women do the majority of work in the home’.  Which is kind of true, no?

Before the vote, the socially conservative Iona Institute conducted a poll which showed that given the chance, and with no financial considerations, nearly 70 per cent of Irish women with children under 18 would stay at home with them. But that really isn’t reflected in the parties’ political and spending priorities.

Peadar Toibin understandably billed the result as ‘a David versus Goliath referendum. We… battled against the political establishment and all the groups and the NGOs that receive funding from the political establishment as well’. But he also went on to point out that ‘in working class areas, in Sinn Fein and Labour heartlands you had significant no votes. It looks like the leadership of those parties are marooned from their supporters.’ That’s an interesting point. Because it was precisely in those areas – in Ireland, just as in Britain – where people are poorest, where the proportion of single parents is highest, that people most resoundingly voted no. Yet Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein’s leader in the Republic, is still complaining about sexist language about women in the constitution.

There is an evident gulf between the political and journalistic establishment and popular opinion (seen also on immigration). It’s pertinent to Britain, too, because the whole exercise was preceded by one of those citizen’s assemblies that Sue Gray, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, is so keen on. It wanted even more radical changes than the ones proposed in the referendum. Which bears out the reality that you can manipulate these bodies to give you the outcome you want, not necessarily what the nation actually thinks. They’re a terrible idea; an opportunity for politicians to delegate their role to a notionally independent body which actually isn’t representative in any meaningful way. 

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the explosion of rejoicing at this expression of the popular will that greeted the abortion referendum result. Nope, RTE and the pundits seem to be blaming the electorate.

The remarkable story of my mother, the heroine of the Holocaust

I’ve always loathed Russia: its regime, its remnants of enduring Stalin-worship, its rulers’ century of malign influence on the world. The cold-blooded autocrat Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine is all too redolent of the USSR, is succeeding in his aim of shattering the security and stability of Europe. I watch clips of Putin addressing vast cheering crowds in Moscow and wonder: what’s wrong with these otherwise sophisticated people? The alternative narratives are mere clicks away on their smartphones, yet they choose to swallow Putin’s dangerous lies and propaganda. Have they learnt nothing from their own history?

My Russia-phobia is nothing new: when I was four years old, my family fled Hungary in the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. This popular uprising against communist repression had been brutally crushed by Soviet tanks: civilians were massacred, thousands imprisoned, the revolution’s leaders hanged. Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising that I feel the way I do about Russia. But then I remind myself that, if it weren’t for one particular Russian, I wouldn’t be alive today. Or, to be more precise, I would never have been born.

My mother, Vali Racz, was a celebrated singer and actress in Hungary during the Second World War. Thanks to her glamorous looks and sex appeal, she was labelled ‘the Hungarian Marlene Dietrich’. In March 1944, the Nazis occupied the country and began rounding up Jews. As a Catholic, she wasn’t personally under threat, but many of her friends and associates were Jewish. Several of them now desperately sought her help. 

She didn’t disappoint. For eight months, her villa in Budapest provided a clandestine refuge for five Jewish fugitives. With the secret police prowling the streets, she needed to deflect suspicion, so she openly socialised with Wehrmacht officers. They would take her out for dinner, or call in for a drink (while the fugitives waited, hardly daring to breathe, in their hiding places).

By the end of December, the Red Army had encircled the city, the devastating Siege of Budapest began, and in February 1945 the Germans were finally routed. That was when my mother faced the second great threat to her life. A committee of newly-empowered Hungarian communists, based in her neighbourhood in Buda, recalled her ‘fraternisation’ with the Germans and concluded that she must have been a collaborator. One day they turned up at her door. She pleaded innocence and informed them that she had, in fact, rescued Jews. But as they were now long gone from her home and uncontactable in a city without working telephone lines or power or bridges across the Danube, there was no one to vouch for her. So they sentenced her to death, keeping her under house arrest. 

Her story then took a thrilling turn of Hollywood proportions. Months earlier, a Red Army colonel called Sasha had been billeted at her villa, and the two of them had enjoyed a steamy affair. Once it became known that my mother was the woman of a Red Army officer her home was off-limits to the more barbaric Russian soldiers – the ones who raped women all over Budapest. To my mother, he was a ‘guardian angel’. What’s more, Sasha supplied the household with all kinds of otherwise unobtainable food and drink – the spoils of war. In the evenings my mother played the piano and sang for him. When after a few weeks he received orders to move his troops to Romania, he promised to return. And so he did – arriving back on the very day before my mother was to be shot.

Entering the villa he found her kneeling on the floor, a priest giving her the last rites. He pulled her to her feet and demanded to know what was going on. She told him about the accusation and the death sentence. With a long hard look, he said that if she was guilty he could do nothing to help her. But my mother explained that, far from collaborating, she had risked her life to protect Jews. ‘I’m innocent,’ she told him.

‘Then I believe you,’ he said. He took her by the arm, put her in his jeep and they roared off to the communist group’s nearby headquarters. When Sasha burst into their midst, my mother in tow, the startled members looked up and gaped in awe at the high-ranking Russian. He forbade them to take any further action in her case until he had consulted higher Soviet military authorities. My mother waited while he left for the nearest military unit, from where he used a crackling radio transmitter to contact the central Soviet command post in Pest. As it turned out, my mother had already been interrogated by Soviet officials there, who were convinced of her innocence. Sasha was given full authority to order her unconditional release. He went back to the reckless, over-hasty committee and demanded her exoneration. She was saved. And so was I.

The next day, Sasha and his men pushed on to Berlin. My mother was to see him one more time. The war was over and, after mopping up in Germany, his troops passed through Hungary on their way home. They were returning to the Soviet Union as heroes. But Sasha’s face looked worn and tired, not victorious. They spent a last, tender night together before saying goodbye.

My mother never heard from him again. He’d told her he had a wife back in Russia and presumably he went back to her. But his liaison with the Hungarian aktrisa would not have gone unnoticed by the Red Army’s political commissars; Stalin regarded such philandering officers as having been tainted by the capitalist enemy and therefore untrustworthy. Was he sent to a gulag, along with the millions of other hapless victims of Stalin?

I have a faded photo of Sasha, taken in my mother’s garden. He was in his forties then, well-built, with medals on his uniform. His head is bandaged from a battle wound, but he is smiling. If only he could have known that, eight decades later, in another country, he would be thought of with warmth and gratitude by someone who never met him. And for whom he is a timeless, redeeming representative of his people.

As for my courageous mother, in 1991 she was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust documentation centre, for her rescue of Jews. As both she and Sasha demonstrated, even in the darkest chapters of human history,  there is always the light of hope.

Has BBC Verify done more harm than good?

As an increasingly jaded BBC hack, I reacted to the creation of BBC Verify last May with temple-rubbing despondency. The definition of ‘verify’ is to ‘to prove that something exists or is true, or to make certain that something is correct’. This is, in essence, the most basic rule of journalism. Yet here we were, having to reassure our increasingly distrustful audiences that we weren’t just broadcasting any old rubbish without checking it properly. Now why might that have become necessary?

One need look no further than the BBC’s coverage of Covid-19. The BBC seemed to jettison all pretence at balance during the pandemic. Unverified and often misleading claims about the virus, the efficacy of lockdowns, face-coverings and other non-pharmaceutical interventions were broadcast on a daily basis. When vaccines arrived, the BBC refused to countenance even the mildest journalistic curiosity. In recent days, an all-party group of MPs has accused the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) of knowing about post-vaccination heart and clotting issues as early as February 2021, but failing to highlight the issue for several months. Why did it take MPs to properly highlight this and not the national broadcaster?

So could BBC Verify signal a change of direction? A renewal of impartiality? A reappraisal of recent mistakes? Greater accuracy?

The evidence to date is not encouraging. There is more chance of Nigel Farage joining the Green party than BBC Verify being tasked with properly reappraising Covid claims or scrutinising lockdown harms anytime soon. Regrettably, some areas of journalistic inquiry have been, in effect, ‘cancelled’ at the BBC.

Still, BBC Verify has not been idle. Far from it. With conflicting reports and endless hours of grainy smartphone footage emerging from Ukraine and Gaza to analyse, not to mention Houthi attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden, its dedicated and highly skilled journalists have had a lot to get their teeth into. The new department has been staffed with specialists from a range of disciplines who used to work quietly behind the scenes. Some of these unseen experts hoped the brave new world of BBC Verify would bring them on-screen opportunities. BBC managers had other ideas, parachuting in tried and tested correspondents to present the findings of their lesser-known colleagues. So much for transparency.

There was always a risk in creating a verification brand that the impact of BBC mistakes would be amplified. And so it has proved, even when BBC Verify has not been culpable. The most egregious example came last October when a TV correspondent drifted away from the facts and into ill-advised on-air speculation about who was responsible for a deadly explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City, remarking that it was ‘hard to see’ past the Israeli military as the force responsible. (Subsequent evidence pointed to a misfired rocket by Palestinian militants.) BBC Verify was, in fact, much more measured and even-handed in its analysis of the blast but the brand was badly tarnished in the political row that followed.

The furore over the Al-Ahli Arab hospital explosion highlights a critical flaw in the reasoning behind BBC Verify’s creation. What is the point of having a department that attempts, using meticulous processes, to establish fact from fiction, claim from counter-claim when, at the same time, editors are permitted to rush onto the airwaves poorly-briefed correspondents who then fill the information void that typically accompanies breaking news stories with unsubstantiated and inflammatory waffle? The tension between these practices remains ongoing and unresolved.

But a greater tension, one that is fraying the trust between the BBC and the public, and which makes a complete mockery of the BBC Verify brand, is the elevation of progressive liberal dogma over indisputable facts.

Take the BBC’s coverage of the murder of Jorge Martin Carreno. The 30-year-old Spanish man was hit over the head, throttled, then pushed into the River Cherwell in Oxford where he drowned in July 2021. What was highly unusual about this exceptionally violent murder was that it was committed by a woman.

Except it wasn’t. The sadistic psychopath who killed Carreno was a biological male who identified as a woman. But when Scarlet Blake’s sentencing was reported on the News at One there was no mention of this whatsoever. Blake was described as a woman throughout – not even a trans woman.

As we now know, Blake’s new feminine identity didn’t override the murderous impulses far more typically found in men than in women. In a tacit recognition of reality, Blake will be housed in a male prison. Inside the BBC, however, this seems to be less important than being viewed as politically ‘progressive’.

Given the disputatious nature of the trans debate, perhaps the BBC Verify team could be put on the case to settle, once and for all, whether biology matters. They could do a deep-dive into the crime figures, especially violent and sexual crimes, and examine their relationship to biological realities. They might probe the long-term implications of mis-recording offences committed by biological men. They could examine the many research papers showing how real women face disadvantages across a range of metrics because of their biology, not how they ‘identify’.  

Of course, this will never happen. The BBC knows biology matters – the Corporation goes to great lengths to make sure women are equally represented in its news coverage. But as an apparent consequence of the Alice in Wonderland political leanings of senior editors, when a male rapist or murderer decides to identify as a woman, the BBC sides with the criminal in using their preferred pronouns.

So despite its much-hyped launch, the good ship BBC Verify is holed beneath the waterline. If the BBC ignores or distorts the facts when it comes to politically sensitive subjects like transgenderism, as shown by its coverage of Carreno, or takes an unbalanced stance in times of crisis, as it did during the pandemic, why should anyone believe it is playing straight with the truth on any other subject?

And herein lies the problem. Deborah Turness – the CEO of BBC News and the creator of Verify – clearly believes transparency and trust will be boosted by showing the public ‘how’ BBC News does its work. Regrettably, she has focused her mission in the wrong place. The real problem at the BBC is the ‘why’.

Why has the BBC swallowed the corrosive and dangerous doctrine of self-ID pushed by extreme trans activists? Why does the BBC refuse to examine its editorial lapses during the pandemic? And why does the BBC seem to place the vexatious values of the progressive left above impartiality?

Do Spaniards have the right to eat in restaurants at midnight?

Yolanda Díaz, one of Spain’s deputy prime ministers, raised eyebrows during last summer’s election campaign when she arranged to be filmed doing the ironing. ‘I love ironing’, she announced virtuously. ‘I spend hours, almost every day ironing’, she went on, warming to her theme. ‘When I get home from work’, she concluded with evident self-satisfaction, ‘I iron my clothes and everyone else’s.’

Now the 52-year-old Labour Minister in Spain’s minority left-wing government has irritated even more people by suggesting that the nation’s restaurants should close earlier: ‘It’s madness to carry on extending opening times; a restaurant still open at 1 o’clock in the morning is not reasonable’, she declared. ‘After 10 o’clock at night the working hours are nocturnal and, therefore, have certain risks. They have mental health risks’, she added earnestly.

The hours Spanish restaurants keep are certainly remarkable. Half a century ago when I was doing A-level Spanish I was astonished (and delighted) to learn that they didn’t even open until nine in the evening; the nightlife sounded wonderfully exotic and romantic – a world away from Birmingham in the 1970s. When Spain joined the European Economic Community in 1986 many predicted that the timetable would in time become more like that of northern European countries. In fact, however, just the opposite has happened. Enter a Spanish restaurant at 9 p.m. nowadays and you’re likely to find the place empty; it only starts to get busy a couple of hours later.   

This state of affairs seems to bother some Spanish politicians a lot more than it bothers the rest of the populace. The left often refer to northern European Union countries as somehow self-evidently better than Spain. ‘It is obvious’, Díaz added, as though this settled the matter, ‘that the timetables in our country are very different from those in Europe. It is not normal’.

Restaurant owners, however, were quick to point out that it is precisely because Spain is different in such respects that it remains an attractive tourist destination. The leisure and entertainment employers’ association ‘España de Noche’ (‘Spain by Night’) said early closing would be suicidal; the nightlife is one of the country’s main attractions. Others suggested that the proposal ‘would only benefit our competitors in the tourist market’ by removing ‘one of the most unique and special values of the Spanish lifestyle’. It’s an important consideration: Spain is the second-most visited country in the world after France and tourism is one of the main drivers of the economy. 

A restaurant owner I spoke to said that obviously everyone would like to have their evenings and weekends free but in the hotel and catering business you have to expect to work during other people’s leisure time: ‘The schedules do not respond to a whim of the employer but to the demand of the customers.’

And that demand is determined in part by Spain’s climate. In the summer the midday heat is so intense that the streets are often more crowded at two in the morning than two in the afternoon; after a long siesta it’s only natural that people want to dine late. An outraged presenter on one of Spain’s main radio stations demanded to know who Yolanda Díaz was to be telling him what time he had to have his dinner, predicting that next she’d be telling everybody what time to go to bed.  

Already the right-wing parties are heaping criticism on the government for the hugely unpopular amnesty it proposes to give Catalan separatists. Meanwhile a new corruption scandal over procurement of Covid masks is blowing up. It’s difficult to understand why the Labour Minister should have chosen this moment to annoy the hospitality sector too.    

Perhaps most vociferous in her opposition has been Isabel Díaz Ayuso, right-wing president of the Madrid region, well-known for her joie de vivre and enthusiastic defence of the capital’s restaurants and bars. ‘Spain’, she wrote, ‘has the best nightlife in the world, with its streets full of life and freedom. They [the government] want us to be puritanical, materialistic, socialist, soulless … without restaurants – just because they happen to feel like it.’ She signed off sarcastically: ‘Bored and at home.’

She may have been at home but, unlike the Labour Minister, it’s difficult to imagine her doing the ironing.    

Alastair Campbell’s Brexit delusion

In these tumultuous times, it’s difficult to be certain of anything for too long. But one thing that’s never going to change is Alastair Campbell’s ever-inflating ego. 

The former Labour spinner spoke to BBC journalist Kirsty Young this week for her BBC podcast Young Again, where she dissects the lives of her guests, quizzing them on what they’d do differently. For Campbell, you’d think there would be a fairly obvious, um, Middle East-shaped issue he’d spend most time on…

Instead, Tony Blair’s ‘Rottweiler’ used a not insignificant portion of the interview to harp on about how he only wishes he could have done more to save the world. In his typically humble style, Campbell said:

I think I will lie on my deathbed not wishing I’d spent more time at the office, but I will lie on my deathbed wishing I’d done more to change the world. I’ve got no doubt about that.

Mr S is glad to see old age hasn’t dulled Campbell’s sense of self-importance. The spin doctor continued:

The other day somebody stopped me in the street: ‘I love your podcast.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much’, but part of me was thinking, ‘Where’s this going? I’ve got a train to catch.’

And then I said, ‘Yeah, well, it’s great, but if you really want to change the world, you’ve got to get involved properly in politics, you’ve got to start a charity or whatever it might be’, and this woman said: ‘Oh, don’t underestimate how many people you’re touching, you might be inspiring, you might be motivating.’

I walked away and I’d love to be able to say that made me feel good. It didn’t. It made me feel guilty. I walked away thinking, ‘if she thinks I can have that effect on people through doing a podcast or writing a book about activism, how much more could you do if you actually did it properly?’

But the real zinger came when Campbell decided that he was solely responsible for Britain’s relations with the EU and, therefore, the presidential appointment of Donald Trump. 

I’ve got to tell you, I can lie awake in bed tonight absolutely convincing myself that I was responsible for Brexit by not getting involved in the first campaign. And because of Brexit, Donald Trump became President. And because Donald Trump became President…

Talk about delusions of grandeur. Campbell also admitted that ‘particularly in the political landscape, you have to have enemies sometimes’. Well, he certainly doesn’t make life easy for himself…

The disgusting defacement of Lord Balfour’s painting

There’s a new movement in town: Philistines for Palestine. Not content with traipsing through the streets every other weekend to holler their hatred for Israel, now ‘pro-Palestine’ activists are taking aim at art. Witness yesterday’s fevered attack on the painting of Lord Balfour at Cambridge university – an act of petulant, self-satisfied philistinism that will do precisely nothing to help people in Gaza. 

The slashing of the painting was carried out by a member of a group called Palestine Action. She walked up to the 1914 portrait and sprayed it with red paint before wielding her knife to cut it to shreds. Why target Balfour? Because he played a key role in creating the modern state of Israel. And to the manically Israelophobic left, there are few sins as grave as that.  

BREAKING: Palestine Action spray and slash a historic painting of Lord Balfour in Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Written in 1917, Balfour’s declaration began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by promising the land away — which the British never had the right to do. pic.twitter.com/CGmh8GadQG

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) March 8, 2024

There was something deeply unsettling about this Taliban-style assault on a piece of art. It had a medieval feel. A clearly riled individual, under the spell of some kind of fear or animus, using violence to try to cleanse the world of a sinful image. It feels like Year Zero fanaticism, a Red Guard-style effort to scrub ‘the problematic’ from public view. 

Such wanton cultural vandalism is not ‘progressive’ activism. It’s the rage of the entitled. It’s the nihilism of bored bourgeois youths who crave something to hate in order that they might feel more alive. We’ve already seen the sons and daughters of eye-watering privilege glue themselves to art in the name of ‘saving the planet’. Now they’re upping the ante and destroying art in the name of ‘saving Palestine’. That their antics will do nothing to ‘save’ either Gaia or Gaza matters little to these people. All that matters is that they get to make a public spectacle of their personal angst. 

That’s what lies at the heart of the neo-Maoism of middle-class radicals who love nothing more than to drag down statues of slavers or slash the likenesses of long-dead colonialists. It isn’t about changing the world – it’s about centring their own feelings. It’s the theatre of self-righteousness. It seems there is no global crisis that England’s middle classes won’t happily reduce to an opportunity for public moral preening. ‘Poppy, dear, there’s war in the Middle East — fetch the tomato soup…’

The defacement of Balfour wasn’t only ridiculous, though. It wasn’t only further proof of the narcissism that masquerades as progressivism in our strange era. It also hinted at the intolerance and possibly the bigotry that lurks in modern leftism. Ask yourself: why was Balfour targeted? It wasn’t just because he’s ‘problematic’. It wasn’t only because he had iffy views, as did everyone back then. No, it was because he helped pave the way for Israel. It’s because he helped give Jews their own homeland.

The slashing of that painting was not an ‘anti-colonial’ act. It wasn’t merely a performative assault on a Dead White European Male, of the kind we’ve become depressingly used to. It was also a signal – a noisy, violent signal – that anyone involved in the creation of Israel is evil and deserves erasure from public life. It was a clamorous declaration of intolerance towards anyone who helped to found or who supports this allegedly evil state. 

The irony is too much: what will no doubt be justified as an anti-imperial act was in truth an imperious expression of haughty English disgust for a tiny state overseas. Give me Balfour’s imperial reconstruction of the Middle East over these people’s sinister loathing of Israel any day of the week. After all, creating states is surely preferable to dreaming of destroying them. 

The middle classes seem to be in the grip of a kind of Palestine mania. Their feverish obsession with Israel and the idea that it is a ‘uniquely murderous’ entity belongs less to the realm of reason than to the sphere of moral delirium. It makes no sense in normal political terms. 

When I read Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books say that many people who’ve seen Gaza’s ‘visions from hell’ have been ‘going mad over the last few months’, I want to ask: why did other recent wars not drive you mad too? Why did Saudi Arabia’s bombing of school buses and funerals not push you towards insanity? Why didn’t the deaths of tens of thousands in Syria? Why isn’t the current jihadist war on Christians in Africa? Why does the Jewish state’s wars offend you more than any other war?

That’s what I felt when I saw that clip of the violent defacement of Balfour. I wanted to ask the slasher: why this issue? Why does Israel-Palestine induce in you more wrath and more emotion than anything else happening in the world right now? I know why I think it does. I won’t put it in writing though.

Watch Charles Moore discuss the attack on Lord Balfour’s portrait on SpectatorTV

How Germany became a security liability

There were lots of smiles and some awkward football banter when German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock met her British counterpart David Cameron in Berlin earlier this week.

Cameron was careful to tiptoe around Berlin’s recent security blunders, after an online call between German officials discussing British military activities in Ukraine was intercepted by Russia.

Britain’s former prime minister is good at this diplomatic dance, and he made a valiant effort to not, in his words, ‘play into the hands of some Russian narrative about divisions between allies.’ But it’s hard to paper over the cracks these recent security breaches have caused.

After a shaky start to the Ukraine war, Germany has made an effort to become a dependable ally to Ukraine and a country able to take a fair share of the responsibility for security in Europe. It is now the second largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine, and has recently boosted funding for its own armed forces by €100 billion. Last month, in a reversal of roles, chancellor Olaf Scholz urged the US and the EU to ‘send a clear signal’ to Vladimir Putin by ramping up support for Ukraine.

Yet alliances aren’t just about money, they are also about trust and dependability. And in the last few weeks, Germany has squandered large amounts of both. There has been an intense debate over whether Germany should supply Kyiv with long-range Taurus cruise missiles. Scholz, who is against the idea for fear of escalating tensions with Russia, claimed that Britain and France help Ukraine launch missiles at Russian targets, which Germany could not do. His discussion of British involvement in Ukraine was rightly slammed as ‘a gift to Russian propagandists,’ and ‘a flagrant abuse of intelligence’ in the UK.

But worse was to come. Last weekend, the Russian propaganda channel RT released a 38-minute recording of a supposedly top-secret discussion between senior German air force officials about the Taurus missiles. The officers used standard, commercial video-conferencing software and one of them, Brigadier General Frank Gräfe, had joined the call from a hotel room in Singapore. This careless setup allowed Russia to intercept the connection.

The men, among them Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, discussed in frank detail – and as it turned out for the whole world to hear – the politics and practicalities of how Taurus could be used in Ukraine.

Among the topics of discussion was how many Taurus strikes it would take to destroy the strategically important Crimean Bridge (‘10 or 20,’ the officers assumed), how many missiles could be delivered in total (a maximum of 100, ‘that’s it, that’s obvious’) and uncertainty over Scholz’s position (‘no one knows why the federal chancellor is blocking the dispatch of the missiles — this gives rise to all sorts of outlandish rumours’).

The fact that Russia was able to intercept the conversation was in itself embarrassing and damaging. But the fact that Moscow chose to release this recording suggests they could potentially have access to even more information.

It has also allowed Putin to crank his propaganda machine up another notch. Dmirty Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, announced on social media: ‘Our historic adversaries, the Germans, have once again turned into our archenemies… The second world war era call has once again become relevant: DEATH TO THE FASCISTS!’

But more damaging still is that the intercepted details reveal information about British involvement in Ukraine. As the Luftwaffe officers discussed whether Taurus can be deployed without direct German involvement, Gerhartz suggested that Britain has ‘a few people on the ground… yes, dear Lord, they’d be looking over the Ukrainians’ shoulders while they load the Taurus.’

Such revelations call into question whether Germany can be relied upon to keep shared military information out of enemy hands. Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British army, said he was ‘very disappointed’ by the leak. Tobias Ellwood, a Tory MP and former chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, argued that ‘basic protocols’ appear to have been neglected. Former British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace slammed Germany for being ‘pretty penetrated by Russian intelligence, so it just demonstrates they are neither secure nor reliable.’

Scholz himself has also come under intense criticism. His earlier indiscretion, combined with the Taurus leaks, has led to a strong sense that German leaders are unreliable when it comes to defence matters. Wallace even argued that ‘as far as the security of Europe goes he is the wrong man, in the wrong job at the wrong time.’

Cameron struck a more conciliatory tone in Berlin on Thursday, avoiding direct criticism of Germany by arguing that the Taurus missile debate was a ‘matter for the German government to decide.’ But it was plain for all to see that the emphasis on unity was for Russia’s benefit when Cameron directly challenged Scholz, saying: ‘If what you’re doing is helping a country defend itself from illegal and completely unjustified aggression, then there should be nothing to stop you helping that country to fight back to recover its territory.’

No matter how convincing Baerbock and Cameron were in their display of amiability, elsewhere tensions have already spilled over. The German Ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, has called Ben Wallace’s comments ‘extremely unhelpful,’ arguing that ‘this is what Russia wants.’ He also saw ‘no need to apologise’ for German security breaches that included British military information.

Scholz and his allies feel politically safe on this issue. A recent survey has suggested that only 35 per cent of Germans want their government to send the missiles. Many in his own party have applauded Scholz for resisting pressure from Germay’s allies, comparing the situation to when his predecessor Gerhard Schröder defied American requests to take Germany into the Iraq War – a clumsy analogy given Schröder’s friendship with Putin.

Regardless of Scholz’s position, in the short, medium and long term, re-establishing German credibility on security matters is crucial. With American support in Europe uncertain, Berlin needs to work closely with London and Paris. Ad-hoc statements by the Chancellor and security leaks by his air force undermine not only Germany’s credibility but also western unity. And that is what Russia wants.

Only Nigel Farage can save us now

When the Prime Minister cannot be bothered to listen to the Budget it sends out a pretty big signal to the country that there’s nothing much in it. Rishi Sunak spent long chunks of Jeremy Hunt’s latest financial statement on Wednesday chatting away to Treasury Chief Secretary Laura Trott. It was a wholesome scene reminiscent of one of those joint social evenings that neighbouring boys’ and girls’ schools in pleasant Home Counties towns sometimes put on for their sixth-formers. Compared to listening to Hunt, it must have been a gas.

Sunak’s semi-disengaged demeanour was emblematic of the Conservative benches in what was supposed to have been a key week in the great Tory fightback that clearly isn’t going to happen. Instead, Theresa May has just announced she is standing down as a Tory MP. And Sajid Javid, the first of the five chancellors of this parliamentary term, has declared that the prospect of waking up to Keir Starmer as prime minister simply isn’t frightening. This after trolling the remnants of the Tory vote by persuading Hunt to spaff a million pounds of taxpayers’ money on a Muslim war memorial. 

Meanwhile a busy week in the Channel ensured that Sunak himself passed the totemic figure of 40,000 small boat migrants since becoming PM. The two polls to have been published since the great Budget non-event put the Conservatives on 18 per cent (People Polling) and 20 per cent (YouGov) respectively. 

So much for all the talk of a May general election. It has always seemed more likely that Sunak will go on to late autumn on the grounds of getting to his second anniversary in Downing Street. As talented curriculum vitae assemblers everywhere will know, any less than two years in a post can raise doubts in the minds of prospective future employers.

Despite the unfolding disaster, there is no procession of Conservative MPs following Andrea Jenkyns and Simon Clarke in demanding another change of leadership. Nor is there any excitable gossip about a threshold of letters to 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady being anywhere near met.

There is a sense that Sunak and his top team are not going for the Labour jugular any more. Just as the Prime Minister allowed Labour to get away with its procedural shenanigans in the face of Islamist intimidation, so the Chancellor limited himself to some gentle ribbing of Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves.

The government is now being run according to the theory that Lord Finkelstein set out in a recent column in the Times: that holding to the centre ground may not save the Tories this time but will still leave them better able to win most elections over the long term than a tilt to the Right would. So they are going down without much of a fight. This administration has voluntarily transferred itself to the end-of-life ward. Sunak will now seek to preside over the extinction of Red Wall Toryism and bequeath a mainly centrist rump to whoever takes over from him.

Give Labour five years, or more likely ten, to alienate the commuting classes and back the Tories will roar under their own rejuvenated progressive phalanx of Coutinhos and Trotts, Keegans and Chalks. For the outgoing top echelon it will be trebles all round in the House of Lords bar amid talk of Starmer being quite generous with big quango posts for those who didn’t cross him too viciously in the run-up to the handover. 

So it is that a new British ‘populist’ moment will be averted and the nation state-fixated Right will get locked out by the globalists for another generation ahead. It is becoming ever more obvious that there is only one person alive who can upset this apple cart as it rolls gently along towards its dismal destination. 

For now, Nigel Farage is carrying on being an avowed ‘non-politician’ in order to facilitate his media punditry. He could make big money in America this autumn as Donald Trump’s warm-up man. He could even be the next unofficial UK ambassador to Washington in the event of a Trump victory. Or he could stick it to the establishment in our own general election and clear space for something very much better. Do that one, Nigel. Please do that one.

Labour’s ‘equalities’ dystopia

With Sir Keir Starmer creeping closer to No. 10 every day, attention is rightly being paid to the radicalism of Labour’s agenda. Many have pointed to the awful prospect of its Race Equality Act, which would entail vast social engineering by state bureaucrats in pursuit of racial ‘equity’. Labour backs a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that arguably equates criticism of Islam with racism – amounting to something like a blasphemy law. Meanwhile, its chilling plans for a ‘trans-inclusive’ ban on conversion therapy could criminalise clinicians not taking an ‘affirmative’ approach to patients who present with gender dysphoria. In other words, Labour could make it illegal not to set vulnerable young patients on a path towards experimental drugs and irreversible surgery.

These plans are concerning enough, but there are also elements of Labour’s equalities agenda that have so far been largely overlooked. When the policy programme for its October conference pledged to ‘make equality central to policymaking’, this was no exaggeration. Few have yet realised the scale of the equalities revolution Keir Starmer has in the pipeline.

Most notably, Labour is set to revive the ‘socio-economic duty’ (SED) in section one of the 2010 Equality Act. Dreamt up in the dying days of the Brown government, the SED was scrapped at the start of the coalition in 2010 by the then Home Secretary Theresa May, who described it as among the ‘worst aspects of pointless political correctness and social engineering’. It has since been adopted by the devolved governments in Scotland in 2018, and in Wales in 2021, giving us an idea of what it would look like UK-wide.

Many will think that the British state is already overburdened by equalities bureaucracy with the nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act, but the socio-economic duty (the Fairer Scotland Duty in Scotland) is a whole new ball game. The SED potentially adds several new social categories for the state to take an interest in. In Scotland, this has been interpreted to include: low income, low wealth, material deprivation, area deprivation, socio-economic background, and material deprivation, with ‘communities of place’ and ‘communities of interest’ thrown in as well.

Under the socio-economic duty, any major decision taken by the public sector must ‘actively consider how they could reduce inequalities of outcome in any strategic decision they make’.

The scope is vast. The SED applies to basically every part of the public sector you can think of: budgeting, town planning, city investment plans, procurement, recruitment, housing.  Officials are even expected to consider socio-economic disadvantage when taking ‘decisions about the shape, size and location of the [public body’s] estate’. (You have to wonder how that would have affected the ghastly eyesore that is the Scottish parliament in Holyrood.) Seemingly every public servant in Scotland is subject to the SED, whether they are ministers, local authorities, or even food standards boards. This would be the same across the UK if it is brought in nationally.

It’s not as if all this paper-pushing has made Scotland and Wales any better governed or indeed any fairer. The socioeconomic duty hasn’t, for instance, stopped Mark Drakeford imposing punitive green targets on Welsh farmers, threatening thousands of rural jobs. Nor has it deterred the SNP’s regressive minimum-pricing scheme for alcohol, a policy that has had no effect on the heaviest drinkers but which clobbers the poor. Indeed, a 2021 report into the SED rollout in Scotland by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – a Blairite quango which is hardly an enemy of the equalities state – couldn’t point to anything tangible in its favour.

Officials who responded to the ECHR survey agreed that socio-economic inequalities were now being ‘taken into consideration for strategic decision-making’ because of the SED, which was something they ‘largely welcomed’. But despite this, four years into its rollout, they also felt ‘that the extent to which the SED would result in changes to people’s lives remained to be seen’. In other words, the initiative did nothing to improve people’s lives but did give bureaucrats more boxes to tick.

Even avid proponents admit that it will ‘not in itself lead to better policy-making’. For the SED to really come into its own, says charity Poverty2Solutions, officials must be obliged to jump through a further hoop: developing policies ‘in partnership with people who have lived experience of socio-economic disadvantage’.

It isn’t only through the SED that Labour will put Britain’s equalities bureaucracy into overdrive. Some of its proposals are just bizarre. Apparently, Labour’s answer to Britain’s productivity problems is to compel companies with more than 250 employees to produce ‘menopause action plans’ and to make sure that ‘health and safety reflects the diversity of the workforce’. The party’s plan to ensure that ‘non-binary and gender diverse people’ are ‘treated with respect and dignity in society’ offers no specifics, but it isn’t hard to imagine hectoring information campaigns about the importance of ‘they / them’ pronouns. Or it becoming a hate crime to mock someone who identifies as a cat. An international LGBT+ envoy will spread the gospel worldwide.

Labour will also widen the scope for political parties to pursue affirmative action. Rather ironically, this comes after Labour was forced in 2022 to end 30 years of all-women shortlists for the coming election – much to the chagrin of party activists – after realising that with more than half of Labour MPs now women, the policy would contravene its own Equality Act.

Among these head-scratching trivialities sit policies that betray a fervent left-wing radicalism. Alongside its Race Equality Act, the party wants a gender pay gap review which will ‘eliminate inequalities in earnings’ between men and women. Needless to say, this outcome will never be achieved in a free society given the constraints of human biology – though doubtless this will not stop a Labour government from trying. No less removed from reality is its adoption of the ‘social model’ of disability. This element of ‘disability theory’ holds that there is no such thing as disability per se, but rather that it is socially constructed: someone is only ‘disabled’ due to economic, social, cultural, physical and attitudinal barriers, which must be removed. This deeply radical idea implies far more than making reasonable adjustments for disabled people. It means that if, say, a blind person has a more difficult time in the world, this is not only the fault of society but also the job of the state to correct.

The sheer scope of Labour’s equalities agenda disproves the common canard that Starmer is simply a safe pair of hands technocrat. If a Labour government is returned this year with a thumping majority, it will be able to reorient every organ of the British state towards flattening out inequalities. This is a recipe for a hugely expanded state – and a much less free society.