Removing Hamas will not solve everything

Ever since Hamas invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 of its citizens and kidnapped 240 as hostages, there has been an effort to distance the Gazan population from the terrorist group. In most cases it has been well-intentioned, reflecting a desire that western populations do not associate the rape, torture and mass murder of Jews seen on 7 October with the residents of a territory that is 98 per cent Muslim. Since 9/11, political, civil, journalistic and security elites have made delinking Islam and Islamist violence a priority in their initial responses to terrorism. This has been the case particularly in countries with a sizeable or highly visible Muslim population that could become a target for reprisals and racism. 

While this seems sensible as a means of preventing attacks on innocent Muslims in the West, separating Gaza from Hamas in a political sense is not easy. One of the difficulties encountered is Palestinian public opinion. A poll of 668 people by the Ramallah-based polling company Awrad suggests that 75 per cent of those living in Gaza and the West Bank supported Hamas’s attack on Israel, with 59 per cent supporting it ‘extremely’ and 16 per cent ‘somewhat’. In the West Bank, where three-fifths of Palestinians live, support was as high as 83 per cent while in Gaza itself a more modest 64 per cent said they backed ‘the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th’. Some 76 per cent had a positive view of Hamas, though this is more common in the West Bank (88 per cent) than in Gaza (60 per cent). Some 99 per cent had a negative view of Israel, of which 97 per cent is ‘very negative’. The polling, which included on-the-ground interviews in southern Gaza, also shows 75 per cent endorsing ‘a Palestinian state from the river to the sea’. Only 17 per cent supported a two-state solution. 

There has been some suggestion that Israel’s military operation risks radicalising Palestinians and pushing them towards Hamas. It’s scarcely possible to make Palestinians more anti-Israel than they are already. In polling conducted one month before the 7 October attacks by another Ramallah-based company, some 1,270 Palestinians were asked to name their preferred method of breaking the deadlock with Israel. Support for ‘armed struggle’ came out 29 points ahead of ‘peaceful popular resistance’ and 33 points ahead of negotiations. The same poll found 64 per cent of Gazans saying they would vote for senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh over incumbent Mahmoud Abbas in hypothetical presidential elections. (Palestinian presidential elections are very hypothetical; the last one was held 18 years ago.) 

This makes uncomfortable reading for western liberals, many of whom apply a double standard to the conflict. Examples of Israeli extremism, support for racist political parties, and settler violence define the country’s political and moral character, but Palestinian extremism, anti-Semitic laws and violence against Israelis are merely outgrowths of conflict and occupation. While beliefs and actions that are fringe in Israel are said to represent the mainstream, beliefs and actions that are mainstream in Palestinian society are said to represent only the fringe. 

Hence the efforts to cast Hamas as an alien interloper into Gazan society, when the terror group won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections with an overall majority. (Jimmy Carter, who headed up a team of monitors, described the election as ‘orderly and peaceful’ as well as ‘honest, fair, and safe’.) Hence the downplaying of the Martyrs’ Fund, the Palestinian programme that pays stipends to terrorists and their families if they are imprisoned or killed in the course of carrying out attacks against Israelis. Hence the overlooking of the Palestinian custom of handing out sweets to children to celebrate terrorist attacks against Israel.

Hence the pretence in western capitals that while Hamas may be extremists, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, which runs the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, are ‘moderates’. These moderates were most recently seen issuing a statement suggesting Israel, rather than Hamas, was behind the Supernova music festival massacre that killed 360 people. (The Palestinian Authority later deleted the statement from its website.) In September, Abbas gave a speech in which he said the Nazis killed the Jews not because they were Jews but because they were money-lenders. This should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Abbas, whose doctoral thesis claims that Zionists collaborated with Hitler in the Final Solution. 

None of this is to deny the distinction between Hamas terrorists and the civilian population of Gaza when it comes to the laws of war. The former are legitimate targets, the latter are not. Nor is it to suggest we should regard the deaths of non-combatant Palestinians as any less of a tragedy. It is merely to state facts and to illustrate how western elites’ determination to sanitise Palestinian society and its attitudes gives western populations a distorted picture of the conflict and the prospects for peace. Removing Hamas is not enough; Palestinian society, culture, institutions and attitudes need fundamental reform before there can be any hope for peace. 

The Palestinians’ self-appointed spokespersons in the West don’t like to hear any of this. They have their mythos in which Israelis are the evil ogres, Palestinians the righteous victims and they the knights in shining UN resolutions. The very progressives, activists and academics who lecture the rest of us about speaking over ‘people of colour’ and denying their agency do exactly that with the Palestinians, whose words must be rewritten for their own good and whose actions are always conditioned by the actions of others. Western progressives are too busy giving Palestinians their solidarity to treat them like human beings. 

Why won’t the Tories ban pupils from transitioning?

Finally, after months of argument and expectation, media briefings and leaked drafts, it seems the government just might be ready to release its transgender guidance to schools. Possibly. In a few weeks.

Word is that this latest iteration asserts the importance of sex over gender. It makes it clear to schools that sports teams, toilets and changing rooms should be demarcated according to biology. Only female children are to play on girls’ sports teams or sleep in girls’ dormitories on school residential trips. This is sensible and in keeping with decisions recently taken by major sporting bodies.

But those hoping for a complete ban on children social transitioning – changing their name and pronouns and wearing uniform meant for the opposite sex – will be disappointed. Such a ban appears to have been ruled out. Instead, children will be allowed to change their gender identity at school – in ‘limited circumstances’ and with ‘appropriate safeguards’ in place. Primarily, this seems to mean that mum and dad must be informed.

What’s shocking is that such a stipulation is deemed necessary. It lays bare the fact that, up until now, children have been able to make such life-altering decisions without their parents’ knowledge. A Policy Exchange report published earlier this year claimed that 40 per cent of state secondary schools were allowing children to self-declare their gender without parental consent. Not only have schools failed to communicate vital information but, worse, some teachers have actually colluded with gender-distressed children to keep their parents in the dark. This represents a breakdown in adult solidarity and, ultimately, an abdication of moral responsibility towards children.

Government guidance making it clear that schools should inform parents if their child is thinking of changing gender is a clear step in the right direction. But it is the minimum required if we are truly to put child welfare first. The fact is, after so many delays, guidance issued now does not fall on a blank slate.

Today’s children have been bombarded since their earliest days with the message that how a person feels about their gender trumps biological sex. It has been conveyed through children’s books, television programmes, library drag queen story hours and incessant social media content. Far from providing a refuge, schools have opened the door to campaigning organisations and re-written the relationships and sex education curriculum so that children spend less time learning how babies are made and more time learning how to become trans.  

This context means that simply informing mum and dad will do little to stem the tide of children seeking to transition. Concerned parents are confronted by children well versed in the importance of positively affirming someone’s identity. Indeed, they are more than likely to have picked up on the same message themselves. Groups like Mermaids have had astonishing success in propagating the idea that it is better to have a happy daughter than a dead son. This manipulative line is fundamentally dishonest: given love and support, gender confused children are no more likely to take their own lives than other children. But few parents are brave enough to take the risk.

Anything other than affirming your self-declared trans child’s wishes becomes even more difficult when the law is involved. The Bayswater Support Group for parents of children with gender dysphoria has recently written to the Crown Prosecution Service to raise concerns that its guidance on gender identity could lead to ‘spurious’ charges of domestic abuse. In their letter, they outline possible scenarios in which parents who do not consent to their teenager’s desire to undergo gender reassignment could face police prosecution.

When parents are under so much pressure to affirm their child’s chosen gender identity, and teachers simply have to ‘inform’ parents that this has happened, there are few opportunities to hit pause. Adults need to be able to assert their authority and take responsibility for the welfare of children. This might mean saying ‘no’ to social transitioning, or, at very least: ‘not yet’. A total ban on changing gender while at school could have helped achieve this.

The government did, at one point, consider this option but ran scared after claims that such a move would breach the Equalities Act. Rather than withstanding legal challenges or changing the law, government ministers revised their guidance. Reports that the soon-to-be-released guidance has been ‘toughened up’ by Kemi Badenoch, suggest some in cabinet wanted this watering-down to go further. Thank goodness they were stopped.

From what we know so far, the guidance provides a badly needed step in the right direction but leaves schools in the difficult position of having to negotiate the ‘limited circumstances’ in which social transition will be allowed. When confronted with distressed children and activist parents such decisions will not be easy. It should not surprise us if more schools simply opt for gender neutral uniforms and gender neutral language for all students. Sadly, this compromise is unlikely to quell the increase in the numbers of gender distressed children.

But perhaps concerned parents should take heart. We’ve been here before, after all. Several times. The guidance to schools has not yet been released and could easily be postponed or changed once more.

The Scottish Greens’ oil crusade is coming unstuck

‘Well, well, well,’ as the meme goes. ‘If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.’

The news that Grangemouth, Scotland’s last oil refinery, is to close by 2025, with hundreds of jobs thought to be at risk, has elicited statements of concern from across the political spectrum. But no one is likely to improve upon that from Scottish Green MSP Gillian Mackay, who posted on Twitter/ X:

There couldn’t be a more dazzling display of radical cluelessness. Mackay’s party, which is in government with Humza Yousaf’s SNP in Scotland, has made a crusade of harrying the oil and gas industry out of operation north of the border.

Earlier this month, when the King’s Speech confirmed an annual system of awarding oil and gas licences, the Scottish Greens accused the government of an ‘obsession for fossil fuels’ and said ‘the simple scientific fact is that new oil and gas licences are a disaster for our planet’s future’. The party condemned the Prime Minister for ‘his support of oil and gas during a climate crisis’.

In October, when Rishi Sunak announced 27 new oil and gas licences for the North Sea, Green environment spokesman Mark Ruskell MSP called it ‘an environmental disaster’, said there was ‘no sustainable future in endless oil and gas drilling’ and insisted we ‘urgently need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels’.

In September, co-leader Patrick Harvie, the minister for zero-carbon buildings in Yousaf’s government, gave a speech to the Scottish Renewables Heat Summit. He spoke of the need for an ‘urgent transition from the fossil fuel age’ and said moves away from oil and gas based heating were ‘an opportunity to liberate people from dependence on fossil fuels’.

The same month, Harvie’s co-leader Lorna Slater, also a Scottish government minister, issued a statement calling for people to attend a rally against oil and gas. The statement’s headline: ‘No more fossil fuels — join the march today.’ Her colleague Maggie Chapman MSP called for spending ‘focused on green solutions to wean us off fossil fuels’.

In May, Ruskell urged ‘a significant, generational shift’ in the levels of tax imposed on oil and gas companies ‘to send a clear message that these firms have to pay a price for such obscene profits made on the back of their climate wrecking activities’.

That same month, he greeted UK Government support for a proposed new oil and gas field by declaring that ‘we will oppose the self-destruction of approving any new oil and gas development at every turn’ and boasting that the Greens ‘ensured the Scottish Government’s draft energy strategy includes a presumption against no new oil and gas fields in the North Sea’.

These are just a few examples. There are many, many more. In their actions in government and in their political campaigning, the Scottish Greens have agitated for an end to oil and gas production in Scotland. Now they are getting what they want but not the way they wanted it.

As though it was possible to make such a sudden, fundamental change to an industry without producing unintended consequences. As though ‘just transition’ was ever anything other than a poll-tested slogan, no different from those deployed by successive Westminster governments during deindustrialisation of the UK’s coal, steel and manufacturing heartlands.

The Scottish Greens are entitled to campaign for the urgent abandonment of oil and gas. It’s no more or less legitimate than any of their other policies. But it takes mesmerising incuriosity to advocate the closure of an industry without bothering to study how said industry operates and how closure would likely play out. Such are the joys of being a progressive. When you know you’re virtuous, you don’t need to know anything else.

The old left had its faults but I’d take it over the new left any day. The old left knew about industry, jobs, the dignity of labour, and the material conditions of life. The new left is interested only in image, text, symbols and interpretation — postmodernism as a political platform. And what could be more postmodern than agitating for a plan that will inevitably mean people lose their jobs then proffering your solidarity when they do, like Margaret Thatcher’s industrial policy as rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut.

Gillian Mackay says she has approached the trade unions ‘to offer my support’. Perhaps she and her colleagues might consider offering their resignations instead.

How to date a widower

When is it acceptable to consider dating a widower? How do you know if they are still grieving and not ready to move on? According to statistics, men die earlier than women, so I was surprised this year to meet several whose wives had died before them. Divorced since the early 1990s, I had no intention of remarrying, but thought of striking up some sort of liaison with a widower.

I had rejected two non-widowers, whom my grandmother would have described as ‘cast-offs’, meaning exes one mustn’t go back to. I knew I would have to tread carefully with widowers, particularly those who’d had long and happy marriages and who might justly be suspicious of a divorcee who could in no way match up to their wives.

Two I’d met were of a certain age, though didn’t look it. My American friend Holly advised caution, emailing: ‘Most men like to be looked after and some may be looking for a nurse or mom.’ Whoa! Searching for sex and companionship, I might fall into a trap and become a nurse by mistake. I might have to administer pills, escort a man on a Zimmer frame everywhere, or cook two soft-food meals a day – horror! Holly also forwarded me a somewhat cynical article indicating that sex with an older man would cease altogether after a very short time.

My first recent widower was from America. Tall, handsome, athletic, four years older than me but still with an active career, he had been without his wife for three years. At a party where we were the only singletons, he had seemed to like me and had put his hand on my arm. We were both house guests in the same neighbourhood, me staying with my cousin and he with old friends. I texted suggesting a drink. He said he had ‘wall-to-wall commitments’ that evening but could possibly come Friday. He would let me know then. That evening, while walking to a local restaurant, I saw him on his way there too, just ahead of us, with his host and hostess. That must have been his ‘wall-to-wall’ commitment. On Friday, he texted to say that my kind invitation had slipped his mind as he and his hosts had been in ‘a social whirl’. We would have to meet next year. I googled his deceased wife. Not only did she look warm, vivacious and attractive – everyone liked her, I’d now heard – she had been militant in some American labour union. I felt like the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca. Compared with the first wife, I would surely seem superficial and inexperienced.

I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. I had heard of other women behaving in a desperate and undignified way, charging round with casseroles to comfort a bereaved man. An ex-pat vicar I knew in Mallorca couldn’t fit all the food into his freezer after his wife died. Then, disappointing the many available women in his parish, he’d married a non-churchgoer, a widow who had – scandalously – been seen going to bars on her own.

That’s another thing about widowers: they often marry widows. It’s something they have in common – but it is not without its pitfalls. One friend, widowed at 47, married within a year a widower whose wife had died six years earlier. She realised too late, though, that he’d wanted a fresh start, not ‘a sobbing woman’ who hadn’t yet processed her grief.

One doesn’t want to be indecently pushy. I recall one of my American cousins – older than me, divorced twice – pointing out excitedly that the beach club’s flag was at half-mast, meaning that Mr So and So’s wife had died that week. She would ask him to lunch at once. I heard, too, about a man who married the florist who did the flowers at his wife’s funeral.

Back in the UK, a local widower I met recently was interested in trees, so I invited him to a group outing where these would be discussed. Alas, he would be away with family. Another widower, younger than me, kindly brought to my house a woman who’d lived there as a child, and we discussed the house’s intermittent poltergeist activity. This man, whose nice, shy, quietly competent wife died earlier this year, has made a thoughtful and imaginative gesture, and I know at least we can be friends.

Things have now taken an about-turn. A puppy in arms appeared in our local shop. My own dog, Perry, died at 17 last year and I wasn’t sure if I would ever get another. But I remembered my joy at having a dog in my home and so I have bought the darling little thing. Do I even want to have another relationship with a human? Aren’t I safer, and much happier, with a dog?

‘The potential for jeopardy’: Pullman Dining on the Great Western Railway, reviewed

I am lazy and nosy, and so I spend a lot of time on the GWR service from Penzance to London Paddington. Each journey is a play with a unique atmosphere. Some are seething, particularly in summer when an eight-carriage train cannot fit everyone who wants to swim in the ocean but dine in west London that same night. Some are non-committal; some restful. I rage at usual things: luggage in the disabled space, which is almost always occupied by the non-disabled, though they may be fat; videos played without headphones; young people swearing at older people because they grapple with a rage they cannot understand. You can measure the social contract on any long train journey, and I have. It’s broken.

But there is always consolation if you have money. I didn’t know there is a restaurant car on the GWR service from Penzance to London Paddington. It is called Pullman Dining. I thought common train dining went the way of train windows that opened, which had to be abolished when someone stuck their head out and was hit by a branch, because stupidity is infinite. I used to like the bar car, which served floppy bacon sandwiches and gin and tonics at 11 a.m. but it was replaced by a trolley service, manned by charming people. It is the Flying Dutchman of snacks, appearing once every seven years with a Wispa and a sigh. It is semi-mythical, and I do not trust it.

But on Friday we explored the 3.15 p.m., and learnt that, like Cinderella at the ball, a small green and grey first-class carriage had transformed itself into a dining car with paper tablecloths and fine tableware. If you have a first-class ticket you can reserve a table: otherwise you must throw yourself on the mercy of the train manager. I don’t care for first class since they abolished the oversized leather seats. They were soothing because they were made for libertines and monsters: for Logan Roy. I have stowed away in the new first class since – if you say you support the strike action, they might let you sit there – and I am always cold. The grandeur has gone: you are only paying for the absence of other people. Nor have I ever had a good meal on a train. The beef on the Orient Express was overcooked and, though the scrambled eggs on the British Pullman were adequate, nothing compensated for the way commuters looked at you from their platforms in outer London.

Still, a restaurant on wheels has the potential for jeopardy, and therefore excitement. Sometimes it is in Devon, sometimes in the Somerset Levels, sometimes in sullen Reading. We walk into the first-class carriage disguised as a restaurant and are instantly cocooned in affection. I am spending a lot of time monitoring the Cornish Palestine Solidarity Campaign Facebook page, and I need it.

The beef fillet is superb, bloodier than I asked for, and the better for it. The effect is slightly ruined by the fact that the dauphinoise potatoes are undercooked and taste of mud. The sage-stuffed chicken with hispi cabbage is fine, as is the pannacotta with poached rhubarb: the cheeses are too cold, and the bright orange one tastes of soap. The view, meanwhile, is only of our own reflections. Even so I recommend it, at £33.50 for two courses, or £39.50 for three. The replacement of the bar car with mythical trolley service and surprise fine dining is a metaphor for political polarisation, of course. But for me it’s a novelty, and a transient one. Look around for worse.

How Vegas became a sporting hotspot

Anyone know the Hindi for schadenfreude? Who could have seen that coming: certainly not your correspondent, who had invested some time ago in India to win the Cricket World Cup. Not to be, sadly, and the red-hot favourites were given an absolute pasting in their own backyard by a team of unfancied Aussies who had lost both their opening games of the tournament.

It certainly disproves the Samson theory of sporting excellence: in days of yore a sportsman’s luxurious mullet (look at rugby’s Mickey Skinner, or football’s Frank Worthington and Stan Bowles) often meant a similar lush on-field display. But Travis Head – no longer sporting his bushy 1970s porn star ’tache – put paid to that notion with a match-winning ton as well as a stunning piece of athleticism in the field to catch Rohit Sharma, India’s captain, who could scarcely believe what he saw.

India’s strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi doesn’t strike me as someone with a rip-roaring sense of humour, so it was pleasing to sense his fury as his national side choked at the end – and in a stadium named after him to boot. Looking as if he had just been slapped in the face with a wet fish, Modi handed Aussie skipper Pat Cummins the trophy and stomped off, leaving him alone on the podium as the fireworks went off.

It capped off a particularly tangy trophy presentation which the Indian players couldn’t be bothered to watch, sulking off to the dressing room while their fans booed the excellent (English) umpires, Richard Illingworth and Richard Kettleborough. But I expect I am not alone in feeling reasonably satisfied that one of the most arrogant sportsmen on the planet, Virat Kohli, for all his excellence, was left clutching a runners-up medal.

I may have been sceptical about the Las Vegas Grand Prix, but even the greats can get things wrong. Max Verstappen himself began race weekend criticising the event as ‘99 per cent show and 1 per cent sporting event’. At the end he was on top of the podium in an Elvis-themed suit after belting out ‘Viva Las Vegas’. The event itself was a thrilling spectacle, and for once an insanely dramatic race with the lead changing multiple times on the track, not just in the pit lane.

So chalk one up to Sin City, which clearly has designs on becoming one of the poles of the sports world. Along, oddly, with Riyadh. Could it be that all the big razzmatazz events in sport will soon be in one of those desert fastnesses? The Vegas GP will be Formula 1’s marquee event for years to come; Super Bowl 2024 is in Vegas; and the Oakland A’s baseball team will soon be pitching up there too. And don’t be surprised if a major cricket T20 tournament doesn’t make its presence felt. Up to now of course the city’s first love has been boxing, and there’s barely a major bout that hasn’t been held under the bright lights of the Strip.

But that is slowly changing as the big fights head to Riyadh for the biggest bucks. Tyson Fury’s bout with Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk will be held there in February, the first undisputed heavyweight championship of the world since 1999. Next month, on 23 December, big names like Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder are fighting on the same card in the Saudi Arabian capital.

Saudi will be staging the 2034 football World Cup while most of the world’s footballers head to its leagues for synapse-bending sums of money as soon as they start to feel their best days are behind them. The Gulf already has four F1 races and several big-money golf tournaments. So now Saudi has the cash and Vegas is the destination. Sport is changing. It’s a long way from the days when Stanley Matthews travelled to matches by bus, along with all the other fans.

Don’t mock Big Tech around Rishi Sunak

PMQs began with Sir Keir Starmer’s favourite trick. He read out a sob-story intended to humiliate the government. Having outlined the woes of two unfortunate citizens, he accused Rishi Sunak of ‘refusing to take responsibility’ and of ‘boasting that everything is fine’.

The sad pawns in this prank were a teenage boy and his hard-working mother. Sir Keir even named them in the house. The young lad doesn’t go to school and his mum struggles to look after him while maintaining her job in the NHS. The pair get no help. They have no friends or neighbours, apparently. No colleagues, no relatives and no teachers to give them support. There isn’t even a boyfriend or a husband to share the load. Clearly this is an extreme case of helplessness and isolation, and their circumstances are unlikely to be improved by publicity. But Sir Keir seemed not to care either way. He quoted the mother who, rather helpfully, uses sentences that seem well suited to a Labour brochure.

‘Whatever spin the government puts on it, you can’t hide the reality for ordinary working people.’

Is it right for him to use her troubles to rocket-boost his ambitions? He should repay this debt as soon as he can. Turning to waiting-lists, he accused Rishi of starving the NHS of funds. Rishi blamed Sir Keir for conniving at strikes that led to operations being scrapped. And he took solace in re-announcing historic acts of munificence.

‘Weeks after I became prime minister, we injected record funding’, he said, and he unfurled a new catch-phrase: ‘the long-term workforce plan.’ Only a fantasist would believe that this smooth-sounding label will fix the system. The NHS isn’t really a public service any more, it’s just a fruit machine operated by gambling addicts.

Kirsty Blackman of the SNP argued that energy bills could be reduced by making fuel more scarce. Her plan sounds appealing on the face of it: invest half a billion in ‘the transition,’ she said, and then bingo, everyone gets cheap fuel forever. That kind of logic probably goes down well in a nursery school, and it may have been devised in one. Rishi said that ‘North Sea oil’ should have a ‘starring role’ in our energy supply. And he rejected the SNP’s policy of £400 rebates for each family because, he said, he doesn’t want put resources ‘in the hands of foreign dictators.’ Perhaps he means Humza Yousaf.

Cambridge MP, Daniel Zeichner, posed an ironic question about Rishi’s recent podcast with Elon Musk. He asked what Rishi was hoping to learn from ‘an unelected super-rich individual’ who took over a thriving organisation ‘and plunged it into a death-spiral.’ This quip won guffaws aplenty from the Labour benches. Rishi snapped back with uncharacteristic passion. He spoke up on behalf of geeks and nerds everywhere. ‘This illustrates everything that is wrong with Labour’s approach,’ he cried, and he accused Zeicher of failing to grasp the importance of the tech sector ‘in Cambridge of all places.’ He said he felt sorry that the university town ‘is being so poorly represented.’

The sudden fire in Rishi’s belly was a surprise. For the bulk of the session he was happy to recite investment figures and growth forecasts like a bored middle-manager at a Friday afternoon meeting. But he caught fire as he leapt to the defence of Big Tech. The Tories picked up on his power-surge and cheered in response. ‘More!’ they chanted, ‘more, more’. The session turned into modest triumph for Rishi. But what does it mean? Inadvertently he lent weight to the theorists who believe that he’s planning to do a Nick Clegg after the election and spring from the cabinet to California. The idea that Rishi is using his time in Downing Street as a research opportunity to impress future head-hunters is rather worrying. Doubly worrying, it’s probably true.

Penny Mordaunt hits back at Tory ‘ideologues’

It’s not been the best of times for the One Nation Tories. Yesterday Andrea Jenkyns – deputy chair of the European Research Group – launched a full-frontal attack on the caucus, telling that GB News:

This One Nation Group make up the majority of the parliamentary party, but these are the ones who didn’t want Brexit, who didn’t want Boris, who didn’t want Liz Truss — so they’re not really in tune with the British public… I don’t think the Tory party are going far enough [to the right] actually. If you look at the group, they’ve never accepted Liz [Truss], they never accepted Boris and it’s about time that we started having policies that were in our manifesto and that speak to the people.

So at last night’s Conservative Voice event, it was the turn of Penny Mordaunt to respond. The Leader of the House was asked by one audience member about Tory infighting and the Portsmouth MP gave a typically robust reply. ‘I don’t have time for people that say you’re the wrong type of Conservative,’ she told the crowd. Positioning herself as a ‘pragmatic Conservative’, she continued:

I believe we are best when we’re not ideologues… When you go to my end of the Tea Room here, we’re talking about the impact we make on people’s lives. Going to the other end of the table, and they’re talking about political philosophy and dogma.

Mordaunt then turned her attention to the Prime Minister and his team’s communication skills:

No. 10 put out a video marking the anniversary that the PM came in. And I didn’t retweet it. I didn’t retweet it because on his list of things that he’s done – the CPTPP, the Windsor Framework, a long-term plan for the NHS — those are all very important things and they are difficult things to get done. But they don’t mean anything to the people I represent. We’ve done a lot that does mean a lot to the people I represent. So this is about communication. It’s about delivery.

Let’s hope they’re listening in No. 10…

Rachel Reeves borrows an attack line from Ronald Reagan

Rachel Reeves is getting used to being nicknamed ‘the copy-and-paste shadow chancellor’ by the Tories. Today she leaned into that name by repeating a phrase she’s been using for a while; one she copied and pasted from another politician. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 question of ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ was the central theme of her Autumn Statement response. Her recast of it was ‘the questions that people will be asking at the next election and after today’s autumn statement are simple: do me and my family feel better off after 13 years of Conservative governments? Do our schools, our hospitals, our police today work better after 13 years of Conservative governments? In fact, does anything in Britain work better today than when the Conservatives came into office 13 years ago?’ 

Reeves wanted to make voters question whether they could really trust the Tories any longer, telling the Commons that ‘the reality is you can never trust the Tories with our NHS’. And ‘no one can trust the Tories with taxpayers’ money’.

‘Why on earth should people who experienced deteriorating public services under this government trust them to fix it?’, she added. Both parties will be fighting on this key issue of trust at the next election. The Conservatives will argue that things are already starting to get better, and urge voters to stick with them. Labour will say there’s no evidence this is true and that it’s time for a change. 

The speech straight after a fiscal event is one of the more difficult ones for an opposition politician. Reeves always does a remarkably good job of them and is getting better all the time. The actual rows haven’t yet been revealed, any Tory rebellions are only just starting to ferment. The shadow chancellor skated around rows that her own party might end up having, particularly on welfare reform. As the figures emerge suggesting that the tax cuts are to be paid for with big departmental spending cuts later, she will have another row with her party about whether she would mirror those spending plans, or what she would do differently. But it was a good response by Reeves and framed the Labour themes neatly.

The truth about Hunt’s ‘tax cutting’ Autumn Statement

Jeremy Hunt’s March Budget was an exercise in Big State Toryism. It lacked meaningful tax cuts, was full of new spending promises, and was estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to take the ratio of public spending to GDP to ‘43.4 per cent, its highest sustained level since the 1970s’. But today’s Autumn Statement, the Chancellor told the Commons today, was going to be different. Framing the fiscal update as an ‘Autumn Statement for Growth’, Hunt began his announcement by insisting that  ‘our choice is not big government, high spending and high tax because we know that leads to less growth, not more. Instead we reduce debt, cut taxes and reward work’. 

What followed was a series of concrete tax cuts for both businesses and workers. Hunt was working with a £27 billion fiscal windfall calculated by the OBR – more than four times the amount he previously thought he’d be working with. He spent nearly all of it on a combination of tax cuts and business relief. The biggest announcements included his decision to make ‘full expensing’ – which allows businesses to write off their investments against their tax bills – permanent. It was hailed as the ‘largest business tax cut in modern British history’, amounting to £9 billion, which plummets the UK to the ‘the lowest headline corporation tax rate in the G7’ – a point that this government will want to emphasise, as Rishi Sunak’s decision to hike corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent for the largest businesses (and Hunt’s decision to keep it there) remains a huge point of contention within the party.

But the surprise announcement was on National Insurance (NI), which has been cut by two percentage points for workers and simplified for the self-employed: ‘abolishing the compulsory Class 2 charge and cutting Class 4 National Insurance’. The reduction from 12 per cent to 10 per cent for employees is estimated to put £450 back in the pockets of your ‘average’ worker, a tax cut costing £8 billion a year. 

The decision to target the tax on jobs – combined with welfare reforms, which will further restrict benefits if people are refusing to look for work – suggest the Tories are trying to develop a more cohesive narrative around their plans for next year (and indeed the next five, when they inevitably ask voters to give them a fifth turn in office).

‘If we want people to get up early in the morning,’ said Hunt, ‘if we want people to work nights, if we want an economy where people go the extra mile and work hard then we need to recognise that their hard work benefits all of us.’ In other words: the more we work, the more the economy grows. And the more it grows, the better off we all can be.

But was this really the ‘Autumn Statement for Growth’? While the tax cuts were heavily focused on encouraging investment and work (the OBR estimates that all measures taken together will add 200,000 jobs to the UK economy by the end of the forecast period), the GDP figures tell a different story.

Hunt may be selling his fiscal update as one that will dramatically boost growth estimates, but the OBR has actually revised down its forecasts for the next few years. While the OBR is now predicting tiny growth this year (compared to its prediction of a small recession back in March), it has revised its forecasts downward for the next three years: from 1.8 per cent to 0.7 per cent in 2024, from 2.5 per cent to 1.4 per cent in 2025, and from 2.1 per cent to 1.9 per cent in 2026. 

What continues to weigh down the economy? A myriad of things, many of which were again plastered up, or glossed over completely, in today’s Statement. While NI may be coming down for workers, millions have been pulled into a higher tax bracket over the past few years due to Sunak’s decision to freeze personal tax thresholds. Fiscal drag is set to slow, yet today’s update from the OBR estimates the freeze means by 2028-29 ‘nearly 4 million additional workers paying income tax, 3 million more moved to the higher rate and 400,000 more paying the additional rate.’

The Chancellor may be able to boast about cutting tax now, but he is not going to want to talk much about the overall tax burden which is still set to rise to a post-war high by 2027-28. In fact, the November forecast is now higher than the revised March forecast (which takes into account newer GDP figures), estimated that the tax to GDP ratio hits a staggering 37.7 per cent, rather than 37 percent.

Yet even with record high levels of tax funneling into the Treasury, the Chancellor only just meets his (already very loose) target for reducing the debt, which needs to see the ratio of debt to GDP falling by the fifth year of a rolling forecast. And there’s no guarantee he’ll meet this. The current forecast – which shows debt to GDP rising to 98.6 per cent next year, up from 97.9 per cent this year, and eventually falling to 94.1 per cent by 2028-29 – is predicated on the ‘government’s stated policy of increasing fuel duty rates in line with RPI inflation and the reversal of the “temporary” 5p cut.’ 

But the OBR isn’t convinced: not only has Hunt left himself half the headroom than the average to meet his fiscal rule (£13.0 billion compared to £27.9 billion) the OBR notes that if Hunt, like ‘all chancellors since 2011’ decides to hold rates where they are, ‘then more than 43 per cent of the headroom in 2028-29 would be removed and debt would no longer be falling in 2027-28.’

For all the talk of ‘hard decisions’, the government continues to dodge the big spending questions that are set to see debt continue to rise and borrowing to remain well above pre-pandemic levels.  Hunt’s decision to uprate benefits with September's more generous inflation figures largely makes sense, not least given the current cost-of-living crisis continues to disproportionately affect the poorest. But his decision to – yet again – avoid the politics of the state pension and ‘honour our commitment to the triple lock in full’ is on its own a £30 billion commitment – one that is three times the size of his largest ever tax cut for business, and even trumps his entire fiscal headroom for every tax cut on offer.

It seems, then, that not every ‘tough decision’ really has been made. Tax cuts are very welcome. But it is becoming increasingly clear that they can only happen within the tight framework of a high-tax, high-spending state – one that is being solidified by the Tory party.

Watch: MP accused of calling Stockton North a ‘s***hole’

When Labour MP Alex Cunningham asked Rishi Sunak why child poverty was at 34 per cent in his Stockton North constituency, he received an unexpected reply. During the exchange in the Commons, an MP was caught on microphone apparently suggesting the reason was that Stockton North is, er, a ‘shithole’.

The comment was picked up on parliament’s live video feed but mystery surrounds who made the remark. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly denied that he was to blame. Asked whether he made the comment, his spokesman said: ‘He did not, and would not. He’s disappointed they would accuse him of doing so.’ Other Tories are suggesting that the actual remark was ‘because it’s got a shit MP.’

So who is the mystery MP who made the remark? Have a listen for yourself below:

Lab MP @ACunninghamMP has attempted to raise a point of order after a Tory MP (believed to be foreign secretary James Cleverly) appears to have called Stockton North a “shit hole”

Cunningham had been asking about the area’s child poverty pic.twitter.com/eJTdVwjzHz

— Rachel Wearmouth (@REWearmouth) November 22, 2023

The Tories are cutting it fine with their Autumn Statement

Just a year ago, Jeremy Hunt played Scrooge at the despatch box. In an attempt to regain market credibility following Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, Rishi Sunak’s new government announced £30 billion of spending cuts (largely pencilled in for after the election) and £25 billion of tax rises. It was a far cry from the summer leadership contest, when Truss and Sunak promised to lower the tax burden. Sunak’s argument has always been that he would cut tax – but only once some order had been restored to the public finances.

Sunak’s reticence has been unpopular with his own side. Boris Johnson attacked him for lacking a ‘grand economic strategy for growth’. With the tax burden at its highest level since 1949, other colleagues see his claims that he is a low-tax Tory as disingenuous. ‘He’s like a mafia don going to confession,’ says a former cabinet colleague. ‘He says he is sorry for what he’s done but no one believes it.’

This week’s Autumn Statement is meant to be the moment Sunak and Hunt prove the naysayers wrong. Their argument: yes, it hurt – and yes, it worked. Tight pay settlements helped lower inflation, which has given the government greater fiscal headroom so the tax cuts can begin. The question is whether the cuts amount to very much, will change Tory fortunes – or be a case of too little, too late.

Despite previous suggestions that tax cuts would have to wait until the new year, Hunt and Sunak chose to slash national insurance for the employed and self-employed. Employee national insurance has been reduced from 12 to 10 per cent – saving the average worker £450 a year. This will come into effect in January – leading to talk that Sunak wants to keep open the option of a spring election. ‘No. 10 want maximum flexibility on election timings,’ reports a senior minister. For the self-employed, class 4 contributions have been cut from 9 to 8 per cent and Class 2 NIC payments abolished. An average self-employed earner – on £28,000 – should save £350 a year.

But then comes the part that the government isn’t shouting about. Last year, Hunt chose to extend the freeze on income tax and national insurance thresholds – so workers face the hidden tax known as fiscal drag. Far more workers will end up in higher tax brackets. Add everything together – stealth tax rises and advertised tax cuts – and taxes are not falling. They are rising, albeit a bit more slowly: from £989 billion in this financial year to £1,036 billion next year. This is less than the £1,047 billion originally planned. Put together with the other measures – increasing the national living wage to £11.44 an hour and making ‘full expensing’ permanent – it is meant to give Sunak an economic-recovery narrative. Yet it’s hardly a Thatcherite revolution.

Ministers want to point towards a light at the end of the tunnel, to say that the country is on the path to lower taxation, should they win the next election. That, it is thought, could re-equip the Tories with their best electoral weapon: the promise of lower taxes.

The government is considering doing more in the Spring Budget. Under discussion are further cuts including to income tax.

This week’s changes, combined with reforms to toughen up the benefit system, bring together the bones of a growth strategy. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the measures will put 200,000 people back into work over five years.

There will be critics. Ahead of the Autumn Statement, MPs complained that ‘full expensing’ is an accountancy fiddle which allows companies to deduct too many investment costs as tax write-offs. In campaigning terms, too, it’s not exactly a doorstep-ready pledge for a party in its last pre-election year. Therefore, the decision to make it the highest-priced part of the Autumn Statement – it is estimated to be the biggest permanent business tax cut in recent history – raises further questions about Sunak’s political judgment.

The argument for removing the tax penalty on capital investment is that it is a long-term decision that addresses one of the biggest drags on growth. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Labour party and the CBI all like the idea. It also ought to attract more overseas investment. Since Labour is unlikely to undo it, ‘full expensing’ ought to bring some certainty for investors. ‘It is a matter of doing the right thing,’ says one figure involved in the planning.

The other criticism will be that Sunak has not gone far enough. Yet those hoping for fireworks or a tax-slashing bonanza were always going to be disappointed. The Prime Minister has made much of his caution. He wants to define himself against Truss’s unfunded tax cuts and Labour’s plans for borrowing. He wishes to be seen as a pragmatic middle-way leader whose announcements make long-term sense.

It’s also the case that the economy remains fragile and options are limited. Just this week, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned that the ongoing risks from inflation were being underestimated. ‘Next year is going to be difficult on the economy,’ predicts a minister. It means some think the big opportunity to improve things was missed months ago. ‘The Budget that could really have had an impact was last spring,’ says a minister. ‘At this point it is about sending a message.’

In response, Labour’s plan is to stick to its agenda and not fall into Tory traps on benefits and tax. When Rachel Reeves addressed Labour MPs ahead of the Autumn Statement, the shadow chancellor reminded them of their key message on the economy: do you feel poorer now than you did 13 years ago? ‘The public don’t follow the Autumn Statement but they know how they feel in their pocket,’ says a Labour figure. ‘Every time a Tory politician goes on the news and says that inflation is down, people just get annoyed.’

Sunak’s bigger problem is that while the economic picture may have improved, the polls are nearly as bad for the Tories as during the Truss era. Hopes that the party conference, the King’s Speech and a reshuffle would improve their fortunes have been dashed. The Labour lead has only increased.

Sunak urgently needs to satisfy his party and give voters a reason to back him. With this week’s statement, Sunak and Hunt have finally set out a path to reducing tax and a coherent growth strategy. But, unless something changes fast, the Conservatives won’t be in power long enough to see it through.

Britain’s welfare system is out of control

To grasp the scale of Britain’s welfare crisis, consider some of the changes announced by the government this week. There will be tighter restrictions on sickness benefit and people with mobility issues will have to work from home. It’s a big and controversial reform. But the result? The number of Britons claiming sickness benefits – 2.8 million – will still keep rising to 3.4 million by the end of the decade. Reversing this trend, it seems, is a political impossibility.

The worst aspect is that Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is probably going as fast as the system can manage. His reforms will likely be met with a volley of judicial reviews, even though no changes are due before April next year. These bold reforms are in all likelihood simply suggestions for the next Labour government. The welfare system will meanwhile keep on absorbing an ever greater share of the workforce. The Universal Credit bill is expected to rise by £30 billion, or 40 per cent. It is a scandalous waste of money and of lives.

This crisis can be seen everywhere except in the national debate. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, recently said that he had not been aware that 18 per cent of working-age adults in his city are on out-of-work benefits. Perhaps this explains his failure to translate its prosperity into jobs, welfare, social cohesion and the other benefits that ought to accompany economic growth.

It’s amazing what you can cover up if you use ‘official’ unemployment numbers. Anyone signing on has a number of options. Claiming unemployment is one, but claiming sickness benefit – which is done by 4,000 people every day – is another. This is why the total number claiming out-of-work benefits has risen to 5.5 million, up 300,000 since May last year. This figure should be a scandal, yet it goes almost entirely unreported, which means it remains unsolved. Everyone looks the other way.

Jeremy Hunt this year laid out economic growth projections – a miserable 0.6 per cent this year, 0.7 per cent next – but the real picture will be even less impressive. Workers are facing two decades of no growth in their real-terms average wage. The Tories have failed to link economic growth to improving living standards or falling unemployment. The disability caseload is expected to surge from five to seven million, so any boasts about growth are laughable.

It is no surprise that it is such a struggle to grow the economy when you consider both the welfare bill and the tax burden. The Chancellor’s decision to protect the triple-lock bribe to pensioners will add £30 billion to this. And while Rishi Sunak’s tax cuts are welcome, they don’t change the overall trajectory of a tax burden that is the highest for decades and still rising – as is debt.

We can at least see some serious intent with the welfare reforms under way. The issue is with the assessments that have been made. When David Cameron took power, just 3,000 people a month were assessed as being too sick to be able to do any work at all. That has risen tenfold.

Claiming to be suicidal, for example, can be a fast track to the maximum benefits payout: some 14 per cent of sickness benefits claimants are put in a top-risk category that was only ever intended for a very small number of people. On both of these counts Stride is trying to restore balance; but this system moves so slowly that any plans made now could only be implemented after the election.

Would Labour continue the mission? Since Liz Kendall was made shadow work and pensions secretary, we have heard disappointingly little from her on the subject. Her party does have a proud tradition of welfare reform – Frank Field, James Purnell, John Hutton – but that was back in the Blair era when Labour was a reforming party. Now it is a party of caution, seemingly terrified of doing anything that could jeopardise its 20-point opinion poll lead over the Tories. If Labour fails to recognise the scale of the problem, it is certain to fail to address it once in office.

So the picture we see from this week’s Autumn Statement goes beyond what the Tories have in store for their pre-election year. Their in-ability to control the size of the state – especially pensions and welfare – has created a surging tax bill that will continue to rise, whatever Sunak pretends. All these problems are set to be inherited by a Labour government which shows no sign of having given them any consideration. And then there is mass migration, which is being used by both parties to cover up problems they would rather not address.

The vote for Brexit was, in large part, a vote for a better economic model: one that would force politicians to address difficult problems and not look to globalisation to provide easy answers. The Tories started off trying to honour this pledge but struggle to get even minor change through a welfare system clearly out of control. Labour shows no sign of being willing to recognise the problem. The voters who had hoped for something different at the next election will not have much of a choice.

Why is the public sector so unproductive?

The government has achieved its promise to halve inflation from last December’s level, borrowing has come in at little under the predictions made in March’s budget, and the Chancellor has felt able to lower taxes. But one thing isn’t going well: productivity. Little-noticed figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this week show that output per worker has fallen by 0.1 per cent over the past 12 months and output per hour is down by 0.3 per cent.

The problem is especially acute in the public sector. As a former board member of the ONS I know how difficult it is to measure public sector productivity and how politically hard it can be to tackle it – you could increase productivity in state education, for example, by increasing class sizes, but that would not help the standard of education and it wouldn’t make you very popular as a government. The statistics we have for measuring public sector productivity are mostly still experimental. But the data we do have tells an alarming tale: while productivity in the private sector has risen by around 30 per cent since 1997, in the public sector it has hardly risen at all.

This matters because demographics are driving demand for public services. The population is ageing rapidly. In 1966 the over-65s made up 12 per cent of the population. By 2041 this will have doubled to 24 per cent. The development of ever-more expensive medical techniques and the increase in lifestyle-related diseases, obesity in particular, is pushing growth in health and social care. Thanks to this and the state pension, government expenditure is now 45 per cent of GDP, up from 35 per cent in 1960.

If we are going to maintain public services it will either require tax rises – or a step change in public sector productivity. Getting more for taxpayers’ money ought to be a win-win, but we are hampered by poor data. If we had better regional and international comparisons of productivity it would be easier to identify opportunities to improve. The ONS needs to be more creative in measuring public sector output, as it was, for example, in including estimates of the size of the illegal economy – areas such as drugs and prostitution.

But one area where we can certainly improve productivity is in enhancing functional capabilities in government. The use of digital technologies, data analytics, and artificial intelligence have underpinned many improvements in private sector productivity yet their deployment seems to lag behind in the public sector. One instance where it has worked, saving money as well as improving people’s experience, is at the DVLA, as anyone who has renewed their driving licence recently will know.

This would be easier to achieve if we had a fundamental rethink of the centre of government. Most of the people looking at potential ways of improving efficiency are currently based in the Cabinet Office and its offshoots like the Government Digital Service or Crown Commercial Service. But the Cabinet Office has little authority over fiercely independent government departments, or over local government. It is the Treasury which controls the purse strings over the public sector as a whole and so has greater influence over it. So why not shift things like the Government Digital Service there? Or we could do as former Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has suggested and set up a new Office of Budget and Management, which would take over control of public spending from the Treasury and also assume responsibility for getting more out of taxpayers’ money.

We need, too, to improve the skills sets of civil servants. At present, they are better trained in developing policy than in delivering it. There are many people in the private sector who could help with this, but at the moment it is difficult to attract them to the public sector, because they can earn more in the private sector. We are also struggling to retain civil servants who are good at delivery. We need to change public sector pay so that it is linked to improvements in productivity – awarding more to those who succeed.

Making these changes might seem a little ambitious in the last year of a parliament – it certainly does not seem the right time to be making structural changes such as breaking up the Treasury or Cabinet Office. But it certainly would be a good project for whoever wins the next election.

Why we should all welcome Hunt’s tax break for businesses

Rishi Sunak has made ‘long-term decisions’ the leitmotif of his government. Today’s Autumn Statement announcement on permanent full expensing – which will allow businesses to write off capital investment costs against corporation tax immediately and in full – shows his Chancellor is singing from the same hymn sheet.

While it might sound dry, this tax reform is a vital step towards fixing one of the key structural weaknesses in the British economy: lacklustre business investment. Hunt’s announcement today will help boost productivity, economic growth and wages. In due course, full expensing should make us all – businesses, workers and consumers – better off.

The current version of full expensing, introduced in the March 2023 Budget but due to expire in March 2026, allows businesses to offset 100 per cent of most types of plant and machinery investment against their tax bill up front. Research by the Centre for Policy Studies and the Tax Foundation suggests that making the current version of full expensing permanent – as Hunt did today – would boost the long-run capital stock by 1.5 per cent, and deliver a 0.8 per cent boost to wages and a 0.9 per cent boost to long-run GDP. Other people’s findings are even more positive.

This is in contrast to traditional investment allowances, where the tax deduction is spread over time. The more you spread out a deduction, the less valuable it becomes because of inflation and the time value of money (‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’). Indeed, for some years before the introduction of the ‘super-deduction’ investment allowance in 2021, the UK tax system ultimately permitted only 62 per cent of investment costs to be deducted (on a net present value basis).

Full expensing, however, will act as a powerful investment incentive for businesses. It helps to eliminate pernicious distortions from the tax system by ensuring investment decisions are treated the same way as day-to-day spending. It thus removes a disincentive to businesses making long-term decisions.

Britain has long had an investment problem. This matters because, in the grand scheme of things, business investment in new equipment and technologies is a key factor in productivity growth – which in turn is the key driver of economic growth and rising living standards.

While most developed countries have experienced a productivity slowdown in recent years, the problem has been particularly acute in the UK. Measured in terms of output per hour worked, productivity increased by just 0.6 per cent per annum in the decade to 2019 – less than a third of the long-run average rate. Largely as a result, GDP per capita is only around 6 per cent higher now than in 2007.

Low levels of business investment have undoubtedly been a major factor in stagnant living standards. In the decade between the financial crisis and the pandemic, gross-fixed capital formation (GFCF) in the UK averaged just 17 per cent of GDP, well below the OECD average of 21 per cent and behind G7 peers like Germany (20 per cent) and France (22 per cent).

Our relatively uncompetitive tax system has been one of the key factors in explaining low investment levels. According to the Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index 2023, Britain ranks 28th out of 38 OECD countries when it comes to corporate tax competitiveness.  

Putting full expensing on a permanent footing, as the Chancellor has now done, will go some way towards improving our position. The long-run cost to the Treasury will be relatively low – around £1.4 billion per annum, according to our previous modelling (and between £1 billion and £3 billion according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies). Once you take account of the additional business investment and economic growth – and so tax revenues – generated by the policy, it is plausible that the long-run effect could be a net positive for the Treasury.

But the far more important thing is that the policy will boost long-run business investment. And significantly, given the electoral landscape, it’s a tax reform that Labour seem likely to keep in place. The Chancellor’s decision to commit to permanent full expensing truly does seem to be a long-term decision which will help to improve the tax system, grow the economy and make us all better off. 

Why so many teenagers support Palestine

I’m a sixth-former in one of Britain’s largest comprehensives and know no one who supports Israel over Palestine. Some readers might find that shocking. Consider, though, how my generation gets its news. TikTok is today by far the no. 1 source of news for teenagers; YouTube is next, Instagram third. Studies show the average teen spends two hours every day glued to their screens. Few my age buy or read a newspaper, or would ever think of doing so. Even the idea of sitting down to watch television news seems alien to us. We view the world through smartphones; we understand current affairs through video snippets.

In theory, the videos TikTok shows you relate to what you have previously watched: if the algorithm sees that you like something, it gives you more. It’s designed to be addictive. One survey found that just over half of teenagers who go on TikTok use it for news. There are almost no checks and balances to make sure that what TikTokers see is fair, balanced or accurate.

I have come across many videos about the war on my TikTok ‘for you’ page and I can confidently say that I’ve only seen pro-Palestinian ones. If such material were all assembled in a newspaper or a TV channel, it would look like pretty hardcore propaganda.

‘If you’re not pro-Palestine,’ declares a girl on TikTok who is about my age, ‘we’re not friends. If you’re neutral right now, we’re not friends. If you’re too uneducated to have an opinion, we’re not friends… Your neutrality is your complacency.’ To be socially acceptable to her, then, you need to support Palestine against Israel. To venture that the conflict is complicated is to be ‘uneducated’.

‘Palestinians are willing to die for this land because they are native to it,’ says another video. ‘If Israelis were native to it, they wouldn’t bomb it.’ The conflict is seen through the prism of occupier and occupied. The hashtag ‘stand with Palestine’ has more than 4.2 billion TikTok views associated with it, about ten times more than those associated with the hashtag ‘stand with Israel’.

In the US, almost half of TikTok users are under 30, and it shows. Under each video there are comments, and when it comes to Israel-Palestine, the constant refrain is that the war is racism at work. It’s the Black Lives Matter mindset applied to geopolitics: if you support Israel, you’re white. If you’re concerned about anti-Semitism, you’re white. The conflict is framed as white power (bad) vs diversity (good), and the Arabs are represented by the latter.

I’ve asked some of my peers why they support Palestine so strongly. Most say Israel is committing genocide and is purposefully targeting innocent people. They reference countless online videos showing horrific scenes in Gaza, often showing violence against children. They say they have never seen a video of an Israeli child suffering. What about the Israeli children, even babies, killed and brutalised on 7 October? I’m surprised by how many say the Hamas attacks were justified because Israel has made Palestinians suffer for generations. Retaliation was overdue, they feel.

Do they acknowledge that Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organisation the world over? Do they know that Hamas is committed to the total eradication of Israel? Few seem to care. Or they mistrust the story: more lies spun by the old ‘official’ media, which they regard as horribly biased in favour of Israel.

There aren’t many signs of my generation changing our viewing habits as we get older. If anything, the reverse is happening: older people are joining us, especially on YouTube and Instagram, platforms that have moved in TikTok’s direction by driving more users towards bitesize videos. These videos are not produced by huge influencers with millions of followers: just teens who are active on TikTok, looking to take a stand – and boost their following. The BBC or Sky News do produce TikTok-friendly videos. But they struggle to compete with short, opinion-filled ‘hot takes’ from teens in their bedrooms.

Hunt’s Autumn Statement was surprisingly upbeat

Jeremy Hunt has just finished the most upbeat economic statement we’ve heard in a good while – certainly since the one from Kwasi Kwarteng that plunged the UK into economic turmoil. Today, the Chancellor was keen to impress upon MPs that the swathe of tax cuts he was announcing could only happen because of the repair job he and Rishi Sunak had carried out following the Truss premiership. There was a lot of self-congratulation: Hunt told the House of Commons that this was an ‘autumn statement for a country that has turned a corner, an autumn statement for growth’. The Tories want voters, somehow, to start thinking that they are the party managing to clear things up and make things less expensive.

The key announcements were what Hunt described as ‘the biggest business tax cuts in modern British history’ and ‘the largest ever cut to employee and self employed national insurance and the biggest package of tax cuts to be implemented since the 1980s’. There was also a revival of welfare reform, something the Tories haven’t done much on for the past five years but which could be a key battleground with Labour at the next election. Again, Hunt’s language was big and boastful: this was the ‘biggest set of welfare reforms in a decade’, and was focused on giving people the support – and then the sanctions – to get them off sickness benefits and into work.

Those tax cuts included abolishing class 2 national insurance contributions altogether, and cutting class 4 contributions for the self-employed by one percentage point to 8 per cent. He will also cut the main rate for employee national insurance by 2 points to ten per cent, meaning 27 million people will benefit when it comes in from January, thanks to emergency legislation allowing him to bring the cut in earlier than next April. He is also extending the 75 per cent business rates discount for hospitality, retail and leisure for another year, and the pre-trailed £11 billion decision to make full expensing permanent.

Hunt claimed that the benefit changes he was announcing would ‘more than halve the flow of people who are signed off work with no work search requirements’. As I blogged yesterday, it is going to be difficult to help people with mental illnesses back into the workplace if they don’t have the correct occupational health support and therapy, and Hunt pledged to spend £1.3 billion on helping ‘nearly 700,000 people with health conditions find jobs’. including ‘nearly 500,000 more people’ being offered treatment with mental health. That’s a very ambitious increase – and it is worth noting that the considerably more modest targets set for the NHS on access to psychological therapies weren’t met. If after 18 months of intensive support, the jobseekers have not found a role, they will then have to take part in mandatory work placements, and if they don’t engage with this process for six months, then their case will be closed and their benefits stopped. 

As ever, there was a tour of constituencies as the Chancellor thanked MPs, many of them in marginal seats that the Tories are currently projected to lose, for their campaigns on one measure or another. And there were a few jokes, though Hunt is not famed for his wit. He drew the biggest laugh when he said that both he and Keir Starmer had tried to make a Jeremy prime minister, but to the relief of both parties, they had failed. ‘This Jeremy is growing the economy, his Jeremy would have crashed it’, he added. It was a neat summary of what the Conservatives will say in the next election as they try to persuade voters that Labour still can’t be trusted.

Can Israel keep the West on side?

On 7 October, Israeli security officials were already questioning how long they would be allowed to fight in Gaza. As the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) hurriedly mobilised more than 300,000 reservists, one official told me that ‘destroying Hamas depends on the length of our window of legitimacy’.

Last week, I was on an embed with an IDF unit in Gaza City. As the sun set over the Mediterranean, I checked the date on my watch and realised the 18th day of the ground campaign had just ended. During the 2009 and 2014 Gaza ground offensives, the IDF was forced to stop fighting by the 18th day and accept a ceasefire (brokered both times by the Egyptians and forced on it by the US). Throughout Israel’s 75-year existence this has been a pattern for virtually every war: a ceasefire has been imposed when Israel holds a military advantage.

The latest war has lasted seven weeks. The IDF has operated on the ground for the past four. And for now, the window of legitimacy remains open: Joe Biden is not yet pressuring Israel for a ceasefire and the support of America’s main allies, Britain and Germany, remains resolute. There was a recent wobble when the French President Emmanuel Macron (who else?) called for a ceasefire in an interview with the BBC (where else?). But he seemed to row back on his comments afterwards and has since largely remained silent.

The Arab League has called for a ceasefire, along with much talk of ‘Israeli aggression’. But when it comes to real diplomacy, little has been done to try to achieve one. With the exception of Iran’s protectorate, Syria, and Hamas’s patron Qatar, nearly every Arab regime wants to see Hamas destroyed. They just can’t say it openly. Meanwhile, an Arab delegation is in Beijing to gain support for a ceasefire. If they really wanted one, they would have flown to Washington.

After weeks of negotiations, a temporary truce is in place for four days in exchange for 50 women and children hostages being released and for 150 Palestinian prisoners to be let out of jail. This is not the ‘Ceasefire!’ demanded by protestors on the streets of London, which would only allow Hamas to survive and attack Israel again in the future (as the terror group’s leadership have repeatedly promised). Rather, what we are seeing is just a temporary lull.

Israel shouldn’t be complacent about their window of legitimacy. The IDF needs more time to finish destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure in the northern part of Gaza, around Gaza City and its surrounding townships. Most of the area has been depopulated and rendered un-inhabitable.

What’s more, Israel needs to tackle the Hamas strongholds in the southern side of the Strip. The Hamas leadership are believed to have fled to the southern town of Khan Younis (where many hail from). This mission will not be straightforward: more than two million Palestinians are crowded there, two-thirds of whom have been displaced.

Since 7 October, Biden and his administration have expressed unconditional support for Israel’s military campaign. The airlift of military supplies has been unceasing, while two aircraft carriers and one US Marine expeditionary group were deployed to the region – as a warning to Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies not to get involved. It also served to bolster Israel’s missile-defence system (a US Navy destroyer intercepted missiles and drones fired by the Houthis in Yemen). The rest of the West, as well as the Arab regimes, have all taken note.

Israel’s capability to strike Hamas is entirely dependent on Biden, who has shown no signs of faltering in his support. But last week the US entered the 12-month period preceding the 2024 election; the President is trailing Donald Trump in the polls. Foreign wars, especially those which can affect oil prices, are rarely popular in America. Biden is also coming under increasing pressure from the progressive wing of his Democrat party, and some of his officials. There is no sign yet of him heeding these calls. But the pressure to do so is likely to become fiercer once the truce ends.

If that doesn’t work, the expectation will then be on Israel not to launch its second phase in the south of Gaza. But this is par for the course: Biden knows he will be criticised for his support for Israel. The bigger problem for him is what he does about Benjamin Netanyahu.

While the Biden administration is standing up to its critics and defending the offensive against Hamas, it is also promising that Israel has no intention of permanently re-occupying Gaza or rebuilding the settlements it dismantled in 2005. Netanyahu has confirmed this: for once he’s telling the truth. The problem for both Biden and Netanyahu is that Israel has no real plan for what to do with Gaza when the war ends.

There are only two viable options: neither is palatable to the Israeli government. One is for the IDF to remain indefinitely in control of the ruined Strip, constantly fighting pockets of Hamas holdouts, while being lumbered with the responsibility of the more than two million Palestinians there. The other is to work on the transition of control to the Palestinian Authority, which was ejected from Gaza by Hamas in the 2007 coup. The PA (whom Netanyahu loathes) will, therefore, need much strengthening and capacity–building to take over. Netanyahu cannot commit to either of these plans.

The Biden administration will almost certainly suspend its support if there’s any prospect of a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza. And the far-right parties which are an integral part of Netanyahu’s coalition will rebel if there’s any plan under which Israel either takes the humanitarian responsibility for Gazans or accepts the return of the PA. At present, they are refusing even to countenance Israel allowing supplies through its territory to Gazan civilians and insisting they only go through Egypt.

Netanyahu knows that a serious plan for the future of Gaza, with full details on how it plans to address the humanitarian crisis in the interim, will go a long way towards reassuring Israel’s allies and buying time to operate there militarily. But he is too petrified of his extremist partners to deliver such a plan.

It is not only the Biden administration urging Netanyahu to come up with a proposal. Israeli generals have been pressuring him, too. They fear the opportunity for them to achieve their objectives could end; they need to know the long-term strategy in order to tailor their war plans accordingly.

In place of a plan, IDF generals, and the world, are hearing a steady stream of Netanyahu’s ministers and parliamentarians calling for the nuking of Gaza and the transfer of its population to Egypt and calls for the rebuilding of settlements. Israel’s allies know these political hacks are broadcasting to their narrow base and are not statements of Israel’s policy. But in the absence of any real post-war policy, these provocations make it hard for them to continue providing Israel with full support. The more populist-minded western leaders, such as Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau, are already wavering. Israel isn’t doing anything to help them, nor for the more unwavering ally leaders such as Biden, Rishi Sunak and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The democratically elected leaders of the West were shocked by Hamas’s attack on 7 October. Their support for Israel has hitherto been exemplary, despite the pusillanimity in many quarters of their own parties and much of their domestic media. Israel has had all the backing it needs to embark on the difficult job of destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, despite the terrible footage of Palestinian suffering. But these allies need Israel to get its act together and plan for what comes next. Otherwise the Israelis might find that the window of opportunity to destroy Hamas doesn’t stay open for much longer.

Virology poses a far greater threat to the world than AI

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

He is right. There is almost no debate about regulating high-risk virology, whereas the world is in a moral panic about artificial intelligence. The recent global summit at Bletchley Park essentially focused on how to make us safe from Hal the malevolent computer. Altman has called for regulation to stop AI going rogue one day, telling Congress: ‘I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong… we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.’

In contrast to that still fairly remote risk, the threat the world faces from research on viruses is far more immediate. There is strong evidence that Covid probably started in a laboratory in Wuhan. To summarise: a bat sarbecovirus acutely tuned to infecting human beings but not bats, which contains a unique genetic feature of a kind frequently inserted by scientists, caused an outbreak in the one city in the world where scientists were conducting intensive research on bat sarbecoviruses. That research involved bringing the viruses from distant caves, recombining their genes and infecting them into human cells and humanised transgenic mice; three of the scientists got sick but no other animals in the city did.

Yet calls to regulate this frankly idiotic corner of virology – gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens – are met with libertarian shrieks of outrage from scientists that even the new President of Argentina would be embarrassed by: leave us alone, we know what we are doing! Most of us were blissfully unaware that a small handful of virologists were being handed huge sums by the US and Chinese governments to see if they could find a virus capable of causing the next pandemic and bring it to a big city, then juice it up in a low–biosafety lab. Only governments, by the way, would fund that kind of work: no venture capitalist would touch it.

Yet now, compared with four years ago, the risk from such research is bigger, not smaller. Even if the recent pandemic did not begin in the Wuhan lab, the fact it could have done has alerted bad actors worldwide to how easy it would be to use virology to bring the world economy to its knees. From Pyongyang to Tehran to Moscow, ears have pricked up. The research proposal writes itself: ‘Dear Kim/Khamenei/Vladimir, if we don’t do this research our enemies will. Please can we hire some virologists and start sampling bats?’

It’s not just rogue regimes thinking this way. So are criminals. Last month, in Fresno, California, police arrested a Chinese national, who had changed his name multiple times, on charges of selling misbranded Covid-19 tests. That allegation is the tip of the iceberg. According to a report from a congressional committee, the man – part of a transnational criminal enterprise funded from China and on the run from a court ruling in Canada – was operating a large, chaotic, secret laboratory in which were found samples of viruses including Covid, HIV, hepatitis B and C, dengue and rubella, plus, according to a label on a freezer, ebola. Oh, and a thousand genetically engineered mice.

When the story first surfaced, after a  council officer in the small town of Reedley in California spotted a garden hose leading into the warehouse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seemed remarkably uninterested. The CDC declined to test some of the samples before they were destroyed, so we do not know whether there was ebola in that freezer or not. The media moved to damp down ‘conspiracy theories’ that this was a Chinese government operation to start another pandemic. All those transgenic mice, the Associated Press told us, were ‘simply used to grow antibody cells to make test kits’. Right.

Even if he was just a rogue criminal with no connection to the Chinese government, it is alarming because, as the congressional committee put it, ‘a disturbing realisation is that no one knows whether there are other unknown biolabs in the US because there is no monitoring system in place [and] the US currently does not conduct oversight of privately funded research, including enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens’. There could be labs like this all over America, let alone Asia.

I find myself in a strange position here. I usually argue that regulation stifles innovation far more often than it encourages it, and that tying things like genetically modified crops up in impossible red tape has done great harm. Golden rice – genetically enhanced with vitamin A precursor – could have saved half a million lives a year in the 24 years since it was invented by the Swiss biotechnologist Ingo Potrykus, for example. But Greenpeace campaigned relentlessly against it, pushing governments to impose impossibly tight regulation, a stance that more than 150 Nobel Prize winners have condemned in strong words: ‘How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a “crime against humanity”?’

Yet when a genuine risk is posed by one small part of virology, those of us calling for more regulation are somewhat lonely. Led by Bryce Nickels of Rutgers University, a group of scientists have founded an organisation called Biosafety Now but they are getting scant support from the scientific establishment. Greenpeace has, as far as I can tell, said nothing about that irresponsible research in Wuhan.

The Covid Inquiry has unmasked the flaws in trusting ‘the science’

There is something therapeutic and healing in watching Professor Chris Whitty give evidence to the independent public inquiry into the Covid pandemic – the sense of calm emanating from the man, his occasionally Panglossian self-satisfaction, his refusal to become anything more than barely ruffled even when his interlocuters gently venture forth the suggestion: ‘Overreaction?’ The impression one gets, or perhaps is supposed to get, is of a very clever, terribly rational man in a world full of thicko scumbags.

I watch a little daytime TV at the moment as part of my rest and recuperation programme following that car crash I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. More usually it is one of the quiz shows, such as Tipping Point, where the contestants are from the very opposite end of the intellectual scale to Chris and can only enrage with their stupidity. No, Shenille – sadly, Tony Blair was not prime minister at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar. Listening to Whitty’s comforting emollience, I can almost feel my hitherto distraught muscles knitting back together, repairing themselves, filling with blood and blooming. He is like a very expensive balm.

What we learn from this inquiry – that the scientists are convinced we should have imposed lockdown earlier and harder, for example – is maybe less interesting than what one might read between the lines. Or, as those scientists would disdainfully put it, speculation. The first and most obvious thing is the withering contempt in which the scientists held the politicians, which must surely have made the management of the pandemic more problematic than it needed to be.

We can infer this from the testimony of the former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, for example. With scarcely disguised scorn, Vallance suggested that science was not Boris Johnson’s ‘forte’ and that the then prime minister needed to have fairly simple graphs explained to him over and over again until he finally grasped the point. This contempt occasionally broke cover during that long, rather wonderful summer of 2020, not least over Rishi Sunak’s fairly ridiculous Eat Out to Help Out scheme, with newspapers reporting disquiet among the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) at one or other governmental misstep. In fairness to the scientists, they were dealing with a government which had chosen the intellectual titan Matt Hancock to be in charge of the country’s health, which he did with a kind of messianic idiocy.

The second is the make-up of that very committee, Sage – the people who for a year or so effectively became our unelected government. Its membership was rather closely confined and, during cross-examination, Whitty admitted that at first it was probably too narrow in its membership. According to him it later became much broader, but when asked more specifically about who might have been co-opted to give a differing view, he channelled Dr Pangloss again and suggested that in theory an infinite number of scientists might have been invited to provide their expertise, but that too many voices would have made consensus more difficult to achieve. Hmm – this is rather the problem, the nature of that consensus. Whitty admitted – indeed stated almost with pride – that no economists had been consulted, for example.

The issue here is that too great a proportion of the scientists had intellectual skin in the game. Science is perhaps mankind’s greatest achievement, but we sometimes forget that it is practised by humans, with all their frailties and inclinations. The point being that Sage may have been providing the government with advice with which all or most epidemiologists might concur – but without the corrective advice that might be provided by an economist or, for that matter, an oncologist. The advice was always about the immediate, and while Whitty insisted that he and his colleagues were at pains to alert ministers to the potential downsides of action taken to prevent the spread of the virus, we might infer that those downsides were flagged up with rather less avidity than would have been the case if the committee had heard from one or two dissenting voices from different scientific disciplines.

This lack of debate was exacerbated in the country at large by that curse of our age, political polarisation: many of those who might have raised a warning about the long-term effects of sequential lockdowns – the teachers, for example – were too often ideologically committed to what became the leftish view that no lockdown could possibly be sufficiently stringent and they should continue ad infinitum. We have seen more recently the effect this has had on schoolchildren.

Faced with this, one understands a little better the mindset which seems to have established itself in our politicians, including the mindset which led them to enjoy riotous parties when everybody else was confined to barracks. They were given advice which was far, far too narrow and, put simply, they didn’t entirely trust it. Vallance remarked that Johnson had particular difficulty understanding the consequences of government interventions (such as lockdowns) on the spread of the virus. My suspicion is the former PM was at heart deeply sceptical – for ideological as well as perfectly rational reasons – about these interventions and needed convincing that he was being told the
unvarnished truth.

In short, it was a government that had pledged to ‘follow the science’ but was always doubtful about its veracity. The final break came when Johnson refused to impose a lockdown during the Christmas of 2021, a decision which history suggests was unquestionably correct: the scientists at the time begged to differ and of course the Scots went their own way. The lesson to be learned, I reckon, is that it is no use following the science if the science comes from only one direction and there is no open debate about its efficacy or otherwise.