New Zealand’s coalition goes to war with Jacinda Ardern’s legacy

New Zealand finally has a government again. It’s been 40 days since Labour was defeated in the country’s election, but the centre-right National party, which won the vote, has struggled to form a coalition. At last, it has thrashed out a deal with the libertarian ACT party, and centrist populist New Zealand First.

The coalition is good news, at least, for foreigners seeking to live in New Zealand. Earlier this year, the National Party announced a plan to whack foreign buyers with a 15 per cent tax on houses worth over $2 million (£1.6 million). Now that idea has been ditched – a casualty of the coalition agreement. But New Zealand’s prime minister Christopher Luxon is cagey on how his government is going to make up for the shortfall.

Asked how he intends to pay for tax cuts without the foreign buyers tax, Luxon said: ‘I want to be really clear, we are going to deliver tax relief as we promised and in the amounts we promised to working and lower to middle income earners in New Zealand.’

Also out the window is legislation banning tobacco sales to people born after 2008 and the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration is set to be repealed. The mooted Covid inquiry looks set to have its terms watered down.

Most controversially, the new government has vowed to review the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document which balances the relationship between the government and the Maori. In the election, ACT leader David Seymour – who will rotate in the role as deputy PM along with New Zealand First leader, Winston Peters – said that his party would end co-governance and ‘division by race’. New Zealand First also outlined plans to remove Māori names from government departments and to introduce a bill making English an ‘official’ language of New Zealand. These policies, if enacted, mark a sea change from previous ‘progressive’ governments.

Of course, there’s no guarantee the coalition will hold together and be able to enact its plans. Luxon begins his tenure as New Zealand PM with a pair of ideologically disparate coalition partners in Seymour and Peters, but the protracted negotiations seem to have, for now, culminated in a robust and comprehensive agenda. If the government can stick it out though, it’s clear who the big victim of the new coalition will be: the legacy of Jacinda Ardern.

Tips for the Coral Gold Cup and Becher Chase

There are two high-class chases taking place tomorrow – one at Haydock and the other at Ascot. They will have a bearing on the betting markets for the Ladbrokes King George VI at Kempton on Boxing Day and the Cheltenham Festival. However, neither race this weekend is now an attractive betting proposition because each has attracted just four runners.

I suggested a bet a week ago in the Grade 1 Betfair Chase (Haydock 3 p.m.) at a time when most bookmakers were still offering three places. So I am pleased to see that Corach Rambler, put up each way at 14-1, now only has three rivals tomorrow. However, I am fully aware that he is the lowest rated horse in the race and it is perfectly possible that he could still finish fourth (or indeed not finish at all).

Bravemansgame is the most likely winner, with 6 lbs in hand of the second favourite Protektorat on official figures, but he is now odds on and cannot be backed at current prices.

At Ascot, Shishkin looks likely to be an even shorter priced odds-on favourite in the Grade 2 Nirvana Spa 1965 Chase (1.30 p.m.). If he is at his best, he will be too good for his three rivals of which Pic D’Orhy is likely to prove his toughest opponent. However, once again there is no horse in the race worth backing at the current odds.

Also at Ascot, I was tempted to put up Saint Segal in the Jim Barry Hurst Park Handicap Chase (3.15 p.m.) as he is perfectly capable of reversing the form with Boothill, on better terms, following their run at the track early this month. 5-1 initially seemed attractive each way because Jane Williams’s stable star looked like a Grade 1 Arkle Trophy contender early last season and he can race off a rating of just 136 here in a contest worth more than £65,000 to the winner.

However, I am pretty certain Saint Segal would prefer softer ground and he is also prone to race far too keenly, particularly in small-runner fields. So I will refrain from tipping him for these two reasons and not get too frustrated if he does win.

Instead, I am going to look forward to early December and put up a horse in each of two big handicap chases, one at Aintree and the other at Newbury.

PERCUSSION loves tackling the Grand National fences and has put up three fine performances over them in just over a year. His most recent run was earlier this month when he was a fine second to Geskille in BoyleSports Grand Sefton Handicap Chase.

Percussion has been raised 2 lbs in the official ratings for that run, but I am pretty sure he will be better over the longer trip of the BoyleSports Becher Handicap Chase on December 9. I am also convinced he is a better horse on faster ground and he is unlikely to have to run on heavy ground again at Aintree, as he did just two weeks ago.

Back Percussion each way at 10-1 with bet365, paying four places because his talented trainer, Laura Morgan, has already made it clear that he is an intended runner in the race.

The big handicap chase in just eight days’ time is the Coral Gold Cup, formerly the Hennessy Gold Cup, at Newbury. Three horses are currently vying for favouritism: Complete Unknown, Monbeg Genius and Mahler Mission.

Both Complete Unknown, trained by Paul Nicholls, and Monbeg Genius, trained by Jonjo O’Neill, are much better on soft or heavy ground and different weather forecasts vary on whether they are going to get these conditions. 

In any case, I prefer the chances of Mahler Mission who can take another big pot back to Ireland for his connections. Trained by John McConnell, Mahler Mission was putting up a superb performance in the WellChild National Hunt Challenge Cup at the Cheltenham Festival in March, only to come down at the second last when holding a four-length lead. We will never know if he would have won if he had stood up but connections clearly felt that he was ridden too aggressively that day in the three mile six furlong chase for amateur riders.

His regular pilot, Ben Harvey, will be back in the saddle at Newbury and I think he has a huge winning chance if, as expected, he is ridden with more restraint. He will have a lovely weight of 10 stone 10 lbs if the top weight Ahoy Senor takes his chance in the contest.

Back Mahler Mission 2 points win at 8-1 with bet365, SkyBet, Paddy Power or Betfair fixed odds. I will probably go in double-handed in this race next weekend once I have a better idea of what ground conditions to expect.

Once thing is certain, the jumps season is now in full swing with plenty of top-class racing to look forward to before and beyond Christmas Day.

2023-4 jumps season

Pending:

1 point each way Corach Rambler at 14-1 for the Betfair Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

2 points win Mahler Mission at 8-1 for the Coral Gold Cup.

1 point each way Percussion at 10-1 for the Becher Chase, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Iron Bridge at 16-1 for the Welsh Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Giovinco at 20-1 for the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

Settled bets from last week:

1 point each way Fugitif at 11-1 for the Paddy Power Gold Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. 4^th. + 1.75 points.

1 point each way Notlongtillmay at 14-1 for the Paddy Power Gold Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. 2nd. +2.5 points. 

2 points win L’Eau Du Sud at 10-1 for the Greatwood Hurdle. Unplaced. – 2 points.

2023-4 jump seasons to date: + 2.25 points.

2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 14 of the past 16 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 475 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a “point” is your chosen regular stake).

Russia’s plan to freeze Ukraine

Winter hasn’t officially started, but Ukraine is already covered in snow. As temperatures dip a few degrees below zero, the nation is grappling with an electricity deficit. Ukrainians have been urged by the national power company to use electricity sparingly during the day and take measures such as switching on the washing machine at night. It’s just a taste of what’s about to come: for Russia, the cold is a weapon – and missile strikes aimed at power stations seek to freeze the nation into surrender.

Last winter, even though Ukraine’s air defence systems downed hundreds of Russian missiles and drones, Russian forces managed to successfully strike Ukrainian energy facilities 271 times. The average Ukrainian household endured five cumulative weeks without electricity. Thousands were deprived of heat and water supply. My family, like many others in rural homes, use wood burners, so they weren’t as badly affected as those in the cities. But across the country the cascade of blackouts caused damage costing more than $11 billion, with half of the entire energy system lost.  

Ukraine’s power grid has mostly recovered since last year’s attacks. Our defences are stronger. The main networks have been surrounded by protective barriers made using mesh wire, stones, sandbags and nets the size of tennis courts. Ukraine has received more air defences and stocked up on coal, while backup gas and electricity generators have been set up to protect critical infrastructure like hospitals, boiler houses and water canals.

But that won’t be enough. Some of the power units are still being repaired, and the restored ones can’t match the pre-damage capacity. This week, a cold spell has placed power plants under additional pressure – and it’s not even December, when temperatures can reach -15°C.

Russia has reportedly saved up some 800 missiles to use this winter and trebled the size of its drone fleet. When Moscow strikes, Ukrainians may be plunged into cold and darkness again. But while the thermometer is creeping down (in the depths of winter, temperatures can sink to -25°C), Ukrainians are ready. The last winter hardened them; they know what to expect. Many have already bought reserve generators, batteries, power banks, lights, candles and camping stoves. My friends who work in IT have bought mobile Starlink kits, to access the internet and keep working when under bombardment.

Moscow hopes that strikes will lead to a complete blackout, a humanitarian disaster and the beginning of peace negotiations on unfavourable terms for Ukraine. This strategy failed last year and is likely to fail again – unless Russia has planned something Kyiv doesn’t expect.

Starmer says the EU anthem best sums up Labour

Join die Labour jubilation! Keir Starmer, the man who is very likely to be our next prime minister, has just been asked on Classic FM to choose a piece of music that sums up Labour and picked ‘Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the choral Ode to Joy’. Which just happens to be the European Union’s anthem.

‘It has got a sense of destiny and is hugely optimistic,’ Starmer told his radio audience. ‘It’s that sense of moving forward to a better place, [which] is incredibly powerful.’

So a sort of high-brow version of the Blairite D:Ream belter: Things can only get better. Or perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to those Starmer-supporting Remainers who hope that, with him in No. 10, Britain might somehow find its way back to its joyful membership of the EU.  

Or Maybe Starmer just really likes Beethoven. In his Desert Island Discs appearance on Radio 4 in 2020, he chose Ludwig’s Pastoral Symphony and his Piano Concerto No. 5, the latter because it reminds him of his wedding day and therefore his wife. He also chose the Northern Soul classic Out on the Floor by Dobie Gray, Three Lions (natch), and Stormzy’s tribute to Grenfell. He’s man of the people, after all, and, unlike poor Beethoven, who was deaf by the time he used Ode to Joy, Keir wants us all to know that he’s a very sensitive listener.     

What good would forcing cyclists to have number plates do?

There was little competition for the oddest and most obscure bill to be announced in the King’s Speech: the proposal to licence London’s pedicabs. On the list of the most pressing issues facing the nation, it doesn’t tend to feature very highly. There must be many people in Britain who have never seen a pedicab, let alone ridden in one or come into conflict with these vehicles, which tend to ply a tiny zone of tourist London around Piccadilly Circus. But could the move to regulate pedicabs evolve into something a little more substantial?

During a debate on the pedicab bill in the Lords this week, Lord Hogan-Howe, formerly chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, made the suggestion that the legislation be expanded to cover cyclists in general.

‘If we learn any lessons about holding pedicab drivers and owners to account, could we consider whether we take those lessons and apply them to cyclists?’ he said. In particular, he pitched the idea that bicycles should have registration plates to allow irresponsible cyclists to be identified (whether he meant small markings on the mudguard, or large number plates which would be read by traffic cameras, he didn’t say).

Hogan-Howe, who is a crossbench peer, does not speak for the government in any capacity, but the very fact that we have a pedicab bill at all does rather reveal a certain schizophrenic attitude of the Prime Minister: while he has decided to get heavy with a rather small subset of cyclists, he is simultaneously promising to roll back regulation of motorists. Also contained within the King’s Speech was a proposal to allow driverless cars on the streets – in spite of the many problems which the technology has revealed during trials in San Francisco and elsewhere. Rishi Sunak has also launched a review into 20 mph zones and low traffic neighbourhoods, and promised to be the motorist’s friend (although not to the extent that he felt able to use central government powers to try and block Sadiq Khan’s expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez)).

If you are worried about pedestrians being mowed down by pedicabs, or passengers being thrown off overturned vehicles, surely you should be even more concerned by the continuing toll caused by motor vehicles. The uncomfortable reality is that the annual number of road deaths, which fell steadily by two-thirds between 1980 and 2010, has stalled at around 1,700 a year since the present government came to power. While it is true, as Lord Hogan-Howe says, cyclists can and do kill, the vast majority of these casualties are connected with motor cars. Pedicabs do not feature in the statistics. What’s more, those cyclists who have killed pedestrians are invariably brought to justice.

More regulations on cyclists, especially electric bicycles, as well as e-scooters would certainly be popular with some voters – and so I wouldn’t be surprised if the government adopts some of Lord Hogan-Howe’s suggestions. E-bikes, in particular, seem to be being used freely on cycle paths when some should in fact be classed as motorbikes. Yet the voters who would be impressed by such measures are also like to be dismayed that the government is in any way considering watering down low traffic neighbourhoods and 20 mph zones – initiatives which have made life a lot more pleasant in many Conservative-voting suburban areas.

At present, government policy seems to be taking its direction from what might be called the militant motorists’ lobby – a body of car-drivers who demand absolute freedom for themselves, but who come over all authoritarian when demanding laws to deal with the cyclists and pedestrians who get in their way. I fear that throwing in the government’s lot with them will prove an electoral – as well as moral – dead end.  

The tension simmering beneath the Dublin riots

The situation in Dublin yesterday – in which five people were injured in a knife attack in the heart of the city, resulting in a riot and violent clashes with the police – was to the untrained eye reminiscent of Belfast from days gone by.

Speculation about the nationality of the attacker fuelled the scenes of violence which took place last night and that has led to condemnatory tutting. After all, Ireland’s national myth is tied into tales of immigration and welcoming. A riot over immigration in its capital city contradicts the stories Ireland tells the world about itself.

The instinct, almost reflex reaction of the establishment, was to deploy the term ‘far right’. The commissioner of the Garda, Drew Harris, said that a ‘hooligan faction driven by a far-right ideology’ were to blame.

There’s no doubt that far-right elements were involved in the violence. But it is too easy for a society and a governing class, frantically obsessed with positioning itself as a good global citizen, to blame this unseemliness on a fringe. This is not the Dublin of Guinness and glass palaces housing tech companies which it wishes to present to the world.

To immediately sound the far-right klaxon betrays an institutional glibness which explains many of the inherent, simmering tensions currently characterising Irish political debate. 

This, after all, was not the first act of random street violence in Ireland in recent times. There was a stabbing at Dublin Airport in September, while a woman was stabbed in the centre of Dublin on Chatham Street on Thursday night last week.

Concerns about the impact of immigration and Ireland’s readiness to cope with it is starting to ratchet up. These tensions are undoubtedly intertwined with the Republic’s unprecedented housing crisis. There has been a record amount of homeless in recent years. People’s anecdotes about rental prices in Dublin would make even a hardened Londoner blanche. No wonder Ireland has seen protests when migrants are moved into accommodation ahead of Irish people who have been waiting for a home for some time.

What is Ireland’s escape route from this quagmire? A great many – based on current polling – want to chuck their lot in with Sinn Fein, such is the contempt for the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail cabal which has taken turns at running the country. That such a party is being viewed as a solution says a great deal about the mire the Republic finds itself in. 

A poll by the Business Post found that 75 per cent of people believed that Ireland is taking in too many refugees. Interestingly, 83 per cent of Sinn Fein supporters endorsed this view, with between 70 to 74 per cent of the supporters of the two other main parties also agreeing with that statement. 

To therefore immediately blame unrest on the far right, as the Irish government and police have done, shows yet another European establishment out of kilter with its people on immigration.

Undoubtedly there was clear desire for opportunistic violence amongst some of the crowd who rioted last night. However, the crux of the matter will be the stabbing which led to those riots, and the circumstances which allowed such an attack to take place. 

In the court of public opinion, particularly in Brussels, the Republic and its leaders have for many years wanted to be patted on the head for ‘doing the right thing’. They have wanted to be the friendly country – and certainly friendlier than the English across the water. However, as the old political elites in Sweden and the Netherlands are now finding, there is a price to pay for such a lax approach to the questions of immigration and integration. Will the Irish political establishment cotton on before it is too late for them? Based on their response in the past 24 hours, I wouldn’t bet on it.

The families of Israel’s hostages are living in hell

Yair Mozes, whose mother and father are among the 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas, is trying to describe what it feels like. ‘It is hell,’ he says. ’You don’t go to sleep properly, then the minute you wake up, you’re bolt upright. I’m just about managing at present… then every now and then I fall apart and sleep for ten hours straight, as my body can’t handle it anymore.’

I suspect even those words don’t really do it justice. But they sound familiar. My own relatives suffered that same ghost-like half-life when I was kidnapped for six weeks by Somali pirates while working for the Telegraph back in 2008. Sleepless nights, visits to the GP for tranquillisers, and terrible paranoia. My brother wondered if perhaps I hadn’t been kidnapped, but bumped off by the CIA after discovering that they were sponsoring the pirates. Fat chance that I would ever unearth a story as good as that. But I had vanished into thin air, and overnight he felt like he was in a lurid airport thriller. In that situation, conspiracy theories seem normal.

Grim as it was, though, my family had far less to worry about than Mr Mozes. I was being held by pirates, whose only interest was getting money, and who didn’t generally kill folk if things didn’t go their way. Mr Mozes’ parents are being held by Hamas, who, judging by last month’s massacres, seem to relish it. The pair are also in their late 70s and somewhat frail: his mum Margalit is a diabetic.

I met Mr Mozes last week, when he and other hostages’ families were on a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Well-wishers lined the route, and there were stop-offs for speeches and snacks. The march ended up outside Prime Benjamin Netanyahu’s house last Saturday, trying to persuade him that freeing the hostages should be as big a priority as destroying Hamas.

Historically, Israel has always gone to extraordinary lengths to get hostages back. The 1976 Entebbe raid in Uganda, in which Israeli commandos snatched 102 passengers from Palestinian hijackers, is up there with the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy. When Ron Arad, an Israeli airman, fell into the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1986, Israel offered a $10 billion aid package to Tehran, and kidnapped an Iranian general in Syria. Following Hezbollah’s abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit in 2006, Israel freed more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get him back.

Indeed, given that one of the freed prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind last month’s massacre, some Israelis feel that hostages have become their country’s weak spot, and that Mr Netanyahu should just tough it out. Last month, his finance minister, the hard-right settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, demanded that the army ‘hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration.’

The prime minister has his intimate experience of hostage showdowns. His brother, Jonathan, commanded the Entebbe raid, and was the sole Israeli fatality. But with the Hamas hostages like dispersed in tunnels all over Gaza, a repeat of Entebbe would stretch even the modern IDF’s capability.
Instead, the strategy is to keep the military pressure on Gaza. An agreement has now been reached whereby 50 captives, all women and children, should be exchanged from today, in return for a four-day pause in fighting and the release of 150 Palestinians in Israeli jails.

The swap was part-brokered by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, who has acted as a go-between. Don’t expect many Israelis, though, to be singing His Highness’s praises. Many are livid about Qatar hosting Hamas’s leadership in exile, and have not forgotten how they cheered last month’s attacks from their offices in Doha.

The polite term for what the Qataris are doing is ‘diplomacy’. The less polite term is that they are acting as ‘chewers’, as they’re known in kidnapping circles. These are people who pose as neutral, disinterested intermediaries, but in fact have connections to the kidnapping gang. I had one in my own case, a shadowy man called Ali. He claimed to be acting in ‘a humanitarian capacity’ but was on suspiciously good terms with my pirate captors.

The Qataris aren’t the only intermediaries that Israelis are less than happy with. They are disgruntled with the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has failed to get welfare access to the hostages. Its officials have visited detainees of terror groups in the past, such as the Afghan Taliban, and has extensive contacts in Gaza, where it operates humanitarian programmes. So far, though, it says Hamas has refused its requests.

This has angered many Israelis, who point out that the welfare needs in this particular hostage crisis are almost unique: there are babies, children, pensioners with dementia, people with injuries. It has also prompted acid comments from Israel’ foreign minister, Eli Cohen, who suspects that like many foreign aid organisations, the Red Cross harbours an institutional sympathy towards the Palestinians. (The ICRC says: ‘From day one, we have called for the immediate release of all the hostages, and for access to them… But we are not the ones making the decision and creating the conditions for access to materialise. We wish we had that power, but we don´t.’)

Last month, Cohen told Mirjana Spoljaric, the ICRC’s president, that ‘The Red Cross has no right to exist if it does not succeed in visiting the hostages.’ He criticised it for focusing on Israel, ‘which is bound by international law and acts in accordance with it,’ instead of the humanitarian crisis created by Hamas.

The ICRC insists it is speaking direct to Hamas at the highest levels, and says that ‘while it may feel like we are silent’, it makes more progress if works discreetly behind the scenes. Israelis wonder, then, why it continues to issue a running commentary of Tweets and press releases, which focus as much, if not more, on the humanitarian impact of the Gaza invasion.

The ICRC’s ‘Facts and Figures’ webpage on the crisis, for example, refers to ‘renewed hostilities’ between both sides – a somewhat anodyne term for a war sparked by one of the worst terror attacks in modern history.

This kind of studied, BBC neutrality might be suitable for the ICRC’s wider international audience, and yes, it may avoid upsetting Hamas. But if you want to win the confidence of hostages’ families – who, as per my own experience, often feel the world is conspiring against them anyway – then it may not help. The 240 abductees, after all, aren’t PoWs in a war between two nation states, they are civilian victims of criminal kidnappings.

Israelis have not forgotten, either, the Red Cross’s notorious failure to speak out on behalf of Holocaust victims during the second world war. Red Cross representatives visited Hitler’s death camps, but chose not to publicly condemn what was going on for fear of upsetting the Nazis and losing welfare access to allied prisoners of war. They also feared compromising the neutrality of Switzerland, where the Red Cross is based. In 1997, the organisation admitted to ‘moral failure’ for keeping silent.

If the exchange of 50 hostages begins later today, it will of course be a welcome start. But it goes against the best-practice rule for hostage negotiations, which is to get everyone out at the same time. The more they’re released in dribs and drabs, the more those still in custody assume a greater value to Hamas, who may keep them back as an insurance policy.

Those left behind will probably be the adult males, most likely the younger, fitter ones. Their families, however, may not be as robust as they are. And as I know from my own spell as a hostage, families are the victims of a kidnapping as much as the captives are. Israel has already had its share of Ron Arads and Gilad Shalits. It doesn’t deserve any more.

Introducing my manic Christmas tradition

It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least by anyone with a developed frontal lobe – that seasonal enjoyment and growing up are inversely proportional. As the stranglehold of middle age tightens, I am incapable of conjuring the Christmas excitement I felt as a child. And it seems to have been replaced with intense festive angst. 

Samuel Johnson was talking about second marriages when hatching his aphorism about hope over experience, rather than what Americans refer to as ‘readying the home’, yet every year I still try to summon those seasonal spirits of childhood. My efforts border on the authoritarian, kicking off in a prescriptive fashion as Advent starts. I blame my mother – and not just because it’ll save in therapy fees later. She was wilfully resistant to my young self’s seasonal yearnings, postponing buying a tree until about a week before the big day, and then returning with something that was only my height. I’d been to the Royal Opera House; I’d seen The Nutcracker. The tree was meant to instil awe not elicit a shrug. She once even made me re-use the previous year’s Advent calendar. The deprivation was real. 

Now my own festive routine is enshrined, at no small cost to the mental wellbeing of myself, my husband and our daughters. On 1 December, breakfast is eaten off our Christmas plates, accompanied by Carols from King’s at plaster-cracking volume. I stand over the girls as they open the first door of their vastly overpriced, overwhelmingly tasteful and disappointingly chocolate-free German Advent calendars. Before I go to work, I buy the tree. The biggest, fattest tree our London terrace can accommodate. (The man I’ve bought it from for the last 15 years knows my house well enough to be able to rein in any delusions I have about property proportions; last year he was right that 14ft was too tall.) I then decorate it in an obsessive fashion with my carefully curated decorations (German and paper mâché since you ask).  

But before 1 December, a mince pie won’t pass my lips (requiring Herculean restraint on my part). The only seasonal preparation I’ll countenance comes on the last Sunday before Advent which is Stir-Up Sunday; so named because the opening line to the Collect for that day in the Anglican 1549 Book of Common Prayer reads, ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.’ Round ours the mood is less holy and more fisticuffs, as it presents an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the festive stress before the first bars of Bublé hit the airways. 

Stir Up Tension and Marital Disunity Sunday is undoubtedly born of my intransigence. For in the face of my husband’s steadfast opposition, I’ve been making a batch of at least half a dozen Christmas puddings for friends and family for the best part of 20 years. My husband protests that it’d be cheaper to courier Fortnum & Mason’s finest across the country. I reason that part of his resistance comes from the fact he doesn’t like Christmas pudding, so it’s reasonable to ignore him because he’s got a seasonal screw loose. (My girls don’t like it either, but that genetic anomaly is their father’s fault, so I forgive them.) 

I think I feel compelled to rustle up my fruity mounds as part of my festive rebellion against my mother’s restrained approach. I’d like to pretend that I use a recipe that has been carefully preserved in the pages of some trusted culinary bible, and passed down through the generations, but that would be a gross deception. My mother would simply head to Fortnum’s for ours, reasoning that if one spent four times what it cost at Waitrose, all manner of things would be well. So I’m pre-disposed to overspend when it comes to my puddings, but I splurge on the ingredients instead. I use quince instead of cooking apples, rum instead of brandy, the quotidian dried fruit is bolstered by dried figs, dried apricots and dried prunes, and the perversion which is candied peel is very definitely out.  

So the angst in our household is already running high by 1 December. All that’s left to do is argue about which grandparents’ turn it is, the merits of Christmas lunch versus Christmas dinner, and why, despite knowing I always make one, my mother-in-law insists on buying a Tesco’s Finest Christmas pudding. By which time, any seasonal spirit has shrivelled like a supermarket sprout left languishing in the furthest reaches of a fridge drawer until mid-January.  

Was the Emperor Elagabalus really trans?

The North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin has made the remarkable discovery, known to historians only since the 9th century AD, that the Roman emperor Elagabalus was a sexual pervert who liked to be called ‘she’ and offered vast sums to any doctor who could kit him out with female sex organs. In celebration of such a visionary, the museum has decided to describe him as a ‘transgender woman’ in their display of a coin minted during his reign (AD 218-222). The museum had better be careful what it wishes for.

Elagabalus became emperor at the age of 14 when he was already being debauched by men and ‘being on heat, the recipient of lust in every orifice of his body’, according to the Augustan History. His main interest seems to have been searching out men with large genitals and assigning them to official posts in relation to size. At banquets, he put perverts next to himself and took pleasure in fondling and touching them.

But, we are told, he never had intercourse with the same woman twice except for his wife. He was always with women at the baths, treating them with depilatory ointment. He once put on a meal of 22 courses, taking friends to bathe and having intercourse with women between each one. He also violated a Vestal Virgin.

His real forte, however, was parties. He gave summer banquets of various hues, green one day, blue the next (etc.), and among his favourite foods were camels’ heels and cocks’ combs. Guests were asked to invent new sauces, but those whose efforts failed to please were forced to eat nothing else until they had come up with something better.

He liked inviting parties of similarly deformed guests (e.g. all one-eyed or deaf or gout-ridden), and once invited eight fat men for the pleasure of watching them trying to recline together on the same couch. He also took to seating guests around the table on air-filled cushions, which slaves surreptitiously let down in the course of the meal (a proto-whoopee cushion?). He once organised a party at which each course was served in a different house, ensuring that the houses were as far apart as possible. A terrible fate awaited drunken guests: they would wake in the morning to find lions, leopards and bears roaming their room. An inveterate joker, he would order his slaves to bring him a thousand pounds of spiders’ webs. He used oxen to haul out fish from his ponds. Sometimes he served up dinner with food painted on the plates.

One could go on, but even this very short extract from his life suggests he does not make the best model for the trans, or any other, ‘community’, though there’s no accounting for taste.

On the other hand, any museum director who actually bothered to read the life of Elagabalus in the Augustan History might just possibly begin to wonder whether it was all true. He was after all Syrian, not a good honest Roman and while the people adored him – there’s nothing like seeing aristocrats mocked – the Roman elite got the last laugh, ridding the world of him after four years and producing this account of his life.

Still, what sensible museum would pay attention to the dictates of historical likelihood when contemporary fashion plays its siren tune?

In defence of the latest high migration figures

The debate over migration figures released today seems to be whether or not we’ve reached a new ‘record high’. The Office for National Statistics reports net migration rose 672,000 in the year to June. This would have been a record high if the ONS hadn’t also revised last year’s figures up by a staggering 140,000 to 745,000.

This seems, to me, to be a technicality. Either way, the figure is hovering around its highest point in recent history. Net migration has more than doubled since June 2016, when the UK voted to leave the European Union. The numbers really took off after Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit reforms, which created pathways for graduates to work in the UK and for non-EU migrants to more easily make their way here. There’s no real point in quibbling over when the record was hit: let’s simply agree that, yes, the numbers are very high.

The debate, then, should be whether these levels of net migration have merit. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a debate taking place. Migration-sceptic opinions run deep these days, not just within the Tory party, but within the Labour party, too. The former and current Home Secretaries may take different approaches to this issue – especially in tone – but one thing that unites them is a commitment to ‘reducing levels of legal migration’ as James Cleverly said today. Meanwhile Labour leader Keir Starmer has described today’s figures as ‘shockingly high’, an indication of ‘failure’ that so many workers would be migrating to Britain. 

Remember they’re talking about legal migration: people who have been sponsored by businesses and universities, or who have used one of the few government schemes for refugees, to come work, study and find safety in the UK. Still, long gone is the Ronald Reagan school of thought on immigration: in politics anyway, it seems no one is gunning to defend these arrivals.

Their main issue seems to be with the headline figure: that 672,000 additional people arriving in the UK is simply too high. Something, therefore, must be done. 

But what? It’s here that people start to struggle. If you want to reduce the overall figure, you have to start identifying groups within that figure that you would rather not have in the UK. Who might they be?

Given the response of the British people to the atrocities seen in places like Ukraine – opening up their homes and letting people stay – it feels unlikely the target would be 240,000 people who have come in on humanitarian visas in the past two years. Or, for that matter, the additional 161,000 people who have come through legal pathways for refugees.

Perhaps the answer, then, is to go after the net 519,000 international students who have come to the UK in the past two years. Their return to the UK post-pandemic, though, is largely hailed as a good thing, not least because of their estimated £40 billion worth to the economy. If anything, there’s a case for taking students out of the net-migration data altogether: while the ONS says some evidence shows students are starting to stay longer, around 80 per cent still tend to leave within five years of arriving.

Then there’s the surge in work visas – 335,000 in the year to September – which have helped to ease the labour market crisis, which has been a large domestic contributor to inflation. It’s hard to send this group back home when the NHS England waiting list sits at nearly 7.8 million, and the ONS is reporting the increase in work visas for non-EU migrants (up to 33 per cent, from 22 per cent last year) is ‘largely attributed to those coming on health and care visas’.

This is the trickiest bit for the migration dissenters: that Johnson’s immigration reforms did exactly what people were calling for after Brexit. They cut off low-skilled pathways to come work in the UK, pivoting instead to making sure those who came here were tax contributors, or students who would either become contributors or eventually return home.

It is no longer easy to claim that people arriving are taking more from the system than they are paying in. Students and workers aren’t simply paying into the system – they are also paying an NHS surcharge to get their visa, handing over an additional sum to the health service. All of that is before they even start contributing tax (those who might skirt around these rules are people on the shortage occupation list, which mean that the government thinks there is an immediate need for the services in the UK that cannot be provided by domestic workers).

It’s possible, in theory, to make some blunt changes to the immigration rules to see numbers come tumbling down. As Patrick O’Flynn says on Coffee House, Rishi Sunak could simply ‘tweak student and work visa requirements to ensure a significant fall from the gargantuan 606,000 net migration number bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson’. For Patrick – and many others – this illustrates just how simple it is to get that headline rate down. To me, it illustrates why the focus on the headline rate is such a mistake. Yes, we could try to quell the flow of the world’s best and brightest students being educated in the UK. We could also send some nurses home. To what end: a lower headline rate and far more gaps in Britain’s core services? Could that ever be chalked up as a win?

Perhaps the most persuasive argument against net migration has nothing to do with the migrants at all, but the 5.3 million working-age Brits who are claiming out of work benefits. What about their opportunities? Allowing businesses to bring over migrants to fill the gaps is surely hurting their chance of employment?

This would be a far more compelling case if the data backed it up. We had an experiment when the economy reopened after the pandemic of wages surging. I reported back in July 2021 about some of the incredible offers companies were making to get potential workers through the door, paying more than ever before for what are normally lower paid jobs. Sadly, this didn’t move the dial much: the peak number of people on out of work benefits was 5.9 in February 2021, down to 5.3 million over two years later. 

To this day, job vacancies remain well above their pre-pandemic levels, sitting at just over 950,000. It’s easy in the migration debate to pit migrant workers and native workers against each other, but labour market data suggests that no such battle is taking place. There are still currently more than enough jobs to go around for anyone who wants to work. The issue is not migrants or wages, but convincing those who are currently not working to decide, for their own benefit, to enter the workforce.

For some people, even breaking these numbers down won’t be enough: the issue is, and will remain, that there are simply too many migrants coming to the UK. Unlike some, I don’t impose any accusation or bad-faith assumption on them for feeling that way. But they must accept what some kind of state crackdown – like imposing a government-mandated limit on visas – would mean. It would produce a smaller economy, a poorer country, less opportunity and prosperity to go around. 

There’s no one to vote for if you want controlled immigration

There has been much Tory huffing and puffing about the ONS revising 2022 net migration to 745,000, up from its previous estimate of 606,000. James Heale has documented their dismay. Conservative MPs are a journalist’s dream: they don’t do much but they’re always quick off the mark with a statement lamenting all the things they’ve not done. 

You will have read this story before. The Conservatives pledge to crack down on immigration, immigration goes up, and the Tories announce that they’re jolly cross about it. Boy, just you wait till they get into government. Oh how things will be different then. 

Every election the Conservative party has won in the last 40 years it has done so on a manifesto promising controlled or reduced immigration. In 1983, it was a pledge to ‘maintain effective immigration control’; in 1987, ‘firm but fair immigration controls’; and in 1992, ‘immigration controls which are fair, understandable and properly enforced’. 

Tory manifesto language had hardened significantly by 2010, when the manifesto drawn up by those nice Notting Hill Tories declared that immigration was ‘too high and needs to be reduced’. Reduced by how much? ‘Back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.’ 

Five years later, the Conservatives went to the country promising: ‘We will continue to cut immigration from outside the EU.’ In 2017, immigration was ‘still too high’ and would be reduced ‘to sustainable levels’, which was once again defined as ‘the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands’. 

Then came the 2019 election. Once Brexit was done, the Conservative manifesto announced, ‘we can decide who comes to this country’. That would mean: ‘There will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down.’

Narrator: overall numbers did not come down. 

The revised figure means 2022 saw the highest level of annual net migration since 1964. (That’s as far back as I could find figures for.) As is now well-documented, increases in immigration no longer come predominantly from EU member states but from countries outside the bloc. In the year to June, 968,000 of the 1.2 million arrivals were from non-EU countries. That is before we factor in illegal immigration via small boats, another route of ingress the Tories have vowed to restrict. In the past five years, more than 112,000 people have entered the UK without permission via the Channel. Never fear, though. The ONS say this year’s figures show immigration trending downwards. With their last estimate being out by a mere 139,000, their analysis must be considered robust and reliable. 

In election after election, Conservative votes have produced progressive outcomes on immigration. The Tories used to blame the EU but they no longer have that excuse. They used to blame Labour but immigration levels during the Blair and Brown years have nothing on the Conservatives. Yet immigration-restrictionist voters have turned out time and again for the Tories on election day. 

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann suspects the reason is that these voters don’t yet appreciate the scale of mass immigration the Tories have presided over. That may be, though I wonder if it has more to do with demographics and ideological instincts. The demographic most likely to back immigration restrictions are also those least likely to be affected by the economic and social impacts, such as increased labour market competition, housing scarcity and demand for school places. The demographic most likely to encounter these impacts is also the most likely to have experienced educational, social and cultural settings where even scepticism towards mass immigration is framed as reactionary and racist. 

Put bluntly: boomers moan but don’t march while millennials might march but not on this. (There may also be, as I suggested recently, a Trumpian ‘build the wall’ phenomenon whereby boomer immigration restrictionists care more about hearing ‘crack down on immigration’ than they do about said crackdown materialising.)

Whatever the sociology behind it, the determination of immigration restrictionists to vote for a party that keeps increasing immigration all but guarantees that the party will continue its policy. That will mean more mass immigration, with all the social and cultural externalities that brings, and in turn greater difficulty in managing rapid population change and more resentment towards immigration of any scale. 

The continued failure of the two main parties to address these issues is storing up political and social problems for the future, by which point addressing them will be far more difficult and divisive. There is little hope that a governing class that refused to learn this lesson even after Brexit will learn it in sufficient time to head off the sorts of outcomes that have boosted nationalists in some of Europe’s most stoutly liberal nations. The only saving grace in this country is that first past the post makes it excruciatingly difficult for a new party to unseat and replace either the Conservatives or Labour. 

I am an immigration liberal. I don’t dispute that there is a minus column as well as a plus column, but I believe the latter totals more than the former. Even so, I’m not sure how long the uneasy, undemocratic peace on this issue can or should endure. Vote Labour, get uncontrolled immigration. Vote Conservative, get the same. The message coming out of Westminster is that it doesn’t matter how you vote, the policy will not change. This has all the makings of another Brexit. 

James Cleverly admits to foul-mouthed Commons jibe

James Cleverly has admitted to calling a Labour parliamentarian a ‘shit MP’ – but denied saying Stockton North is a ‘shithole’. The Home Secretary confessed to making the comment during a heated debate in the Commons following yesterday’s Autumn Statement.

Cleverly was overheard taking a pop at Labour’s Alex Cunningham, after the MP for Stockton North asked Rishi Sunak why child poverty was so high in his constituency. A spokesman for Cleverly immediately denied that he made the comment – but a source close to the Home Secretary has today admitted he did use a four-letter word in the chamber.

‘He (Cleverly) apologises for unparliamentary language,’ the source said. ‘As was made clear yesterday, he would never criticise Stockton. He’s campaigned in Stockton and is clear that it is a great place.’

Mr S is pleased to hear it, given that Stockton South is a Tory seat. Earlier today, Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen called on Cleverly to apologise for ‘dragging Stockton’s name through the mud’. Not the smoothest start for Cleverly in his new role…

Scottish parliament to investigate SNP health secretary

Uh oh. It’s not looking good for Scotland’s health secretary Michael Matheson. During a rather tearful speech in the Chamber last week, Matheson revealed that he had referred himself to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body for an external review. While this temporarily halted press enquiries into the details, the referral isn’t the safety net Matheson desperately needs. For now it turns out that the SPCB wants to investigate him further. So far it’s only taken Holyrood 10 months to act…

However, the watchdog won’t be looking into the porkies Matheson told the press last week — namely, denying his iPad had been used for personal activities when he knew it had. And speaking of transparency, hapless Humza Yousaf isn’t coming out of this palaver particularly well either. In a particularly poor performance at First Minister’s Questions today, Yousaf ducked questions from Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross on Matheson’s honesty, or lack thereof:

DR: So let me ask Humza Yousaf: if government ministers need to be honest, why is Michael Matheson still in a job?

HY: I will say, for the fourth time, that Michael Matheson admits to making mistakes in the handling of this issue. And it is astonishing that Douglas Ross thinks that the party of Boris Johnson…can lecture anybody about standards in public life.

Oh dear. A pretty conspicuous deflection there from the FM. So much for all that openness and transparency Yousaf promised of his premiership, eh?

Why Geert Wilders won

Far right, anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has won a historic victory for his Freedom party (PVV) in shock Dutch elections on Wednesday. As the final votes are counted, Wilders appears to have more than doubled his 17 MPs in 2021 elections, winning 37 of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament and almost a quarter of the 13 million votes. ‘The PVV can no longer be ignored,’ vowed Wilders following his success overnight. ‘We will govern’.

Wilders, who campaigned on the idea of ‘stopping’ immigration, appears to have benefitted from widespread mistrust of the government after a series of scandals under ex prime minister Mark Rutte. For years, Wilders has tried to present himself as different from other politicians: the 60-year-old has called parliament ‘fake’ and posed as a candidate for change – despite soon celebrating 25 years as a politician. In this election, his message finally hit home.

‘Hah, hah, hah, 35 seats!’ he said last night, after watching the first exit poll. In a packed café in Scheveningen, the Hague, he told his supporters: ‘The voters have said: ‘We have had enough’…We will ensure that the Nederlander comes to be number one again.’

For 13 years, Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) has distanced itself from Wilders. But the VVD’s new leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, chose early on in the campaign to open the door to Wilders. Instead of excluding him, as Rutte did after a disastrous minority government in 2010, she said she would ‘not exclude his voters’ but would look at his policies.

In response, Wilders was perceived to take a slightly milder tone – on some points, at least. Wilders, who has lived under 24/7 protection for almost 20 years due to death threats, has called Islam ‘the ideology of a retarded culture’. But in this campaign, he was more conciliatory. He said he was prepared to put his extreme stance on Islam ‘on ice’ and be a prime minister for ‘all Dutch people’. Even so, his uncosted manifesto still calls for ‘no Islamic schools, Korans and mosques’. He has also never taken back a 2014 campaign speech calling for ‘fewer Moroccans’, for which he has a criminal record.

Sarah de Lange, professor of political pluralism at Amsterdam University, said that the media went along with the idea that Wilders was ‘milder’, while other parties’ focus on controlling immigration played into Wilders’ hands.

'Wilders has clearly benefited from the fact that Yeşilgöz made him the flavour of the month and that the VVD and (centre-right new party New Social Contract) have made immigration a central issue in the elections,' she said. 'The result is a huge surprise...to experts like me.'

If Wilders does become prime minister, he will inherit a country in a difficult position. The Netherlands is in economic recession and is in the middle of a huge housing crisis, largely due to a lack of building. A scandal involving Europe's largest gasfield in Groningen, a region in the north – where drilling has caused earthquakes – has damaged tens of thousands of homes. As a result, drilling has been stopped – but this has contributed to crippling bills for many Dutch. Even in this wealthy country of 17.9 million, 7 per cent of children will officially be living in poverty next year, according to economic analysis unit the CPB.

'All of my money goes to everyone except to me,' one man told NOS broadcaster. 'I vote for Mr Wilders. He says he doesn’t exclude anyone, he won’t exclude Muslims. I think he’s realistic.'

As parties, like the VVD which suffered a historic loss, retire to lick their wounds, or congratulate themselves, like the pro-reform New Social Contract or GreenLeft/Labour, which have scored big gains, it remains to be seen whether Wilders will be able to form a 76 seat majority that will allow him to lead a government. Pieter Omtzigt, head of the NSC, previously excluded working with 'anti-constitutional parties' but is being more nebulous after the 'complicated' result. Yeşilgöz said on election night she 'didn’t see that this country would have a leader who does not bring together all Dutch people, who is there for all of the Dutch…but above all I don’t see a majority forming.' But for now the ball, as she said, is with Wilders.

Tory backlash as net migration hits record levels

After much Whitehall spin, the official figures are now in. Net migration in 2022 is estimated to have hit 745,000, a huge revision upward from an earlier estimate of 606,000. That figure only fell slightly by 10 per cent to 672,000 for 2023, as a total of 1.2 million people arrived to live in the UK in the 12 months up until June. Today’s net migration figure is more than three times the level when the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledged to ensure ‘overall numbers come down.’

The reaction of Conservative MPs to these figures has not been a happy one. The New Conservatives group of 25 right-wingers has released a collective statement, noting that the high levels of migration are ‘a consistent trend’ caused ‘directly by the policy decisions of this government.’ They warn that ‘this really is “do or die” for our party’ and urge ministers to today publish an emergency set of measures to meet the pledge by the time of next year’s election.

Public anger is not confined to just this group of MPs. Neil O’Brien, who served as a minister in Rishi Sunak’s government until last week, posted on Twitter/X that ‘In every election since 1992 we have promised to reduce migration. Today’s extraordinary numbers mean the PM must now take immediate and massive action to do that to do just that.’ In private, others are even more critical, with some irritated by Home Secretary James Cleverly’s claim that the government remains ‘completely committed’ to reducing levels of legal migration. ‘They’re certainly taking their time about it,’ remarks one solidly centre-right backbencher.

In May, Rishi Sunak vowed to bring down net migration below the level he ‘inherited’ upon becoming Prime Minister and his supporters can point to today’s 10 per cent drop as proof that he has delivered on that pledge. It is true too that much of the increase in migration came under Boris Johnson, who showed little desire to curb the number of legal arrivals to the UK. Neither argument though is likely to get much of a hearing, given that today’s fall is only thanks to a staggering ONS revision upwards of last year’s figures.

‘A technical triumph’, is how one MP dismisses today’s drop. Further measures will be needed if Sunak is to prove that he is serious about bringing down legal migration, in addition to ‘stopping the boats’.

Sunak has no excuse for immigration being this high

Of all the essential tasks facing Rishi Sunak when he became Prime Minister, bringing down the level of legal immigration should have been by far the most straightforward.

All he had to do was tweak student and work visa requirements to ensure a significant fall from the gargantuan 606,000 net migration number bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson. He could then have tried to sell the idea to Tory-leaning voters that a downward direction of travel had been set in motion, with further down payments on the way (as Jeremy Hunt attempted to do with taxation yesterday).

Instead, the ONS has just published its new estimate for net migration in the 12 months to the end of June 2023 and the number is 672,000. That figure encompasses an astonishing 1.2 million incomers and emigration of just over half a million. Very nearly a million incomers were from outside the EU, which is probably not what the electorate had in mind when voting for Brexit in order to ‘take back control’ of the borders.

Startlingly, the Boris figure from 2022 was today also revised upwards to 745,000. So if Sunak wanted to end any lingering doubt and prove that he is the worst politician to occupy 10 Downing Street this century (a high bar) then technically he could now go out and claim that he has not presided over a record immigration volume after all.

Surely not even he would be clueless enough to do that. Yet his central contention on migration – set out in an early prime ministerial interview with Paul Goodman of the Conservative Home website – that the British public are only really bothered about illegal immigration is about to be smashed to smithereens.

Of course, he has failed to halt the illegal stuff too, despite his pledge in January to ‘stop the boats’. He now says that even more legislation is required to make further progress on this. Some people might have believed he was being sincere on that score, in spite of Suella Braverman’s damning revelations about his hesitancy, had he delivered on the Tory manifesto promise to bring overall levels of legal immigration down from the approximately 250,000 they stood at in 2019. Instead, he has almost trebled that number despite having full freedom of action to control legal immigration volumes from every country in the world.

We can expect more fireworks from Mrs Braverman on this score. After all, she wrote in her letter to him upon leaving the government that he had ‘failed to deliver’ on a promise to her that he would: ‘Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas.’

In other words, Sunak fully owns this situation. And it is not even as though the vast influx of new people has been economically justifiable. Official statistics released with the autumn statement yesterday showed that while massive net immigration has helped deliver whatever anaemic growth has occurred, it has also coincided with an actual fall in GDP per capita. So more mouths to feed, more pressure on public services and housing and not even a proportionate increase in the size of the cake.

Home Office sources tell me that Braverman and her ministerial team pressed Downing Street repeatedly to tighten visa requirements over the past 12 months but were rebuffed at every turn. She will no doubt have a paper trail to demonstrate this.

The Prime Minister has no hiding place. In direct contravention of his party’s manifesto promise he has deliberately contrived to drive net migration to severely socially corrosive levels. Some voters will no doubt note that as the head of a billionaire household himself, he will be well insulated against the downsides of all this.

The extreme nature of his policy is further highlighted by the fact that the 2022 figure was said by various experts to be the result of a blip created by post-Covid international travel getting going again, as well as bespoke migration schemes for Ukrainian, Afghan and Hong Kong citizens.

Nobody in Westminster thought that net immigration in excess of 600,000 was going to be the new normal. Nobody, that is, except the former Home Secretary whose recent speech about a migration ‘hurricane’ heading for the West is being vindicated in real time.

As we all know, most political careers end in failure. But failing catastrophically while not even trying to deliver the agreed benchmarks for success on a core policy amounts to an unprecedented exercise in cynicism. An unprecedented exercise in punishment on the part of the electorate seems by far the most likely political consequence.

Was the Black Death racist?

Even the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, we are now being told, practised racial discrimination as it raged through Europe wiping out maybe half of the existing population. The new idea is that black people were more likely to die from the plague than white ones. The ‘evidence’ presented by an American researcher and an employee of the Museum of London consists of skull measurements where there are said to be signs of black ancestry; it is not derived from DNA, which would be much more comprehensive. Many of the bones of Black Death victims come from the Crossrail tunnels, so as you approach Liverpool street on the Elizabeth Line you are passing under what were once plague pits in which the bodies of victims were unceremoniously buried. 

Really, though, this is not about evidence at all. It is about ideology: the assumption, a far-fetched one, is that late medieval London teemed with people of very varied ethnic origins who had arrived from far away. And the assertion, which is without any foundation whatsoever, is that they were mainly servants, often female, and therefore subject to ‘white oppression’, living off a poorer diet than white Londoners and therefore showing less resistance to disease.

The argument does not seem to be that certain ethnicities are more prone genetically to certain diseases, such as sickle-cell anaemia. The fact that the random sample of crania studied is tiny (nine bodies attributed to black plague victims) makes this so-called scientific research laughable. Studying skulls, admittedly according to a different technique, was a favourite exercise of racial theorists in the Nazi era, who fanatically measured Jewish heads to prove that Jews are a distinct and subhuman species different from Aryan mankind. The museum of Las Palmas on Gran Canaria has rooms full of medieval skulls which were supposed to show that the native inhabitants of the island were pure exemplars of ‘Cro-Magnon Man’, which was useful for Franco’s claim that the Canary islanders had always been part of the equally Cro-Magnon Spanish race, even before their conquest in the fifteenth century. In reality, skull shape is determined by many factors, including childhood diet and age of puberty; and the time of the Black Death (1347-51) was an age when famine often struck and malnutrition was common.  

Ah, you will say, but what about all those English folk with the name Black? Isn’t that proof of black ancestry going back many centuries? No: much more probably the name records descent from a blacksmith, or from someone with black hair, or – scandalously – a Black Friar from the Dominican Order who gave way to temptation. By the time of the Black Death (which will obviously have to be renamed) an occasional sailor who was an ex-slave of African origin could have arrived in London aboard a Genoese or Catalan ship, because there were routes linking the western Mediterranean, with its active slave trade, to England. But in medieval Italy African slaves were described as ‘olivastre’,  olive-skinned, or even described as white, just as the Berbers of north Africa are olive-skinned or white to this day.

The problem with these supposed revelations goes much deeper. Modern political obsessions derived from Critical Race Theory now determine the past. It is no longer a case of what happened but of what one wants to think happened. And that is determined by what is misleadingly called the pursuit of Social Justice. Cases of this sort of self-deception in describing the past abound. A key moment in the origins of the Industrial Revolution has come under the spotlight. Controversial assertions about the origins of Henry Cort’s innovative methods of iron-production – now being attributed to Caribbean slaves of West African origin from whom he supposedly stole the technique – has shown how gaps in the evidence can be creatively filled by unwarranted speculation, and bits of evidence can be (if the critics are correct, as they seem to be) misread. But this and other such research is being conducted in support of a higher objective, such as the payment of reparations or the promotion of twisted conceptions of ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’.

That does not mean that every fantasy about the past is motivated by activist ideology. Leading scholars can fall victim to bizarre fantasies. My favourite example is the insistence of a distinguished expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the late John Allegro, that Jesus was actually a mushroom (or at any rate a hallucination produced by magic mushrooms). The problem is often that people begin with an idea, for instance, that the rebel Perkin Warbeck really was the son of King Edward IV, and then insist on reading the evidence with the sole intention of proving this. That is not how historians should work. The evidence needs to be studied before, not after, the argument is definitively framed. The real identity of Perkin Warbeck is not going to shake any political foundations after 500 years, but there are sinister aspects to the way the past is being misused, bound up with cranky but dangerous conspiracy theories like Holocaust denial, and latterly the denial that the murderous attack by Hamas on Israel took place on 7 October. In the debate about Henry Cort we are being told that it is an exercise of white supremacy to argue that ‘facts are facts’. The good thing is that, as these cases arise, it becomes more and more obvious that this way of studying the past is intellectually bankrupt and that it is time to return to the aims and standards of traditional history-writing. 

Is Javier Milei already defying his critics?

Critics of Argentina’s president Javier Milei have already made up their minds: he is a lunatic and his plans will collapse on first contact with the real world. Argentina’s money will run out and the economy will grind to a halt. To some commentators, he is a ‘hard-right’ ideologue who will crash the economy within weeks. They say he’s like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng on roller-skates.

If you listen to those attacking Milei, you’d be forgiven for thinking the man in charge in Buenos Aires will precipitate yet another economic calamity in a country which has been stumbling from one disaster to another for almost a hundred years. But hold on. It turns out that the markets don’t quite see it like that. Following Milei’s victory in Sunday’s election, Argentinian assets are soaring in value. If that continues, there is just a chance that Milei’s plan might work. 

Milei is certainly a radical. He plans to ditch the peso for the dollar, get rid of the central bank, and take a ‘chainsaw’ to a bloated public sector and welfare system. Armed with quotes from Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, Milei is the most hardcore libertarian to come to power over the last couple of decades. Yet so far, Argentina’s benchmark Merval index likes what it sees: on the news of Milei’s victory, it rose by 21 per cent, marking its best daily performance in over 21 years. It has carried on rising since. The country’s dollar bonds rose strongly too and the black market peso fell as investors worked out that there would be less demand for the unofficial currency. 

Perhaps this might only be a short-term boost. Even so, if Argentina does continue in its economic slump, it hardly seems fair to blame Milei entirely for Argentina’s woes. This is a country that, under the left-wing Peronists, had an inflation rate of 140 per cent and interest rates of 130 per cent. Last year, output shrank by 5 per cent. Argentina has already had to reschedule massive IMF loans. Things can hardly get much worse – a fact the markets may have cottoned on to. Argentina’s disastrous economy record shows that high-debt, high-spending economies addicted to printing money are not especially healthy. There’s a chance that maverick libertarians, like Milei, may be the only people with a solution – and it is worth backing them while you still can. 

Net migration hits 672,000 – with 2022 figures revised up

Has migration to the UK peaked? Net migration in the year to June hit 672,000, down from 745,000 in 2022. Some 1.2 million people came to Britain whilst 508,000 moved overseas. The ONS says it’s too early to call this a downward trend, but that immigration seems to be slowing whilst emigration is increasing.

Perhaps the biggest story though is the size of some of the revisions. The ONS had previously put the net migration figure for 2022 at just over 600,000. Today they found 140,000 more people and revised it up to 745,000. This is a staggering change. Taken with today’s figure, that new peak suggests numbers are coming down. But how much can we trust the ONS’s estimates? Will today’s number be revised up in six months’ time?

According to the latest figures, almost everyone arriving in the UK was from outside the EU (some 968,000) with a growing number of these non-EU nationals arriving for work (33 per cent compared with 23 per cent a year ago). Most of those workers have arrived on health and care visas to take jobs in the NHS and care homes. Meanwhile, those arriving through humanitarian routes such as the Ukraine and Hong Kong resettlement schemes decreased from 19 per cent of arrivals to just 9 per cent.

Whilst migration may be slowing, 627,000 is still a pretty large number and given Britain's workforce problems – with some 5.5 million on out-of-work benefits – it’s no surprise that companies and the health service are increasingly relying on migrants to fill jobs. It’s an easy economic fix for the government too. The Office for Budget Responsibility points out that migrants tend to have higher participation rates and so provide a productivity boost. If cities like Liverpool continue to have as many as 18 per cent of their working population on benefits no wonder migrants are flocking in.

The largest group of non-EU arrivals though was study visas, with nearly two in every five arriving to take up a place at a university or college. This could suggest that migration will stay at high levels for longer because – as the OBR pointed out yesterday – whilst students have tended not to hang around (historically 80 per cent leave within five years) now more and more are making the move permanent and transitioning to work visas. 

A growing number of migrants are bringing their children and elderly parents with them too. In the year to June 2019 dependants accounted for just 6 per cent of non-EU student immigrants and 37 per cent of non-EU workers. Those figures are now 25 and 48 per cent respectively. In the most recent figures the top five nationalities coming to the UK were Indian, Nigerian, Chinese, Pakistani and Ukrainian. Some 31,000 arrived through the Ukrainian sponsorship and family schemes. 

Overall, these new estimates confirm a change in immigration in the last couple of years, a strategic decision the government says very little about. Previously European migrants almost accounted for all UK immigration, now the majority of migrants are from non-EU countries. Whole families are coming where it used to just be individuals and students are staying for longer. But as Britain ages and sickness in the workforce goes on unaddressed it’s unlikely we’ll see a sustained drop in immigration anytime soon.

Did Israel-Palestine protests push Geert Wilders’s election victory?

Geert Wilders’s victory is another slap-in-the-face moment for the European Union. The complexities of Dutch democracy may mean that he struggles to form a strong government. But his victory, which seemed impossible just a few weeks ago, reminds us that, whether we like it or not, anti-immigration politics is the most potent force in 21st century western democracies. It also raises interesting questions about how the Israel-Palestine war may be influencing elections far outside the Holy Land.

There are of course many factors behind Wilders’s latest ascent — his ‘Nexit’ position against the European Union, his Freedom alliance with Dutch farmers against the eco-left, and his broader objections to the Green agenda all contributed.

But on October 7, the day Hamas struck, his VVD party was polling at 12 per cent. Throughout the month of October, that support more than doubled.

What changed? Well vast pro-Palestine protests took place in Holland. On October 14, 20,000 people marched in Amsterdam. The biggest news story in Holland in the past month, as in Britain, was the sheer numbers of people willing to take to the streets to wave flags in solidarity with Palestine and berate their government for its unwillingness to condemn Israeli aggression.

It’s too early to say with certainty that those protests triggered an angry backlash at the ballot and propelled one of Europe’s most explicitly anti-Islam politicians to victory. The coincidence seems too remarkable to ignore, however. Will we see similar shocks in coming elections across the west? What with Meloni’s victory in Italy, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally again leading French polls, and the Alternative for Germany (Afd) still growing – and, of course, that man called Donald still making waves across the Atlantic – it seems that nationalism, and the ‘populist revolt’ of 2016, is far from over.