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Brussels is dropping a bureaucratic bombshell on Europe
Brussels makes one thing better than anywhere else: regulation. Reporting duties, due diligence checks, ESG disclosures, and endless frameworks for climate and labour compliance – if it can be mandated, Brussels has a directive for it. Now Brussels has outdone itself with a directive that makes companies legally liable for the behaviour of every entity in their global supply chain. It’s due to come into force in 2027. The law has triggered a rare backlash. This week, Emmanuel Macron has called for it to be taken ‘off the table’. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz has also demanded its repeal. But it seems even the bloc’s two most powerful governments can’t stop this from going through.
Even the bloc’s two most powerful governments can’t stop this from going through
On paper, the EU is committed to reducing regulation. In 2024, the former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi delivered a report calling for the EU to reduce obstacles for businesses and to have leaner regulation. Ursula von der Leyen stood beside him nodding when he presented the report.
But on this supply chain regulation the bureaucracy is doubling down. The new directive is part of the EU’s push to make businesses morally responsible. It forces companies to account not only for their own practices, but for the environmental and human rights records of every link in their supply chain. A business could be held liable for the actions of a subcontractor on the other side of the world, something no American or Chinese competitor is subject to. It’s a gift to compliance lawyers and a slow death sentence for exporters.
Ursula von der Leyen has staked her Commission’s legacy on this kind of regulation. The rules are part of a broader project that aims to make the EU a global standard-setter. Backing down now would mean admitting the agenda she has championed is unworkable. This is why the EU is pushing through a directive so economically damaging that even the French and the Germans are sounding the alarm.
This is the quiet crisis at the heart of the EU. Even the most powerful countries no longer control the rules. France and Germany helped create the EU’s regulatory machinery. Now they’re stuck inside it, unable to turn it off or even slow it down. The US economy has grown more than 40 per cent since 2008, while the EU limps along at half that pace, shackled by its own rules and regulations. The commissioners in Brussels talk about dynamism. What they produce is paperwork.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is walking right back into this trap. Labour’s plan to realign with the EU’s regulatory framework is couched in the language of diplomacy. Yet as Martin Howe KC noted in his analysis for The Spectator this week, Starmer isn’t just realigning, he’s surrendering control over entire sectors, from agriculture to energy. The UK will be required to follow EU law, interpreted by EU judges, with no vote and no voice. What the PM sees as a return to reason means dragging British companies back into the red tape that even France and Germany are trying to escape. This is why Starmer’s ‘reset’ is so naive. Labour still treats the EU as if it is the only adult in the room – technocratic, sensible, measured. When in reality, its ‘sensible’ regulations are sheer madness.
Starmer is free to pick and choose which areas of EU regulation Britain engages with, at least for now. Britain is no longer bound by EU law. But everything coming from Starmer suggests he has a general, almost devotional, belief that European regulation is better. Alignment is portrayed not just as a pragmatic choice, but a moral one.
Meanwhile in Europe the cost of regulation is piling up. Growth is stagnant. Industry is hollowing out. The French press is full of business leaders complaining about the ‘regulatory frenzy’. Le Figaro counts 13,000 new EU rules since 2019. That works out to ten new rules per day. The directive on supply chains is just the tip of the iceberg. From farming to tech to energy, Brussels is issuing orders that national governments can no longer stop.
This is no longer a union of sovereign equals. The Commission proposes, the parliament postures, and the member states fall in line. France and Germany can moan, but they can’t unpick what Brussels and the European bureaucracy conjure up. They’re legally required to implement the directive into national law. Refusing would put them in breach of EU treaties and expose them to infringement proceedings before the European Court of Justice. The lesson here is that once you’ve signed up, there’s no going back. You don’t get to revise the regulations. You just comply.
Britain got out and was unshackled from this process. Brexit meant that British governments could decide how to regulate British companies. Starmer, in his eagerness to prove his grown-up credentials, is giving that away. Deal by deal, framework by framework. The logic of his approach, of constant alignment, will lead him there. And unlike France and Germany, he won’t even have a seat at the table.
Being inside the EU doesn’t mean you have control. It means you’re subject to decisions you can’t undo. Labour should pay attention to what even Macron and Merz are complaining about. Before Starmer continues down the path of ‘resetting the relationship’, he might want to ask whether the relationship is worth resetting. Because from where I’m standing, Brussels looks less like a partner and more like a constraint.
Illegal gold mining is blighting Peru
It was gold that brought the Spanish conquistadors to Peru in the 1500s. More than 500 years on and the precious metal is still causing problems. Gold mining came into sharp focus at the end of April when 13 miners were found, naked, bound and gagged, at the bottom of a mine in Pataz which had been taken by an armed gang. Some bore signs of torture and there was evidence they had been executed. The main suspect behind the attacks was arrested last week.
Peru’s illegal gold rush has become increasingly bloody in recent years. Some 39 workers at the Pataz mine have been killed in the past three years, according to the Peruvian mining company Poderosa, which was the victim of the recent attacks. Criminal groups are vying for control over a resource which represents big business. Illegal gold mining has become one of the most profitable and violent criminal enterprises in Peru, at times outstripping even the cocaine trade. Peru exported more than $15 billion of gold last year. As much as 40 per cent of it is estimated to have come from illegal sources. Illegal mining has been further incentivised by the soaring price of gold.
As the profits have increased so too has the violence. Gangs are armed with military-grade weaponry. In late 2023, an armed group stormed a mine in the north of the country, killing nine workers and injuring 15. In January last year a group of more than 100 armed men ambushed a police convoy, freeing four members of an illegal mining gang. In the days before the recent massacre, police rescued 50 workers, including the security guards which mining firms are now required to hire, from another mine in Pataz. According to local reports, more than 200 mining tunnels have been seized by the groups.
The Madre de Dios region, which borders Brazil and Bolivia, is often described as the epicentre of illegal mining in the country. But such activities have spread across huge parts of the country including Pataz and the northern border with Ecuador.
As well as large, well-equipped organised crime groups, illegal mining is also carried out by smaller, artisanal miners. Local people are often driven to mining because of a lack of economic opportunities. They work in makeshift camps and lack knowledge of best environmental practices. Some organisations have also claimed that some of the workers, including children, are trafficked and forced to work in modern slavery conditions. Illegally mined gold is then often able to enter the global market mixed with legal gold, making it difficult to trace.
The violence is not the only consequence of illegal and unregulated mining activities. South America, and more specifically the Amazon Rainforest, is one of the most important regions on the planet for biodiversity. Miners clear trees for informal landing strips, and release mercury and other contaminants into the water. This reduces the amount of light getting into rivers, causing problems for marine life which need light to hunt for food, and can also poison fish directly.
The photos of the slain miners have shocked the Andean nation
Illegal mining also dovetails with other forms of illegality. The same perpetrators also smuggle drugs. Cases of human trafficking and prostitution have also been linked to the growth of illegal mining. Much of the mining also takes place on indigenous land, with communities threatened if they try to defend it.
The interim president, Dina Boluarte, has been criticised for inaction and has resurrected an anti-terrorism bill to try to stem the tide. In response to the latest incident, the government has pledged new security deployments in Pataz, but questions remain about their long-term impact. The problems are also more deeply rooted than the current president’s term. Corruption is an issue. Some officials have been accused of colluding with the criminal enterprises. Policing what are often remote areas, thick with jungle, is also challenging.
A major operation called Operation Mercury was launched in Madre de Dios in 2019. Some 1,500 military police were mobilised to dismantle illegal mines. The operation notched some notable successes – including a significant decline in deforestation – but illegal mining ultimately relocated elsewhere or has since resumed. Attempts to formalise the industry have also fallen foul of red tape or a lack of political will.
The photos of the slain miners, numbered and wrapped in plastic, as well as videos showing the executions, have shocked the Andean nation. Violence of all kinds has been escalating in Peru. Parts of the capital Lima have been under a state of emergency since March. Beleaguered Peruvians will hope that the latest attack may finally galvanise effective action.
In defence of seagulls
We Brits used to rub along pretty well with seagulls. Their distinctive call conjured memories of happy days out at the seaside and it was strangely hypnotic to watch them circle above the waters as we breathed in the salty air. But now they’re in danger of becoming public enemy number one as the tabloids pump out scare stories about our feathered friends.
Only this week, the Daily Star called them ‘flying scumbags’, the Daily Mail described them as ‘feathered thugs’, and the Sun labelled them ‘dive-bombing muggers’. Meanwhile, the Daily Express warned that an ‘apocalyptic swarm’ of 3,000 seagulls had ‘invaded a UK town’. The Daily Star raised the stakes to Jurassic levels, terrifying readers with a story about seagulls ‘the size of pterodactyls’ that are ‘terrorising’ a British village.
The Daily Star called gulls ‘flying scumbags’
I’ve never seen a seagull the size of a dinosaur, but I know it is incredibly annoying when they rip open bin bags and dive-bomb you when you’re trying to relax over an al fresco lunch. Around three quarters of the UK’s herring gull population now lives in urban areas: a YouGov survey in 2022 found that more than half of those asked had a negative view of seagulls. A separate study found that more people supported culls than opposed them.
But before we demonise seagulls, we should consider the part we may have played in all this. Overfishing has depleted the fish stocks that they historically relied on for food. Is this why they’re forced to come and bother us for our grub? When they attack us as we eat our fish and chips, they’re only claiming the food stolen from their waters.
Coastal development has also disrupted their nesting sites. As we build more homes and other properties, gulls are forced to move inland to urban areas in search of sustenance and shelter. Rising sea levels and sea temperatures, which have been linked to climate change, may also have disrupted their nesting sites and the availability of food.
It’s typical human arrogance to muck about with nature and then clutch our pearls when it turns out that there may be consequences. When seagulls flock to our towns and cities to harass us for food, they serve as a warning sign that something’s gone wrong. Yet we treat this warning as something to eradicate, rather than listen to.
When things are going well, seagulls play a vital part in the ecosystem because their scavenger nature helps to control the populations of smaller creatures. They also help with nutrient cycling, which boosts the health of marine and coastal environments and reduces the spread of disease. But as their numbers fall, this negatively affects biodiversity, which has a knock-on effect on us all.
Tabloid stories about ‘dangerous’ animals never consider the part that humanity plays in nature’s problems. Every summer we get scare stories about ‘dangerous’ sharks, but while humans kill around 100 million sharks every year, sharks kill very few of us – just seven people worldwide in 2024.
Last summer, the Guardian asked whether cows were ‘the UK’s most dangerous animals’ and the Daily Star described them as ‘mooing killers’. But every year, cows kill around five humans in the UK while humans kill around 2.8 million cows. In recent months, we’ve also had warnings that rats and dangerous dogs are going to be the death of us, but most of us are still standing.
Now it’s the turn of seagulls to face the wrath of the media, and the hysteria is reliably free of self-reflection. Look, I’ve had food whipped out of my hand by a seagull many times. I know it’s annoying and can even be terrifying. But that distinctive call of the seagull that once charmed us should now be heard more as a warning sign. It’s up to us whether we listen or not.
Great football writers are different
Brian Glanville, who died this week at the age of 93, was a unique voice in the crowded and often hysterical field of football writing and a uniquely important one. His historical reach was unparalleled. He published his first book (a ghosted autobiography of Arenal striker Cliff Bastin) at the age of 16 and attended 13 World Cups, starting with the 1958 tournament in Sweden.
His lean, elegant, novelistic style, informed by his parallel career as a fiction writer, could be found nowhere else in the UK. As Patrick Barclay put it, ‘most football writers fall into two categories: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville and those who should have been’.
Glanville was simply different. For one thing, he was, to not put too fine a point on it, a ‘toff’. In an industry dominated by tough, plain-speaking and working-class journalists, that stuck out like a top hat at a miner’s gala.
This was important for me, as a rather serious and sensitive (opera loving!) middle class teenager in the gritty urban environment of the west of Scotland. Football culture, dominated by Celtic and Rangers, tended to be on the rough side and it was tempting to head to the genteel environs of the cricket or rugby club. Perhaps football wasn’t for the likes of me?
Glanville gave me the confidence that it absolutely was. Football was for everyone. And not only could we go, we could go with our heads held high. Glanville saw no need to disguise his old Carthusian background, literary leanings or broad cultural knowledge. He just loved the game so he went along, and wrote about it, in his own graceful, witty and opinionated way.
He wasn’t a snob. In fact, he may have been the victim of snobbery. Glanville almost never appeared on TV due, I strongly suspect, to a weird reverse class prejudice. He just didn’t fit the profile. I saw him appear just once, on a Scottish sports panel discussion hosted by Archie McPherson. A froideur pervaded the set every time he spoke in that languorous plummy drawl. The host and other panellists seemed to regard him as if he had come from another planet.
Yet, whereas other gifted sport writers like McIlvanny, Arlott and Cardus were reluctant to work for tabloids, Glanville happily wrote for the Sunday Times and the People, though in the latter he acknowledged that ‘literary illusions were not encouraged’.
He appreciated good writing wherever it was to be found. He admired fanzines, including, I was ego-strokingly thrilled to discover, Scotland’s The Absolute Game (‘refreshingly abrasive’ he called it) where I had my very first published piece. And this despite a weekly column (‘Bruno Glanvilla’) that lampooned him mercilessly.
He clearly adored language. In an essay for Prospect magazine, Glanville expressed a desire for an idiom that could be read ‘by intellectuals without shame and by the working man without labour’. He said no one in the UK had cracked this tough nut, but Glanville surely came closest. Influenced by such omnivorous polymaths as Runyon and Lardner, he utterly rejected the false dichotomy of sports and ‘serious’ writing.
He was also searingly honest and unafraid to take unfashionable positions
Having lived in Italy and written for Corriere dello Sport for many years, he recognised this as a particularly British conceit. Of Italy he wrote ‘readers are treated as literate, while the English tabloids have seldom ceased to treat their readers as morons’. He would roll his eyes at the fuss made over Nick Hornby’s supposedly ground-breaking ‘serious’ football book Fever Pitch. He slipped a quote by Keats into a match report once.
Certain of his phrases have stayed with me – I’ve quoted his ‘bloated incubus’ to describe the FIFA’s ever expanding World Cup several times. I also loved his description of Geoff Hurst’s ‘it’s all over now’ strike in the 120th minute of the 1966 World Cup final with Germany as a ‘terrible’ (in the true sense of the word) ’left-footer’. There are many, many more.
He was also searingly honest and unafraid to take unfashionable positions. He spent most of his career railing against the iniquities of FIFA president’s Havelange and Blatter, and the vacillations and compromises of the perfidious FA. He wasn’t much impressed with women’s football, and had little time for David Beckham, lamenting the day he overtook Bobby Moore’s record of England caps for an outfield player.
This honesty cost him, though. For all his love of continental football writing, he described as ‘craven’ the behaviour of his hero the Italian journalist Gianni Brera – ‘a whole man whose subject happens to be sport’ – when he refused to involve himself in the Lobo-Solti bribery scandal that Glanville had covered extensively for the Sunday Times. The two men exchanged ‘bitter words’ and never reconciled. He hated cheats and cowards.
It may even have prematurely ended his career. Glanville stopped writing some years ago, and appears to have simply withdrawn from the arena. Frailty perhaps, or was there no longer a place for his particular directness? It’s certainly hard to think of a warm welcome being offered in a Premier League press conference for a man who described the division (repeatedly) as the ‘greed is good league’.
And yet, who could seriously deny this important and perfectly expressed (very Glanville) truth?
The cheapening of the Chelsea Flower Show
‘I have died and gone to heaven,’ the gentle-faced, fortysomething American beside me murmured into her phone. I turned and stared. Too late I remembered the instructions repeated in childhood not to stand with one’s mouth open. But I couldn’t help myself. In the glorious sun at Chelsea Flower Show, I – unlike my neighbour – felt like I had died and gone to hell.
Tuesday morning at Chelsea Flower Show is among life’s rare treats. At least, it used to be. The whoosh of excitement crossing Royal Hospital Road, where policemen marshalled crowds; the magnetic pull towards the show gardens, where the eye was dazzled by loveliness; inside the Great Pavilion, a visual assault like medieval millefleur tapestries in which every inch of dark meadow is studded with petals and leaves and bursting buds. The scent was distinctive, too: grass underfoot and showy roses. Even beyond the dawn of the phone age, older women continued to wield notebooks. Their husbands all seemed to merge, alike in their straw hats of apparently uncontrived wonkiness.
In the air was more than the smell of flowers. Sometimes, looking around, it was like watching hounds first detect a scent, noses just beginning to twitch, as these knowledgeable men and women sallied forth on Chelsea’s first day, reserved for members of the Royal Horticultural Society. Every year was much the same, delivering its treats, the same gardeners’ adrenaline rush, the same deep satisfaction at witnessing something of supreme quality undertaken seemingly for the sheer love of it.
Until Tuesday 20 May 2025 when, for me, the Flower Show castles in the air I had built over three decades of visits came crashing down. Very occasionally life delivers a disappointment so overwhelming it leaves you both defeated and staggering. For me, Tuesday was one of those moments.
A brief backtrack. As a child I had a recurring dream that I was a gardener in Louis XIV’s new gardens at Versailles. The first plant I bought myself for the garden plot my parents gave me when I was seven or eight was the small, clump-forming alpine perennial oxalis adenophylla, whose pink-flushed, trumpet-shaped flowers still seem to me lovely against its glaucous little leaves that look like decorations on old-fashioned bathing caps. In my twenties, I wrote a gardening page for House & Garden and later a biography of gardening doyenne Vita Sackville-West. I lost my wedding ring in the herbaceous border beyond my study windows, somewhere, I suspect, below a tangle of campanula lactiflora – ‘Loddon Anna’ – that I haven’t the heart to lift. Does this put you in the picture? For 30 years I’ve loved Chelsea. On Tuesday morning, not a bit of me anticipated anything but delight.
The new Chelsea is like the nastiest possible day at Bicester Village
Once upon a time, Chelsea was described as resembling a vicarage tea party. That description hasn’t quite rung true for decades. But what changed this year (or had I simply failed to notice it before, because previous year’s show gardens were less dreary?) is that the new Chelsea is like the nastiest possible day at Bicester Village. The scent in the air is not roses but acquisitiveness.
In the Great Pavilion, I could have bought the bronze-leafed rodgersia I’ve meant to plant for several seasons or, if I didn’t find them so unappealing, potted calla lilies in a range of more or less synthetic-looking colours. But outside the Pavilion was where the action really was. And what was on offer there? Secateurs and dibbers? Possibly. But if so they were lost among the stalls selling handbags and bespoke mirrors and ‘long-lasting premium doormats’ and cashmere knitwear and quilted bedcovers (no, these weren’t variants on cloches, they were for bedrooms not borders) and rocking horses and pepper mills in the shape of chess pieces. Be still, my twitching spade hand. There was even something for those who decided not to blow the budget on a glasshouse but buy a pair of earrings instead: a Boodles concession. Hurrah! At last, Chelsea Flower Show has caught up with the times. On your next visit, sod the garden and think about your own appearance instead. You won’t be alone. Many of my fellow visitors appeared to be in Chelsea Flower Show fancy dress – floral-themed I grant you – with peculiar hats that prevented them from seeing the ugliness around them.
I looked again at the RHS website and the Chelsea ticket page, curious to see how the RHS now pitches the world’s greatest flower show to punters. Chelsea, it tells us, ‘is filled with amazing garden designs, gorgeous flower displays and exclusive shopping’. Horticultural excellence, then, is no longer enough or even the point.
I telephoned a friend, a prominent and highly respected garden designer. I asked her: am I mad? Have I missed the point? Am I being stuffy? ‘I’ve stopped going to Chelsea,’ she told me.
Katharine Birbalsingh is right about our worship of victimhood
One of the main accusations levelled at the trans movement is that the tidal wave of youngsters claiming to be gender dysphoric in recent years is a form of social contagion, especially among rich, progressive households.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the former government social mobility tsar and head of Michaela Community School in northwest London, seems to agree that it can be understood as a social phenomenon. And she has her own particular theory. ‘Our society is such that victimhood is admired’, she told the Standard yesterday, and one reason a disproportionate number of those drawn to the trans movement are ‘white and privileged’ is that it offers them ‘a victimhood narrative to embrace’, one denied them on account of their wealth and skin colour.
There can be little doubt that victimhood has an inherent appeal today
There can be little doubt that victimhood has an inherent appeal today. A victim culture has long been observed in western society, one which respects and admires those who deem themselves downtrodden, oppressed and wronged, and a society which accords higher moral worth and value to the opinions of the victim. Both today’s trans and anti-racism movement are imbued with a victimhood narrative. The entire nexus of wokery is underpinned by grievance. And that was its chief attraction from the outset.
A decade ago, woke was visited upon a society that had already sanctified victimhood. This shift was made clear in the 1990s, a decade which began with a new therapeutic sensibility and ended with the post-Diana consensus that we should unload all our sorrows in public. The 1990s also saw that foretaste of wokery, ‘Political Correctness’, with its fixation with righting historical wrongs imposed on women and people of colour, an obsession already starting to grate with conservatives.
In that decade we first witnessed how victimhood, with its necessary association with the underprivileged and oppressed, came to be appropriated. Sinn Fein’s reinvention of itself as the party of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland was partly realised by consciously aligning itself with the ANC and its universally-approved crusade. In entertainment Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic creation ‘Ali G’ reflected a real-life demographic: the white or Asian child who wishes to be black because that identity confers the status of a rebel at odds with an oppressive system.
A genuinely unjust system in the postwar era gave birth to the civil rights movement in the United States and women’s liberation worldwide. Both sought to redress injustice and remove impediments for certain sections of society. But the sense of righteousness that fuelled those revolutions in the Sixties soon descended into self-righteousness and self-pity in the narcissistic and disappointed decade that followed. Many foresaw the consequences of a shift from breaking down the barriers of discrimination to morbidly obsessing about them. As Michael Wharton, under the well-known Fleet Street byline ‘Peter Simple’, wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1972, about the mania for ‘racial discrimination’ and ‘sexual discrimination’: ‘What would our society be like if this process reached its ultimate though fortunately unattainable conclusion, in which every single person saw himself as a victim of discrimination by some other person?’
The postwar settlement’s collectivist spirit also sowed the seeds for our victim culture. It nurtured the widespread belief that the lowly plight of the subject or citizen was not automatically his or her fault, but rather that of ‘society’ or ‘the system’. The result was a passive mindset. Hyper-liberalism can be understood as the end of the long decline in the belief in individual agency, with a resultant descent into introspection, envy and resentment.
The evidence of victimhood’s saturation and ultimate triumph today can be observed in the man who purports to be the arch-enemy of woke: Donald Trump. This narcissist portrays himself as a victim, or the spokesman for victims, to such an extent that he now implausibly speaks of white South Africans as victims of ‘genocide’.
If Donald Trump can be seduced by victimhood, with all the social and political advantages it confers, then there’s no reason why teenagers shouldn’t also want to jump on the bandwagon.
Putin orders new offensive
‘You want a ceasefire? I want your death,’ said Russia’s chief propagandist Vladimir Soloviev during prime time television, the camera zooming in on his face. His message was aimed at both Ukrainians and Europeans urging the Kremlin to stop the war. Soloviev, alongside a chorus of other Kremlin loyalists and military experts, has lately been gloating about how Vladimir Putin weathered western pressure and secured Donald Trump on his side. There will be no peace, they say, until Ukraine capitulates to Russian demands.
Putin, as if to prove the point, announced yesterday that he had ordered the military to begin creating a ‘security buffer zone’ along the Ukrainian border – which is not quite the peace process Trump has been calling for. The zone would stretch along Russia’s Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, meaning Putin’s troops would have to break into Ukraine from the north, seizing parts of the Kyiv, Sumy and Kharkiv regions. The border, already penetrated by constant raids from both sides, will soon become the front line of a fresh invasion as Putin seeks to seize more Ukrainian land. ‘Our armed forces are currently solving this problem,’ he said after returning from Russia’s Kursk region, recently liberated from Ukrainians.
The Russian President is longing for a breakthrough on the battlefield, but his troops are bogged down in the Donetsk region, unable to deliver a single win to make Kyiv more obedient during negotiations. He’s used this strategy before. The infamous first Minsk deal was signed after Ukraine suffered a catastrophic defeat at Ilovaisk in August 2014, where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were slaughtered while retreating through a so-called humanitarian corridor arranged by Putin.
This time, the Russian President needs something just as big and traumatic for Ukrainians to live through. But since the fall of Avdiivka in February last year, Russian forces haven’t managed to capture a single major city. Yesterday, Putin promoted Colonel General Andrey Mordvichev, who was awarded the Hero of Russia for the occupation of Avdiivka, to Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Ground Forces. His job now will be to replicate that success elsewhere, where Ukraine’s defences haven’t been heavily sealed with mine fields, trenches and drones.
Ukraine braces for the looming attack. Nearly 56,000 people have been evacuated from the Sumy region, while in Kharkiv more than a hundred residents are fleeing daily. Ukrainian soldiers warn of Russian forces massing near the border, with small sabotage units probing for weak spots. Ukraine’s overstretched and exhausted army will struggle to defend such a wide front. Kyiv’s best hope of averting a disaster is to secure a ceasefire, something Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing for in recent months.
Ukrainians who once dared to hope for peace now see more war as inevitable
But with Trump walking away from the talks, urging Russia and Ukraine to negotiate directly without mediators, and his refusal to impose new sanctions on Moscow, a Russian offensive looks all but inevitable. The Kremlin keeps inventing one excuse after another for the ceasefire delay, with the latest being that Zelensky and his government supposedly lack the legitimacy to sign a peace deal. This week, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, called for elections in Ukraine before the agreement is signed – otherwise, Moscow reserves the right to refuse to recognise its outcome. And break it, too.
Lavrov also dismissed the Vatican as a venue for the next round of talks, calling it ‘not exactly elegant’. He argued that hosting a meeting between representatives of two Orthodox countries at a Catholic venue would be ‘uncomfortable’ for the Vatican itself, despite Pope Leo XIV’s offer to host and Trump publicly supporting the idea. Moscow also opposes having any US or European representatives at the table. That leaves Putin’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, free to threaten the Ukrainian side with more war and deaths unless they concede to absurd terms: withdrawal from four regions that Russia hasn’t fully captured, shrinking Ukraine’s one-million-strong army to 50,000 soldiers, and even giving Moscow a veto over future western arms shipments to Ukraine.
Ukrainians who once dared to hope for peace now see more war as inevitable, unless Ukraine’s allies abandon their recent empty sanctions threats and come up with real ones to force Russia to accept a ceasefire. Unless that happens – and US Senator Lindsey Graham stops bragging about the largest US sanctions package against Russia and finally pushes it through the Senate – thousands more will die soon.
Britain is enjoying another Brexit dividend
Has there ever been a day when Brexit seemed such a good idea? The story of Brexit began to change on ‘Liberation Day’ on 2 April when Donald Trump announced a 10 per cent tariff on imports from the UK and a 20 per cent tariff on those from the EU. No longer was it possible for anyone to argue there were no tangible benefits from leaving the EU: here was one of them staring us in the face. Following that, all proposed tariffs were suspended for 90 days to allow negotiations. Since then, though, the story has changed dramatically – and in Britain’s favour. Thanks to the trade deal announced by Trump and Keir Starmer a fortnight ago, some tariffs on UK imports will be dropped altogether. Now comes the bombshell that Trump is proposing that EU imports be subject to a whacking 50 per cent tariff from early June.
The President’s threats may never materialise, of course. We know his method by now. The 50 per cent tariff is a negotiating gambit. He hopes that it will jolt the EU into ceding more ground than it evidently has done already. In a post on Truth Social, he describes the EU ‘being very difficult to deal with’. It is very likely that there will be some movement before the deadline. In the meantime, however, Britain looks to be in a dream position. It sits metaphorically mid-Atlantic, with trade deals with both the EU and the US. There is now a strong incentive for companies which export to both the US and the EU to set up shop in Britain – assuming they are not dissuaded by the EU regulations which will now apply here, thanks to Starmer’s ‘reset’ in relations with the EU.
Question is, however, how does the EU now react to Britain’s advantage? Just as we know how Trump operates, we know how the EU works, too. It is hard to imagine that it will sit by and tolerate Britain enjoying a privileged position of being able to trade relatively freely with both the US and itself. Even now, its negotiators will be dreaming up ways to compromise Britain’s advantage. They will be working out ways to punish businesses which seek to move operations to Britain. They will be exploring ways in which Britain’s reset can be used against us. Starmer’s concession to allow the European Court of Justice the role of arbitrator in trade disputes between the EU and the UK is no doubt going to help it.
It is hard to award Keir Starmer too much credit for putting Britain in its new-found privileged position – it seems a little accidental how it has happened, although the Prime Minister perhaps does deserve praise for not falling for Trump’s verbal bait. Other potential Labour leaders would no doubt have skewered any chance of doing a trade deal with the US. Nor is it certain that the government will take full advantage of the situation; simultaneously it seems determined to drive investment away through excessive taxes and employment law. Moreover, there is still a chance – though a diminishing one – that the EU will succeed in negotiating an 11th hour deal which stops the punitive 50 per cent tariffs ever coming into effect. But for the moment there will be many UK businesses who, possibly for the first time, are grateful to be outside the EU.
Kim Jong Un is mad about a boat
Kim Jong Un is not a happy man. Only a month after he unveiled North Korea’s first 5,000-ton destroyer, another similar warship was seriously damaged as it was launched yesterday.
North Korean state media issued an unusually lengthy report following the destroyer’s failed launch, mentioning how the ship’s hull had been damaged, the ‘launch slide of the stern detached’, and damage to the warship’s bottom had ‘destroyed the [vessel’s] balance’. The exact causes of the accident remain unknown, but the warship would have required expertise to launch successfully.
Some of the engineers and scientists involved in the crash will – at the bare minimum – be out of work soon
In his response, Kim Jong Un lambasted the incident as a ‘criminal act caused by absolute carelessness [and] irresponsibility’ of ‘relevant officials’, whom he vowed to hold accountable for their crimes. Kim then set a deadline of June for the warship to be repaired. Some of the engineers and scientists involved, whether from the North Korean Munitions Industry Department or the Mechanical Institute of the State Academy of Sciences, will – at the bare minimum – be out of work soon.
The entire incident is embarrassing for Kim Jong Un, who personally witnessed the failed launch. While North Korea’s naval forces outnumber South Korea’s, Pyongyang’s fleet is largely outdated and less technologically advanced. The gap between the two has widened since the North sunk a South Korean corvette, ROKS Cheonan, in 2010, and Seoul upgraded its fleet in response.
On the domestic front, this is by no means the first time that North Korea has admitted that its projects, military or otherwise, have gone awry. In January 2021, during the state’s Covid lockdown, Kim Jong Un announced that his five-year economic plan had failed ‘in almost every sector’. In May 2023, state media acknowledged a botched attempt to place a military reconnaissance satellite into orbit. And in May 2024, hours after Pyongyang had notified Seoul and Tokyo of its intention to place another satellite into orbit, state media admitted that the newly-developed rocket engine carrying the satellite had exploded mid-flight.
Such openness towards failure may seem unusual for a regime premised around lying and deception. But admitting mistakes is part of Kim Jong Un’s strategy to portray North Korea as a ‘normal’ state to domestic audiences and to highlight the importance for North Koreans to act in line with the regime’s diktats or else face the consequences. Such rare moments of honesty also signals to international audiences that North Korea will not be deterred by setbacks.
And if you think these admissions will stop the North Korean regime from continuing to modernise its military, then think again. Pyongyang is set on responding to the joint military exercises conducted by Washington and Seoul, such as those which took place earlier this month. North Korea has long derided these exercises as ‘war games’.
For Kim Jong Un, strengthening the country’s navy is not solely about projecting power against North Korea’s ‘primary foe’ of South Korea or its ‘hostile’ enemy of the United States. Pyongyang’s desire to develop its navy is also inextricably tied with the hermit kingdom’s concern with status, domestically and internationally. It is not surprising that Kim chastised officials responsible for building the now-damaged destroyer for having harmed the country’s ‘dignity and self-respect’. After all, a strong navy is essential for any great power, irrespective of its actual capabilities. Earlier this year, Kim Jong Un said that bolstering North Korea’s naval forces was a ‘sacred cause’ and an ‘important starting point of the journey towards building an advanced maritime power’.
The fact that the Supreme Leader stated how the destroyer’s restoration is ‘not merely a practical issue but a political issue’ underscores how Pyongyang is determined to improve the sophistication of its military. At the end of April this year, a beaming Kim Jong Un, accompanied by his increasingly-visible daughter Kim Ju-ae, oversaw the launch of a new 5,000-ton guided-missile destroyer, the Choe Hyon. State media claimed the warship will enter operation in 2026, and be equipped with the ‘most powerful weapons’, which likely include short-range tactical nuclear missiles. Strengthening the country’s naval capabilities therefore forms a key part of Kim’s ultimate goal, namely, international recognition of North Korea as a de facto nuclear state.
Whilst admitting failure is embarrassing for the Kim regime, we should not be surprised if similar instances arise in the future. Despite this week’s mishap, Pyongyang will not change its military modernisation strategy. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – and it is about time that the West took the threat of a nuclear North Korea more seriously.
The EU could pay a high price for not settling with Trump
The deals have been settled. The exceptions have been made. And supply chains have started to return to normal, while the stock market has recovered its losses. We may have thought the ‘tariff wars’ were over. But President Trump has today resumed hostilities, threatening a fresh round of levies on the European Union. It seems the bloc is about to pay a very high price for not settling with Trump earlier.
The EU is paying the price for failing to get a deal across the line while it still could
The President was typically blunt. On his social media channel, he laid into the EU’s obstinacy over trade. ‘The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with,’ he thundered. The bloc’s, ‘powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable.’ From the start of June, EU goods sold in the US will face levies of 50 per cent.
European stocks plunged on the news, with Germany’s DAX falling by 2.2 per cent and France’s CAC-40 by 2.6 per cent. There is no surprise about that. The EU has a trade surplus with the US of €198 billion a year and many of the continent’s major exporters will now face big barriers exporting to their largest single market. It was one thing when the whole world faced American tariffs. But the situation has changed. The UK has negotiated a trade deal, so British goods will be down to just 10 per cent. China has reached an agreement with the US that brings tariffs down to 30 per cent – which should be manageable given how competitive it is on costs. Canada and Mexico are largely exempt, and Japan is expected to wrap up a deal very soon. The EU will be the only major bloc facing major tariffs in the American market.
The EU is paying the price for failing to get a deal across the line while it still could. Over the last few days, it offered a few minor concessions on imports of lobster from Maine, but that was about it. It refused to budge on agriculture, or cars, and even at the end of April it was still threatening Apple and Meta with huge fines as if everything was carrying on as normal. It complacently assumed it was in the clear and that President Trump was all bluster.
That has proved a fatal miscalculation. The American market will be open to goods from the UK, China, Canada, and probably soon Japan as well. But EU companies will face punitive levies. A Range Rover will face 10 per cent tariffs, but a BMW 50 per cent. Scottish or Canadian whisky will face modest levies, but cognac will be very highly taxed. And Ireland’s pharmaceutical industry, selling billions of dollars of medicines into the US market from offshore manufacturing hubs, could be wiped out. And the EU will only have itself to blame.
Israel should not listen to Keir Starmer
Benjamin Netanyahu should not be Prime Minister of Israel. It is a stain on Israel’s political system that after the massacre of 7 October, the man whose entire selling point to voters was that he alone could keep Israel secure has been able to remain in power through a deal with extremist Israeli politicians.
But none of that changes the fact that Netanyahu’s response to this week’s appalling statement by the leaders of France, Canada and the UK was entirely correct.
To recap: earlier this week: Emmanuel Macron, Mark Carney and Keir Starmer issued a demand to Israel: do what we say or face ‘concrete actions…we will not hesitate to take further action, including targeted sanctions.’ Halt the ‘egregious’ expansion of military operations in Gaza, they ordered, or be treated as the villain of the piece.
No wonder Hamas then thanked them, because (as I wrote here earlier this week) the three supposed allies of Israel were doing Hamas’s bidding. As Hamas put it: ‘The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) welcomes the joint statement issued by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. Hamas considers this stance an important step in the right direction…’
In response, last night Netanyahu let rip.
By issuing their demand – replete with a threat of sanctions against Israel, against Israel, not Hamas – these three leaders effectively said they want Hamas to remain in power. They want Israel to stand down and accept that Hamas’s army of mass murderers will survive, rebuild and repeat the 7 October massacre again and again and again because that’s what Hamas has vowed to do. I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity and you’re on the wrong side of history.
Netanyahu may be a deeply flawed prime minister but every word of his response is correct. The démarche from the three leaders is a straightforward demand that Israel allow Hamas to regroup, with nothing in return for Israel. Stop fighting, Israel: wave the white flag.
It wasn’t Netanyahu who picked this fight. It was Starmer, Macron and Carney who went on the offensive, threatening sanctions on Israel (with the UK also suspending trade talks). When Israel is treated as some sort of colonial outpost by three western leaders and is ordered to wave the white flag to terrorists, any leader would respond as Netanyahu did.
Starmer has stood and watched as Jew hate has become normalised
While Starmer, Macron and Carney called for Hamas to release the hostages, they targeted none of their ire at Qatar. Qatar has such powerful links to Hamas that last week it was able to instruct the terrorist organisation to release Israeli-American hostage Eden Alexander immediately (as part of a side deal to coincide with President Trump’s trip to the Middle East) and he was then released within hours.
All of which begs a question: why is Starmer doing this? I have no idea, nor do I care, what he actually thinks. What matters is that he is another example of how politicians without principles are the most dangerous of all. Starmer issued a statement yesterday after the murder of two Israeli Embassy staff in Washington, telling us that ‘as always, I stand in solidarity with the Jewish community’, later adding that “anti-Semitism is pure hatred and we must confront it wherever it emerges’. Fine words, but pure drivel.
Starmer has stood and watched as Jew hate has become normalised on the streets of Britain, with support for intifada and ‘resistance’ trumpeted alongside praise for Hamas and Hezbollah on the regular hate marches. At a march in Manchester just days after 7 October, for example, an enormous banner reading ‘Manchester supports Palestinian resistance’ was not merely permitted, it was the centrepiece – with police standing alongside to ensure those holding it could march freely.
Politics is about numbers, and for Starmer and his party there is one set of numbers which count above all in this context. There are 37 constituencies with a Muslim population over 20 per cent, and in a further 73 seats the Muslim population is between 10 and 20 per cent. At last year’s election, Labour’s vote fell by over 14 per cent from 2019 in those constituencies where the Muslim population was above 15 per cent. The votes went to the so-called ‘Gaza independents’, with wins in Leicester South, Blackburn, Birmingham Perry Barr and Dewsbury and Batley. But it is not just those four victories that concern Labour. Their overall support shows that candidates running on their appeal to Muslims can secure enough votes in such seats to pose a real threat to Labour. Health Secretary Wes Streeting only held on in Ilford North by 528 votes, for example, from British-Palestinian independent candidate Leanne Mohamad; in Bethnal Green Rushanara Ali clung on narrowly; and in Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips only just scraped home by 693 votes.
This is what drives Starmer’s inaction against open anti-Semitism in Britain, and it is why he has become increasingly publicly hostile to Israel. Expediency is the driving force – and if that means siding with Hamas over Israel, so be it.
Labour MP backs Lowe’s calls to free Lucy Connolly
The case of Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Tory councillor who was jailed over an offensive tweet, has sparked outrage across the country – and now even a Labour MP is calling for her release. Mary Glindon, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend, has put her name to an early day motion tabled by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe which calls for a review of Connolly’s sentence to ‘ensure that limited prison space is prioritised for dangerous and violent offenders’ in a move that breaks ranks with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. How very curious…
Remarking on her support for Lowe’s motion, Glindon said:
I simply signed the EDM because I was very upset that Lucy had lost her appeal, and that her young daughter would be without her mother for a longer period. In my opinion, Lucy doesn’t pose a threat to the public. She seems to be paying a heavy price for what she did.
Lucy’s impetuous tweet was not only unthinkable but vile in content… Lucy has experienced the pain of losing a child and could be forgiven for a sudden, otherwise unthinkable reaction – one she quickly corrected. The judge has been unduly harsh. I can’t imagine how this will impact her young daughter. My heart bleeds for her.
Glindon’s support comes after Connolly’s appeal against her sentence was quashed by a judge this week. The wife of Northampton councillor Ray Connolly had taken to Twitter during the riots of last summer to fume: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’ The tweet was reported and Connolly was sentenced to 31 months behind bars. This week Starmer defended the punishment – telling Lowe in the Commons that: ‘Sentencing is a matter for our courts, and I celebrate the fact that we have independent courts in this country… I will always support the action taken by our police and courts to keep our streets and people safe.’
Lowe’s motion now has six signatories, including Conservative MPs Sir Gavin Williamson and Andrew Rosindell. In a surprise move, the first politician to support the EDM was ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – before he promptly withdrew his name from the list. As outrage continues to gather online over Connolly’s incarceration, will more MPs join forces with the former Reform man? Watch this space…
Netanyahu accuses Starmer of siding with Hamas
To Netanyahu, who has taken aim at Prime Minister Keir Starmer after the deaths of a young Jewish couple in Washington DC on Thursday. 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez was charged with murder yesterday evening after allegedly killing Israeli embassy staff Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim who planned to get engaged next week in Jerusalem. In a clip addressing the attack, Netanyahu claimed that British, French and Canadian leaders had ‘effectively said they want Hamas to remain in power’. He added about the leaders that they want Israel to ‘stand down and accept that Hamas’s army of mass murderers will survive’.
The remarks by Israel’s prime minister come after the young couple were attacked outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, where they were attending a reception for young Jewish diplomats which centred around discussing ways to get humanitarian aid into Gaza. Rodriguez, a left-wing activist, is accused of the murder of foreign officials, causing the death of a person using a firearm and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence – and if found guilty, could face the death penalty. Two American women thought to be employed by the Israeli embassy were also targeted in the shooting.
In a statement, Netanyahu remarked: ‘We are witnessing the terrible price of antisemitism and the wild incitement against the state of Israel. Blood libels against Israel are paid in blood — and they must be fought relentlessly.’ But pushing back against his comments about Starmer is armed forces minister Luke Pollard, who insisted the murders were a ‘terrible example of the antisemitic hate that, sadly, we are seeing rise in the world’ and added:
I don’t recognise what Prime Minister Netanyahu has said about that awful event in the United States. We condemn the killing of diplomats thoroughly. We want to see a proper investigation – as we would do in all things – to secure justice for those people who have been murdered in the States. But we also, at the same time, should not remove ourselves from the need to secure a lasting peace in Gaza. A lasting peace is good for Israel.
Meanwhile President Donald Trump has hit out at the attacks, writing on his social media platform Truth Social: ‘These horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW! Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA. Condolences to the families of the victims. So sad that such things as this can happen!’ The US president is thought to be getting increasingly irritated, however, by the continuation of the war in Gaza, with the White House calling on Netanyahu to ‘wrap up’ the war as quickly as he can. Watch this space…
What Trump gets wrong about South Africa’s white ‘genocide’
There’s a joke in South Africa that it’s so easy to claim asylum here, even the Swiss could do so. It’s easy to believe. At our local shopping centre in Johannesburg, the security guards hail from various safe African countries – Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi. All are on refugee permits that are renewed every few months, often with a bribe.
If there’s murderous intent among South Africa’s poorest, it’s not directed at white people
There are countless illegal migrants and refugees from as far away as Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ironic then that president Cyril Ramaphosa is making such a fuss about the 49 Afrikaners who have been granted asylum in the United States.
During his visit to the White House this week, Ramaphosa was ambushed by US president Donald Trump, who raised the plight of white farmers in South Africa. It made Ramaphosa squirm, but Trump is only partly right about the situation on the ground. And if he thinks a genocide is underway, he is wrong.
Whites account for 7.3 per cent of the population and less than two per cent of murder victims. This is not, of course, a gentle country. South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. There have been horrific murders on white-owned farms; victims have been raped and tortured before being killed. But it’s a mistake to think these people were murdered due to the colour of their skin. The majority of those who meet a sticky end are black.
Violent crime is not, of course, much of a concern for Ramaphosa and his ministers who live in luxury, surrounded by guards. When they venture out, they travel in motorcades, blue lights flashing and police cars front and back. Meanwhile, they insist that the rest of us – including farmers, who live in rural isolation, far from help – have nothing to fear. Easy for them to say.
So did the 49 farmers who left for a new life in America have reason to be scared? Perhaps.
People have their own limits on what danger they are willing to live with. Some can endure uncertainty; others see danger all around.
But whatever motivated these folk to leave, Trump is wrong if he thinks all white farmers share their view. He is also wrong if he thinks a rural white genocide is underway. And this isn’t the only misapprehension.
When I come to Britain, I am invariably asked whether South Africa’s crippling unemployment — notably among the black youth — could be solved by nationalising farms and splitting them into five or 10-acre plots where youngsters could at least grow food. My response: ‘Why don’t you carve up Warwickshire so the jobless of London can do the same?’.
The black population is mostly young, urban, literate and hungry for work. Education is compulsory, kids know Pythagoras and Shakespeare and many families have moved to town in less than a generation and grown up on series like Friends and Big Bang Theory. In a country with little in the way of social support or welfare, everyone finds something to do, but herding goats is not on the list.
For a journalist, there’s no better way to check the political temperature than by visiting a black beer hall in one of the townships. I do it frequently, hearing concerns of the masses who live crowded in shacks, largely out of work, the streets unpaved and the air scented by litter and pit latrines.
Whereas in the suburbs just a few miles from here, my home — with lawns and a swimming pool — is behind a seven-foot wall topped with a 60,000-volt electric fence, crime is part of daily life in the townships. There are few streetlights and muggers and pickpockets lurk in the dark. When a thief is caught, justice is dished out instantly: with sticks and rocks.
Yet in these beer halls where I stand out as the only white person, I have never faced a harsh word, or felt threatened. The crowd is courteous and welcoming; they tell me of their struggles to pay rent, or send money home to a rural grandmother and how distraught they feel when a son or daughter must go to school with broken shoes. If there’s murderous intent among South Africa’s poorest, it’s not directed at white people. But politicians don’t come here for a drink.
For all the awkwardness of a country that’s really a dozen nations hemmed in by a border created by the British, along with a shocking murder rate and streets not safe to walk by night, South Africa is a tolerant land cursed by misunderstanding, both abroad and at home. The local press that veers to the left is obsessed with ‘femicide’. Believe their reports and you’d think that women face death every time they walk down the street, whereas the majority of murder victims are male. The press also pays disproportionate attention when a white rather than a black person is killed; this may explain why the plight of farmers gets such publicity.
The truth is that most South Africans enjoy living here. Good luck to those who have opted for a new life in America. But don’t expect their departure to mark the start of a mass migration of white farmers across the Atlantic. Given how many migrants come to South Africa, there are clearly worse places to live.
How Starmer was stitched up over the Chagos islands
Yesterday, following a last-minute flurry of lawfare, the government published the text of its Chagos agreement with Mauritius. Future history books may well cite it as the perfect example of Britain ceasing to be a country that can be taken seriously.
This lousy deal essentially amounts to a massive gift from British taxpayers to the Mauritian government, in exchange for being allowed to give up territory
The agreement transfers to Mauritius the entire Chagos archipelago, including the Diego Garcia airbase, subject to a 99-year leaseback of the latter. The small print is worth noting. Mauritians and Mauritian companies are to have preference in employment on the base; it is to be operated in accordance with Mauritian environmental law; and the UK is to inform Mauritius of any warlike activity conducted from it. And a very large annual sum is to be paid to Mauritius for this privilege. This probably amounts in total to some £30 billion (the figure of £3.4 billion suggested by Keir Starmer is something of an accountant’s sleight-of-hand known as ‘net present value’).
While the retention of Diego Garcia is clearly a relief, as it is strategically vital, a number of features of the deal are worrying. The transfer of base sovereignty to Mauritius, a country moving uncomfortably close to Xi Jinping’s China, is concerning in itself. The duty to tell the Mauritian government of any attack on another state conducted from Diego Garcia is a big intelligence gift to Beijing. So too the duty to use Mauritian personnel as far as possible on the base: this can only make its security porous, again to the advantage of those who do not wish us well. And the obligation to observe Mauritian environmental laws could well provide opportunities for devilment.
This lousy deal essentially amounts to a massive gift from British taxpayers to the Mauritian government, in exchange for being allowed to give up territory. Why sign it? The answer is legalism. Before Mauritian independence, the islands, which had to be controlled from somewhere, were administered from Port Louis. Six years ago the International Court of Justice, fuelled by an anti-western resolution from the UN General Assembly, gave an advisory opinion that Britain had acted unlawfully in excluding Chagos when giving Mauritius independence because this amounted to the heinous sin of dismembering an entity before decolonising it.
The government took this at face value, fearful that although the advisory opinion itself was not binding it might face a legal claim from Mauritius. It then admitted that it had no choice but to concede Mauritius’s right and then negotiate over Diego Garcia. From then on Mauritius held all the cards: no doubt quietly egged on by countries such as China, it played them all. Desperate for a deal, and with the US breathing down his neck, Starmer had no choice but to cave.
Yet this called for a much more nuanced approach. Domestically you might well reason that you simply do as the High Court says. But in international relations things are different. The International Court itself does not always appear entirely impartial. In practice countries have a good deal more wiggle-room with its judgments, especially if the other side’s moral position is itself a bit dodgy. And looked at other than legalistically, Mauritius’s claim to a bunch of islands 1,300 miles away across an empty ocean (Chagos is actually a bit closer to the Seychelles) is unimpressive. There’s no natural connection and little cultural commonality; and the Chagossians have little affinity with Mauritius.
Had the UK not handed the Mauritian government the whip hand, who’s to say there couldn’t have been a better solution? There might have been all sorts of possibilities: an offer, for example, of most of Chagos to Mauritius, with Diego Garcia being retained as a sovereign base area, as in Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus. Or some other deal that would have left Port Louis with little reason not to accept.
Unfortunately this does not fit the mindset of this government. Starmer is a lawyer. His Attorney-General is a legalist who seems to take a sea-green incorruptible view that even if other countries can be flexible in their view of international law (which at bottom is only a matter of state practice), our administration must follow the jurisprudence of international courts to the letter, even if it is entirely contrary to the interests of the country and what its electors want.
Why? The government fondly thinks that if it does this, other countries will admire it for setting a shining example. But I have news for the government. Of course other countries will ostensibly commend us for our principled stance. But they will then regard us with contempt for being a pushover and an easy target. That’s exactly what happened with Chagos; and it’ll no doubt happen again. This is something the Foreign Office is going to learn over the next few years, one fears the hard way.
Wagers for Haydock and The Curragh
Astute Scottish trainer Jim Goldie cannot hide his admiration for his five-year-old sprinter AMERICAN AFFAIR, who runs at Haydock tomorrow in the Group 2 Betfred Temple Stakes (3.30 p.m.).
Goldie knows a thing or two about decent speedsters having trained the likes of Jack Dexter and Hawkeyethenoo in recent years – the former, in fact, finished second in the Temple Stakes a decade ago.
The veteran handler said this week that American Affair was ‘very exciting’ and up there with the best sprinters he had trained which is why Goldie has given his stable star an entry in the King Charles III Stakes at Royal Ascot next month.
American Affair has won two 5 furlong handicaps already this year, most recently at York off an official rating of 98. He will have to step up on that run tomorrow to win but I am suggesting a 2 points win bet for him to do just that. That price is available with most bookies but a few are going only 9-2.
There are dangers aplenty including Ed Walker’s Mgheera. Like Goldie, Walker rates his horse very highly and he hopes his five-year-old mare can win for a second successive time this season after landing a decent Group 3 contest at Longchamp earlier this month.
Like American Affair, Mgheera will love the likely quick ground at Haydock. The rain forecast for overnight is expected to be fairly light and the ground is currently described as ‘good to firm, good in places’, so it is difficult to see it being any softer than ‘good’ by the off.
In Ireland tomorrow, Field of Gold will try to go one better in the Tattersalls Irish 2000 Guineas (3.40 p.m.) than when he was close second in the Betfred 2000 Guineas at Newmarket earlier this month. He’s the most likely winner of this Grade 1 contest but odds of odds on are too short.
I was tempted to back Jessica Harrington’s colt Hotazhellbut he would prefer softer ground that he will encounter at The Curragh tomorrow and this is his seasonal debut. He may need a longer trip, too, to be seen as his best.
On the plus side, this colt took some decent scalps last season when winning four times and an official rating of 117 puts him just 3lb behind the favourite. The unbeaten Cosmic Year is very much in the reckoning too but odds of around 4-1 seem skinny for what he has achieved on the racetrack. On balance, this is a race to watch and enjoy.
The 48-hour declarations are due later this morning for Sunday’s Tattersalls Gold Cup at The Curragh. (3.05 p.m.). If there was plenty of rain in the forecast, I would have wanted to back Ed Walker’s progressive horse Almaqam but, with little of the wet stuff likely to fall at the track, he must be a doubtful runner. He could well head to Longchamp instead this weekend where the ground is now ‘soft’.
In fact, I am going to stay loyal to a horse that ran some big races for the column at each way prices last season: trainer Clive Cox’s GHOSTWRITER. Both the trip of just over 1 mile 2 furlongs and the likely fast ground will be ideal and, although he faces tough opposition, I hope this will be the day he lands a big Grade 1 pot.
Without knowing the final field or the odds at the time of writing, I will simply suggest 2 points win at Starting Price (although if there are more than eight runners and he is 5-1 or more, some might prefer an each way play.
I have been looking ahead to some of the big races at Royal Ascot and not a lot jumps out at me in terms of value bets. However, I am keen to take on the Aidan O’Brien horses at the top of the market in the meeting’s feature race, the Ascot Gold Cup on 19 June.
My sources tell me Kyprios, the winner of 17 of his 21 starts, is not a certain runner after finishing slightly lame when winning at Leopardstown last month. Stablemate Illinois is an improving four-year-old colt but he is untried over the marathon two-and-a-half-mile distance of the Ascot contest.
I would rather be on the John and Thady Gosden pair, TRAWLERMAN and Sweet Willam. If the trip was two miles, I would prefer the latter but the former is the more dour stayer judged on his second to Kyprios, beaten just a length, in last year’s Ascot Gold Cup. So back Trawlerman, only 1 point each way at 8-1, that price being offered by the majority of bookmakers.
On the ante-post front, I also want to back a horse at a big price in the Jenningsbet Northumberland Plate Handicap at Newcastle on 28 June. Trainer Michael Bell’s horse DUKE OF OXFORD ran a modest race from an outside draw in the Chester Cup last month for a second successive year.
However, the reality is that this five-year-old gelding is much better on an all-weather surface than turf as he showed when third in the Northumberland Plate last season. He is likely to run off a 5 lb higher mark a year on but that is because he won two all-weather handicaps at Kempton at the end of last year.
I suspect this race is his main target for the season and so back Duke of Oxford 1 point each way at 33-1, four places, for this year’s Plate, those odds being offered by all the main bookies that have priced up the race, including bet365, SkyBet, Paddy Power, William Hill and Unibet.
Pending:
2 points win American Affair at 5-1 for the Temple Stakes.
2 points win Ghostwriter at SP for the Tattersalls Gold Cup.
1 point each way Trawlerman at 8-1 for the Ascot Gold Cup, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Duke of Oxford at 33-1 for the Northumberland Plate, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places
Last weekend: – 6 points.
1 point each way Austrian Theory at 8-1 for theKnights Solicitors Handicap, 1/5 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Zain Blue at 10-1for the Knights Solicitors Handicap, paying 1/5 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Cover Up at 17-2 for the Hong Kong Jockey Club Handicap, paying 1/5 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
2025 flat season running total – 7.8 points.
2024-5 jump season: – 47.61 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Is it any surprise doctors are trying their luck with more strikes?
Did anyone really think that the incoming Starmer government was going to appease the public sector unions for long by stuffing their mouths with gold – awarding them fat pay rises without any requirement to improve productivity? When he awarded junior doctors a pay rise of 22 per cent last July, Wes Streeting told us that he had made more progress in days than the Conservatives had made in months. The strikes were over, thanks to grown-up government.
Not so fast, Wes. Predictably enough, the government’s largesse towards towards the unions has merely served to embolden them. Now they are back for more – and the government finds itself unable to satisfy them.
In the NHS, it is an all-out war of envy, entirely divorced from fiscal reality
Pay rises announced this week have gone well beyond what Rachel Reeves was telling us a few weeks ago were unaffordable. The Chancellor had told us that 2.8 per cent was the limit. Yet nurses have been offered 3.6 per cent, consultants 4 per cent and junior doctors (who now demand to be called ‘resident doctors’ in case we realise they are still in training) up to 6 per cent. Think they might be pleased? Er, no.
The BMA is threatening strikes once again. As it did last year, it is still demanding that junior doctors’ pay be restored to a mythical figure it says they were being paid in real terms in 2008 (a figure the BMA arrives at by using the Retail Prices Index rather than the Consumer Prices Index; the IFS suggests that the real-terms fall in pay since 2008 – a date chosen because doctors enjoyed a hefty pay rise that year – is half what the BMA claims). The BMA has demanded another 10 to 20 per cent this year.
Unsurprisingly, the nursing unions, who settled their own pay dispute last year before Labour took office, remain aggrieved that they received a lower pay rise than the doctors did. The grievance has been compounded by their being offered a lower pay rise than junior doctors once again. In the words of Nicola Ranger, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, ‘It is a grotesque decision to again favour doctor colleagues for higher increases than nursing and the rest of the NHS.’
In the NHS, in other words, it is an all-out war of envy, entirely divorced from fiscal reality. The wider context, of which the unions appear to have no insight – or at least choose not to – is that the government is already running a £150 billion deficit and tax rises are failing to deliver enough extra revenue to pay for last year’s public sector pay rises (in spite of damaging employment in the private sector).
Moreover, productivity is lagging. According to NHS England itself, productivity is still 8 per cent lower than it was pre-pandemic (although it has risen over the past year). To put it bluntly: NHS staff are demanding to be paid substantially more in real terms than they were six years ago while producing markedly less value.
No economy can thrive on this basis: it is recipe for an inflationary spiral. The only thing which stops that happening is that, thankfully, we have a private sector where a greater sense of reality reigns, and workers accept that if they cannot produce more they will not be paid more.
Somehow, that message needs to be drummed into public sector unions who seem to think they have a God-given right to above-inflation pay rises, come what may. Sadly, it isn’t going to be this government which gets that message home. Last year’s unwarranted pay awards in the public sector have compromised the government’s efforts to appeal to reason – and condemned us to another four years of union militancy.
Labour’s spending is out of control
To borrow a phrase that was once famously used about the Pentagon, ‘a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money’. The Labour government has certainly been spending some ‘real money’ this week. If you tot up the total amount it has added to spending over the last five days, it comes to an extraordinary £50 billion. The British state is rapidly losing control of its finances, and it is no surprise the bond markets that will have to finance it all are getting worried.
If the Chancellor Rachel Reeves decides, like many of us, to check her bank balance as the week ends, she will get a nasty shock. Let’s take a look at some of the debits she has chalked up since Monday. The week opened with the re-set with the EU, which, while it may or may not help trade, comes with an estimated price tag of £16 billion once all the contributions to EU programmes the UK will have to make are added up.
It is hardly surprising that gilt yields are soaring
On Tuesday, we learnt that there was an overspend of £4 billion in April as, even with extra taxes coming in from the increase in employer’s NI announced in the Budget, the state spent far more than forecast. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a U-turn on the Winter Fuel Allowance, with the details to be announced later this year, and there were reports of concessions on the two-child benefits cap as well. The cost for both changes? An estimated £5 billion.
By Thursday, the government was really getting into its stride. There was the deal over the Chagos Islands, which will cost the UK an estimated £10 billion. And then there were above-inflation pay rises for the public sector, led by the NHS, which will add another £7 billion to the total in the first round. There’s every chance that figure could triple to as much as £20 billion if other workers demand similar increases, and strikes are staged to push the total even higher.
True, some of the figures are estimated, and we don’t have precise numbers yet. But there is one thing we know for certain about public spending: the total bill is always higher than you expect it to be.
When you add it all up, one point is clear. The Labour government has committed to spending an extra £50 billion over the course of a single week. Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that gilt yields are soaring. Government spending is spiralling out of control, and the Starmer administration is no longer even trying to balance the books. If there are many more weeks like the one that has just finished, the country will go broke.
Only now are Britain’s high streets busier than before Covid
Finally, in a horrible week for Rachel Reeves which has seen inflation surge, the public finances take a dive and her authority undermined by Angela Rayner’s memo and the Prime Minister’s U-turn on the winter fuel payment, a glimmer of good news. Retail sales rose by 1.2 per cent in April. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) did, however, revise down March’s figure from 0.4 per cent growth to 0.1 per cent. The quarterly figures, which are more reliable, show that sales volumes were up 1.8 per cent between February and April.
There is now a clear trend. Retail sales volumes bottomed out in December 2023 and have been generally rising since then. However, to underline just how damaging Covid was for the retail sector, sales volumes have only just, this month, surpassed the level they were in February 2020, on the eve of the pandemic. If you are a retailer, you have only recently emerged from a four-year recession. Given the growth in population since 2020, the retail industry has not yet fully recovered from the slump.
The limitations of online retailing, perhaps, are beginning to bite
In April, sales volumes were especially strong in food. This may, however, contain a warning. While the ONS has suggested that the sunny weather in April might have contributed to the rise, an alternative explanation is that people might be buying more food in supermarkets because they are eating out less – which may be a sign of people drawing in their horns. This particular set of figures cannot shed light on that.
There is another trend which is worthy of comment. During the pandemic, online retailers, for obvious reasons, enjoyed a boom. They were already doing well, but Covid seemed to put rocket-boosters under the shift towards online sales. It became fashionable to say that Covid had brought a whole decade’s worth of changes in the retail industry in just a few months. Yet unexpectedly – at least to some people – that trend has now gone into reverse. The value of online sales in April fell 1 per cent in clothing and 1.5 per cent in household goods.
The limitations of online retailing, perhaps, are beginning to bite. Most of all is the problem of being unable to see the quality of the product. This might not be an issue for repeat purchases, but if you are shopping around for something new, or it is an item of clothing that you need to try on, it is difficult. Online shoppers tend to get around this by buying stuff and then sending it back if they don’t like it. But the retailers themselves are steadily trying to erect barriers to make it more difficult to return goods.
I have long thought that one’s own experiences are very important to understanding the economy – on the basis that if you are thinking something, there is a strong likelihood that others are, too. I have been doing quite a lot of online retailing recently, for one reason and another, and it has been a sometimes agonising experience.
Several items which looked good in the photos were a lot less so in the flesh. A coffee table arrived broken and took several weeks – and numerous emailed photographs – to get it returned. A garden table arrived with its glass broken. The retailer insisted that they would need to replace the whole table, not just the glass. It took a fortnight to arrange the collection of the table, but when a replacement was sent the next day, it contained only the glass – I had to wait another week for the table to be sent back.
For people who are not at home most of the time, online shopping can be a disaster. One thing which may be affecting the sector is the trend against working from home. Online retailing, I am sure, is here to stay. But the latest retail sales figures are a sign that it is finding its level, just as its forerunner, catalogue shopping, had to do.
Reform must prove to voters they’re more than a protest party
Reform is now touching 30 per cent in the polls, as Labour lags on 22 per cent and the Tories trail on just 15 per cent. As such, the insurgent party must prepare for more frenzied attacks from the old parties whose dominance it now seriously threatens. Is Nigel Farage’s party ready to face the inevitably detailed forensic scrutiny of its still rather vague policy agenda?
One key question that Reform must answer is where they stand on the ideological spectrum: are they Thatcherite free marketeers, or neo-socialists prepared to use the state to mitigate the excesses of unbridled capitalism?
Reform must decide which ideological road to travel: left or right
The trouble for Reform is that, while their leadership troika are all convinced capitalists with a business background, their strongest support comes from the working-class regions of the Red Wall in the north, Midlands and Wales: all traditional Labour voting areas. Farage is a former metals trader who has spoken of introducing elements of the free market into the NHS; his deputy Richard Tice and Reform chairman Zia Yusuf are both successful millionaire businessmen with a strong aversion to state socialism. Can this trio really speak for working-class voters?
To avoid alienating their supporters, Reform’s leaders must play down their instinctive preference for free market solutions and appear favourable to less austere approaches. We can imagine that a Reform government in practice, for example, might prefer to subsidise the steel mills of Scunthorpe or South Wales with state cash rather than let a lame duck industry go to the wall as a free market Thatcherite would do.
Reform’s ideological dilemma was put into sharp focus this week by an interview that Richard Tice gave to the Daily Telegraph. Tice – who hopes to become Chancellor in a future Reform government – told the paper he was rowing back from a previous pledge to slash £90 million in tax cuts during Reform’s first 100 days in power. That ambitious tax-cutting plan – so dear to conservative hearts – was now just a desirable ‘direction of travel’, he said. It would have to await the party finding £150 billion in savings once they got their hands on the Whitehall books.
To gain power and prove that they are not merely a protest party but are a permanent part of the British political landscape, Reform must decide which ideological road to travel: left or right.
The difficulty of that choice is reflected across the Channel in France. Marine Le Pen’s populist Rassemblement National (RN) party, which holds views on mass migration and crime usually seen as hard right, is distinctly left-wing and neo-socialist on economic policy.
The thorny issue of immigration has already opened up another ideological fault line within Reform with the expulsion of outspoken MP Rupert Lowe from Reform’s Westminster ranks. As well as personal differences with Farage, Lowe had advanced a hard-line policy proposing the mass deportation of illegal and criminal migrants. This was popular with many Reform officials and members, whereas Farage, Tice and Yusuf – seeking to woo moderate voters – have adopted a far softer tone and approach.
It remains to be seen how Reform can simultaneously appeal to the two constituencies that they need to win over – working-class voters who are culturally right-wing but economically left and disillusioned Tories mistrustful of state intervention – without dissolving into ideological incoherence.
Unless Reform can demonstrate how they can translate desirable and popular aims into practically achievable policies, Farage’s party will remain vulnerable to charges that they too are unlikely to find the answers to the stubborn problems that have eluded their established opponents.