We are facing an epidemic of online fraud

At what point are we going to drop the fiction that acquisitive crime is on the wane and admit that we are in an epidemic of fraud? Today, Barclays Bank has appealed to social media firms – rather than banks like itself – to refund victims of online scams. I am sure that social media companies could do more to close down scams, but isn’t the real problem that the law is tolerating online crime in a way that it doesn’t tolerate other crime? 

If your house is burgled, you know to contact the police. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will investigate, or even pay you a visit to take fingerprints, but at least it will be recognised as a crime and you will be treated as a victim – even if you left your doors unlocked. 

But if you are defrauded online? Good luck with getting anyone to take that seriously. Contact the police and you will be referred to Action Fraud, surely the biggest misnomer of any public authority in Britain – Inaction Fraud would be more accurate. It is really just a database, set up to collect inflation and try to warn people of popular scams. It is not going to be launching an investigation into the crime to which you have fallen victim, still less arresting anyone and pursuing their prosecution. 

Enter the online world and crime is treated as a mere occupational hazard. If you do get defrauded it is either tough luck, or at best your bank might refund you. But your bank may well try to blame it on you. There is no more blatant case of victim-blaming that the scorn levelled at people who fell for (often very plausible) scams.

Anyone wonder why we have ended up with so much online fraud – £1.2 billion’s worth in 2022 according to UK Finance – when the perpetrators are allowed to get with it with impunity? If we want to tackle fraud we are going to have to do rather more than expect banks and social media companies to bail out the victims. We are going to have to drag the scammers out of their bedsits, or wherever, and into the courts. 

When the government and finance industry are trying to push us into a cashless society they tell us that electronic payments are traceable, unlike suitcases full of cash being handed over at motorway service stations. Go on, then: trace the money that has been lost through scams, all the way back to the criminals who instigated them. If they are abroad, demand their extradition, or threaten to cut off aid or trade.

Pushing everything online is putting people ever more at risk of fraud. That includes banks who have been closing their branches and forcing customers to bank online.

So, no, Barclays and others should not be allowed to escape their responsibilities. In particular, money stolen through online scams must pass through some bank account. Surely banks have a very large liability in inadvertently helping to facilitate crime by allowing criminals to open bank accounts.

But, above all, let’s stop pretending that crime is falling and recognise online scams for what they are. Looking through my inbox I can see I am already the subject of several attempted frauds this morning – and it is only 10 o’clock. Not even in the darkest alleyways of 19th century London were we exposed daily to so much criminal activity. 

Watch: DeSantis grinds teeth during grilling

Poor Ron DeSantis. Once, he was the frontrunner to take over the Republican mantle from Trump. But now, following a staff exodus, tanking ratings and a barrage of insults from The Donald, the Florida Governor looks to be yesterday’s man. DeSantis is currently a whopping 45 points behind in the polls for the Republican nomination, with Trump refusing to attend Wednesday’s debate on the basis that he is ‘leading the field by “legendary” numbers.’

And the strain now appears to be getting to DeSantis, judging by his appearance in a clip he recorded yesterday. The Florida Governor was asked about a leaked memo from a friendly Super PAC detailing his debate strategies. A perspiring DeSantis was forced to repeatedly deny that he had read the memo, all the while furiously grinding his teeth. Some Trump fans likened him to Homelander from the Boys TV series; others jeered that he looked ‘finished.’

Either way, not a great look ahead of Wednesday night’s showdown…

Sanctions are failing to turn Putin’s oligarchs against him

When personal sanctions on Russian oligarchs and officials were imposed by the UK, US and EU after Putin’s invasion, the rationale was that this would undermine the Kremlin. In the main, this has failed – and there is still no coherent strategy to encourage those Russians willing to turn against the regime.

Wider economic sanctions are slowly grinding away at the economic base of Putin’s regime and its war machine. The case for personal sanctions is much less clear. It is absolutely right and proper that those directly involved in the war, conducting repressions or justifying aggression ought to be punished. However, in their enthusiasm to be seen as taking a determined stand (and, in part, driven by what one British diplomat described as ‘performative one-upmanship’), all sorts of other Russians, especially wealthy ones, ended up on these various lists. As things stand, the UK has sanctioned over 1,600 people and entities, the EU almost 1,800, and the USA more than 3,000.

One frequently-used argument at the time was that this would induce the oligarchs to try and persuade Putin to change course or even turn against him. This was always naïve. Most so-called ‘oligarchs’ are not really businesspeople but hand-picked cronies placed in charge of key economic sectors.

The remaining genuine entrepreneurs know what could be at stake, as demonstrated when billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky was prosecuted on trumped-up charges early in Putin’s reign: their wealth, their freedom, even their lives depend on toeing the line. They lack the autonomy, let alone the muscle, to challenge Putin’s police state.

Only two oligarchs initially expressed blandly ambiguous concerns about the war. Banker Milhail Fridman, born in western Ukraine, wrote in a letter to staff that he wanted the ‘bloodshed to end’. Industrialist Oleg Deripaska likewise simply said that ‘Peace is very important! Negotiations need to start as soon as possible!’

The irony is that sanctions, visa and travel bans and asset seizures have left many of these people more, not less dependent on the Kremlin. They cannot travel abroad and what remains of their wealth is disproportionately in Russia – and thus in Putin’s grasp. It is often also dependent on government contracts.

Of course, none of this should matter. Ideally, people should stand up for what is right, regardless of the economic or personal cost. How many of us really would, though? For every Martin Niemöller (the Lutheran pastor who criticised Nazi policies and spent eight years in prison and concentration camp for his pains), ‘Beijing Tank Man’ (the unknown protester who lay down in front of Chinese tanks amidst the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre) or Alexei Navalny (who returned to Russia even after being poisoned, and now languishes in prison), there are myriad who share the sentiment but not the courage to act.

We may deplore this, but here we are. We ought to be doing what we still can to encourage prominent Russians to break with Putin. Yet this is one area in which the West is still struggling to get its act together. None of the sanctioning powers have any clear criteria – publicly denounce the war, donate assets to Ukraine, whatever – for coming off these lists, which would offer a road map out of limbo.

The UK led the way by last month lifting sanctions on the innovative Russian banker Oleg Tinkoff. He had renounced his Russian citizenship, sold his share of the bank he had founded, and publicly declared his opposition to Putin’s ‘insane’ invasion and the ‘killing of peaceful people’.

Now Arkady Volozh, co-founder of the tech giant Yandex, resident in Israel since 2014, is appealing for EU sanctions on him to be lifted. His attempts to manage a sale of his stake in Yandex, even at a substantial discount, appears to have been foiled, along with his plan to hive off its foreign operations. His chances of getting anything for a company worth more than £20 billion at its peak seem close to zero now that he has publicly condemned the invasion as ‘barbaric’.

Volozh, like Tinkoff, no doubt has expensive teams of lawyers working his case, and doesn’t necessarily need our sympathy. One can also legitimately ask both men why it took so long for them to express their views. Yet the real question given that only two Russian billionaires – both of whom were already living abroad – have come out against the war, is what can be done to encourage more to make this leap?

It would be easy to say that it doesn’t really matter, but both were nearly household names. Volozh, for example, has disappeared from the Russian news since he took his stand – and people have noticed. Besides, figures like Tinkoff and Volozh were innovators driving the very real development of the Russian economy in the earlier Putin years, not the self-indulgent kleptocrats holding it back. The more Russia can be drained of its truly talented operators, from computer programmers (and hackers) to entrepreneurs and managers, the less effectively it will able to respond to the twin pressures of war and sanctions.

As far as we know, Putin has not yet unleashed his assassins on businesspeople who have fled, but his hatred for ‘traitors’ is well known. If Tinkoff and Volozh start a trend, that may change. This is, however, a good moment to seriously consider a strategy that leverages the existing pressure of sanctions on the less compromised and more competent members of the Russian business and professional classes and gives them reason to jump ship. Simply offering the uncertain chance of a case-by-case review to those with the resources to hire the right lawyers is not enough. 

Indeed, this need not be simply about lifting sanctions on some rich people. If we really want to starve the Russian regime of talent, why not make it easier, not harder, for Russians opposed to the war and possessing the skills we need, to find new lives in the West? Conversely, the tougher we can be on the political hacks, secret policeman and cronies of Putin, the better.

Should you stop taking melatonin?

Do you take it? If not, the chances are you’ll know someone who does. In an age of insomnia, melatonin has become a must-have sleep aid; as ubiquitous as yoga or herbal tea. In America, it is available over the counter and, according to The National Sleep Foundation charity, 27 per cent of adults take it. The use of melatonin has more than quintupled between 1999 and 2018. In the UK, where it is prescription only, melatonin use rose by nearly 900 per cent between 2008 and 2019, and many more of us – exact numbers are unknown – buy it unlicenced online.

Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone produced by the brain’s pineal glands which regulates the circadian rhythm, or 24-hour body clock, which tells us when to wake and sleep. Secretion increases after the onset of darkness, peaking in the middle of the night. Most who take the hormone synthetically before bedtime swear it is cure for insomnia.

However, evidence it can help chronic sleeplessness is limited, and many experts are concerned by melatonin mania. ‘It is massively overhyped. The effects on sleep are very mild indeed,’ says sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley, who adds: ‘People say it’s safe because it’s natural. Well, Vitamin A is natural. You eat too much and it will kill you.’

Unlike prescription sleeping pills, which impact receptors in the brain to slow the nervous system, melatonin is a ‘chronobiotic’ that shifts the circadian rhythm and ‘signposts the brain towards sleep, rather than switching wakefulness off’ explains sleep expert Dr Sophie Bostock, who also believes ‘the evidence for melatonin as a sleep aid is weak’.

While studies have found that melatonin can decrease the effects of jet lag – ‘but it can only shift your clock by about two hours,’ says Dr Stanley – taking it to get a better night’s kip appears to have little more than a placebo effect. An analysis of 19 studies involving 1,683 people, published in the journal PlosOne in 2013, found melatonin reduced sleep latency – the time it takes to fall asleep – by just seven minutes, and increased overall sleep time by eight minutes. A clinical practice guideline published in 2017 by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, meanwhile, suggests melatonin should not be used to treat chronic insomnia in adults at all.

To have any positive effect, users have to know exactly when their melatonin production peaks. Take it too early or too late and your circadian rhythm will be disrupted and you could just feel more tired. ‘Timing is absolutely crucial and there are probably about four people in the world who can tell you, as an individual, when to take melatonin because it’s down to your melatonin cycle which you can only measure from a spit test,’ explains Dr Stanley.

Then there‘s the fact that melatonin is unlicenced, meaning that, in America, its safety hasn’t been tested by the Food and Drug Administration. Indeed, says Dr Stanley, ‘it’s not recognised as a drug. If you buy melatonin in Walmart you have absolutely no idea what dose it is.’ A 2017 study of American melatonin samples in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that the actual melatonin content ranged from 83 per cent less to 478 per cent more than the label stated – worrying, given overuse of melatonin can worsen insomnia and has been linked to vomiting and joint pain.

More alarming still, of the over two dozen supplement samples researchers studied, 26 per cent were found to contain the hormone serotonin, a potential hazard for people taking SSRI antidepressants, which increase serotonin levels in the brain. Those taking this adulterated melatonin are inadvertently putting themselves at risk of serotonin syndrome – where they have abnormally high levels of serotonin – which can result in muscle rigidity and seizures.

Yet American users are still less at risk than us Brits, believes Dr Stanley. ‘At least in America you’ve got a name on the packet – somebody you could perhaps sue. Buying it off the internet is absolutely crazy. You have no earthly clue what you’re buying.’ Melatonin is only licensed on the NHS for over 55s (because production is thought to decline with age), people with jet lag and children with long-term sleep problems. Dr Stanley fears UK doctors are prescribing melatonin increasingly liberally because they ‘think they don’t have any alternatives.’

Although complications from taking melatonin are rarely mentioned, the government advisory body The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence lists headaches, abdominal pain, hypertension and anxiety among myriad ‘adverse effects’ and recommends talking therapies over medication to help sleep. Because melatonin can reduce blood coagulation – or clotting – it puts people on blood thinning medication such as warfarin at risk of excessive bleeding, while frequent use of melatonin has been linked to dementia. And, says Dr Stanley: ‘It disrupts the body clock so can affect the menstrual cycle in women.’

The full impact of melatonin on reproductive hormones is still unknown, but research in the journal Brain Sciences published last November found it could delay the onset of puberty in mice. So it is particularly concerning that prescriptions of melatonin among children rose by 168 per cent between 2015 and 2022, with over 60,000 patients under 17 prescribed it in March 2022. Almost all those prescribed it by paediatricians have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which affect the circadian rhythm, and there is evidence that children who take it fall asleep faster and sleep longer.

‘But there is concern that the majority of studies in children have been short term,’ says Dr Bostock. ‘It seems therefore to be taking unnecessary risks to prescribe melatonin for sleep problems when behavioural interventions are likely to be more effective. I’m most worried by the fact that young children are learning from an early age to rely on an external substance to help them sleep.’

In any case, Dr Stanley says, melatonin production can be controlled naturally: ‘You just need to sleep in a dark bedroom and avoid bright lights before bed. It’s common sense. You don’t need to take some nonsense off the internet.’

Time is money at Disneyland

‘We’re all mad here,’ I mumble as I head towards the Cheshire Cat. To my left is the home of the world’s most famous mouse – and a sign warning guests to expect a wait of up to an hour and a half if they want to meet him. This is my tenth trip down a Disney theme park rabbit hole – my third as an adult and my second to Disneyland Paris – so the queues in the ‘most magical place on Earth’ comes as no surprise. But this time there’s a difference: I have my very own fairy godfather.

Alex, our VIP tour guide, dressed in a three-piece suit with a checkerboard waistcoat, whisks us past the queue to a side door of Mickey Mouse’s home and rings a bell. Before you can say Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, photos have been posed for, autograph books signed, kisses blown, and we’re back outside with an hour and 20 minutes – and our sanities – saved.

For the next six hours, Alex escorts us across Disneyland and Walt Disney Studios, the two parks that span 4,800 acres of Disneyland Paris. No request is too big or too small: when my eldest niece B insists on going on all thrill rides (multiple times) and the youngest, V, reels off a long list of beloved characters she would like to meet, Alex doesn’t even blink.

We head to the Princess Pavilion in the shadow of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, where all the Disney princesses hang out. The wait time is usually around two hours to meet one character – and (the crucial bit) you have no idea who awaits you at the front of the line. That means you can excitedly queue to meet Cinderella – and end up shaking hands with Merida, the Scottish princess from Brave, who (let’s face it) no one really cares about. But not if you have an Alex. In just ten minutes, we’re face-to-face with two of our favourites, The Little Mermaid’s Ariel and Belle from Beauty and the Beast. B talks books with her namesake, but V wants to know where the Beast is…

After unsuccessfully trying to pull the sword from the stone, spinning around on the Mad Hatter’s teacups, making elephants fly with Dumbo, and taking a trip to Neverland with Peter Pan (the normal queue time is nearly two hours vs an Alex wait time of ten minutes), we head to B’s favourite ride, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, the runaway mine train ride. We walk straight on, twice. Total time saved: an hour and five minutes.

A quick lunch break for Mickey Mouse-shaped pizza, with a side order of hugs from Goofy, and we’re off to our first show of the day, The Lion King, a 30-minute condensed version of the West End hit. Visitors have been queuing for around 45 minutes to grab a seat, but Alex has called ahead to reserve the best in the house. We follow this up with Mickey and the Magician, a stage show of classic songs performed by Disney favourites. 

The smaller of the two parks, Walt Disney Studios, is home to some of the newer franchises – Pixar, Marvel and Frozen. Elsa of Frozen fame is, of course, a Queen – and so wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out at the Princess Pavilion. With this in mind, Disney execs are building her her own land of Arundel to rule over. For now, she’s having to make do with her own hugely popular show, which sees crowds start to gather up to 45 minutes beforehand.

Marvel’s Avengers have assembled at the Avengers campus. Thor, God of Thunder and Loki, the god of mischief, casually walk past. Members of the Guardians of the Galaxy challenge us to a 1980s dance-off as Captain America salutes the crowds. We help Spider-Man save the campus from self-replicating nanobots with lots of wrist flicking mimicking Spidey’s web throwing, but with Alex we don’t wait the advertised 55 minutes to do it. Flight Force, an indoor rollercoaster, launches us from zero to 60mph in just three seconds. B easily meets the height criteria, but Alex wisely insists I try it first and walks me to the front of the queue. Saved: 45 minutes’ queue time, ten minutes of tears and several months of trauma for a nine-year-old – but a couple of hours at the chiropractor for me.

Off to Pixar to ride a spinning turtle shell through the east Australian current on Crush’s coaster, a howdy from Jess from Toy Story and then we are shrunken down to the size of a rat for Ratatouille’s great escape – from angry chefs with huge kitchen knives. Time saved: an hour and 50 minutes.

Alex has managed to bag us a reservation at Chez Remy, a Ratatouille-themed restaurant. If you fancy sitting on a bottle-cap chair eating steak and chips at a jam jar-lid table that’s covered with a large paper umbrella – the kind you would normally find in a fruity cocktail – you can, but a warning: Disneyland Paris’s most popular dining spot needs to be booked months in advance.

Time is an expensive commodity at Disneyland Paris – and it’s for sale. Book to stay at one of the four Disney hotels and you’ll have the perk of magic hour, 60 minutes to explore the parks until the masses are let in. If rides are your priority, fast passes will allow you to skip the queues on some of the most popular ones, but this will cost you €170 on top of the entrance price. You can also pay-as-you-go for individual rides: the amount fluctuates between €7 and €18 depending on a ride’s popularity that day, but purchasing just a couple of these tickets can save you hours. If you’re looking to meet more characters during your trip, a good option is character dining, where for a hefty fee (and not the greatest culinary experience) you can meet around five Disney favourites over breakfast, lunch or dinner.

But if you want to feel like you are on holiday in the busiest (sorry, happiest) place on Earth, you’ll need your very own Alex. One VIP tour guide can take up to ten people so if you can extend your guest list you can split the tidy sum of €3,300.

It’s now 4.30 p.m. and in just six hours we have been on 11 rides, watched three shows and met many of Disney’s beloved characters. Without Alex that would have taken us at least two full days to accomplish even with days of militant advance planning.

As we watch the parade from a special roped-off viewing spot, B squeezes my arm and tells me she’s having the best day ever – and so am I. After all these years, Disney is still as magical as ever – but the magic has a price tag.

What it takes to build a modern home high on the Dorset cliffs

With its golden sand sweeping along the bay towards Lyme Regis, the young river bubbling into the surf and the weathered limestone cliffs rising and falling along the Jurassic coast, there are few more picturesque beaches in the country than the one at Charmouth. And it was, of course, that view that Allan and Ali fell in love with.

Ali, who works as an advisor on catastrophic injury awards, and Allan, a retired KC who had spent most of his working life travelling around the north of England dealing with criminal cases, just happened to be passing an estate agents and saw a picture in the window. It wasn’t just love, it was love at first sight. ‘We weren’t even looking for a house,’ Allan says.

They certainly weren’t looking for the existing building that occupied the triangular site on the cliffs above Lyme Bay. It was an old house they quickly termed ‘the shack’ and was riddled with asbestos. They figured they could demolish it, at some expense, and get planning permission to build a modern home.

‘After being assured we would be 1,000 years from falling over the cliff face, I cashed in my pension,’ says Allan.

Planning permission in such a scenic spot was always likely to prove an ordeal. ‘We figured we could build an “upside-down” house to maximise the view and tried to move the footprint up the hill, but the planners wouldn’t allow it,’ Allan says. ‘In the end we had to use the footprint of the original building.’

They turned to Phil Coffey, of Coffey Architects, for help, after being introduced by a friend who worked on large office buildings. Coffey has done more than a few of those.

‘It was a tough planning environment, given it’s an area of outstanding natural beauty, but we like to think we’re good at planning,’ Coffey says. ‘A sensitive architectural response helped convince the planners – we moved the proposed home further north so it fitted into the existing line of houses and turned it so that the profile, as seen from the coast, was as small as possible, with the volumes hidden behind each other. We estimate we were able to increase the size [compared to the previous occupant] by about 40 per cent.’

Planning permission was finally granted for the project in 2017, three years after they bought the site. But it wasn’t just securing that that was a battle: there were also problems putting in an access road, thanks to an uncooperative neighbour. Then came the departure of the project manager and issues with the geology. ‘There was so much movement with the soil – greensand on top of gault clay – and effectively a stream running through it,’ Coffey says. ‘We put in 30 concrete piles down to six metres and it became a significant piece of engineering.’

In fact, Allan estimates that the foundations alone – the piles and the concrete raft they hold up –  cost £250,000 out of a total budget of about £1.5 million, including the outside landscaped spaces and Ali’s prized yurt.

Costs on the 1,600 sq ft property ballooned during the pandemic. ‘Everything Kevin McCloud says on Grand Designs is true,’ Allan jokes. ‘It always costs more and takes longer than you think it will.

‘During the pandemic, it was all out in the open so we were able to carry on. But there were interruptions as people went off sick and then all the prices shot up. Wood went up 50 per cent. Paint too. We bought handles from Ukraine the week they were invaded by Russia. But by then we were totally committed. We’d sunk our life’s savings into this, sold the houses in London and Charmouth. We had no backup – this was it.

‘I would never do this again, honestly, but I have no regrets as I have died and gone to heaven. I have never lived like this.’

He certainly hasn’t. In fact Ali, 62, and Allan, 71, had never really lived together before, despite them having been together for 25 years and marrying in 2013. Allan’s high-powered legal job, before he retired at 70, had kept him in Manchester or Liverpool during the working week. ‘It was difficult to have a conventional relationship,’ Allan explains.

‘They were very different people,’ says Coffey. ‘We effectively started with two different houses and brought them slowly together. 

‘Allan wanted a proper piece of architecture as well as a home. Allison wanted a home over the architecture. You can see their personalities and how they live together in the building: Ali is about comfort and is in control of the interior; the crispness and detail and exterior is all Allan. It’s an interesting juxtaposition between the two – we think they enjoy all the differences.’ 

Allan agrees: ‘It’s a very unconventional layout, which maximises the living space at the expense of the sleeping areas. I always had this vision of a big window overlooking the sea and Phil’s design means you can see all the way from the front door to the bay. All the rooms except two small ones – the utility room and larder – have cathedral ceilings. No beams, no trusses, no ties – they’re completely open and look magnificent. The whole house is magnificent.’

It’s also very flexible. It has to be. Add in a requirement to accommodate Allan’s three children and Ali’s son, sister and mother – not all at the same time – plus a horde of grandchildren, and it has the potential to be, as Ali puts it, ‘anarchy’. No wonder she keeps that yurt at the top of the garden.

Ali adds: ‘It was a leap of faith but it’s been totally worth it – I love it. It’s stunning. To anyone who’s thinking of doing something similar, who has a dream – I say follow your dream!’

For Coffey, the journey has also been an experience he won’t forget. ‘The projects with the toughest constraints usually produce the best results: the more difficult it is, the bigger an achievement it is. We never thought we’d build a house on such a tough site, with its planning and topography issues, for a couple who had never lived together! But between us, the client and the site, we think we’ve done OK. Life would be dull without constraints and architecture would be nothing without relationships, and this truly is a relationship that’s now set in stone!’

What military lessons can we learn from Ukraine?

The past comes in convenient lumps, each able to provide a lesson. When I was growing up, it was the Munich Agreement, giving Hitler the Sudetenland, and Suez, that embarrassment, that historians tried to glean some wisdom from. We later embraced the lessons from Vietnam, about guerrilla warfare, and after that the teachings of Iraq and Afghanistan, about counterinsurgency. All wars taught us something, apparently.

Ukraine has appealed for international military support by presenting itself as a testing ground for future wars. The Ukrainian defence minister says that Ukraine is the perfect place for the arms industry to try out its new kit, and our own defence secretary has said as much too. You can learn your lessons, make your mistakes, in Ukraine. It’s a useful proxy for another, future conflict. But, in war, how much can we really learn and reapply elsewhere?

Historians often say the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for world war two. Only a few years separated the two conflicts, and the Spanish Civil War supposedly gave Germany a chance to try out new bombing techniques, which influenced the blitz it inflicted upon Britain. In reality, though, the parallels between the two conflicts are weak. The naval dimension to the Spanish Civil War was small scale – the greater strength of the Republican navy failed to sway the struggle, and could not protect shipping from hostile submarines and aircraft – and the use of aircraft was very limited compared to the strategic air warfare of world war two. Far from the Civil War providing the Germans with an opportunity to prepare for Blitzkrieg, it was similar to the American Civil War in being seen by many commentators as somewhat primitive. Bombing captured the imagination of civilians but its impact on the conflict in Spain was exaggerated by them.

There wasn’t much to learn about tank warfare either. In March 1937, having visited Franco’s army, British Military Intelligence officer J F C Fuller wrote:

It is in no sense a great war, a trench war… Of tanks I saw few… Tank tactics are conspicuous only through their absence… I do not think we have to learn from either tanks or anti-tank weapons in this war.

And in April 1938, after visiting the Nationalists in Spain, the British Assistant Military Attaché in Paris reported that he was witnessing:

A war in which the majority of participants are almost entirely untrained… a war in which modern weapons are used but not on the modern scale. In view of these singularities, it will be obvious that the greatest caution must be used in deducing general lessons from this war: a little adroitness and it will be possible to use it to “prove” any preconceived theory.

There was neither the equivalent to the German offensives in 1939-41, nor to the large-scale, high-intensity, attritional fighting that was subsequently so significant in the world war in Europe.

So what is there to learn from Ukraine? In 2022, there was a blaze of optimism about the ability of new weaponry and methods to thwart Russian attackers, but the key factors were determined Ukrainian resilience, and poor Russian planning and execution. Those who readily discern military revolutions have been misled. It is an advantage to defend one’s own land, and varying the equations of weaponry only makes so much difference. Artillery has proven its worth.

All this, though, tells us little about the nature of conflict and causes of success in other wars, which in the last year were fought in places including Myanmar, Ethiopia, Niger, Mali, and Sudan. Soon, too, there might be a war over Taiwan. Indeed, there is a danger of reading more widely from the specifics of Ukraine. The politics is different and the terrain incomparable. The weapons are not the same. The tactics are unique.

Will the NHS learn from Letby’s murders?

Will the fallout from the Lucy Letby case really lead to lasting change in the NHS? The most prolific killer of babies was able to continue even as doctors raised concerns about her – to the extent that the consultants themselves were forced to apologise to her face for a ‘campaign’ of bullying, rather than their concerns being taken seriously about her presence at the deaths or collapse of all the babies at the Countess of Chester hospital. Now, doctors’ union the British Medical Association has turned on NHS managers, saying the time has come for a reckoning for the ‘unaccountable’ bosses.

NHS managers are often unfairly maligned: politicians like to raise cheap applause by promising to abolish entire swathes of them, as though health services can just run automatically or doctors have the time to take on administration as well. But it is undeniable that NHS management is not accountable in the same way as clinicians, even though their decisions can have life-or-death consequences too. The many NHS scandals over the decades have all had management failings as well as clinical mistakes. Letby was a murderer, while other scandals were about poor care, but the common thread in all of the cases is that managers were never ready to acknowledge that something was going wrong, were reluctant to share information, and went to more effort to shut down scrutiny than they did to investigate the truth. There is no professional regulation of individual managers, and while ministers have been resisting the calls for that to change this weekend, they may struggle to maintain the line.

They are also unlikely to maintain the line that the best way to investigate the lessons to be learned is through an independent non-statutory inquiry, which can work quicker than a public inquiry. Yesterday I interviewed Ann Alexander on Times Radio: she was the solicitor who worked with the families who lost loved ones to serial killer Dr Harold Shipman, and pushed for the inquiry into those killings to be made a public one too. She explained that ‘the importance of a public inquiry is that the inquiry chair has the power to subpoena witnesses to attend to ensure that documentation is provided and to encourage a complete in-depth investigation.’ Giving evidence on oath will be particularly important in a case where there are allegations of a cover-up.

Public inquiries are important, but I’ve written about enough of them over the years and in my book on the NHS to feel a little cynical about the impact they can have. Alexander described how hard the Shipman families still had to work even a decade after the inquiry to ensure that its recommendations on death certificates, for instance, were actually implemented. It is very easy for politicians to leave the conclusions of these inquiries to someone else, or more precisely no-one else, and for the lessons to disappear, only to resurface with the next scandal.

There are plenty of cultural problems that wouldn’t be solved by regulation: the tendency within the NHS is to regard things going wrong as a problem rather than an event to learn from – as in the aviation sector, for instance. This weekend NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard wrote to trusts emphasising the ‘importance of NHS leaders listening to the concerns of patients, families and staff, and following whistleblowing procedures’. Regulation can change the incentives in favour of listening to victims rather than treating them as inconveniences, but leaders are even more important in that, and the number of inquiries that have reached the same conclusions about managers suggests there aren’t enough leaders who recognise that they too need to change the way they work.

What the future holds for women’s football

Well, that’s the end of that. Football, like an unrepentant runaway, stubbornly refuses to come home. Spain, deservedly probably, edged the thrilling, almost unbearably tense final and England will return to a warm, if not ecstatic, reception. England’s first football World Cup final in 57 years was undoubtedly that rarest of phenomena these days: a truly national event, with a TV audience likely to set a record for any female sports broadcast. It will also open a conversation about the importance of and future of women’s football. What should that conversation be like? I have a few suggestions and a few appeals. 

For a start, can we stop comparing the men’s and women’s games in terms of quality of performance? Let’s dial down both the hype and counter-hype. If I read one more time about how women’s football is not respected, or, in response, about 15-year-old boys in Dallas beating the US women’s team, I think I may fling my iPad against the wall. And it’s a new iPad. Women’s football has greatly improved and its best is impressive. But no, the women wouldn’t beat the men or come close and that means about as much as saying Iga Swiatek wouldn’t beat Carlos Alcaraz. It’s irrelevant. There are intrinsic physical differences too tedious to go into that give men an insuperable advantage. And we all know that. End of story. 

Second, can we stop comparing the men’s and women’s game in terms of cold, hard financials, or for that matter, cold, hard viewing and attendance figures? ‘Price of everything and value of nothing’ anyone? Nobody, I think, would dispute the proposition that women should get the same percentage of the revenue generated by their sport as the men do. But that is, at the moment at least, going to be considerably different. That may not be exactly fair, and it is, strictly speaking, an inequality, but it is not evidence of prejudice or discrimination.

It may be possible to imagine a time when the women’s game is as popular with the public as the men’s but that looks still to be far distant. And, since you can’t force the public to love a product any more than you can force someone to love a person, nothing we can do will change that. And we all know that too. So, again, end of story. 

Also, let’s stop patronising women’s football, it’s not some prelapsarian, Corinthian throwback to better, purer sporting era. There was gamesman(woman?)ship aplenty at this World Cup, the girls can play as dirty as the boys. England targeted the wounded Kerr in the semi for some bruising treatment, time-wasting was almost de rigueur, and even the Japanese indulged in a spot of simulation in an attempt to win free kicks and penalties in their knockout tie with Sweden – and the Japanese language doesn’t even have a term for this dark art. In short, they were all at it. 

And there were plenty of poor quality and boring games too. The tournament ended well, in terms of thrills, but anyone who watched the whole thing will have had to endure some pretty mediocre stuff in the earlier rounds. A few sides seemed to be playing the very opposite of Tiki Taka, whatever that might be called. ‘Turnover after turnover after turnover’ said the ITV co-commentator at one point. There were some comically bad penalty kicks. 

But there were plenty of positives. A tournament that struggled to sell its broadcast rights and was blighted by pre-tournament wrangles over pay reached a thrilling height with the two compelling semis and today’s zinger of a final. New stars emerged (Paralleulo, Caicedo) and old favourites had a last hurrah (Kerr) and, there was plenty of drama, plenty of upsets, and even a new winner. (When did last happen in the cluttered men’s version?)

This bodes well. If women’s football suffers from a lack of compelling narratives, ancient rivalries revisited and such like, a few more were begun here. England vs Australia might have needed some cross-sport pollination to hype it up (it was dubbed the sixth Ashes test), but it won’t need much boosting in future after that ferocious encounter in Sydney. Yes, the crowd was rude and some of the tactics were crude but that’s the grit in the oyster of competitive sport. You can be too nice. 

The notable failures will set up some interesting plot lines too. Rather pleasingly, arrogance and hubris got their just desserts in this tournament. The pantomime villains of the whole show (anthem refuseniks USA) were rewarded for with an early and ignominious exit, as were Germany who were so confident of progressing from the first round that they hadn’t put a charter plane on standby for if they failed. How these two giants respond will be interesting. 

And as for the UK, let’s celebrate the undoubted benefit that women’s football’s raised profile has produced in terms of greater participation in sport. According to the FA: 

Since October 2021, there’s been a 17 per cent increase in female affiliated players across all levels of the game, a 30 per cent increase in female registered football teams, and a 15 per cent increase in female youth teams – made up of girls aged between 5-18 years old.

That will surely only continue now, and probably increase. In a nation notorious for its poor diet and sedentary lifestyle, this is very good news. More women playing football, getting out in the sunshine and keeping fit is surely an unalloyed good – even if hardly any of the girls inspired by this tournament to put down their iPhones and get down the park ever make a living out of it.  

So well done Sarina and the team. It was a great effort, and I’m not sure you could have done much more. And the beauty of sport, men’s and women’s, is that there’s always next time.  

Just wish you’d stop taking the knee. 

America has lost the war against Islamist terror in Africa

After 9/11, the US built a network of military outposts across the northern tier of Africa to fight a shadow war against Islamist groups, and Niger became central to the effort. From Base Airienne 201, known to locals as ‘Base Americaine’, US drones were sent across the region to track down Islamist terrorists. The coup against President Bazoum marks another disruption in this long-running, mostly secret, war on terror. American troops in Niger are currently confined to their bases. The future of America’s two-decade counterterrorism campaign there is in doubt.

In 2008, about 2,600 US military personnel were deployed in Africa, but today, there are around 6,500 troops and civilian contractors. The US government couldn’t identify even one transnational terror group in sub-Saharan Africa after the Twin Towers attacks but embarked nonetheless on wide-ranging counterterrorism efforts there. Over the years, America has conducted drone strikes in countries like Libya and Somalia, and its commandos have fought in countries including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Somalia, and Tunisia. Just over half of the US forces are stationed at Camp Lemonnier, a sprawling base in the tiny nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. More than 1,000 are still deployed in Niger. Personnel rotate in and out of that country like they would in any other war zone.

After two decades of failing to crush terrorism in Africa, the US has quietly admitted that things are going wrong. An assessment last year by one of the Pentagon’s own research institutions couldn’t be grimmer. The number of Islamist terror attacks in the western Sahel (the strip of Africa between the Sahara Desert in the north and the tropical savannas to the south) has quadrupled since 2019, it said, and the violence had ‘expanded in intensity and geographic reach.’ The researchers found fatalities linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel jumped from 218 in 2016 to 7,889 in 2022. An increase of more than 3,000 per cent in six years.

America’s war in Africa uses a significant proportion of America’s most elite troops – Army Green Berets, Navy Seals, and Marine Raiders. Around 14 per cent of US commandos dispatched overseas in 2021 were sent to Africa, more than anywhere in the world except for the Middle East. Special Operations forces were sent to Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Tanzania, and Tunisia in 2021. But exactly what they were doing there is a secret. The US government only provides details about innocuous missions, like short-term deployments for training or to assess a nation’s counterterrorism capabilities, but retired Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa (Socafrica) until 2017, says that US special forces have seen combat in at least 13 African nations in the last decade.

The US government did its best to hide its African war against terrorism, but secrecy became untenable as more and more Americans were injured and killed. Between 2015 and 2017, there were at least 10 unreported attacks on American troops in West Africa. In February 2017, US Marines fought al-Qaeda militants in a battle that Africom (America’s African military command) still won’t admit took place in Tunisia, near the border of Algeria. Just three months later, during an ‘advise, assist, and accompany’ mission, 38-year-old Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans were wounded in a raid on a militant camp in Somalia. That same year again, in October, Africom was finally forced to abandon the fiction that US troops weren’t at war on the continent after Isis militants ambushed American troops near Tongo Tongo, a village in Niger, killing four US soldiers. In 2020, one US soldier and two Pentagon contractors were killed when the Somali terror group al Shabaab attacked an American base in Manda Bay, Kenya.

‘Combatting VEOs’ – military slang for violent extremist organisations or terrorist groups – is ‘critical to stability,’ Kelly Cahalan, an Africom spokesperson, told me. ‘It is a top priority… of many of our partners in Africa and they ask us for help solving this challenge.’ The solution has not been forthcoming. Despite all the US military assistance, training exercises, advisory missions, base-building, drone surveillance, air strikes and ground combat, even the Pentagon’s own assessments have been uniformly dismal. While Africom claims that it ‘counters transnational threats and malign actors’ to promote ‘security, stability and prosperity’ on the continent, it’s been Africans, not just people in the Sahel, who have suffered. The Africa Center found that, across the continent, fatalities from militant Islamist violence have increased from about 3,000 in 2010 to 19,109 in 2022.

Niger was the West’s only major ally left in the West African Sahel. Its neighbours – Burkina Faso and Mali – are beset by terror attacks and run by military officers who overthrew their governments. Niger was one of the only places where America could safely base its troops, and diplomats saw it as a fragile but critical partner in the campaign against Islamist terrorism in Africa. Now, the US has ‘paused’ security assistance to Niger, and when Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, was asked whether the US would be withdrawing its troops, he said they were planning for ‘various contingencies’. The coup, and America’s loss of one of its only Sahelian partners, is another setback in a long-running string of failures.

After Sunak, who?

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens, the author Fay Weldon once declared. 

This observation about life’s tendency to deliver sudden squalls between periods of apparent calm could certainly be applied to the leadership of the Conservative party. 

It is only a year ago that Kemi Badenoch rather brilliantly used the leadership contest that followed the downfall of Boris Johnson to force her way into the top rank of Conservative politicians after having been overlooked during various Johnsonite Cabinet reshuffles.

Now her merits are widely acknowledged and she is firm favourite at the bookies to become the next leader of the party. Of course, nothing is happening on that front right now because Conservative MPs have sensibly concluded that the public would not take it well were they to launch into yet another leadership coup before the next general election.

So there are no crisis stories being written about Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street operation despite the Tories being much further behind in the polls than they ever were under Johnson and having failed to record an appreciable bounce-back from the dire days of Liz Truss.

But beneath this surface calm there is a lot of energetic paddling going on as senior figures in the party prepare for the next ‘everything’ phase that will ensue if the Tories suffer a heavy defeat in a general election in autumn next year.

Before Parliament went into summer recess, Badenoch was on the receiving end of a rash of negative briefings which presumably emanated from the camps of rivals wishing to knock her off her perch. As Sunak himself found before being defeated by Truss 12 months ago, being seen as heir apparent is tantamount to having a target painted on your back.

At various end-of-term drinks parties Tory MPs and special advisers alike were to be found discussing who will be having a tilt at the leadership when Sunak falls. It was generally agreed that the contest is likely to be dominated by women, with only Foreign Secretary James Cleverly of the male contenders being given much chance. Whether he runs largely depends, I was told, on whether Mrs Cleverly is happy for him to do so.

The publicity garnered by Penny Mordaunt for her sword-handling skills at the Coronation and a series of strong despatch box performances point to her readying herself to stand again so long as she holds her Portsmouth North seat where she is defending a near-16,000 majority. Her substantial following among MPs and elements of the party grassroots mean she will be a serious contender once more.

None of these big three contenders can afford to do too much obvious manoeuvring for the leadership this side of a general election. To do so would risk them being seen to put their own interests above those of a party that cannot afford the voting public to pick up any signals that Sunak is being written off as a lame duck by his own senior colleagues. One can expect all three to exploit October’s party conference in Manchester to set out their stalls but to do so with subtlety to the extent that subtlety is compatible with Conservative leadership jockeying.

Hence, ‘nothing’ is seen to be happening. Yet this limitation does not apply to one other senior Cabinet minister, and it is this person who Sunak’s Downing Street operation will surely be regarding with most nervousness over the coming year.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman stood in last summer’s leadership contest and did somewhat less well than Badenoch. Her candidacy was initially met by cruel mockery among leftish metropolitan commentators. But she did not let that put her off. That she was one of the ‘Brexit Spartans’ back in the day should surprise nobody. There is a steeliness to her that makes underestimating her a perilous business. Currently she is rated a 16-1 outsider by betting markets. She can therefore be expected to take more risks than the others in projecting herself.

It just so happens that Braverman is in charge of the most emotive issue in the eyes of Tory-leaning voters – attempts by the Government to stem the flow of small boats carrying illegal migrants across the Channel and into mid-range hotels up and down the land. Sunak’s own prospects depend on him being seen to ‘strain every sinew’ to stop the boats.

Yet many suspect that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and its supervisory court in Strasbourg is a step he is not prepared to take. Braverman supported just such a radical policy when she stood for the leadership in 2022. Were she to outflank the PM over the coming months by becoming an energetic public advocate for such a step – either inside his Cabinet or outside it – that would count as a major incident likely to trigger aftershocks. At last year’s Tory conference, she told a Spectator event: ‘My position personally is that ultimately we do need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.’

Perhaps she will shortly update us on her thinking. Just remember: nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.

Ireland’s bonkers plan to kill cows to save the planet

You have to hand it to the green movement. When it comes to their increasingly farcical and delusional race towards the illusory target of net zero, they’re never short of ideas. Bad ideas, that is.

E-bikes and E-scooters that have an unfortunate tendency to explode in the middle of the night. Electric cars which take days to charge – when you can find a charger. Motorists threatened with eye-watering fines if they dare to go faster than 20 miles an hour. Honestly, don’t be surprised if the next generation of cars come equipped with only two gears and a built in speed inhibitor.

But here in Ireland, we have really taken the lead in coming up with Very Bad Ideas. In fact, the latest might be daftest yet.

The government wants to kill our cattle.

In what would normally be dismissed as little more than the frenzied imagination of a cranky conspiracy theorist who thinks the government really is out to get them, the Irish department of agriculture has come up with a plan to spend €600 million over the next three years, killing 200,000 dairy cattle.

What grave threat could possibly be posed by Daisy the dairy cow? Well, it’s all down to her methane. Yes, cow farts are apparently killing the planet.

Ireland’s Environmental Protective Agency claims that the agriculture sector accounted for 38 per cent of national greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 and, as they strive to reduce all agricultural emissions by 25 per cent by 2030, that means the cows have to go.

While addressing the Environment and Climate Committee last March, Minister for Agriculture and food, Charlie McConalogue, admitted that one of the bright ideas conjured up by the Dairy Food Division Group was to ‘explore a voluntary dairy reduction scheme as part of its Climate Action Plan for 2023.’

To which every beef and dairy farmer in Ireland promptly replied: ‘Hell, no’.

While our political elites and those who swim around in the civil service, the media and academia don’t like to admit it, Ireland is still a predominantly agrarian society. Many elements of the Irish media like to present the country as a vast tech-hub, home to giant data centres and where all the major social media companies have established their European headquarters. That is undoubtedly true, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

Before you even add beef into the equation, the dairy industry is worth at least €13 billion to the Irish economy, with 54,000 employed within its ranks. There’s a reason Irish butter brand Dairy Gold is so prized in the American market, and why we export dairy products to more than 100 other countries. Our climate and the quality of the grass makes for happy cows and happy cows make good meat and dairy.

You know you’re living in strange times when cows become a front line of the culture war but several recent marches by eco-zealots have seen young protesters holding placards proclaiming that anyone who eats meat or drinks milk obviously hates Mother Earth and probably wants to strangle a polar bear.

As one genuinely upset and bemused farmer told RTE News: ‘We’re being made out as if we’re killing the planet.’

There is certainly an element of the age old urban-countryside divide at play here, or as we call it in Ireland, jackeens versus culchies. The younger metropolitan protesters have never been to a farm in their life and hold the farmers in contempt, while the farmers just want to be left to alone to do their job.

But there is another element to this strange and ridiculous proposal which the green movement fails to have taken into account – the long-term ramifications.

This cull would be a disaster for agriculture sector, a disaster for the economy and a disaster for national morale. Why on earth should the taxpayer be expected to pay €600 million to kill our national herd?

First, they came for the dairy cattle, next they’ll be going after the beef herds. That leads us to one of the great contradictions inherent in the green movement: even if the powers that be massively reduce the beef herd, they won’t massively reduce the appetite for beef.

That means that stores will start importing cheap and inadequate beef from Brazil instead. Yes, the same Brazil that has been cutting down swathes of the Amazon to make way for pasture land for their own beef herds which they then export to countries like Ireland.

Can anyone who proposes culling our national herd honestly explain how it would be better for the planet if someone living in Dublin gets their Sunday roast flown all the way from Brazil rather than sourced from a local farm in county Meath, which is only a 90 minute car journey up the road?

It’s as if some form of collective madness, a strange miasma, has descended on our politicians and other advocates of this plan. It’s a madness which ignores reality and replaces it with a quasi-religious hunt for that Holy Grail of the eco-movement: net zero.

It’s also a contagious madness – the Dutch government and other EU countries are keeping a close eye on how things develop here.

The elites in this country don’t care if this move tanks the economy and leaves tens of thousands jobless. After all, they have their secure jobs and index linked pensions to look forward to. And they will still be able to engage in their most cherished pastime – boasting to other European countries about how Ireland ‘is leading the way’.

Let’s see how smug they are, though, when 50,000 extremely irate and recently impoverished Irish farmers descend on the Dail to make their displeasure known.

Honestly, you could sell tickets for that one.

Christian churches are under attack in Pakistan

On Wednesday, 19 churches and more than 80 Christian homes in Pakistan were ransacked after the inhabitants of the city of Jaranwala were accused of blasphemy against Islam. Perhaps the most unacknowledged aspect of the violence was just how expected it was. 

Nationwide, non-Muslim places of worship, especially churches, have been on high alert for the past month following burnings of the Quran carried out in Sweden by anti-Islam protesters. All the Islamic clergy and groups in Pakistan needed was an excuse to ignite the tinderbox.

The excuse was provided by a rumour that desecrated pages of the Quran were found near the home of a Christian family in Jaranwala. Such ‘evidence’ can easily be fabricated, or planted, to implicate someone in Pakistan. The accusation is, anyway, a mere formality since both the vox populi, and the country’s penal code, assert that the intangible, victimless crime of outraging Islam merits violence. The one thing radical Muslim mobs and the state of Pakistan differ over is whom to delegate the responsibility of carrying it out. 

Once it was alleged that desecrated pages of the Quran had been found in Jaranwala, mosques in the region whirred into action, inciting bloodshed with due references to the events in Sweden. Soon, members of the radical Islamist group Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), which has previously urged Pakistan to drop a nuclear bomb on France for Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of Muhammad, started assembling the mob. 

With 76 years of Islamic supremacism hammered into the national discourse, it was never going to be difficult to gather a sufficient number of Muslims who would already feel entitled to be offended by the existence of the church crosses the ensuing mob demolished and the Bibles they burnt. That Christians are considered ‘People of the Book’ in Islamic theology also becomes redundant when mosques remind everyone at least five times a day in the Islamic call to prayer that all other gods are false except Allah.

Even so, perhaps the most critical cog in Pakistan’s blasphemy machinery is the law enforcement personnel who have an unblemished record of total absence in such situations. It’s unfortunate that Pakistan, a country created and sustained as a security state, can’t seem to muster even residual security for some of its citizens. While critics of the state can disappear within the blink of an eye, majoritarian mobs always have ample time to make a show of their demolition acts, invariably recorded on video.

Having police deployment isn’t always beneficial though, as former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer found out in 2011. He was gunned down by his own security guard for having the audacity to say out loud that there might actually be something amiss with a law that wants to kill people for words.

Taseer had also defended Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who spent a decade in jail facing the death penalty over blasphemy charges after drinking water from the glass of a Muslim. Taseer’s murderer, who was paid to protect the man he killed and was hanged for his crime, is now a saint with his own shrine in the capital Islamabad, and inspired the rise of the TLP.

Similarly, Hindu police officers must be deployed to Hindu temples in the Pakistani province of Sindh. Muslim officers there seemingly cannot be relied on to protect the idols whose destruction is glorified in Islamist discourse.

Police also can’t be trusted with the protection of the mosques of the constitutionally excommunicated Ahmadi Muslim sect, which are being increasingly demolished by law enforcement themselves. (Among the many glittering distinctions of Pakistan when it comes to religious extremism is the fact that it is the only country in the world where an individual can be arrested for reciting the Quran, should they happen to identify as an Ahmadi.) 

Even so, after non-Muslim worship places are vandalised, homes torched, and individuals killed, there comes the most crucial step in Pakistan’s blasphemy template: Muslim victimhood.

While churches in Jaranwala were still ablaze, outgoing prime minister Shehbaz Sharif still managed to summon the audacity to condemn Sweden for ‘hurting the emotions of Muslims’. If it’s not Sweden, or France, a favourite rallying cry in Pakistan is for the plight of the Muslims of India, a country with 300,000 mosques, and growing – 300,000 more, at any rate, than the number of Hindu temples built in Pakistan since partition in 1947. 

Those who might be a tad bit surprised by Pakistan’s bravado in deciding to condemn other countries’ treatment of Muslims and Islam, might be intrigued to know that more is planned. The country is actively working towards exporting its sharia code to create a global Islamic blasphemy law. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) backed the move, insisting it will be egalitarian in nature.  

Their questionable logic goes: you provided equal-opportunity allowance for a book to be burnt, or a cartoon to be drawn. We codify death for offending the majority’s sentiments, allow the minorities’ places of worship to be frequently demolished, and practically hold millions violently hostage in their own country. Let’s call it even.

Au revoir to Le Gavroche

You do not need to be a ‘food person’ to know the name Roux. Or to be familiar with Le Gavroche, the family’s cherished Mayfair restaurant, soon to close after 57 years. They are a name and a restaurant that transcend beyond the world of Michelin stars. And this despite the fact the restaurant requires a considerably plump paycheck or a lot of saving up to become familiar with its riches.

Michel Roux – formerly Jr. – the son of the late Albert who founded Le Gavroche with his brother Michel Roux Sr. in 1967 – announced the restaurant’s closure late on Friday. The need for an improved ‘work-life balance’ was the primary cause. For a single restaurant closure to make global headlines is testament to its gravitas: here is a true institution, putting on tables the most precise and classic French cooking. 

‘This decision has not been made lightly’, wrote Roux, now 63. ‘Le Gavroche means so much, not just to myself and the Roux family, but to the wider Gavroche team and our guests who have become family over so many years.

I’d like the restaurant to close on a high. It’s about turning the page and moving forward so I can focus on my family and other business ventures. This is not the end of Le Gavroche – the restaurant may be closing, but the name will live on, as will the Roux dynasty.’

Dynastic is true. Le Gavroche is a legacy restaurant, one where history has long been made and one synonymous with Britain’s feted culinary revolution. In 1974, it became the first in Britain to win a Michelin star. Sitting down to sample such then unlikely fancies as foie gras and pot au feu? Ava Gardner, Charlie Chaplin; countless more besides. After being the first to win two stars, in 1977, it became the first to win three, in 1984. It has held a pair since 1993. 

And through its doors have come and gone many of the UK’s most celebrated chefs: Pierre Koffmann, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, and Monica Galetti among them. It has been reviewed by the best: Fay Maschler named Le Gavroche as ‘one of the 12 restaurants that changed the way we eat’; the late AA Gill heralded its food as ‘magnum-opus eating’; and the treasured chef and author Simon Hopkinson, visiting in 2008 and spending only £54 (a lot then, I understand), gave Le Gavroche a score of 9.75/10. 

Its dishes, many old fashioned, remain culinary standpoints in London eating culture. Le Caneton Gavroche is a whole poached duck in consomme, with three sauces and served for two. A relic motoring on with indeterminable staying power. 

Only four months ago I was tasked, alongside Reveller editor David Ellis, to cook perhaps the most famous Le Gavroche dish of them all: the Soufflé Suissesse. It has been on the menu since inception and more than 50 might be ordered even on a less than frenetic weekday evening. To stand there in the kitchen, Roux poring over each misadventure with double cream and cheddar cheese, felt special, not least for someone who so adores eating. Few kitchens hold such weight in a world where kitchens are so often forgotten.

And so here I bid au revoir to a titanic restaurant. One to be missed. French cooking has five mother sauces. I might go so far as to dub Le Gavroche one of Britain’s mother restaurants. The others? The Fat Duck, perhaps. Harvey’s, long gone, another. It is difficult to suppose others of the same stature and standing will follow. The glitz and glamour of fine French dining appears to be fading.

You should read Simon Raven

It is high summer but in the early mornings you can already sense the first thrilling signs of autumn, the perfect reading season. What a good moment to revisit the enjoyably cruel England of Simon Raven, as described in his matchless series of novels Alms for Oblivion. It is pagan, unjust, beautiful, funny and evocative. It encompasses the melancholy era of national decline, from the last trumpets of empire to the seedy, garish concrete and glass squalor of Ted Heath’s fevered age. It is funny, bitter and full of a surprisingly uninhibited love of this country. It is interested in history, patriotism, courage, money, food, drink and sex, not necessarily in that order. Much (though not all) of the sex takes the form of unadorned lust. Unlike so much modern fiction, it does not more or less ignore the great issues of its time, but plunges boldly into them. I think of it often, even when I am not reading the books: vicious, lithe, boozy, treacherous Angela Tuck, Maisie the principled whore, Tessie Buttock and her grubby, cosy hotel off the Cromwell Road, ruined, ravaged Fielding Gray, brave, beautiful Hetta Frith, honourable Peter Morrison, a last and lingering survivor of the age of chivalry, and devious Somerset Lloyd-James with his lisp, his shameless greed and his yellow bald bonce. There are dozens of others, hilarious, tragic, left-wing and reactionary, cultured and philistine. They carry on for all time, a little like Dickens’s characters, whether you are watching them or not.  

Raven’s world, so remote from – yet so similar to – the land in which we now live, is accessible through nine brief and pungent books. I advise skipping one volume, Come Like Shadows, which falls well below the standard of the rest. In fact few of his other books are up to much. But Alms for Oblivion really ought to be on any civilised person’s reading list. You will be relieved afterwards when you return, shocked and educated, to whatever cosy, tasteful banality you generally inhabit. But you will be glad you went into Raven’s darker and more dangerous countryside, and it will not be long before you yearn to pay another visit.

In Raven’s universe, Catullus, not Christ, sets the moral standard and a frank, unapologetic paganism lurks everywhere. Why should we object? We do not often enough consider what the alternative is to our civilisation. That is one of the reasons why we have let it crumble. You certainly do not have to like all that you find. The Furies of the ancient world still roam, taking horrible revenges. You will be surprised how little you mind this. The Kindly Ones appeal to us today because our deep thirst for justice is never really quenched either by the feeble pretence of retribution provided by the secular courts, or by the increasingly vague versions of hell offered to us by the modern Christian church.

My favourite of these episodes involves the frustrated woman who stuffs her annoying old mother into a care home, and then promptly has her head sawn off by the first lover she brings back to her – now parent-free – little flat. You have to laugh, as her discarded mother certainly does.

It is more feline than Waugh and perhaps, at the bottom, even more serious. The people, often closely based on real men and women who you can enjoy trying to identify, are drawn lovingly but without mercy. The apparent capriciousness of fate is shockingly but credibly portrayed. Courage, though praised for its nobility, is often penalised with death or disaster. Goodness does not often work out well and can be punished as harshly as evil. Trickery and cynicism are rewarded. There is perhaps rather more homosexuality and self-abuse than you might initially expect, but then, isn’t that true of real life? Above all, the writing is beautiful, so much so that you seldom realise just how skilful it is. And the grosser pleasures of life, the dinner at the Ritz paid for by someone else, the second magnum of Premier Cru Claret, the lavish, stunning doses of Cognac, are as lovingly described as they would be in the expurgated bits of Brideshead Revisited.

I am especially fond of a gluttonous luncheon in a German railway dining car, aboard a train for which death is waiting a little further down the line.

Raven, thank goodness, has not been expurgated. Where would you start? Yet he has, I fear, begun to fade away. You can still buy the Alms for Oblivion books, in chunky anthologies containing three or four novels at once. But does anyone? When I mention his name, few nowadays recognise it.  I confess I do not much like the cover designs of these new volumes, which have not properly caught the raffishness or the fun of the stories. I prefer my tattered, disintegrating 1980s paperbacks. And I still learn new things from each reading, as well as occasionally being moved to tears by their undiluted love of honour and courage and their unusual respect (in these unmilitary, unvirtuous times) for the military virtues. Raven places himself in his books in not very flattering ways, sometimes as the chilly, disillusioned Captain Detterling (he has no Christian name), more often as the tricky, unreliable character called Fielding Gray, given to vanishing when most needed. It is clear that Raven yearns for the densely forested, bibulous, raucous and morally shaky English paradise of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, with beautiful Sophy Western waiting at the end of the story with her forgiving arms wide open. I must assume that he also lived and breathed Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’, with its stern reminders that we can all expect Death’s equalising scythe, however grand we are, and sooner than we think. Raven was well-acquainted with Death, and did not mind keeping close company with him.        

It is a striking paradox that one of the country’s foremost homosexual authors (Raven was in fact sexually omnivorous, but that would not normally prevent his being claimed for the rainbow cause) has not really been taken into the bosom of the gay movement. I think this is because he was never really the Stonewall type. Whenever I urge his works on anybody less than about 70 years old, I am a little worried that they simply will not be able to stand his pre-modern acceptance of sad and bad outcomes, or his cheerful cynicism about almost all sorts of sex. There are, alas, quite a few unacceptable words by today’s standards, but they are what the people involved would actually have said in those times so what are we to do? Some horrible things are said, which make me wince, but I suspect they are a true reflection of how such people spoke, not all that long ago, and it is important that we know it. If we are to believe the sentiments placed in the mouths of some of the finer characters, Raven was a fierce enemy of prejudice long before it was fashionable. But try this, from the opening of The Rich Pay Late (set in 1956) to see if you might like the style, at least: ‘A thick yellow fog was settling into Chancery Lane for the night like a cat into its basket. The lights from the windows opposite shone as from a far country; there was neither sight nor sound of the street below.’

I also cannot get out of my mind this sweet passage from Friends in Low Places just before a necessary and violent death destroys the idyll: ‘So Mark and Isobel were happy amid the growing piles of filth and broken glass. To complain of these gave a zest to love: as did the sullen clouds which were now gathering in the evening sky, for the threat of storm when shelter is near always stirs a delicious thrill of mock anxiety in the stomach.’ The country wedding which is the climax of Friends in Low Places is superficially a ghastly clash between rural England and the raffish London world, and rather well done. But it also is extraordinarily moving, and even more so when the reader is coming round for the second time and knows the ugly, tragic future of the loveable, beautiful couple at the altar.

And to set alongside the gourmandising is this description of the hellish cuisine of suburban England just after rationing and well before Elizabeth David. A very wicked man has gone to his parents’ home to try to trick them out of a lot of money. To do so he must put up with this: ‘Mrs Holbrook appeared with a trolley on which were three plates of watery scrambled egg, a dish of thinly-cut luncheon roll, and a flagon of Cydrax. She picked up the whisky decanter, checked the contents and carried it out of the room at arm’s length, like a hospital nurse with a bed-pan.’ Reader, if you do not know what luncheon-roll or Cydrax may have been, that is your good fortune. These things existed and they were not good. The passage stirs such memories of a world which was once very real that it actually makes me shudder.

Why do I return again and again to these novels, even though by now I know know them almost by heart. What is so good about the ten volumes of Alms for Oblivion?  Is it the recurring characters, many of them based on Raven’s own contemporaries at Charterhouse, the school where he got up to the ‘usual thing’ only much more of it than was actually usual? These included Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father William, who became editor of the Times. You have wonder what he had done to Raven to provoke the systematic, sustained and hilarious revenges taken on him in these books. Another was Jim Prior, Margaret Thatcher’s wettest cabinet minister. Jim Prior was so infuriatingly good that Raven tried hard to diminish him but actually failed completely. I have eventually come to think that he is the noblest person in the saga, partly because long ago I knew him slightly and was impressed then and later by his profound decency. But I wonder if Jim was really so relaxed about it all. In a way he (disguised as the independent-minded Tory Peter Morrison) was the pillar of the whole saga, a man of high intelligence, wit, honour and courage who I am rather proud to have met. I once asked him about the books and his part in them. He chortled that they were ‘Just James Bond for p**fs’ (I suspect the word he used, then in normal currency, has become unsayable). The airy dismissal put an end to the discussion. I have always thought he was in fact reluctant to discuss a work in which so much of his private nature was revealed, or to admit the resemblance. His jest is funny, but isn’t at all a fair description of these stories, with their deep, thoughtful recollections of the last months of the Indian empire, of the army as it was and now is not, of occupied Germany and the catastrophe of Suez, that great event which so few now understand or recall.

Towards the end there’s a very touching episode in which a number of unexpected people rally in the defence of England, tradition and beauty, and in which the revolutionaries are shown up fully for the horrors they are. At this point Raven reveals an unexpected love for the King James Bible, gothic architecture and John Bunyan that his often made me wonder what was in his mind at his life’s end. Just because the stories are sometimes absolutely filthy, which they are, does not mean they are not serious. I think it speaks rather well of his old friends that none of them ever tried to sue Raven (at least, not for the way he showed them up in his novels). I wonder if anybody living knows the whole concealed code of the saga. I am sure, each time I read it, that many scores are being settled here, that something is happening which we are not fully aware of and now may never be. But it passes the great tests. It is a joy to read, and you will be a better person for having done so.

The National: ‘Can an independent Afghanistan offer lessons for Scotland?’

It’s a tough time for Scottish nationalists these days. Polling for indyref2 remains static while the SNP’s own ratings have tanked. There are still no ferries or any sign of a workable bottle return scheme. And the Dear Leader has left the stage to be replaced by hapless Humza Yousaf: the biggest downgrade since Ian Blackford succeeded Charles Kennedy.

So no wonder then that the National – a self-identifying newspaper in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act – is forced to look elsewhere to make its case for independence. In their zest to cast off the British yoke, the hard-of-thinking editorial team have stumbled on a brilliant idea: why not study the 65 countries that left the British Empire and how they became independent?

Naturally, the National has chosen to gloss over Scotland’s own imperial past, with Scots at one stage holding a third of all top jobs in the Empire. But amusingly, their ongoing quest to proclaim the virtues of self-determination has led them to cite some unusual case studies from around the world. A great example is offered in today’s edition, which features the legendary headline: ‘Can an independent Afghanistan offer any lessons for Scotland?’

Forget Denmark, Norway, Ireland and Malta: Scots can take inspiration from the seventh poorest nation on earth. Didn’t see that on a Yes poster anywhere!

Answers to The Spectator Diary 2024 Quiz

1. Which confectionary company’s name reflects the fact that it was founded by Hans Riegel in Bonn? Haribo
2. Which item, designed by a Russian man in 1947, features on the flag of Mozambique? The AK-47 rifle, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov and used in Mozambique’s war of independence against Portugal
3. ‘It’s important you have a good, long right sock.’ Boris Johnson, talking about which activity? Cycling. ‘If you’re on a bicycle, it’s important you have a good, long right sock if you want to avoid it being caught in the chain.’ We think Johnson meant your trousers being caught in the chain, rather than the sock itself. But attention to detail hasn’t always been his thing.
4. Which is the only US state in whose name the instances of one letter outnumber all the other letters combined? Alabama
5. What was notable about the victory of the horse Love Affairs in the 3.05 at Goodwood on Tuesday 6 September 2022? It was Queen Elizabeth’s last victory as an owner
6. The actor Jim Carter once appeared in a western called Rustlers’ Rhapsody. In one scene he was required to fire a gun, but on the first take he made a mistake. Brian Blessed made the same mistake while firing a gun in Flash Gordon, as did Ewan McGregor with a lightsaber in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. What did they all do? They made the noise
7. Rishi Sunak keeps a photograph of which football manager on his desk in 10 Downing Street? Lawrie McMenemy
8. At which event in London did Griff Rhys Jones announce that there had been a complaint about the noise, from a woman in Belgium? Live Aid

9. In the bar of which English county cricket ground will you find a stuffed fox called Joey? Grace Road (Leicestershire being the Foxes)
10. Which type of trousers take their name from the second-largest city in the Indian state of Rajasthan? Jodhpurs. Sir Pratap Singh, a younger son of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, popularised the design in the late 19th century.
11. When staying in Australian hotels, Lewis Hamilton always requests a room on one of the higher floors, because of his fear of what? Spiders
12. On a Queen song released in 1978, all four members of the band play which type of bell? Bicycle bell (on the song ‘Bicycle Race’)
13. Who was Uganda’s heavyweight boxing champion from 1951 to 1960? Idi Amin

14. Which 1998 disaster movie does Nasa show to its trainee managers, to see how many of the 168 factual errors they can spot? ‘Armageddon’
15. Which is the only day of the week not mentioned in the lyrics to ‘Lady Madonna’ by The Beatles? Saturday

Are we prepared for the end of obesity?

Sixty years ago, my biology teacher told me (so it must have been true) that after the war, some Americans were so delighted that the restrictions on food had been lifted that they ate capsules containing a tape worm so that they could eat to their heart’s content without getting fat. This, of course, revolted me, as it was intended to. I never forgot what she said. 

Twenty years later, I was to see the future of the world, at least as far as obesity and type-II diabetes were concerned, on the island of Nauru. There, the inhabitants had suddenly become very rich, thanks to the mining of phosphate rock, and went from a strenuous subsistence to wealthy indolence in a matter of years. With nothing much else to do, they ate and drank enormously, grew fat, suffered from diabetes and died early. 

This was the fate of much of the western world, give or take the indolence, especially, though not exclusively, in the English-speaking part of it. No doubt the relatively reduced culinary tradition of the English-speaking world made it susceptible to obesity because quantity had long been a substitute for quality where food was concerned. There has been a peculiar historical reversal also: where once an embonpoint was a manifestation of wealth, obesity became, at least statistically, a marker of poverty.

It is said that a quarter of the British population is now obese, with a Body Mass Index (weight in kilos divided by height in metres squared) of 30 or more. Obesity is not only unsightly, except, perhaps, for those who like Rubens, but bad for the health. It brings in its train all manner of disadvantages such as an increased susceptibility to cancer, obstructive sleep apnoea, and Covid, but above all type-II diabetes. Obesity is now so prevalent that it might one day reverse the increase in life expectancy that we had long supposed to be all but a law of nature. 

There has also long been a kind of culture war over the nature of obesity. In the blue corner, as it were, are those who see obesity as the wages of sin, that of gluttony in particular. In the red corner are those who see obesity as straightforwardly an illness, brought on by such factors as genetic endowment, commercial pressure to overeat, cheap food full of sugar and fat, and so forth, all beyond the power of individuals to control. There has been a general shift towards the red corner: when I was young, everyone was in the blue corner, like the gym master who told a fat boy who was struggling to lever himself over a horse that there were no fat people in Belsen. This might have been true, but it was not in the best of taste to have said so; and even if the fat boy were fat because he ate too much – well, which of us is in a position to cast the first cream cake? 

Most of us stand, or fight, somewhere between the two corners now. NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) seems by its language in its report about the anti-obesity drug, semaglutide (Ozempic), to veer towards the red corner, for it describes the fat as people living with overweight or living with obesity, more or less as I live with my wife. Inside every fat person, then, there really is a thin person trying to get out, that is to say the real him. His obesity is adventitious, an unwelcome stranger, like a tumour. 

In recommending weekly injections of semaglutide (about £18 each) in persons whose BMI is 35 or over – that is to say the very obese – and with a secondary complication of obesity, especially type-II diabetes, NICE is careful not to imply that no other treatment, such as advice as to diet and exercise, is necessary in addition, or that semaglutide is a complete solution to the problem of obesity in our society, if for no other reason that, for the government to give the drug to every obese person in Britain would cost around £15 billion a year. Even allowing for the debasement of our currency, and deducting the savings made by a reduction in the need to treat type-II diabetes, that is quite a lot of money. 

When the patent runs out, of course, the price will plummet, but other, even more effective drugs are said to be under development, that will be likewise expensive to begin with. But can it be very long before someone advocates the use of semaglutide prophylactically, in childhood? It is an appetite suppressant and it will prevent them getting fat. Is not prevention better than cure? At least a quarter of children in Britain are now obese: think of the misery and ill-health that could be forestalled by only one injection a week! 

Demand for semaglutide in the private sector is bound also to rise, and woe betide any private doctor who refuses to prescribe it for his well-off patients living with obesity who can afford to pay for it themselves – unless or until its long-term use is shown to have deleterious effects. Then the patients will turn on their doctors with the full force of their tort lawyers; they will even say that their doctor did not sufficiently warn them of the one possible serious side-effect so far associated with the drug, acute pancreatitis, a dangerous and unpleasant condition. If, as so far seems unlikely, other serious side-effects come to light in the course of the years to come, the doctors or the drug company, or both, will be sued for lack of foresight.

What of the cultural effects of a drug for obesity? In my childhood, my mother had a book by a man called Gayelord Hauser titled Eat and Grow Beautiful. Perhaps someone will soon write a book, thanks to semaglutide, titled Eat Now, Slim Later. Living with overweight, after all, is a treatable condition.      

Young people don’t even know they’re being taken for a ride

Travelling home on the train last week, I heard the dulcet sounds of political discourse drifting towards me across the carriage. The words ‘social housing’ were followed soon after by the word ‘moron.’ I removed my headphones and attended more closely. 

The speakers were two men aged about 30, whipping themselves up into a lather over the suggestion that there ought to be less social housing in central London. They seemed to be genuinely astonished by an argument they’d come across which pointed out that social housing tenants are dependent on the state for subsidy. ‘Moronic!’ they said, ‘insane!’ 

 Based on their clothing and accents, I’d bet money on both of these men being graduates, probably working in professional creative jobs of some kind, meaning that they’ll be on salaries of £40-50k, which puts them in the top third of earners nationally. 

And yet, given that they got off the train at Peckham Rye, an inner London suburb that is now home to a large number of millennial graduates made downwardly mobile by housing costs, they’re probably spending about half of their after-tax income on a dingy flat share, while also experiencing the highest level of taxation since world war two on top of their student loan repayments. 

I doubt very much that they realise that this is happening to them in a Labour-run borough in which 40 per cent of housing units are allocated to social housing, with roughly half of those tenants out of work, and many having arrived in the country only recently: in London as a whole, one fifth of social housing tenants were born overseas. 

If our Peckham Rye friends somehow manage to save up for the deposit, they might just about be able to afford a £300-400k ex-council flat within walking distance of Peckham Rye station. Their next-door neighbour will then be subsidised, potentially to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds per year, in order to live in exactly the same quality of housing. 

In other words, whether or not they choose to believe it, their tax revenue is not only being spent on their unemployed neighbours’ rent, it is also being used to reduce the supply of private housing available to them, thus driving up prices even further. 

The problem here is that, like most voters, these tragic residents of Peckham Rye can’t give correct answers to these two questions:

1) How much do you need to earn to be in the top 1 per cent?

2) How much do you need to earn to be a net-contributor? 

People tend to overestimate on one and underestimate on two. They assume you need to be earning millions in order to be in the top 1 per cent when in fact the figure is more like £160k. And they think that most people are net-contributors, when in fact most people – by design – are not. 

Depending on how you calculate it (there are a lot of variables at play), you need to be earning at the bare minimum £40k in order to break even on what you take out of the state in any given year. In other words, it is the top third of earners, and in particular the top 1 per cent, who are responsible for keeping the financial show on the road. 

These figures will vary between countries, of course, but the general principle remains the same across the West. Income conforms to a Pareto distribution, and welfare states are designed to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. These facts in combination mean that most people end up taking out more than they put in. 

All of which is to say that, although the upper middle classes are often very annoying, they are not parasites or sponges, as many on the left would have you believe. Quite the opposite. We are all incredibly dependent on them, even if most voters don’t realise it. 

Of course I do recognise that the effects of capitalism are often cruel and perverse, and that people can make many different kinds of contributions to the nation state aside from tax revenue, for instance as stay-at-home mothers or by performing essential work that needs to be subsidised (British farmers, for instance, are in this category). 

But our current reality is that the top 1 per cent of UK earners contribute 28 per cent of all income tax. And yet, because most voters don’t understand the numbers, they expect the state to ‘give back’ money they think is theirs when in fact they’re asking for money contributed by other taxpayers. ‘I’ve paid into the system all my life!’ says every single pensioner in the comments section under an article on the triple lock. ‘No,’ replies the weary millennial, ‘your National Insurance contributions have already been spent, and were too low to cover the cost of your pension anyway – you paid for a much smaller sum for the previous generation, and now I’m tasked with paying a much larger sum for you.’ 

And as the demographic pyramid becomes ever more inverted, working age people are facing an ever heavier tax burden, even while pay stagnates and house prices rise. This is why the economic problems generated by low birth rates are so intractable. 

Most people don’t have an intuitive grasp of a problem, which – to be fair to them – is really not at all intuitive. They don’t realise that the generous welfare provision we’ve all grown used to is paid for by an increasingly tiny share of the population, and they don’t realise that this system will eventually collapse under the weight of an ageing population with 70 years worth of sub-replacement fertility behind it. Our Peckham Rye friends are being taken for a ride and they don’t even realise it. 

Personally, as a 31-year-old London resident – and a mother, too – I very much realise that I’m being taken for a ride. One feature of being self-employed is that you end up with a very clear idea of how much income tax you pay because you have to transfer it directly to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, and they don’t even send you a ‘thank you’ note in return. You tell yourself that this tax revenue is going towards good and important things – okay, not tax breaks for families with young children, or long-term infrastructure, or generally any investment in the future – but other good and important things, right? 

But then sometimes you’re brought up short by how badly the social contract has frayed. Not long after I completed my last tax return, I happened to read a news item about a foreign national who had committed a series of particularly horrible crimes and had relied on taxpayer funded legal aid in order to avoid deportation. His legal aid bill was almost exactly equal to my income tax bill. I doubt he’ll be sending me a ‘thank you’ note either. 

I’m not saying I oppose legal aid, or social housing, or state pensions, or the welfare state in general. I believe that the nation state ought not to be understood like a shop, in which people come and go as they please, with no particular connection to the business or its customers. It should instead be understood like a home, in which people are obliged to look after one another: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And this should be a home in which the inhabitants have control over who they live with (i.e. immigration policy), and the standards of behaviour they expect in return for support (i.e. crime policy). One of the best things about living in a rich country is that we can spend the surplus on looking after the young, the old, the disabled, and those fallen on hard times. I’m not proposing that we do otherwise. 

But what do we do as that surplus shrinks? Because it is shrinking, and fast. For now, most of the property-less net contributors of Peckham Rye don’t know this, and even if they did, they would be highly reluctant to acknowledge that the policies they tend to support – mass migration, the triple lock, Covid lockdowns – are policies that make them worse off and further disincentivise productive, law-abiding people from playing by the rules. This is a class suffering from false consciousness. When, I wonder, will they realise? 

It’s time to end the rewilding menace

There’s a ghastly predictability to the news that the University of Sussex – in Brighton, naturally – wants to set aside nearly half of its land for ‘rewilding’. According to our local paper, the Argus :  

‘The University of Sussex will rewild 42 per cent of its campus land in a move which aims to promote more biodiversity, achieved by designating land into areas where the grass will be cut a limited number of times a year as well as other areas where no mowing will take place. Vice-chancellor Professor Sasha Rosenail said: “The loss of nature should be of crucial concern to every inhabitant of our planet…universities, particularly those fortunate to have large, non-urban campuses, can and should play a leading role in guiding nature’s recovery”.’  

The comments section – where the traditional roustabout side of Brighton makes its plain-speaking presence felt – was less than enthusiastic. Some pointed out that as the campus is adjacent to the South Downs (an area of outstanding national beauty) it’s teeming with biodiversity anyhow; talk about taking coleanthus to Lewes castle. Several commentators believe that this is just an attempt to save money on maintenance; ‘Teenagers rewild their rooms by never cleaning them – lots of bio-diversity in there!’   

You can’t blame us for being cynical. This is, after all, Brighton where the Labour (and then Green) council banned certain pesticides and allowed weeds to reclaim hundreds of miles of pavement – to the extent that old ladies ended up in hospital after nasty falls and dog-owners were forced to cover their pets’ heads with snoods lest the nasty seed-spears which lurked in the ‘bio-diverse’ foxtail barley grass become lodged in their ears or paws. These need to be removed by vets at the cost of hundreds of pounds, as in the case of Molly the rescue dog whose owner Adam Page said ‘She was crying and shaking her head in pain, it was horrible to see… these seeds are everywhere, with weeds over the pavement and verges.’   

A councillor from the Labour group which took over ten weeks ago said that four years of rewilding the sidewalks of Brighton and Hove would take a long time to put right, weeds having caused lasting damage to the pavements and making many of them impassable for the elderly and disabled.  

In Green Brighton, rewilding was also expressed through allowing public conveniences to return to a ‘natural’ state without the modern curses of toilet paper or liquid soap; this was the logical conclusion of the nature-worship which effectively leads to misanthropy, as people are seen as little more than a blight on the landscape.   

We got their number, and we showed the Greens the door. But the attempts to carry out the misguided policy of rewilding continue nationally. As I wrote here in 2020: ‘“Wild” used to be one of my favourite words. It was in all the songs I loved best — ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Born to Be Wild’. How times have changed. Wild — once meaning brave, bold, reckless — is now yet another sanctimonious nag.’  

I wrote this when rewilding was being crowbarred into the new-model Archers, which at first struck me as unfeasible when a conservative-minded old lady, Peggy Archer, gave half a million pounds to a rewinding project. But on second thoughts it did make sense, as the Archer matriarch is wealthy – and rewilding is definitely the shiny new toy of those with more money than sense.  

If Marie Antoinette was around today, she wouldn’t be playing at milkmaids – she’d be demanding that wolves and bears be allowed to fight to the death at your local petting zoo. Though its propagandists try to cosy-up their pet project as some Arcadian vision of kiddies skipping about making daisy chains, the originators were somewhat more honest. In a paper published in 1998, the biologists Michael Soule and Reed Noss established rewilding as being based on the ‘3Cs’ – cores, corridors and carnivores. The first two won’t be scaring the horses but the third should make us all choke on our self-righteous organic muesli. Rewilders believe that, ultimately, ‘large predators’ should play regulatory rules in ecosystems. Talk about a rich man’s plaything – have George Monbiot and Zac Goldsmith never seen Jurassic Park?   

Goldsmith’s younger brother Ben, a multi-millionaire farmer, has form on riding roughshod over the objections of boring old humans. In 2020 Goldsmith the Younger was investigated after being accused by neighbouring farmers of releasing wild boar from his land, something he denied and dismissed as ‘a bit of a Vicar of Dibley-style local ding-dong.’ But rich landowners as a whole are disastrously prone to pushing around tenant farmers as part of their grandiose visions. Last year NFU vice-president Tom Bradshaw said: ‘We’re hearing that some landlords are saying they don’t need tenants and they are going to be putting the land into nature recovery. Where does that leave the tenants?’ Let them eat kale! Around this time Ed Sheeran announced that he planned to purchase farmland to plant ‘as many trees as possible’ to offset his carbon footprint after years of flying, leading Jono Dixon, a farmer in East Yorkshire, to tell the Mail ’I’m sick to death of this tree planting rewilding mumbo-jumbo malarkey. We seem to be surrounded by a bunch of complete utter imbeciles who think they know everything but actually no nowt at all’.   

I’ll say. It’s all oohing and ahhing when the cute critters rock up – Mayor Khan has arranged for a pair of Eurasian beavers to arrive in Ealing this autumn – but the when they’ve got their paws under the table, you’d better start looking over your shoulder for the big boys, as Christopher Snowdon pointed out when writing about wolves here:  

‘George Monbiot is probably right when he says that city dwellers enjoy an occasional frisson of excitement from thinking that wolves are on the prowl somewhere, but this seems an insufficient reason to overrule the wishes of people in villages who will have to ‘co-exist’ with them. Rural management should not be dictated by whatever makes townies feel edgy.’  

It’s not just humans who suffer from rewilding; the darts which the Greens brought to the Brighton streets injure not just domestic animals but foxes and badgers too. Scotland’s largest landowners, the Danish billionaires Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen, have had red deer culled in order to plant trees. What sort of idiot prefers trees to deer? Maybe George Monbiot, who once proposed that Britain’s uplands should be cleared of ‘the white plague’ — the animals formerly known as sheep. Many clowns dream of bringing bears back, which anyone who has ever found one hanging out by their American friend’s swimming pool will know is not a good idea at all.  

But it’s consistent, because rewilding is an attempt to go back in time. Not just physically to when carnivores ruled the earth, but politically too, before messy old democracy, when the wolves ate the lambs – or took the virginities of their brides, with droit du seigneur, as a matter of course. Before pesky people and their petty desire to have a decent standard of living caused human habitats to blight the landscape.   

Rewilding is the end result of stinginess and snobbishness – two of the worst human traits, so when you find them combined, you just know the idea will be a stinker. Rewilders remind me of those rich people who call for the defunding the police from inside their – privately policed – gated communities. Yes, the farmers and the herbicides aren’t perfect. But without them, only savagery and survival of the fittest – or in the case of rewilding, the richest – awaits.