Immigration and a government in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion

Hurrah! The government, it was reported yesterday, is working on getting some more migrants. To plug a million-strong post-Brexit labour shortage in the hospitality sector, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have been instructed by Downing Street to start talks to open the doors to young French, German, Spanish and Swiss nationals.

If it goes well, the plan is to perhaps invite a few more to help out with farming, fish processing and all sorts of other sectors of the economy that are looking a bit peaky. ‘European baristas and au pairs could return to Britain under government scheme’, read the headline. Just like the good old days, eh?  

This seems eminently sensible to me, as I expect it will to many people. It’s a win-win. Brexit, whatever its many-splendoured virtues, has given a bit of a knock to our national supply of handsome, olive-skinned twentysomething Europeans prepared to make flat whites, sling croissants and serve chicken nuggets to the children of overstretched North London liberals. Meanwhile, our own pallid, knock-kneed twentysomethings, who didn’t have the maturity and long-term vision to vote for Brexit, have reportedly been feeling bitter that it has put a dent in their own chances of living and working in Europe.  

This is a move that will reverse that and make everyone a bit happier. It’s a much-needed boost to a struggling sector of the labour market; and a sop, reciprocally, to the wanderlust of our own young.

It doesn’t even – calm down back there – need be seen as an example of how a demented national act of self-harm is being quietly, shamefacedly dismantled piece by piece without any of the people responsible admitting it. Rather, we could say, it’s a piece of fine-tuning: it’s an adjustment, of the sort we’re making and were always going to make, as a newly sovereign nation, to fit our interests. It’s an example, indeed, of just what the evangelists of Brexit promised they were going to do – to control our borders and decide for ourselves who we were going to let in (foxy Spanish baristas) and who we were not (drug-peddling Albanian dog-bangers). 

But isn’t it wearying that we don’t say that, and that we can’t say that? Isn’t it a demonstration of how hard it is to do actual real-world politics these days that you can’t, simply, say: ‘Here’s a sensible policy that’s a win for all of us.’ It needs to be sold it to the opinion-strong, complexity-intolerant ideologues whose anger the Tory leadership still fears. That is, it’s being hedged around with all sorts of fudges and tripwires to keep it within broad-brush metrics that don’t, in themselves, tell us much about whether a policy is a good one.  

There are two things that Braverman and Jenrick, at least in the way that this is reported, seem to be anxious about. The first is finding a way to let lots of young Europeans in in such a way that they don’t affect the net migration figures. The argument – which, as I’ve said, is as respectably a Brexity argument as could be made – was never about ‘keeping migrants out’: it was about taking back control as to which ones to let in.

In a sane world, you could say (for instance): ‘Hey, good news – net migration is up by 10 per cent, but instead of being 20 per cent foxy baristas and 80 per cent Albanian dog-bangers, it’s now 80 per cent foxy baristas and 20 per cent dog-bangers.’ But no. The terror, from those who feel strongly on the subject but don’t have the patience to think about the composition of migration as well as its size, is that a headline number going up will result in shrieks of betrayal. 

Then there’s the idea that they might, as would seem perfectly sensible, want to open such a reciprocal youth mobility scheme to any of our former EU partners who had youth willing to travel. Thus, our potential pool of available labour would expand and, in turn, so would the number of places to which our own young people might be able to travel in search of work.

That would require us to do a deal with the whole EU – which would certainly be easier, it being a bloc, and might be the only way to do it at all – but heaven forbid it look like we’re backsliding and going cap in hand to Brussels. So instead, we’re told ‘Braverman and Jenrick are said to prefer agreements with individual countries. In particular, they want to negotiate agreements which would result in large numbers of French au pairs and Spanish hospitality workers’. What’s wrong with, say, Lithuanian au pairs and Polish hospitality workers? It remains a mystery.  

It puts me in mind, a little, of a running joke from The A-Team. You might remember that B A Baracus – the beefy, gold-festooned, mohawk-sporting character played by Mr T – had an Achilles heel: he’d happily leap from a trench to knock the heads of two armed baddies together like coconuts, but he was terrified of flying. 

He’d freak out as soon as someone tried to get him airborne. So when they needed to get him on a plane, they used post-hypnotic suggestion. Hannibal had ‘programmed’ him under hypnosis so that when he heard the word ‘eclipse’ he’d fall instantly fast asleep, and they could load him aboard as cargo. (He’d wake up ornery, but in the right place.) Anyway, of course there’d be a firefight, and someone would shout to him: ‘B A! I’m out of ammo! Gimme clips!’ and zonk, out he’d go right in the middle of the fighting. 

Here we are, bullets whizzing around us. We’re in a tight spot. But the Conservative government is in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion. If the words ‘more net migration’ or ‘EU-wide migration deal’ are said out loud, there’s a danger that they’ll pass clean out. So they are going through quite the contortions to avoid using forms of words that even hint at such a thing. I pity the fool.  

Drones strike Moscow in fifth attack since May

For the fifth time in three months, Moscow has once again been targeted by drones. In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, the Russian ministry of defence reported that two drones attacked the city in the early hours of this morning.

Despite the ministry’s claims to have intercepted and jammed the drones, they were still able to inflict damage on two buildings in the south west of the city. According to the government news agency TASS, one of the drones hit a non-residential building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a mere two miles from the Kremlin and just over the river from Moscow’s famous Gorky Park.

The building damaged by the drone is also a stone’s throw from the main building of the ministry of defence and just over the road from the Alexander Nevsky military hospital. According to Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev, several other buildings belonging to Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the GRU, are located in the area, including their cyber offence and illegals programme headquarters. That these buildings narrowly avoided being struck will undoubtably be unsettling for Russia’s military officials.

The second drone hit a business centre south of the Moscow river on Likhachev Avenue. The building was still under construction, with damage done to the 17th and 18th storeys. According to Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, no one was injured or killed in the incident.

Footage circulating on social media claiming to show the immediate aftermath of the attack shows smoke rising up from a tall building whose upper windows have been blown out. More pictures show shattered glass littering the pavement on the ground below the alleged drone strike locations.

Once again, Russia has blamed the incident on Ukraine, calling it an attempted ‘terrorist attack’ by the ‘Kyiv regime’. Whoever is responsible for the drones, it is quickly becoming clear that Moscow’s reality as the new home front in Russia’s war in Ukraine is here to stay.

This is the fifth time the city has been targeted since the start of May. Despite Moscow’s showy air defences that were erected at the start of the year, these drones have been able to repeatedly fly into the heart of the city. This isn’t the largest drone attack Moscow has encountered since then, and it certainly won’t be the last.

The news comes as Russia continues to shell Odesa in south Ukraine following the collapse of the grain export deal last week, with the city sustaining heavy casualties and large levels of destruction. That once again damage has successfully been inflicted on Russia’s capital city will no doubt provide a small morale booster to Ukrainians waking up this morning.

Solar panels in, swimming pools out: 2023’s property trends

Inflation has finally dipped a little but is still riding high, and mortgage rates may still rise further: Britain’s households are suffering a pay squeeze. But what are home-owners still spending their money on – and what has fallen out of favour? Here is Spectator Life‘s guide to the winners and losers in the property market this year so far…

The winners…

Solar panels

High energy bills have kickstarted British householders into going green. During the first half of this year, sales of solar panels were up 82 per cent on the same period last year, according to MCS, the standards body. The hot spots of solar installations? Cornwall, Wiltshire and Aberdeenshire. Home-buyers are also keen on them, says Surrey buying agent Richard Winter. ‘Five years ago I’d only have one or two buyers if at all asking for them, but now more buyers are seeking them. However they must always ask if solar panels are included in the sale price.’ This Somerset property for sale has rooftop panels.

Veg patches

With the cost of cucumbers up 83 per cent and tomatoes up 50 per cent – according to the Food Foundation – is it any wonder more of us are growing our own? Kitchen gardens and greenhouses are in. Ed Jephson of Stacks Property Search says: ‘A vegetable patch is right up there on the list of must-haves for my clients relocating to the countryside. Even a couple of raised beds will do – as long as there’s enough space to grow some tomatoes, radishes and salad leaves.’ This house in Berkshire has a kitchen garden fit for a Michelin-starred chef.

Shabby-chic garden furniture

With hot tubs deemed far too expensive to run – B&Q’s head of home delivery reports that no one is buying them right now – we are turning instead to recycling. Clare Coode of Stacks Property Search says: ‘We are seeing simple claw-footed baths or weathered zinc tubs replacing jacuzzis with their flashing lights, sound systems and uber-high running costs.’ Shabby-chic gardens are having a moment, agrees Claire Carter of John D Wood’s Country House manager. ‘Home-owners are going to reclamation yards and doing clever things with apple-packing boxes or wooden pallets.’

Flower meadows

Another trend that has taken the country market by storm is the transformation of equestrian facilities into flower meadows. Inspired by King Charles’s ‘coronation meadows’ initiative to restore the UK’s threatened wildflower meadows, country house owners are embracing the same idea. ‘Rather than a redundant tennis court or something else expensive to maintain, meadows are a cost-effective and more bio-diverse thing to have,’ says Claire Carter.

Low-maintenance landscaping options are gaining popularity among home-owners and landlords – with climate change in mind. Bookings for drought-tolerant landscaping are up 35 per cent on a year ago, according to Aspect, a property maintenance company.

Wild lakes

Energy-eating swimming pools are out – see below – so instead those with the space and the means are looking a more environmentally friendly alternative: wild lakes. These natural bodies of water blend more seamlessly into the garden, without the need for harsh chemicals or those somewhat synthetic aquamarine blue tiles of traditional swimming pools. Jess Simpson, a buying agent, says: ‘Proximity to water has moved up the list for buyers: from a borehole to provide a private water supply, to a swimming pond (not pool!) for sporting and well-being activities, or a lake to maximise the biodiversity.’

Annexes

Buyers that didn’t need an annexe before are considering them when house-hunting as they can be used as a back-up income stream, says Michelle Hendrie, a West Sussex buying agent at Property Acquisitions. ‘Rental income can cover increased interest rates. As an added bonus, the buyer can also get multiple dwellings relief from the stamp duty.’ For deep-pocketed home-hunters, this property in the Cotswolds offers a separate cottage to rent out – as well as a vegetable patch, wild swimming pool and solar panels.

… and the losers

Fixer-uppers

Buyers’ appetite to renovate has plunged as interest rates have risen, reports Curchods, an estate agent in Surrey. Even if you can find a builder to do the work, it’s a challenge to figure out how much it will finally cost – the price of construction materials is up 72 per cent in five years, according to government data. That brick deliveries were down by 30 per cent in May, year on year, is perhaps no big surprise.

Swimming pools

We might well wish we had them on hot summer days, but right now our appetite for private swimming pools has nosedived. ‘I’ve seen several owners deck over their empty pools this year,’ says Claire Carter. ‘One Kent owner’s pool was costing £100 a week to run, so she decked over it, much to her children’s frustration. It was that or paying £1,000 to have it filled in.’

Sofas

Just like lipstick sales are the famous bellwether of tight times, so the purchase of big-ticket items such as sofas is dependent on either people moving house or splashing out on a revamp. Sofa chain DFS Furniture has just reported that trading conditions proved ‘significantly worse than expected’ and that in the wider market there has been a 15 to 20 per cent fall in sales. In contrast, sales of energy-saving air fryers and microwaves are up, according to John Lewis.    

Why don’t more tourists visit Ethiopia?

Standing on a cliff edge looking at where the Blue Nile is just a trickle, watched by a gelada baboon on a distant rock and staring over miles upon miles of some of the most beautiful countryside I’d ever seen, one thought struck me: why is there hardly anyone else here? Ethiopia is stunning to look at, once you get out of the capital, Addis Ababa. It offers history, culture, architecture, religion and everything in between. Yet when you tell anyone you’re going there the most common response is: ‘Really? Why?’

In a country twice the size of France and with a population of 120 million, there were times when I felt I was the only tourist in town. Perhaps it’s the hangover of nearly 40 years ago when the images of starving children dominated the headlines around the world and led to the unprecedented international effort of Live Aid. But that was then. When I went the news in Britain was about a shortage of tomatoes, but there were stalls packed with them in Addis (I’m told that’s the in-the-know way to refer to the city).

The plane to Addis Ababa was packed, but on arrival it turned out that the vast majority of passengers were not stopping but transferring on to flights heading to Eritrea, Kenya, Nigeria and anywhere but Ethiopia, this largely forgotten gem in a continent famous for diamonds.

It’s a shame but not surprising. After two years of Covid keeping tourists at home, there followed two years of a brutal civil war that saw an estimated 600,000 deaths and shocking reports of rape, torture and other atrocities. A peace deal with rebel forces, signed in November, is holding up, just, but some governments are still advising their citizens not to travel here. And even if this wasn’t the advice, it’s debatable how many more Americans, Europeans and others with cash to spend would come. 

So why did I choose to spend a few days here, on my own? The answer to that is easy. It’s a beautiful country, the cradle of civilisation, the place where coffee was discovered, one of the oldest Christian nations in the world; it offers world class scenery, active volcanoes, unique wildlife and is dirt cheap once you get there. Even the weather was agreeable when I visited, hot but not baking in the day and cool but not freezing at night.

But my main reason for going was to see Lalibela, a short internal plane ride from Addis, where there is a truly remarkable collection of around a dozen churches built from the top down out of the rock. They call it the ‘African Petra’, but unlike the Jordan tourist trap it has not been blessed with appearing in an Indiana Jones film, so there is a surprising lack of foreign visitors. This makes it very easy to be guided round these monolithic monuments to Christianity, some of which date back 900 years and contain some of the oldest handwritten bibles in the world. These are working churches with priests, pilgrims and disciples around and during mass, literally hundreds and hundreds of white robed devotees gathering inside and outside.

Being one of the very few white faces in town, you tend to get people coming up and talking to you – and not just to ask for money or a pen (or, in one case, a reference for college). They want to tell me how their government is not helping them, how they feel ignored and the trouble they have finding jobs. One youngster invited me to his school, where I spoke to the headmaster and various other teachers. Many of their sixth formers were going on to college, mostly to study tourism so they could become guides, but they were worried there would be more guides than tourists if things didn’t change.

It seems churlish to complain about a lack of tourists when it affords such laid-back and uncrowded attractions, but Lalibela relies on overseas visitors to the extent that tourism accounts for 85 per cent of its income. The town is on its knees. Surviving restaurants are practically empty. Our hotel – a small guesthouse with immaculately clean rooms and first-class service – had just three guests, all solo travellers. Apart from me there was a retired Spanish bank manager from Benidorm and a Canadian health and safety officer who was YouTubing his way round the world, filming himself in various countries. Oh, and it cost around £30 a night to stay.

Lalibela’s rock-built attraction thinks of itself as the eighth wonder of the world and it certainly ranks as a sight worth seeing. It’s easy to get to by air (not quite so easy if taking the 30-hour road trip), there’s plenty of cheap but good accommodation and it feels safe and friendly, even when walking home down pitch-black streets.

I went into a bar and found a bottle of St George’s beer (he’s a big-name saint there too) costs around £1.30 at current exchange rates. I was the only westerner in there but was warmly welcomed. Street sellers offer coffee fresh from the country where it originated for the equivalent of 20p a cup and strong, local tea for just 30p. Even a packet of cigarettes is less than £1.50, though surprisingly few people smoke. A former soldier I shared a cigarette with told me women weren’t allowed to smoke, though he rolled his eyes as he added: ‘But they do in Addis.’

That’s pretty much the picture throughout the country, it seems. Addis is a dirty, bustling, chaotic city of ten million with shops, restaurants and bars, yet even there prices remain low. I would say the capital is not much to write home about, but it has some attractions – notably the skeleton of Lucy, the oldest human remains ever discovered and which gave the Ethiopian tourist authority the catchy slogan ‘Land of Origins’. There is also the fascinating museum that was once the palace of Emperor Haile Selassie, built in the grounds of the impressive university.

But the best of Ethiopia lies outside the capital. A two-hour drive over some atrocious roads takes you to the source of the Blue Nile where the gelada baboons – or bleeding-heart monkeys – watch from nearby cliffs. The route there passes through towns and farming areas where a sea of corrugated metal roofs, lack of electricity and traditional mud huts remind you that this is still a very poor country.

Live Aid’s money and other funding has created vast areas of fertile land, a new (though controversial) dam to irrigate dry areas and better farming practices, but it clearly still needs the kind of boost tourism gives. And for a destination that promotes wildlife watching as one of its main attractions, it seems a bit self-defeating to confiscate binoculars from tourists as they enter the country. All I was told when I asked why they took my pair was ‘security’. I got them back on leaving.

It may take more than one visit to feel one knows the country. It would take years to learn Amharic, the local language where the word for ‘thank you’ is six syllables long. But as I left, I could not help thinking I would return. To coin an old joke, it was not so much goodbye, more Abyssinia.

What my father’s Alzheimer’s taught me

When I tell friends, ‘You never hear people talking about the upside of Alzheimer’s’, they look at me like I’ve said something about Hitler being nice to animals. In general, a mention of dementia will ruin any conversation. People freeze up at the thought. It’s true that having a relative with dementia is hard and the bad far outweighs the good, but that is no reason to ignore the positives completely. In fact, the tiny benefits can help you deal with all the downsides. 

I’ve had a lot of time to look for the positives. Growing up, my grandparents had Alzheimer’s so I was aware of the condition, but I hadn’t thought that it could happen to my parents. Then Mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2012 and Dad with both Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia in 2016. Sadly, my parents didn’t make it through the pandemic. Now, looking back, I realise that the best relationship I ever had with my father was when he had dementia. 

According to the Alzheimer’s Society, one of the symptoms to look for in the early stages of dementia is a change of mood. Our inner pessimist assumes that will make our loved ones lash out at us in anger or cry with sadness, and that does happen for many people. My father, however, changed from the severe and withdrawn man I knew growing up and became happier than I had ever seen him. 

He was a joy to be around. He even started pulling pranks. When the doctors would test his cognitive abilities by asking him if he knew who I was he’d say ‘I’ve never met him before in my life’, before turning to me and winking – a high-stakes prank when you’re in a care home. 

There is a loss of inhibition that comes with the condition. In Dad’s case, this was a good thing. He went from being a quiet man who didn’t have many passions in life to someone who was up and dancing if music came on the TV. He became the life and soul of the party. He wasn’t dancing like there’s no one watching, he was dancing like he didn’t care who could see him.  

We’re a working-class family in the Midlands, so when I was growing up my father was mainly at the factory. He was either working overtime or was taking the better paid night shifts. He wasn’t around a lot. As northern men, we probably repressed any outward sign of emotion, but Alzheimer’s meant he lost that filter. When he saw me walk in to visit him in the care home he would jump out of his seat with tears of joy in his eyes shouting: ‘Steve!’ He didn’t do that before. 

Our previous relationship was further complicated by the fact that Dad probably imagined his son would become a man he could talk to about sport over a few pints. When his only son turned out to be a teetotal sci-fi nerd with no interest in football, we didn’t have much to bond over. Most of our conversations before his diagnosis were about which A-roads I’d recently used. 

A large life event such as a parent getting dementia is enough to make you forgive and forget past silly resentments that build up in a family. That can bring you closer together. It reset our relationship. With a clean slate, no one failed to meet an expectation or caused upset. Every visit with Dad became a time when we were happy to be there. We’d visit the parks and local pubs and being there was enough. It’s the most honest and authentic we’d ever been. 

I’d never known my father to swear. I’m sure he did but he chose not to in front of his kids. The forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s meant he forgot his self-imposed rule and we had such fun sitting around laughing because of the language he’d use. He would ask the carers if they had any medicine ‘for coughs’. We were like teenage boys giggling away.  

It’s hard to know if the disease changed my father or if the bond may have always been there, masked by baggage that got in the way, and was finally allowed to rise to the surface when the dementia simplified things. It doesn’t really matter either way. All I know is he became a joyous person; a pleasure to spend time with. 

Targeting Odesa marks a new turn in the war

The world is waking up to pictures of fresh destruction in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which has been under constant Russian fire since the grain export deal collapsed last week. At least one person has been killed and 19 more injured following missile strikes overnight. The roof of the recently-rebuilt Transfiguration Cathedral has partially collapsed, and there have been films of local residents trying to rescue icons and other sacred artefacts. The footage is striking – but a tiny part of what’s now at stake.

Back in July 2022, Russia agreed not to destroy Ukraine’s grain-exporting infrastructure given how important the foodstuff is to Africa and world food prices; Turkey and the UN negotiated the deal. According to UN records, the agreement saw 1,145 consignments leave Ukrainian ports carrying 33 tonnes of corn, wheat and other food products to 45 countries.

But a strong Russian harvest, part of which consists of requisitioned crops from occupied Ukraine, has emboldened Vladimir Putin to try a new manoeuvre: to destroy Ukraine’s grain business. Russia’s president wants to give the world an ultimatum: buy Russian grain via Russian banks, or condemn thousands in Africa to hunger or starvation.

After declaring the end of the grain deal earlier this week, Russia has now turned on Odesa with some of the most furious attacks it has launched since the start of its invasion. Last night, 19 missiles were fired at the city; only nine were destroyed before they hit because Ukraine is running out of air defences. Odesa’s city centre is a World Heritage site protected by Unesco, but the architectural destruction is far from the only concern about what is unfolding.

Russia hopes its missiles will ensure Odesa’s infrastructure is so badly damaged that it can never be resumed. Ukraine said that damage in the port of Chornomorsk has destroyed 60,000 tons of grains which was supposed to be loaded on a large-tonnage ship and sent through the grain corridor two months ago. Moscow has a list of demands:

• That Rosselkhozbank, a Russian agricultural bank, is reconnected to the SWIFT interbank system
• Agricultural machinery, spare parts and services are removed from the sanctions
• Lift restrictions on insurance and reinsurance of ships with Russian grain
• Lift the ban on access of such ships to ports
• Reopen the Tolyatti-Odesa ammonia pipeline (the world’s longest)
• Unblock the foreign assets and accounts of Russian agricultural companies 

The wilful destruction of some of the world’s greatest cultural icons – such as Odesa’s cathedral – makes for compelling and haunting photographs. But it is harder to picture the consequences threatened by eliminating, from the world market, such a big supply of grain. What’s more, if Ukraine can’t export the grain it will be devastating for Ukraine’s economy and thousands of farmers.

Ukraine is struggling as it lacks air defence systems to close the sky over the whole country, and Putin exploits this vulnerability. Now he wants to see if he can bomb the West back to the negotiating table. 

Sadiq Khan needs to #HaveAWord with himself

When a public figure is in danger of annoying me so much that it risks impinging on my quality of life, there’s an easy trick I play on myself in order to put the irritant back into their box and into perspective. Rather than take them seriously, I simply reframe them as a comic creation in the style of David Brent of The Office fame. This strategy worked a treat with Meghan Markle when I had to watch the Netflix mockumentary for work.

With the latest mis-step in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s anti-sexist #HaveAWord campaign, the time has come to view him too through the prism of Ricky Gervais’ supreme buffoon. The campaign is peak Brent; faced with an epidemic of murderous misogyny, what could be a better use of public money that the the new Transport for London (TfL) ‘SAY MAAATE TO A MATE’ posters which will apparently stop sexism in its tracks if men give their friends a stern look and a short bleat of ‘MAAATE’ on hearing any dodgy banter?

Is this an attempt to outsource women’s public safety to the man in the street/pub/club now that many women in London do not trust the Metropolitan Police? The Met are, of course, merely the rotting head of a national police force which often not only fails to protect women but counts among its number the actual shock troops of misogyny. Some officers even seem to view sex with the women they are supposed to protect as a ‘reward’ for their supposed hard work in keeping society ‘safe’. Met officer David Carrick committed 48 rapes over 17 years; Wayne Couzens, killer of Sarah Everard, was affectionately known as ‘The Rapist’ by his Met colleagues.

Never fear – Citizen Khan to the rescue! This campaign started in March last year as an expression of the Mayor’s determination to tackle the ‘epidemic of violence and misogyny that countless women face on a daily basis’.

There’s no doubt that this is a real thing, but I’m not sure that spending large sums of cash on a poster campaign telling men to scold their friends if they remark ‘Have you seen the new girl? I’d give her one’ is going to address the main sources of female fear.

One of these fears is rape, now effectively ‘decriminalised’ according to Victims Commissioner Dame Vera Baird; there are currently 25 rapes reported each day in London alone, and as many women say that they wouldn’t report rape, who knows how many more take place?

The second is domestic violence, which takes the lives of two women a week. The law can hardly be trusted to take this seriously when one considers that serving police officers sometimes go unpunished following domestic violence incidents. The risibly low prison sentences routinely handed out to wife-killers also shows the lack of concern for cracking down on these appalling crimes. In the face of such an onslaught, the TfL posters seem positively insulting; they are literally lip service. 

‘Maaate’: would that be a suitable response to a racist remark from a friend? Of course not. We’d be expected to denounce them in public and never have anything to do with them again. In the Specials song ‘Racist Friend’, we are told that: ‘If you are a racist/Our friendship has got to end/And if your friends are racists don’t pretend to be my friend’ before being told to apply this to our families too:

‘Be it your sister/Be it your brother/Be it your cousin or your uncle or your lover/Is it your husband or your father or your mother?’

But your sexist friend gets no such banishment; just a limp little ‘Maaate’. It’s telling that while racism is quite rightly considered too serious an issue to be addressed by eye-catching posters, Khan’s previous similar battle was against ‘junk food’ which led to a poster for a play being banned as it featured a cake. As long as sexism is portrayed as the amiable little brother – falling short, but meaning well – to the certified nut-job racism, the epidemic of misogynist violence which Khan refers to will never be truly tackled.

This campaign is so box-ticking and prissy, with no real effort involved on the part of either those who thought it up or those it’s aimed at. Compare it to the initiative by L’Oreal Paris which, in 2020, developed  a ‘bystander training programme’ Stand Up Against Street Harassment. Now completed by more than 1.25 million people in 42 countries, it teaches citizens to actively go to the assistance of those they witness being bothered. No doubt soft-lad Khan might see this as a dangerous move towards vigilante justice – but what a judgement on the impotence of modern politics when a cosmetics company has a more robust attitude to combating street misogyny than a Labour politician.

This poster campaign has been compared – in the light of a London where Mizzy is a role model, daylight machetes are nothing remarkable and knife crime terrifyingly high – to the rearranging of those mythical deckchairs on the Titanic. But I see it more as the rearranging of magnetic plastic letters on a fridge door, which Khan wants us to read in any but the most obvious and sensible way: DETECTION + PUNISHMENT = LESS CRIME.

This won’t be helped by putting money into things which are not crimes while apparently giving up on things that are, so why not go after the 100 or so men known to be a persistent nuisance to women in the capital and leave the rest of us alone to be as nasty as we please, which may well include flirting in the workplace?

The real dangers to women aren’t the blokes on the building sites or the players in the pub. They’re those boys in blue, like Carrick, who consider raping women as a perk of the job; and the men in frocks advocating ‘punching TERFS in the face’. So maybe have a word with those people first, Mayor, before you lecture the rest of us and our ‘maaates’.

Going soft on Net Zero could save Rishi Sunak

The Tory green brigade now tends to be heavily concentrated in the House of Lords, where Zac Goldsmith recently joined John Gummer, now known as Lord Deben. This pair were jointly responsible for the Conservative party ‘Quality of Life’ report of summer 2007, which argued: ‘Beyond a certain point – a point which the UK reached some time ago – ever-increasing material gain can become not a gift but a burden.’

Had the hard-bitten Andy Coulson not arrived to reframe the Tory message, the party could well have gone into a general election in the autumn of that year with its central charge against Gordon Brown being that he had made the British people too well-off.

A lower-profile Tory environmentalist is Lord Duncan, a former MEP who resigned from the European parliament in 2017 to fight a winnable seat in Scotland but narrowly lost it amid the ‘Maybot’ meltdown. Fortunately for him, the soft red-leather benches of the upper chamber cushioned the blow.

On Saturday, Duncan went on Radio 4’s Today programme to warn off those Conservative MPs who have drawn the lesson from the victorious Uxbridge by-election that the Tories should ease back on what David Cameron is once alleged to have described as ‘the green crap’.

Duncan spoke up for an ongoing ‘bipartisan approach’ between the big parties. It was this, he said, which had allowed the UK to be a world leader in reducing carbon emissions. When politicians talk of bipartisanship, they usually mean disarming the electorate. If both the incumbent and the main challenger have adopted the same position in a first-past-the-post system, then there is almost no way for the public to shift the dial. As Henry Ford might have put it: ‘You can have any colour so long as it’s green.’

Duncan was, in effect, telling elected colleagues for whom grubbing for votes is a regrettable fact of life, not to make the pace, scale and cost of Net Zero a dividing line with Labour. As the old joke about the bishop who came out for anti-disestablishmentarianism put it: ‘That’s easy for him to say.’

Because there are two lessons from Uxbridge and the other by-elections fought on Thursday that both point towards dialling down on the green agenda being a smart move. First, everyone agrees that in Boris Johnson’s old seat it was the Ulez extension plan of Sadiq Khan that determined the outcome. Secondly, across the three seats the key feature was not the opposition parties converting 2019 Tory voters, but huge chunks of those voters staying at home.

So the central challenge for the Conservatives is to motivate those electors to turn out for them again. Finding compelling dividing lines with Labour and the Lib Dems is key. On many issues where the Tories believe they could have a populist whip hand, Labour has responded by copying their policy to prevent any dividing line opening-up. One thinks of the overall public spending envelope or the two-child benefit cap.

There are promising signs for the Tories that their new Illegal Immigration Act could turn into an important battle line if only they can get the Rwanda plan up and running. But Keir Starmer’s tactic on that issue has been to seek to marginalise it, which his party has tolerated because fundamentally it believes that its own preferred approach to migration – open borders – is what is happening on the ground anyway.  

That does not apply in the case of eliminating carbon emissions. On the contrary, the idea that the planet’s very viability is at stake has become an article of faith for most people on the Left. Alarmist coverage reinforcing that view is pumped out by almost every main broadcaster whenever there is a heatwave anywhere in the world.

Starmer would simply not be able to shadow any shift by the Conservatives away from the current punishing and hugely expensive pace of the Net Zero drive. The issue is so totemic for his own activists and MPs that they would go into meltdown. Ed Miliband would surely resign from the shadow cabinet. Hundreds of thousands of left-leaning voters would gravitate to the Green party on grounds that saving the planet was more important than getting traitor Starmer into power.

Yet up in the Red Wall, millions of practically-minded voters will have noted that the places where they live would be improved rather than undermined were it generally a bit warmer. Proposals to ban such voters in short order and at great expense and inconvenience, from having petrol cars or gas boilers will be very unpopular.

In judo there is an approach known as ‘soft technique’ in which a fighter uses the intensity and momentum of his opponent against him. Rishi Sunak has just such an opportunity as regards the green agenda. Starmer cannot soft-pedal on this. He must be seen by his tribe to charge at it.  

Sunak would not have to do anything so crude as to abandon the Net Zero drive altogether. All he would need to do would be to extend time-frames and manage down short-term costs. He could, for instance, attack the Left for its ‘war on the motorist’ and adopt the EU timetable for banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars rather than the UK one – 2035 instead of 2030. He could also start explicitly exempting swathes of unsuitable houses from any requirement to convert to ground-source heat pumps. 

Lords Deben, Goldsmith and Duncan would not like this one bit. Perhaps they would even leave the party, which would serve as a helpful additional signal to the electorate that the Tories had changed tack, just as the departure of Brexit-blocking big names did in the run up to the 2019 election. The posh media would go berserk. Starmer would simply have to take the bait and accuse Sunak of murdering the planet. And the 2024 election would become another ‘establishment versus the people’ moment.

Could Ulez lead to Sadiq Khan’s downfall?

Emmanuel Macron has spoken of his fear of France’s ‘fragmentation’ and of the nation’s ‘division’ following the riots that reduced parts of the Republic to rubble earlier this month. The truth, as the president well knows, is that France is already deeply divided, and the fractures are numerous. As well as the topical one, that of the chasm separating many of the Banlieues from the rest of the Republic, there is also the growing gulf between those who prostrate themselves at the altar of Net Zero and those who are sceptical or downright resistant. And the French, being French, have never been shy in demonstrating forcefully their opposition to the Green zealots.

Ross Clark declares in The Spectator this week that England’s ‘great motorist rebellion’ has begun, a backlash against Sadiq Khan’s expansion in London of Ulez (Ultra Low Emission Zone). The English, being English, have so far demonstrated their opposition peacefully at the ballot box; according to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, his party would have won Thursday’s Uxbridge by-election had it not been for Ulez.

For the moment Khan is defiant, claiming that his decision to expand Ulez ‘was a tough one, but it’s the right one’. The London mayor is saying he is in ‘constructive listening mode’, but he’d better start listening soon. One wonders if the mayor of London is familiar with the name Benjamin Griveaux; he may not be because the Frenchman’s political career never recovered from an infamous remark he made in October 2018. Macron, elected eighteen months earlier, had announced an eco-tax that would increase the price of diesel fuel, bad news for those French who lived in the sticks and relied on their vehicle for work.

These men and women voiced their opposition on social media and on the airwaves, but their concerns were contemptuously brushed aside. ‘People who smoke cigarettes and drive diesel cars,’ sniffed Griveaux, the government spokesman, ‘…are not the 21st-century France we want’. 

As I wrote at the time in Coffee House, ‘Macron may come to regret this insouciant rhetoric’. Sacre Bleu, was that an understatement. Within a couple of weeks men and women wearing high-visibility yellow vests were descending on Paris; a few thousand at first, but by Christmas 2018 there were hundreds of thousands, not just in Paris but in many towns and cities across the Republic. What was most impressive, however, the true sign of the demonstrators’ anger and the determination was the men and women who camped out throughout the winter at roundabouts and other locations. I recall seeing one such group at a roundabout in Aveyron – real France Profonde – on Christmas Day. Had I been Macron or one of his ministers I would have been unsettled by such ferocious commitment.

The eco-tax wasn’t the only reason the provinces were up in arms; in July 2018, the government had reduced the maximum speed limit on French highways from 90km/h to 80. They claimed it was to improve road safety, even though ministers knew from the outset that the measure was unpopular.

One poll in 2015 asked the question if the limit should be lowered to 80km/h and 77 per cent responded in the negative. There were fears that such a reduction would be the first of many, but also a suspicion that it was a cunning ploy to fleece drivers.

‘We can’t let the State implement such a measure,’ said Pierre Chasseray, the head of one automobile organisation. ‘By lowering speed limits on the secondary network and privatising the speed cameras, it would be a jackpot for the State, which would reap the maximum amount of money.’

Furious with the Paris political class, the people went to war against the speed cameras. Between January 2018 and August 2019, nearly 20,000 were put out of action. Some were burned, others spray-painted and numerous cameras were ripped down completely. 

‘The outcry is strong because it is such a tangible issue for ordinary people,’ Jérôme Fourquet – one of France’s leaders pollsters – told the BBC. ‘Around 70 per cent of the population is opposed, and there is no sign of that abating.’

The government’s initial response was to remind citizens that the cameras were there for their own good; when the nannying approach didn’t work, threats of heavy fines and prison sentences were made. They also failed to bring about an end to the speed camera cull. Indeed by this time, Paris was awash with yellow vests and a chastened president Macron was telling the nation he understood their anger. To placate protestors the eco-tax was scrapped and France’s 96 départments were authorised to restore the speed limit to 90 km/h should they wish; 46 have, mostly rural départments where the car is king. 

As for Benjamin Griveaux, he left the government in March 2019 and, after a failed attempt to become mayor of Paris, quit politics in 2021.

Sadiq Khan should perhaps ponder Griveaux’s fate because it transpired that his vision of 21st century France wasn’t shared by the majority of the people, and as every politician ultimately discovers the will of the people always win out. 

The truth about the Bibby Stockholm migrant barge

The ingloriously-named Bibby Stockholm has weighed anchor in Dorset’s Portland harbour to a storm of protest. The vessel is intended to house up to 500 single male adults who have arrived in this country by illegal means. Rishi Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’ has morphed into a need for bigger boats to contain a small fraction of those asylum seekers still arriving every day on our coastline.

A rare but conspicuously uncomfortable alliance of activists and local Nimbys have united in protest against this move. The former assert that conditions will be inhumane; the latter fret about overwhelmed local services. Both are proxies for a national debate polarised between welcoming everyone who wants a better life on these shores and deprecating a policy that risks putting needy Brits at the back of the queue for decent housing and services.

But in this fractious discussion, one thing seems clear: no one would want to swap places with the barge’s new residents. The facility has been given a Robert Jenrick-style make under and all the official PR focuses on facilities being basic but decent. No longer will illegal migrants be housed in four star hotels. They will have to put up with offshore austerity.

Except this isn’t quite right. The facilities will house migrants in air conditioned rooms with wifi. Many rooms have a sea view. Far from being confined, the residents can come and go as they please with buses laid on to take them into nearby Weymouth. Taxpayers will be relieved to know that a register is being kept of who is on and off the floatel, although reports of 400 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children missing from hotels on dry land might make them sceptical.

What’s it going to be like on this vessel for the three to nine months the Home Office believe it will take to process the claims? For eight years between 1997 and 2005, the prison ship HMP Weare was moored at the same location. I was on this category C prison for about 400 medium risk offenders several times. Unlike the Bibby, those on the Weare only left to go to hospital or on release. While there were multiple shortcomings in access to open air and family contact, I was quite surprised at the number of prisoners who told me they liked their digs and had more room and facilities than some of the land prisons they were familiar with. Officers enjoyed their novel deployment too and the atmosphere was mostly relaxed.

While debates rage about the actual cost savings the Bibby will deliver and what if any deterrent factor this three storey asylum ark will present, we have a serious national security problem that these initiatives can help with. It is highly likely, if not certain, that among the many asylum seekers who have reached our shores and disappeared are at least some violent extremists. We know for sure that at least one act of terrorism has been carried out by a failed asylum seeker. And it would be entirely rational for Isis to send combatants or sleepers in this fashion. It is consistent with the Home Secretary’s announcement at the recent counter-terrorism strategy (Contest) refresh that there is ‘a persistent and evolving threat from Islamist terrorist groups overseas.’

It doesn’t matter where you stand on the morality of the Government’s asylum policy, everyone should want people’s safety to be paramount. That will mean the state being able to properly screen and keep tabs on the thousands of people who still risk their lives to get here. More than 10,000 small boat migrants have arrived here from France in 2023 alone. Many are seeking a better life. But at the very least we should know who, and where, they are, even approximately. If even half of 1 per cent of that total were combat-trained jihadis that’s 50 extremists in our midst.

As for the other 99.5 per cent, it would surely be better to allow them to work, rather than be held in state-sponsored penury while their claims are being considered. This could easily become a condition of board and lodging. For the tiny fraction of asylum seekers that will traverse the Bibby’s gangways, that would occupy them and give them some dignity and purpose. It would also mean they could pay tax and start contributing to the country they have travelled so far and so dangerously to reach. Bear in mind that the latest figures from the Oxford University Migration Observatory show that only 17 per cent of asylum seekers received a decision in less than a year. There is a reported claims backlog of 132,000. As it is, the main hazards the barge’s management company will face are boredom, fire and disorder.

Citizens in this country who have committed crime have endured far worse conditions on similar barges than will the new denizens of the Bibby Stockholm. While their only crime is entering the UK by clandestine means, such an initiative deserves a chance and my bet is that like HMP Weare it will soon become part of the landscape. But in protecting our nation from predatory terrorists who are probably already here, biding their time, I’m afraid we are still all at sea.

Ann Clwyd was a humanitarian unlike any today

Ann Clwyd, who has died aged 86, never held ministerial office or high office of any kind. Unless, of course, you count a stint as chair of the parliamentary Labour party, though that is more of a penance than a power trip. She did a few tours on the opposition front bench under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and, briefly, Tony Blair, but she was too independent-minded and probably not metro enough for a New Labour red box. That she was rebelling against the government a few months into its first term only confirmed that. Voting against an early Harriet Harman benefit cut, designed to force single parents into the labour market, Clwyd pointed out there were ‘about 1,500 single parents and only 200 jobs available’ in her Cynon Valley constituency. 

It was one of many instances in her 35-year parliamentary career where she harmed her chances of promotion to stick up for people on the sharp end of life. Another was when she and local miners staged a sit-in at closure-threatened Tower Colliery in 1994. For 27 hours, blasted by coal dust and fortified by Mars bars, she refused to budge, insisting the colliery should stay open while there was still coal to mine. The government eventually backed down to get her out but within days the Coal Board cut the miners’ pay. 

Clwyd then turned to John Redwood, of all people, and secured his backing as Welsh secretary for a workers’ buy-out. The miners clubbed together their redundancy, took over the colliery and ran it for another 13 years until the coal ran out. The miners’ collective not only kept hundreds in work but, as Clwyd later pointed out, it managed to sell coal to foreign markets that British Coal had failed to break into. 

Clwyd may not have risen through the ranks but, as those anecdotes show, she used her position as an MP to try to help make life liveable for the people she served. But her commitment to human dignity was not limited to her constituents. Clwyd took a particular interest in Iraq, having met Iraqi students of Cardiff U\university in the late Seventies and heard their accounts of the repression and cruelty of the regime. She would also come to be a great friend of the Kurdish people. 

It was her affinity for this part of the world that got her sacked from Blair’s shadow Foreign Office team after she and another MP made an unauthorised trip to northern Iraq in 1995, during a Turkish campaign against Kurdish fighters. She maintained strong ties with the Kurds and visited the region shortly before the second Gulf War, when locals were braced for Hussein to once again deploy chemical weapons against them. Clwyd met desperate mothers who were buying nappies to use as makeshift gas masks. 

The Welsh left-winger broke with her comrades to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, though she believed the casus belli was Hussein’s brutal record of human rights abuses rather than any claims about weapons of mass destruction. In the run-up to the war, Clwyd made a series of speeches in the Commons describing the horrors of the Hussein regime. The former torture chambers she had walked through, their walls still flecked with prisoners’ blood. The female academic forced to give birth in a cell then denied milk for the baby, so that she had to watch her newborn child die in her arms. The 15-year-old boy who fainted during a torture session and was crucified on a window frame as punishment. 

One aspect of her humanitarian case was challenged in The Spectator by Brendan O’Neill. Indict, the human rights group she chaired, collected witness testimony describing prisoners disposed of in an industrial shredder. Clwyd wrote about the testimony in a Times article that was picked up worldwide, though O’Neill could find no corroborating evidence. Whether the witness was mistaken, made it up, or just traumatised, or whether the shredder existed and was moved on the eve of invasion to cover up evidence of Hussein’s depravity, we will probably never know. 

Shortly after the war began, Clwyd was appointed Blair’s special envoy to Iraq. Although other advocates of the war have since recanted, Clwyd never did. Because she had not given WMDs as a reason, their non-existence did not affect her support for the intervention, though she was critical of how the Americans handled reconstruction and their failure to bring on board the anti-Saddam sections of the Iraqi army. These criticisms, it must be said, had little if any impact. The moral case for ousting Hussein was not matched by a practical plan for quickly establishing order, democracy, prosperity and human rights in Iraq. 

Clwyd told the Chilcot Inquiry that she stood by her support for the war. She described her many times visiting the Kurds and how, on her final visit before coalition forces began their operations, they kept telling her there was ‘no other way’ than war to stop Hussein. They had never said that before, eager for international support but wishing to avoid a full-scale war. The fact that the Kurds believed force was now needed carried a heavy influence on Clwyd’s decision-making. Speaking seven years after the war began, she told Chilcot: ‘I felt myself there was no other option. I didn’t feel that I could go back and face the Kurds and say that I had argued any other way because I couldn’t on the basis of what I had heard.’ It was an unpopular stance to take by 2010, when British politics and especially Labour wanted to move on, but Clwyd spent her life attaching herself to unpopular causes. 

Her commitment to human rights drove her to author the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, which tightened up the law and created a specific offence of taking a girl from the UK to undergo FGM in another country. When she introduced the Bill, Clwyd noted that FGM was ‘not reported for many reasons, including ignorance, fear or community or cultural pressure to remain silent’. The fate of her law would go on to demonstrate this point. In her final parliamentary remarks on the matter, she complained bitterly that there had been just one successful prosecution in 16 years. 

When her husband Owen died from a hospital-acquired infection in 2012, Clwyd spoke about his final hours with an unvarnished candour about the NHS that a Labour MP probably couldn’t get away with today. She said Owen, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and was in a wheelchair, ‘died like a battery hen’, squashed up against the bars of an unsuitable hospital bed. Watching nurses consistently treat the dying man with an ‘almost callous lack of care’, Clwyd said she feared a ‘normalisation of cruelty’ had taken hold among NHS nurses. She described how an ill-fitting oxygen mask pumped cold air into her husband’s infected eye and recounted how she had to acquire a towel to cover him because of insufficient blankets as well as having to jam a pillow between him and the bed bars. The nurses, she said, behaved towards Owen with ‘coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt’. Clwyd spend her remaining seven years in Parliament campaigning for better patient care. 

Paying tribute on Saturday, Sir Tony Blair said his former envoy’s politics ‘remained steadfastly wedded to representation of the poor and oppressed wherever in the world she found them’. The kind of humanitarian intervention Ann Clwyd believed in has fallen out of favour on both the left and the right, but the instincts that fuelled her support for the Iraq war — her solidarity with the oppressed, no matter where that oppression was taking place — were and still are noble. Ann Clwyd was the very best kind of internationalist: one who believed in it everywhere. 

Watch: Stonewall chair grilled on transgender issues

It’s been a difficult time for the gay rights charity Stonewall. Chief Executive Nancy Kelley is due to leave her job next week, after a torturous year that saw the Allison Bailey case and numerous employers withdraw from the charity’s ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme. Iain Anderson, Stonewall’s Chair, was probably hoping to put all this behind him when he sat down with Sky’s Beth Rigby for an in-depth interview on the charity’s work.

Unfortunately for Anderson, Rigby raised some of the thorniest issues with regards to trans rights, including elite sports and single-sex spaces. Asked about trans swimmer Lia Thomas beating two biological women on a podium, he replied ‘We’re working our way through on this’ and ‘We want everyone to play their full part in society.’ He suggested that he would be open to engaging with organisations that take a more skeptical view of trans rights, telling Rigby: ‘My challenge to the LGB Alliance, my challenge to those that don’t agree with me is, is there an opportunity to come together.’ He was also asked if he agreed with Nancy Kelley’s suggestion that lesbians who don’t want to date trans women may feel that way because of ‘societal prejudices’; Anderson could only reply that ‘those are not my words.’ Hardly a ringing endorsement of the outgoing CEO…

Less than 24 hours after the interview, Stonewall released a 1,029-word statement on its website, complaining that ‘the interview was supposed to be an opportunity to talk about 10 years of marriage equality, LGBTQ+ veterans, and Rainbow Laces 10.’ It appeared to contradict several of Anderson’s comments in the interview. On trans sport, Stonewall declared: ‘We urge sport governing bodies not to exclude the tiny number of trans people competing an elite level’. With regards to ‘anti-trans groups’, the chairty claims ‘We have never used our precious resources on dialogue with people who are vehemently against LGBTQ+ communities, and that will remain true.’ Anderson is meanwhile quoted as saying:

We remain at the forefront of campaigning for trans people’s rights, and I’m sorry if yesterday’s interview caused concern amongst the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. My priority is fighting for trans people & securing a trans equality strategy that will support the trans community.

It begs the question: if the chairman is forced to U-turn on his remarks, who really speaks for Stonewall? You can watch the interview in full below.

Igor Girkin’s arrest was a long time coming

With the reported arrest on Friday of Igor Girkin (aka ‘Strelkov’ or ‘Igor the Terrible’) the career of one of the Russia-Ukraine war’s most infamous, larger-than-life characters may finally have hit a dead end. Girkin, the career-killer with the sensitive face and soulful eyes, has played numerous parts in his time: activist, blogger, FSB colonel, executioner, convicted war criminal and eternal thorn in the side of the Russian Ministry of Defence. A self-professed nationalist, and founder member of the ‘Club of Angry Patriots’, he has consistently lambasted Putin’s ‘special military operation’ for its failures and perceived half-measures, calling repeatedly for martial law and mass-mobilisation to avert a likely defeat.  

Now, it seems, his antics have been curtailed. His arrest by ‘representatives of the Investigative Committee’ came at 11:30 on Friday morning, according to a Telegram post reportedly from his wife, Miroslava Reginskaya: ‘I was not at home at that time. Soon, according to the concierge, they took my husband out under arms and took him in an unknown direction… I do not know anything about my husband’s whereabouts and he has not contacted me.’ Girkin now stands accused of ‘inciting extremism’, a conveniently nebulous term that usually just means the Kremlin has taken umbrage and got you in its sights. But for once the expression is apt. If Girkin is not an extremist, the word has no meaning.

To say that over the past 18 months Girkin has shot his mouth off is sheer understatement. Last September he was predicting a total Russian defeat, calling for Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu to be executed by firing squad, and pressing for nuclear strikes ‘to drive 20 million refugees to Europe.’ Three months later, after a spell fighting in Ukraine, he passed on the demoralisation and bewilderment of the Russian troops: ‘Soldiers and officers do not understand: in the name of what, for what, and with what purposes they are fighting. It’s a mystery for them.’ His unstinting tendency to say the unsayable and remain untouched has had Kremlinologists baffled. Did Girkin have friends in high places, or was he simply too popular with pro-war hardliners to put under direct attack? Certainly his profile in Russia could not be much higher. Even those turned off by him followed his Telegram Channel avidly. As the Ukrainian counter-offensive opened last month, a pro-Kyiv Russian friend was downcast at its faltering progress. ‘Girkin is cheerful today,’ he said. ‘And that’s a very bad sign.’

Recently his attacks moved closer to the Kremlin. After the failed Wagner Uprising on 25 June, he sniped at Putin directly, claiming that if the President was unwilling to ‘take the leadership over the creation of war ready conditions’, it was time for him to step down for someone who could. Still Girkin remained at large, but this week went too far. In an unbelievably reckless – if accurate – post about Putin on his Telegram channel, he raged: ‘For 23 years, the country was led by a lowlife who managed to blow dust in the eyes’ of his people.  ‘But the country will not be able to withstand another six years of this cowardly bum in power.’  He now faces a five-year term in a Russian jail.

Girkin’s arrest is just another twist in a life and career which have stretched credulity, and which the most adept novelist would struggle to make seem plausible. In some ways he is a preposterous figure, a kind of Russian Zelig, forever popping up at crucial moments in history. One can call Girkin many things: thug, psychopath, warrior, shit-stirrer, patriot, buffoon, but one cannot call him boring. Always agitated, always agitating, a twisted idealist endlessly at odds with Russian reality, he called for a return of the country’s monarchy, railed against its liberals and was an ardent proponent of the ‘Russki Mir’ policy, which called for the unification of Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation in one ‘Russian world’.  Ukraine, he said in 2015, had never separated from Russia in his mind, and whatever conflicts took place there he considered a ‘civil war’ inside his country.

He was, it seemed, woefully unsuited to peacetime and always in need of a conflict. Mayhem and violence have followed him throughout his life. Having fought in former Yugoslavia as a young man, he was later reported as playing a key-role in the massacre of 3,000 Bosnian Muslims at Visegrad. In the second Chechen war, he was alleged to have abducted and killed six local men from a mountain village, whose bodies were never found. In one of a series of subsequent emails attributed to him, Girkin explained to a friend that ‘people we captured and questioned almost always disappeared without trace, without court, after we were done.’ From an early age Girkin was clearly a man with blood on his hands, and in no great hurry to wash them.

But it was in Ukraine, after the Maidan Revolution of 2014, where he was to prove most fateful. Having played an active, coercive role in the Crimea annexation that year, he was reputedly dispatched to the Donbas to foment an anti-Kyiv uprising. In this he would prove surprisingly effective, later claiming that without his efforts the eight-year conflict in the region, which claimed 14,000 lives, would never have ignited: ‘I pressed the launching trigger of war,’ he was to boast, claiming that ‘If our squad hadn’t crossed the border, things eventually would have come to an end as in Kharkiv or Odessa.’

While in Donbas, the Ukrainian government claimed, Girkin was directly responsible for the kidnapping, torture and killing of Ukrainian politician Volodymyr Rybak and 19 year-old student Yury Popravko. The government in Kyiv branded him ‘a monster and a killer’, but in the Donetsk People’s Republic he was appointed, for a few months, Minister of Defence.  His most infamous crime of all took place in July 2014 when, apparently mistaking a Boeing 777 passenger jet flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur for a Ukrainian warplane, he shot it down, killing all 298 passengers, 80 of them children.  ‘Murderers!’ screamed a headline in a leading Dutch newspaper the next day. He was convicted of the crime in a Dutch court late last year and sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment.

Whether the five-year term probably awaiting him in Russia now signals the end of Girkin or turns out to be merely the latest episode in a life of grotesque ups and downs remains to be seen. Given the nine-year sentence meted out to opposition leader Alexander Navalny and the staggering 25-year term for Vladimir Kara-Murza, those five years seem relatively lenient. This of course begs all sorts of questions, as does the timing of his arrest yesterday. The real mystery is not why Igor Girkin is finally behind bars, but why it took the Russian authorities so long.

Will Sunak and Starmer now ditch their green promises?

Where do the by-election results leave Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer? The Labour leader had been hoping for a victory parade but his party’s failure to secure Uxbridge – with the Tories clinging on by under 500 votes – has led to Labour unrest. Rather than tour the media studios with a single message that Labour are on the cusp of power following their decisive victory in Selby, both Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner used broadcast interviews to take aim at Sadiq Khan. The pair cited Ulez – ultra low emission zones – as why they lost, and suggested it shows what happens when politicians don’t listen to voters, something of which Khan ought to take note. Ulez became a cost of living issue. 

While there is an argument that the result will make it easier for Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves to further tone down the green message (the national policy forum is this weekend), others in the party are bemused by the comments on Friday – which served to highlight tensions between Starmer and the London mayor rather than aim fire at the Tories. Starmer has a strained relationship with several of the mayors, including Andy Burnham. Khan hopes that by the time he seeks re-election – next May – the issue will have calmed given the Ulez expansion is meant to be in place by end of summer. Away from London Labour, the result means that some Starmer allies see it as further reason to clip Ed Miliband’s wings – pointing to the risk of green backfiring if it looks costly. 

Sunak is not immune to this criticism either. Given he had a very bad night bar Uxbridge, his MPs and Tory peers are already making the case for a stronger line on net zero, such as delaying several targets including on electric cars. A reset is also being talked up – with some MPs demanding a change in direction. As I say in this week’s magazine, No. 10 do not want to use the word reset for fear it looks like panic. But a change of pace is coming – though the five priorities will remain. Sunak’s plan is to keep calm and stick to his five priorities, rather than admit defeat and try again. ‘A reset rarely works,’ says one government aide. 

Sunak will outline a fresh final-year mission at the Tory party conference in October. He will have a new cabinet, made up of MPs hungry to win the next election (with some surprising roles for the younger intakes). He will use the King’s Speech to set out further both what his government hopes to do before the next election and what it would do if the Tories somehow won a fifth term. His agenda is likely to include a move rightwards generally, as well as a focus on fraud and energy security (which the Tories believe is a clear dividing line with Labour).

Ulez and the limit of Sadiq Khan’s power

That the Conservatives retained the west London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, albeit by a whisker, has been put down to a single issue: the London Mayor’s plan to extend the ultra low emissions zone to the outer boroughs, to take effect at the end of next month. A legal challenge is currently in the works, with a ruling expected soon. 

The Mayor’s argument is that improving air quality for Londoners is a priority, and he was out there repeating his point with his usual verve within hours of Labour’s failure to win Thursday’s by-election. 

Whichever way the court rules, however, the extension of the Ulez is surely as much of a political issue as it is a legal, or even a health, issue. And while opposition to the enlarged zone has tended to focus on the cost – with drivers of ‘non-compliant’ vehicles being required to fork out £12.50 a day, and those drivers often being those least able to afford it – there is another argument against the extension that cap all the others.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, may have a mandate that extends as far as the M25, but where does a decision such as extending the Ulez leave the authority of elected local councils, or indeed of the just-elected MP? What is the appropriate level for such a decision to be taken? It was pure chance in the timing of a by-election that gave residents of this particular constituency a say, but what effect, if any, might this have? 

At this point I should perhaps make clear that I am as keen on clean air as anyone, and do have a dog – or non-compliant vehicle – in this fight. As a car-owner living in central London, I accepted the original Ulez scheme without demur, even if it did seem that the imposition of the fee on top of the congestion charge was a needlessly clumsy way of trying to achieve essentially the same thing. 

I wonder from time to time about the calculations that justify local council decisions to close so many roads to through traffic, which often seems to create gridlock and generate worse pollution elsewhere. But that is a separate matter. You can vote against re-electing your councillor; it is nothing to do with the Mayor. 

But there is, or there should be, a legitimate question to be asked about how far and into what domains the writ of the London Mayor should run. When you see opponents of the Ulez extension unfurling their banners on Trafalgar Square, as I did on a recent weekend, you will see the names of places such as Kingston and Orpington and, yes, Uxbridge, which many would regard as self-standing towns. You will also know that, for the most part they are nothing like traffic-choked inner London. There is a lot more green space and there are houses rather than flats, all with their own gardens along tree-lined streets. For many people, the difference is why they move there. 

But the difference, including the relative sparseness of public transport and the larger proportion of families with children, also helps to explain why people want their cars. It seems quite wrong for a mayor whose electoral support comes largely from the capital’s inner boroughs to presume to change how people here live their lives, which includes penalising those who cannot afford the right vehicles. It seems equally wrong for the Mayor to argue that air pollution here is a problem of the same order as it is in inner London. The simple experience of walking along the pavements tells you that is not true. 

Two changes might be worth considering in the light of the city/suburbs divide thrown up by the planned Ulez extension. One is a clearer and narrower definition of the mayoral mandate. As it stands, Sadiq Khan has the power to overrule local authorities, whose members are elected no less democratically than he is, but who, for the purposes of the Ulez, have no way to represent their voters at all. It was Boris Johnson, for his sins, who devised the Ulez for inner London when he was mayor. But unlike his successor, he seems to have had sufficient sense of the capital’s differences to know when and where to stop. As ex-MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, he recently described the planned extension as ‘boneheaded’.

A more drastic response might be to look again at the geographical remit of the London Mayor. By any standards, this is a huge area with a big and diverse population, and the city/suburbs divide is, to a large extent, a political divide, too. It is all very well to describe London as a Labour city, but a large number of outer London boroughs have voting patterns more like the shires. Many of the needs are different, and the approach from local, mayoral and national government must be different to match. 

A functioning democracy requires consent. It is hard to detect anything like public consent for extending London’s Ulez out to the M25. Forcing it upon people could stoke resentment that makes future decisions about the environment harder to enforce. There is a message for other mayors considering their own Ulez schemes, too. They must weigh the balance of pluses and minuses, respect difference, and learn from Mayor Khan’s mistakes. 

How Spain’s politics succumbed to radicalism

If Spain’s left-wing government loses tomorrow’s general election, thousands of people including many senior civil servants stand to lose their jobs. Their positions are discretionary; if the political masters change, so do the personnel.

When the left took office in 2018, for example, an estimated 6,000 public servants were fired, including several hundred advisers. The incoming Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also put trusted supporters in charge of the state-run broadcasting company, the Paradors (a chain of state-owned hotels) and the social research organisation that organises opinion polls. Not surprisingly, its polls have been biased to the left ever since.

This ‘jobs for the boys’ approach is even worse inside the political parties. Across the spectrum, Spanish parties are highly disciplined, top-down organisations; intolerant of dissent, the party leaders fill posts with ‘yes men’. It’s a system that fosters unquestioning obedience, groupthink and dogmatism.

It’s no surprise, then, that there is also little tolerance for the ideas of other parties. Instead, debate is littered with put-downs and name-calling. William Chislett of the Elcano Royal Institute, an international affairs think-tank in Madrid, describes the prevailing culture as ‘particularly toxic… especially the political bellowing about ‘reds’ and ‘fascists’, reviving the language of the 1936-39 Civil War’.

In televised discussions two or three rival pundits often talk over each other. Listening carefully to an opposing opinion is regarded as a sign of weakness – an indication that it might be right. Ensuring your opponents can’t be heard turns out to be a simple and effective form of censorship.

So is suggesting that they have no place in a democracy. In this campaign the right has constantly demonised the left-wing coalition for relying on the votes of democratically elected Basque and Catalan separatists – ‘the enemies of Spain’. Meanwhile the left has repeated ad nauseam the mantra that Vox is a party of ‘far-right fascists’. And since the Partido Popular, the other party on the right, has joined forces with Vox to govern town halls and regions, that makes it an enabler of fascism – which of course is tantamount to being fascist. Both right and left, then, suggest that their opponents are not merely wrong but illegitimate, beyond the democratic pale.

It was very different 45 years ago. Emerging from Franco’s dictatorship, political parties buried their differences to further a unifying national project – joining the family of rich western democracies from which Spain had been isolated for so long. But now, with that mission long since accomplished, old enmities have emerged with a vengeance.

The problem has worsened considerably over recent years with the decline and subsequent demise of the centrist party Ciudadanos. While Ciudadanos was still around, both PSOE, the main left-wing party, and the Partido Popular, the main right-wing party, saw it as a potential coalition partner. But now PSOE has had to move further left to facilitate its agreements with the Sumar party, while the Partido Popular has shifted further to the right to accommodate its only potential ally – Vox.

Spain then has divided into two highly polarised camps that have very little common ground and, according to the polls, are approximately equal in size. A YouGov poll on Monday, the last day on which polls were permitted, suggested a knife-edge result in which the right-wing might just scrape home. Meanwhile, the state-run social research organisation was, predictably, suggesting victory for the left. One thing is certain: whoever loses will be extremely bitter.

But however acrimonious things are about to get, there is no prospect of another civil war. The dictator Franco, nearing the end of his life, predicted what would happen after his death: ‘Spain will go a long way down the road that [the West] wants: democracy, pornography, drugs and so on. There will be a lot of crazy things but nothing terminal.’

Pressed on how he could be so sure, he replied, ‘Because I’m leaving something that I didn’t find on taking over the government of this country 40 years ago: the Spanish middle class… There won’t be another civil war.’

Although the quality of Spanish politicians may not have improved much since the 1930s, social circumstances have. Ninety years ago abject poverty meant that millions had nothing to lose. Spanish people are no longer so radicalised. Unfortunately their politicians are.    

Falklanders won’t forgive the EU’s ‘Las Malvina’ blunder

This week, the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, made pretty much the only blunder which, in the eyes of Falkland Islanders, there is no coming back from: referring to the Falklands as ‘Las Malvinas’. 

The row was sparked after the EU chose to sign a declaration with Argentina and 32 other South American countries, referring to the UK overseas territory as both ‘Islas Malvinas’ and the ‘Falkland Islands’.

Brussels might not – perhaps – quite realise the extent to which the M-word is no laughing matter in these latitudes. (Just ask a Spanish teaching friend of mine!) But Argentina’s government instantly hailed the usage as a ‘diplomatic triumph’ and their foreign minister declared openly they want to use this ‘to further expand dialogue with the EU regarding the question of the Malvinas Islands.’ 

To say that Islanders are not too taken with this idea would be an understatement. Rishi Sunak correctly calling it ‘entirely unacceptable’ that the EU should appear to question the population’s enshrined right to self-determination. 

The EU’s diplomatic service hastily sent out a spokesman to deny that their stance with regard to the South Atlantic micro-nation had changed. In fact, they seemed to object, Argentina had somewhat ‘spun’ the solitary reference to ‘Las Malvinas’. Well, obviously.

But the document was signed by the presidents of both the European Council and the European Commission. And, what’s more, this is apparently the first time they’ve seen fit to use ‘Malvinas’ (before, that is, their spokesman said it twice more in his non-apology). So the British government is now rightly concerned that European states might see this as a green light on the (so-called) issue of the Islands’ sovereignty.

Innocent mistakes do, naturally, occur. A few years back, I’m told, one social media site would slap an M-word filter over pictures taken in the Falklands. Last month, my editor had to inform the Student Loans Company – managed by HMG’s own Department for Education – that her current abode was not in ‘the Malvinas’. Another colleague once found this most improper of nouns on the website of, if you can credit it, the Royal Marines Benevolent Fund.

The EU isn’t Snapchat, though. These are professional diplomats, and they’d been lobbied hard by Argentina to cede ground patently off-limits while the Falklands were still the attached limb of an existing EU member.

The deputy chair of the Falklands’ Legislative Assembly, Teslyn Barkman, issued a forgivably dismissive statement in which she expressed disappointment ‘that it has been decided, without input from the Falkland Islands or the UK government, to refer to our Islands by a name that has been given to us by our aggressive and hostile neighbour’. The Falklands’ governor, Alison Blake, has charged the Argentinians with wilfully misrepresenting the EU’s position on the entire business.

Oddly enough, it happens to be election season now in Argentina. But honestly, this sort of posturing would be no great shock anyway: in Buenos Aires the M-word gets deployed on any day that has a Y in it. 

On this side of the water, though, the truth is there is absolutely nobody who thinks that Argentina ought to govern and/or own the Falklands. This was put to a referendum in 2013, with an outcome so thumping I do sometimes find myself saying to interested people overseas, ‘Yeah, look, this isn’t Belarus, alright…?’ (the renegade 0.2 per cent, for better or worse, were almost certainly after full-on independence).

Despite this, year in, year out, thanks to Argentina, Falklands delegates dutifully present themselves at international bodies like the UN, to listen to copy-and-paste nonsense about ‘decolonisation’ and ‘settling disputes through peaceful dialogue’. This dispute, of course, has already been definitively settled. It wasn’t peaceful; but then whose fault was that? 

There are long-term serious problems caused by the incessant aggro from the Falklands’ nearest, largest neighbour. But on this occasion, the Islands’ community board – an arena that could, most days, be charitably classified as ‘feisty’ – could almost not even bestir itself to react.

Since the FIG statement went up, in fact, posts have included complaints over a dysfunctional car wash, the major hotel restaurant being closed this Saturday, a lecture on peat, the availability of pizza at curry night, someone wanting a ball ticket, a pranged fender outside the bank, ongoing strife with Airbridge transport to and from Brize Norton (or not), and the announcement of a reception for the returning Island Games competitors and those who took part at the recent Golden Shears in Edinburgh. 

Or, as MLA Barkman put it: ‘the news from Brussels changes nothing.’

The trouble with Keir Mather

Every time I cross paths – or swords – with a cranky student activist, I have the same thought: ‘Oh God, these people are going to be running the country one day.’ I have tormenting visions of these blue-haired censors, these giddy blacklisters of the un-PC, in parliament, drawing up laws, wagging a collective finger at the wrong-thinking throng.

Those privileged fuming youths who once blocked my path to the Oxford Union; that offence-seeking mob that tried to prevent me from giving an after-dinner speech at Queen’s College, Oxford – they’re going to be in charge soon, I always fret, and then we’re screwed. We’ll all be under the thumb of that eccentric intolerance that has stalked so many campuses of late.

Well, bad news – it’s happening. Labour’s newest MP, Keir Mather, had a previous life as precisely one of those illiberal youths. While at Oxford – where else? – he wrung his manicured hands over the Union’s penchant for hosting ‘controversial’ speakers and appeared to think that students’ feelings should be put ahead of difficult debates. And this wasn’t long ago. He’s only 25.

Keir the Younger, who looks and sounds like an identikit Starmer, won the Selby and Ainsty by-election last night. He overturned the Tories’ 20,000 majority. He’s the first MP to have been born after Tony Blair became PM (he was born in 1998). He’s being called ‘the Baby of the House’. But don’t be fooled into thinking he’s a sweet, fresh politician: this is a bloke with some pretty questionable views.

He once branded Germaine Greer ‘an abhorrent transphobe’. It was 2018 and the Oxford Union had invited her to speak. Crusading Keir, who’s gay, was not happy. This is a woman who has made ‘dehumanising and downright dangerous comments about transgender women’, he thundered.

She hasn’t, of course. All Greer says is that men are not women. If she’s an ‘abhorrent transphobe’, then so are the vast majority of Brits, who will fully concur with Greer’s insistence that biology is real and it matters. Another Labour MP massively out of touch with public sentiment? Great.

Mather also slammed the Union for hosting the Russian ambassador to the UK. In Pride week of all weeks. It’s ‘hugely insensitive’, he cried, before describing himself as ‘fucking shook’. I’m sorry but if other people’s views shake you to your core, maybe you shouldn’t have been at university in the first place?

Mather’s comments implicitly lumped Greer in with Putin’s Russia. He slammed the Union for hosting both a ‘stooge of the homophobic Putin regime’ and ‘an abhorrent transphobe’. As if these people are moral equivalents. As if a funny, principled feminist and public intellectual is no different to a Kremlin lackey. As if defending the social and scientific truth of womanhood – as Greer does – is akin to running an authoritarian state that denies certain people their basic rights. This is how unhinged the demonisation of gender-critical women has become.

Does anyone else find it worrying that Labour’s new generation includes a young man who has maligned such an important thinker as Greer? She devotes her life to analysing and improving the condition of women and then along come some leftist bros suggesting she is a vile old bigot. I wonder how the gender-critical Labour MP Rosie Duffield feels about sharing the opposition benches with a man who, just a few years ago, was branding people like her ‘abhorrent’.

Maybe Mather has changed. He should say. I’m sure his constituents will be keen to know if he still thinks Germaine Greer is unfit for public life because she says people with penises are men, not women.

The rise of this new breed of Labour politician suggests that while Labour might have done well in yesterday’s by-elections, it won’t be reconnecting with its working-class roots anytime soon. Mather’s an Oxford grad who cut his teeth in public relations, worked as a parliamentary researcher for Wes Streeting, and fumes against free expression he doesn’t like. His other namesake – Hardie – will be spinning in his grave.

Starmer turns on Sadiq over Ulez

You just hate to see it. Less than 12 hours after the Uxbridge result and already the Labour blame game is well underway. The chairman of the local party has quit in disgust, citing Starmer’s lack of principles. And now Starmer has decided that the solution to his problems is to, er, throw his party’s most senior elected politician in England under the bus. Let’s hope it was a carbon-friendly one…

Sir Keir told broadcasters this morning that Uxbridge was always going to be a ‘tough’ seat, arguing that:

We didn’t take it in 1997 when we had a landslide Labour victory. And Ulez was the reason we didn’t win there yesterday. We know that. We heard that on the doors. And we’ve all got to reflect on that, including the mayor.

That’s a very different tone from Sadiq Khan, whose reaction to the defeat was to claim that:

The decision to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone was a tough one, but it’s the right one. Why? Because every year across our city, roughly speaking 4,000 people die prematurely. There are children with stunted lungs forever, adults with a whole host of health issues.

Two voices purporting to speak for Labour in London. Which should the voters listen to? Doesn’t sound like a Labour PM in No. 10 necessarily means good news for Sadiq across the capital in City Hall…

Labour’s Uxbridge chair quits and attacks Starmer

For all Keir Starmer’s eager spin, last night wasn’t the great Labour triumph it was supposed to be. While the party pulled off an impressive triumph in Selby, it was a different story down south after the Ulez issue cost Labour the chance of winning Boris Johnson’s seat in Uxbridge and Ruislip. Recriminations are already flying, with one party strategist briefing the Times that it was ‘an obvious lesson: tin eared operations which cling to policies that punish working families will cost Labour votes.’

David Williams, the chairman of the local Labour party, has now done his bit to pour fuel on the fire too. He has taken to Twitter to announce his resignation from the post this afternoon, citing Starmer’s lack of principles. Claiming that ‘Local people were excluded from the campaign. It was run totally by London Region,’ Williams wrote:

I have resigned as chair of Uxbridge and South Ruislip CLP. I am also resigning my membership of the Labour Party. Politics needs to have principles or we end up with people like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss running the country, Jeremy Corbyn gave a huge boost to the Labour Party.

Talk about Starmer Chameleon…