Labour’s Schools Bill is undoing Britain’s successes

At the 2023 Commonwealth Youth Games, Noah Hanson won a silver medal for Team England in the 110m hurdles. He was only 0.04 seconds behind the Gold Medal winner and he has gone on to represent Team GB at international events. Noah attended the Bobby Moore Academy on the Olympic Park, a school with a strong sporting ethos. Opened in 2017 by the David Ross Education Trust, I personally invested a significant amount of time and financial resources to ensure the sporting legacy of 2012 was more than just a pipe dream. Noah now attends the University of Houston in the United States, running for one of the US college system’s leading track and field teams.

This is a remarkable achievement, and one that is replicated regularly across the Academy chain I established in 2006 – whether it be in classrooms, music schools or on sports pitches across our network. Much comment has been made about academic and curriculum freedoms that academies and free schools have – in reality these freedoms permeate every aspect of the school day. As does the entrepreneurial spirit, drive and determination to change and make things better – for kids and teachers. This is what the academy system was supposed to do: challenge the status quo and enable all children, regardless of background, the opportunity to excel. Things that were often seen as a preserve of the wealthy, are being offered to DRET children – opportunities that would otherwise only be seen in the independent sector.

When Noah came to the Bobby Moore Academy, we identified his talent, and we nurtured it. The same applies to Rowan, who hopes to start a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Music in September. We provide children from all backgrounds with the opportunities to unleash their potential because we have the flexibility and independence to do so. A ‘one size fits all’ approach will fail. However, passing through the House of Commons, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill threatens to remove these key freedoms, for what?

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These innovations and opportunities are not limited simply to the pursuit of academic excellence. Within David Ross Education Trust schools we give students unparalleled access to the arts (through workshops with world-renowned artists), we support students to perform with the Nevill Holt Opera, Shakespeare Schools Festival and the National Youth Orchestra, we give them access to Athletes through our relationship with the British Olympic Association and British Paralympic Association, and numerous other Governing bodies. We are regularly National Champions in both basketball and Table Tennis and win national and country representation across many sports. 

We are able to do this because of the freedom that we have as an Academy chain. What do I mean by freedom? I mean that because we aren’t hamstrung by centrally dictated restrictions, children at DRET aren’t bound to a national curriculum that restricts them from nurturing individual and unique talent, enabling them to experience incredible academic, cultural and sporting opportunities alike. The removal of these freedoms will harm the ability of Academy chains like mine to innovate in a way such as Noah was able to enjoy at Bobby Moore Academy. 

These innovations have been crucial to children’s success and in supporting teachers to provide a high-quality education to their pupils. The list of good and outstanding schools now demonstrates just how important this has been to thousands of children in all parts of the country. This has only been possible because of the determination of a highly motivated team of teaching professionals. This Bill risks undoing this, harming educational outcomes and the life chances of so many of our nation’s children.

When I first founded my trust, I pledged significant financial resources and time, on the understanding that the schools within my trust would have certain key freedoms. Many others across the country have done this too. These freedoms have been fundamental to our success. Now, the Government is poised to renege on those promises.

We made our commitments in good faith, believing that future governments would uphold the promises and commitments made by Andrew Adonis, during the Blair government. The unvarnished success of the Blair era has been supported by prime ministers and secretaries of state ever since. To turn their backs on this and see these freedoms stripped away now is not only a betrayal of that trust but, more importantly, a disaster for the children who most need this education. 

The Bill will mean a new generation of children stand to be denied the opportunities the free school revolution brought to others. When it comes to opening new schools, local authorities are simply no longer able to deliver the quality of teaching our young people deserve.

The opportunity to be taught an intellectually enriching curriculum and participate in properly resourced activities – whether it be sports, art or culture, cannot be merely the preserve of the wealthy. At DRET, 36 schools have either been turned around or started from scratch. 15,000 pupils now receive an education of the highest quality, with opportunities and aspirations that they will often be the first generation of their family to enjoy. Why would any government feel the justification – or the need – to get involved and imperil this?

Shakespeare Trust: celebrating Bard ‘benefits white supremacy’

In a society obsessed with political correctness and progressiveness, nothing is sacred – not, it seems, even William Shakespeare. It transpires that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns a number of buildings in the bard’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, is working on plans to ensure the writer’s place of origin will be ‘decolonised’. The move, as reported by the Telegraph, follows concerns that depicting Shakespeare as one of the greatest playwrights ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’. Er, right.

In a bid to push a ‘more inclusive museum experience’, the Birthplace Trust has announced it will distance itself from Western views on the poet and decolonise its vast collection. The organisation has lamented that some of its archival items may contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise harmful’ and hopes to explore ‘the continued impact of Empire’ on its collections, the ‘impact of colonialism’ on world history and how ‘Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this’. As if there aren’t better uses of time, eh?

The move follows the publication of a research project between the trust and University of Birmingham academic Dr Helen Hopkins in 2022. This concluded that presenting the playwright as a ‘universal’ genius helped to present European culture as the gold standard for art despite, the report noting, Shakespeare being a symbol of ‘British cultural superiority’ and ‘Anglo-cultural supremacy’. Apparently praising Shakespeare is part of a ‘white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric and increasingly “West-centric” worldview that continue to do harm in the world today’. You couldn’t write it…

The Bard of Avon has been a regular target for progressive campaigners, with a number of his works receiving in recent years trigger warnings for racism and misogyny. London’s Globe Theatre even ran seminars on ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’, encouraging participants to focus on the idea of race in his plays. As the playwright himself once wrote: ‘To thine own self be true.’ Reframing history hardly upholds these principles…

It’s impossible to make Scottish politicians financially literate

Even the OECD has finally noticed. The Paris-based policy forum is normally always in favour of higher taxes and more government spending. But the Scottish parliament has clearly pushed even the left-leaning think tanks too far. The OECD has just recommended that MSPs be given training in financial literacy.

If the OECD gets its way, there could soon be a classroom outside the Holyrood building, and any MSPs who don’t do their prep will have to stay behind. As part of a review of the Scottish Fiscal Commission, it has recommended that the country’s politicians be trained in finance and economics. ‘Strengthening levels of fiscal literacy among members of the Scottish parliament will also enhance the impact of the SFC’s work and help it inform political debate across a broader range of spending areas’, it notes.

The OECD certainly has a point. Scotland’s political class is among the most economically illiterate in the world. It appears completely unaware, for example, that if you raise taxes and you have a completely open border with a neighbour, a fair few of your top earners will move (including even senior civil servants).

It is taken completely by surprise that higher levies and taxes may discourage investment or make it harder for businesses to expand. And it is shocked to discover that if you give stuff away for free – such as higher education, for example – demand goes through the roof and it has to be rationed. At times, it makes Juan Peron’s Argentina look like it was run by Friedrich Hayek, or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela by Milton Friedman. The most basic principles of GCSE Economics are ignored.

In fairness, a little education, especially with remedial classes for the slow learners from the SNP, might help at the margins. But it is not going to fix the real problem. It is not just ignorance that is to blame. It is a devolution settlement that has allowed Scotland to spend lavishly, without having to raise taxes to pay for it all.

This creates perverse incentives, since Holyrood might as well spend as much as possible, since most of the bill will be passed onto the government in Westminster. Sure, there is ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ – that might be lesson four or five in the OECD course – but Scotland has come very close to it.

That is the real problem – and no amount of financial education will fix that.

The audacity of ‘decolonising’ Shakespeare

It seems to have become an unspoken requirement of recent that anyone in charge of promoting or putting on the plays of Shakespeare must first of all hate him and his works. We have long grown accustomed to the Royal Shakespeare Company prefacing his plays with trigger warnings reminding us of what a terrible man he was, that his works contain all manner of bigotry, sexism and racism. So it was no surprise to read yesterday that his birthplace is now being ‘decolonised’, in response to concerns that the playwright is being used to promote ‘white supremacy’.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns buildings connected to his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, together with archival material including parish records of his birth and baptism, is now ‘decolonising’ its collection to ‘create a more inclusive museum experience’. This undertaking will involve examining ‘the continued impact of Empire’ on the collection, the ‘impact of colonialism’ on world history, and how ‘Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this’. The trust has stated that some of items may now contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’.

This arrant, knavish nonsense is nothing new, of course. The custodians of British culture, in thrall to a voguish hyper-liberal doctrine that demands no original thinking, merely the robotic repetition of slogans and key words, have been at this for decades. Despite optimistic declarations of late about ‘woke being over’, our museums, galleries and theatres remain awash with this spirit of knee-jerk, ignorant self-abasement.

Those who advocate a woke dogma primarily because their progressive peers, colleagues and friends are doing it will seldom shine when it comes to intellectual or historical rigour. What came after Shakespeare and his time is not his fault, and his legacy and influence through history are a matter for historians to discuss. It is not in the remit of those in charge of collections or in the heritage industry, let alone the job of those putting on his plays.

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What’s for sure is that to employ that buzzword ‘decolonisation’ in relation to the Bard makes no sense. Britain had no colonies in his time, not least because Britain as a nation didn’t exist, and the paltry possessions owned by England were nothing on the vast, deep scale of what was to come.

Trying to make Shakespeare relevant to 21st-century multi-ethnic Britain, to unearth traces of racism in him, is also fraught with difficulty, nay impossibility, given that his England was almost entirely white. Seeking to detect racism in a country where people had no experience of others with different coloured skin is no mean undertaking.

This hasn’t stopped our modern-day flagellants from trying. This latest initiative by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust comes in the wake of claims made in 2022 by a research project it made in collaboration with Dr Helen Hopkins of the University of Birmingham, which condemned the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of ‘British cultural superiority’ and ‘Anglo-cultural supremacy’. That report also took issue with the understanding and the continued presentation of the Bard as a ‘universal’ genius. On the contrary, it said, this claim to universality ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.

The legitimate and justified global perception, that Shakespeare spoke of humanity, and spoke to all humanity, has invariably been employed by those who counter-argue that Shakespeare, though quintessentially English, spoke not of one people or one ethnicity, but of the human condition itself. Othello makes the point explicitly, Hamlet implicitly. Shakespeare has forever had universal reach that transcends time, culture and custom.

Rational argument and empirical evidence will never wash, alas, with those beholden to the enchantment of ‘decolonisation’. Hyper-liberals are not reasonable people. This is made obvious in their unwitting promotion of ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, that accidental dogma which decrees that all cultures are equal, that none must be judged better or worse than another… except ours, which is obviously much worse.

What makes this report all the more despairing is that here, once again, we see an incoherent and illogical worldview on display, disseminated and accepted without anyone pointing to its contradictions. The trust at Stratford wants at once to dethrone the Bard from his status as ‘greatest’, placing him as ‘part of a community of equal and different writers and artists from around the world’, yet in the same breath it damns him and his legacy for its racism and bigotry.

The incoherence of asymmetrical multiculturalism can be explained by the irrational, vainglorious motives and desires of those enraptured by the performance of ‘decolonisation’. Ostentatious displays of self-loathing and atonement, whether it be of oneself or one’s culture, have always been a devious, inverted means of self-aggrandisement, of flaunting one’s superior, compassionate moral worth and elevated social status. And ’tis pride that pulls a country down.

The OECD’s growth downgrade is yet another headache for Reeves

In more bad news for Rachel Reeves as the Chancellor prepares for next week’s Spring Statement, the OECD has downgraded Britain’s growth prospects. The organisation forecast the UK’s economy to grow 1.4 per cent this year and then just 1.2 per cent next year – compared with the 1.7 per cent and 1. 3 per cent that they’d previously estimated.

In fairness, the whole world is seeing slower growth, according to the OECD’s estimates. America’s growth forecasts were also downgraded to 2.2 per cent this year, followed by 1.6 per cent in 2026 compared with the 2.4 per cent and 3.1 per cent that had originally been forecast. The report’s authors warned that the ‘escalation of trade restrictive measures’ – in other words, Donald Trump's tariff war – risked rising uncertainty and could act as a further drag on global growth. They said global output could fall by 0.3 per cent and inflation could rise by 0.4 per cent as a result of increased trade barriers reducing spending.

Though the OECD still sees Britain growing – albeit painfully slowly – the downgrade will add to growing fears that we could be heading for recession. Another report out this morning from the Resolution Foundation found that the fall in employment over the 12 months to January was in tune with levels ‘only seen during a recession’. If the labour market slowdown continued, the report found that Reeves would be £15 billion short of her headroom.

The labour market problems have not been helped by the Chancellor's £25 billion raid on National Insurance with survey data already suggesting employers are reluctant to create new jobs in anticipation of the tax rises. During the budget, the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) also forecast these tax hikes would cut the labour participation rate by 0.1 per cent. Last week, the Treasury's James Murray admitted as much in response to a parliamentary question.

Meanwhile, the only redeeming feature of the OECD’s report is that the rest of the world – America excluded – is due to do just as bad with the other five G7 countries growing at a slower pace than the UK.

While Reeves was clutching at straws on Friday when she blamed January’s GDP contraction on a ‘changing world’, the mounting uncertainty – exacerbated in no small part by Trump’s tariffs – has made economic forecasting increasingly difficult. Given the fragile outlook, further revisions and unexpected downturns can’t be ruled out.

Did Prince Harry lie on his immigration files?

Once again, the spotlight is back on the monarch of Montecito. A US judge has now ruled that Prince Harry’s visa documents must be made public by Tuesday – in a bid to find out whether the Duke of Sussex lied on his immigration files about drug use. In the end, truth will out…

The release of the documents will help shed light on whether the Prince misled authorities over historic drug use. It is thought that the visa paperwork may include forms that would show whether the California-based monarch ticked ‘no’ when asked if he used illegal drugs – after both his own memoir, Spare, and his Netflix series, Harry & Meghan, revealed the renegade royal had dabbled with cannabis, cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms. It’s hardly the most noble of habits, eh?

Even President Donald Trump has waded into the matter. As Mr S wrote in January, after his inauguration the new president vowed to take ‘appropriate action’ if it emerged that the Duke of Sussex had lied on his visa forms. The intervention followed sustained pressure from the Heritage Foundation think tank that started probing the prince after his drug-taking confessions began to trickle out in his self-congratulatory publication. The organisation has been hot on Harry’s heels, even going so far as to sue the Department of Homeland Security last year after the agency refused a Freedom of Information request for details of Harry’s files. Talk about being on the warpath!

Trump previously fumed to the Express US before the election that if the British prince found himself in trouble, ‘I wouldn’t protect [Harry]. He betrayed the Queen. That’s unforgivable. He would be on his own if it was down to me’. However the President has since said he would not in fact deport Harry if the royal was found to have lied on the documents, remarking: ‘He’s got enough problems with his wife’. Ouch.

Why US airstrikes on the Houthis will fail

The United States has started what might well prove to be a long – and probably doomed – campaign of air strikes against Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, in Yemen.

Since October 2023, the Houthis have been very successfully disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, firing missiles and launching drones at cargo ships, oil tankers, passenger vessels: hitting a few, sinking fewer, and inconveniencing millions. While few ships have been hit, fewer sunk, and even fewer people killed by this campaign, the numbers speak for themselves. Fewer and fewer ships are transiting the region, including using the Suez Canal to cut journey times between Asia and Europe. World shipping costs have risen fast. Supply chains took an initial shock and kept taking shocks as the Houthi campaign continued and broadened.

The Houthis claimed that all of this was in protest at the Israeli bombing and occupation of Gaza, and that it only targeted ships going to and from Israel, or which were owned by Israeli companies, or which carried Israeli goods or Israeli insurance. This was never true – although the Houthi campaign did decrease traffic to and from the Israeli port of Eilat. Instead, the Houthis targeted everyone opportunistically – with missiles, from what felt like an endless supply, with drones, and with the type of fast attack boats familiar to anyone who has studied piracy in the Horn of Africa in this century.

Houthi propaganda, meanwhile, has included footage of small teams of black-clad ‘special forces’ descending onto Red Sea shipping by helicopter, in a parody of similar operations carried out by the Special Boat Service and others.

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Some shipping companies appear to have been able to pay the Houthis off. But this is technically unconfirmed. And it is the logic of piracy. It’s not in the rich world’s interests that it continues.

In December 2023, the US Navy and the armed forces of a number of countries both local and more distant formed Operation Prosperity Guardian, which patrolled the Red Sea and its surrounds. Hundreds of Houthi missiles and drones were shot down, with the hope of shepherding ships through those waters. That campaign, although it did not suffer many losses (only a little friendly fire), was a resolute failure. Houthi missile stockpiles did not seem to decrease, and the Houthis were not given up by their Iranian sponsors and patrons. Worldwide shipping remained expensive and traffic around Yemen remained small.

A campaign of airstrikes and interceptions has been waged against the Houthis by America and Britain since January 2024. There have been hundreds of strikes on targets across the country but significantly around the western port cities like Hodeida. British Typhoons scrambling from Cyprus have joined American carrier aviation in a series of attacks on missiles and radars. The American campaign before March 2025 was consistent but not heavy. Largely, according to the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, it was retaliatory: a Houthi barrage targeted shipping or the American naval presence; the Americans would then hit pre-arranged targets – airports under military control, suspected warehouses for the Houthi missile programme and so on.

This campaign did not work. America believed that it reduced the Houthi capacity to destroy shipping and likely saved quite a few lives of those transiting the Red Sea; but it did not bring trade back. Incremental strikes can be matched quite easily. The Houthis would lose people and materiel, but they could harden their defences, learn lessons about dispersing their bases and their people, and keep fighting almost indefinitely.

If the Americans really cared, they would be pounding Yemen with constant strikes designed to keep the Houthis suppressed, with the ultimate goal of doing to the Houthis in Yemen what Israel did to other Iranian proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon, as against Hamas and Hezbollah: killing their entire leadership, destroying their missile stockpiles, compromising their command and control so effectively that fighting back becomes costly and futile.

But this has been tried before by a large-scale international coalition in the 2010s, when a Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in support of the UN-recognised government (backed by the United States and, to a much lesser extent, by Britain) poured munitions into the country. That campaign simply did not succeed and, after years of fighting, the Saudis effectively withdrew. The Houthis, meanwhile, used the period to assimilate Iranian missile and drone technology, and to fire missiles at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, at the Saudi oil industry, and at the United Arab Emirates — almost all of which passed without serious response from America or anyone in the region.

The Houthis are a menace and perhaps deserve a campaign against them as destructive as the one Israel is waging against Hezbollah. For the moment, the Houthis’ Iranian masters seem afraid, saying that the Houthis are not really their clients but independent (a lie) and that Yemen has the right to decide its own future.

But can we really believe, after the century we have seen, that the United States has the intelligence, and the commitment, to keep up such a course? It has won no sustained campaign this century. Every conflict to which the United States has been involved since 2001 has ended before America achieved its goals — after its leaders got bored and betrayed its local allies, contenting itself with lobbing a few missiles and drone strikes to maintain an illusion of control.

The United States could cripple the Houthi movement like Israel has temporarily crippled Hezbollah. But will it do so? Some in Washington are confident. But I am not. Why would it work this time if not before?

The redemption of Joelinton

Five years ago, the Brazilian midfielder Joelinton was one of the Premier League’s worst players. But yesterday he was Newcastle’s best in their 2-1 win over Liverpool in the League Cup final. Spurred on by the clamour of the final, his gladiatorial style overpowered Liverpool’s meek midfield. He celebrated every tackle like a goal, buoying teammates and fans alike. After a third crucial tackle, the commentators purred in unison: ‘That’s his hat-trick.’ Now he’s been called up to the Brazilian national side. His redemption is without end.

Perhaps the circumstances of Joelinton’s arrival at Newcastle in the summer of 2019 were unfair. Manager Steve Bruce originally bought the Brazilian as a striker for a club record-breaking £40 million. A struggling Newcastle expected him to be the answer to all the club’s problems. Fans, awed that the tight-fisted owner Mike Ashley would ever spend such a sum on a single player, wanted him to be the next Alan Shearer. He came from an intense and aggressive Hoffenheim side coached by the young, pioneering German manager Julian Nagelsmann (who now coaches his national side). But at Newcastle, Joelinton found himself playing as a lone forward with little support. The result? Two goals in his first season, followed by a 26-game run without a single goal.

Joelinton was the laughing stock of the league. Fans joked that as a striker he scuffed every shot and that as a winger he ran through custard. Not even the stats bores would defend him. Worst shooting accuracy: Joelinton. Worst conversion rate: Joelinton. Worst minutes per goal: Joelinton.

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It’s normally at this point in a struggling player’s career that the decline becomes irreversible. So often, strikers – especially from South America – impress in the European leagues but fail to meet the expectations of Premier League clubs. Fifteen years ago, it was the Brazilian Jô whom Manchester City signed from CSKA Moscow. Like Joelinton, he was a club-record signing, costing £19 million, but he managed just six goals in 43 games before being shipped off to another club. A few years later, Southampton signed the Argentine Guido Carrillo for £19 million after an impressive spell at Monaco. He lasted a single season, failing to score in ten games. Currently, it’s the turn of the Uruguayan Darwin Núñez at Liverpool. He also played in yesterday’s cup final, doing a lot of his trademark frantic running around and defensive disruption. Despite being a fan favourite, many think Núñez’s haphazard style makes him unsuited to the top of the Premier League. After two seasons, pundits speculate that he will be dispatched to Saudi Arabia.

Given the number of failed predecessors and currently similarly cursed players, you could consider it blind luck that led to Joelinton’s resurgence. He had some fortune. When the Saudis bought Newcastle in October 2021, they cleared out the coaching staff to bring in the young English manager Eddie Howe, who inverted the team’s tactics. Standoffish defending and cautious attacking were out; intense pressing and throwing bodies forward were in. The same conditions under which Joelinton had thrived at Nagelsmann’s Hoffenheim. In Howe’s third game in charge, defender Ciaran Clark was sent off within ten minutes, forcing the striker Joelinton into midfield. He played there for the rest of the season, making tackles more than taking shots. The effect was clear: Newcastle climbed from the bottom of the league to 11th within a few months. He was also named the club’s player of the year that season. His price tag was paying off.

What was evident about Joelinton’s talent to Howe a few years ago – ‘He is a brick wall,’ Howe said, ‘he’s a hard worker’ – is now widely accepted. Eerily similar words were once said by Joelinton’s old boss at Hoffenheim, Nagelsmann: ‘He is hard to break… he marches until his tongue hangs onto the floor.’ His sheer effort and willpower have transformed him from an errant forward into one of the league’s best midfielders.

A few years ago, no Newcastle fan would have believed you if you had said Joelinton would go from Brazilian flop to bonny lad. Now, he has the silverware to prove it.

Britain is facing a reckoning on anti-Semitism

It is difficult to fathom how an incident as horrifying as the kidnapping of Israeli musician Itay Kashti by three men in Wales barely registered as a blip on the national news agenda. In any just world, this crime – motivated by anti-Semitic hatred, religious fanaticism, and a chilling sense of political grievance – should have dominated headlines. It should have sparked national debate, serious introspection, and urgent discussions about the growing wave of anti-Semitism sweeping the UK and beyond. And yet, aside from a handful of reports, silence reigned.

Kashti was lured to a remote cottage in Llanybydder, Wales, on 26 August 2024, under the false pretence of a music collaboration. When he arrived, he was brutally attacked, handcuffed to a radiator, and warned that if he tried to escape, he would be killed. His captors had stocked the house with enough supplies to hold him for at least a week. They had meticulously planned every step, fuelled by an ideology that justified their actions in the name of religion and political grievance.

The kidnapping occurred against the backdrop of a disturbing global surge in anti-Semitism, particularly in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 invasion of Israel. Since that massacre, Jews worldwide have found themselves increasingly vulnerable – to physical violence, threats, and a climate of hostility that has emboldened those who hold deep-seated hatred. And yet, even when a Jewish man is kidnapped, abused, and threatened with death on British soil, the response is muted.

Kashti later described his ordeal as his ‘own personal 7 October’. It’s easy to understand how he could have feared something similar, as his Muslim attackers beat him and threatened his life. He also reflected on the Holocaust. For Jews, these echoes of the past – of Jewish men, women, and children bound, beaten, and brutalised for no reason other than their identity – are deafening.

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The political and religious motivations of the perpetrators were explicitly documented in court. One of the men claimed in his messages to his co-conspirators that they targeted Kashti because he attended pro-Israel marches. Another alleged that he was involved in West Bank settlements, taking ‘Palestinian land’. The men’s communications on an encrypted Telegram group revealed their chilling mindset, with one message declaring: ‘All three of us have complete, 100 per cent faith in Allah, so we can’t fail.’

The brutality of this case is not an outlier, nor is Britain alone in witnessing such hostility toward Jews. Across Europe, anti-Semitic aggression is growing more overt, more tolerated, and more ignored by those in power.

In Dublin, just days ago, an Israeli businessman was spat at while dining in a restaurant, his only crime being his nationality. He later said that nobody intervened, nobody objected. ‘People just kept eating,’ he recounted. There is something profoundly disturbing about this image – not simply the act of hatred itself, but the quiet complicity of those who chose to look away.

This attitude is not confined to the streets. It reaches the highest levels of power. During Ireland’s Holocaust Memorial Day event, a Jewish Israeli woman was forcibly removed from the room after protesting the Irish President Michael D Higgins’s grotesque comparison of the Holocaust to the situation in Gaza.

This is the climate in which Kashti was kidnapped. A world in which anti-Semitism is becoming normalised, in which the mistreatment of Jews provokes not outrage, but shrugs of indifference.

The brutality and anti-Semitic motivations behind this crime are disturbingly reminiscent of another case: the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris. Halimi, a 23-year-old Jewish mobile phone salesman, was abducted by a gang of primarily Muslim men, the self-proclaimed ‘Gang of Barbarians’. They believed the age-old anti-Semitic trope that all Jews are wealthy, demanding exorbitant ransoms from Halimi’s family. For 24 excruciating days, they held him captive, subjecting him to unspeakable torture – burning him, beating him, and starving him – before ultimately dumping his broken body by a roadside. Once discovered, he died on the way to hospital, having suffered unimaginable agony.

At the time, French authorities were disturbingly slow to recognise the anti-Semitic nature of the crime. Police initially dismissed the religious and racial motivations, treating it as a simple kidnapping-for-ransom. Only later did it become more widely accepted that Halimi was tortured specifically because he was Jewish. The case became a watershed moment in France, forcing a long-overdue reckoning with the rising tide of violent anti-Semitism in the country.

Today, it is only by the grace of God that we are not mourning a murder instead of a kidnapping. Despite being tied to the radiator in the house the men had rented specially for his abduction, Kashti was able to escape. He managed to hide in nearby bushes and call his wife, who raised the alarm. His taxi driver – unwittingly caught up in the ordeal – alerted police. Had events unfolded differently, we might have been speaking about yet another Jewish man tortured and killed in Europe simply because he was a Jew.

The three men responsible for this heinous crime were sentenced to just eight years and one month in prison – a shockingly lenient punishment given the gravity of their actions. In the United States, they could potentially have faced decades in federal prison. 

The Ilan Halimi case forced France to confront a harsh truth: violent anti-Semitism was alive and well, thriving in parts of French society. Left unchecked, it can have horrific results. Nearly two decades later, Britain now finds itself facing the same moment of reckoning. Will Itay Kashti’s kidnapping force Britain to acknowledge the reality of Muslim anti-Semitism within its borders? Or will it bury the issue, reluctant to address the uncomfortable truths it exposes?

Can Keir Starmer stem the welfare rebellion?

Keir Starmer is gearing up for a showdown with his party as the Prime Minister prepares to unveil his welfare reforms. On Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall will announce the details of the government’s plan to shake up the benefits system in a bid to reduce the ballooning welfare bill and get more people back into work. The measures mooted have already proved controversial – there was talk of an announcement last week, for example, only for it to be delayed as final details were thrashed out.

The measures Kendall is expected to include in what is being touted as £5 billion in savings involve tightening the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) welfare payments and freezing or cutting Universal Credit payments to long-term sick and disabled people. The general idea is to change the system so only the most severely disabled apply and incentivise the rest of the claimants to return to work.

Speaking on Sunday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting suggested that some claiming sickness benefits were able to work. Streeting said there has been an ‘overdiagnosis’ of mental health problems in Britain, as when it comes to ‘mental wellbeing/illness, it’s a spectrum’. He also made the case that this was an issue for some of those now out of work as they risk being ‘written off’. It’s this moral argument for returning individuals to the workplace that ministers are keen to advance.

However, there is already plenty of Labour pushback. Writing in the Times, the Greater Manchester metro mayor Andy Burnham has warned that the planned changes would ‘trap too many people in poverty’. Given that Burnham is historically one of the most critical Labour voices for Starmer, these comments aren’t all that surprising. The question is how far the unhappiness will spread. As Bloomberg first reported, several ministers – including Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner – voiced concern at Cabinet last week over the proposals.

While government whips remain confident that the Prime Minister has enough support for the bulk of the proposals, Starmer is already having to consider a climbdown on one aspect of the shake-up. Proposals to freeze PIP payments are expected to be shelved in the face of backbench criticism. Labour MPs made the point that even the austere chancellor George Osborne wouldn’t go this far. However, one of the reasons the idea appealed to some ministers is that it could have scored them some immediate points with the OBR. This matters ahead of the Spring Statement later this month when Reeves could well discover that all of her headroom is gone, forcing her to respond accordingly. If Labour MPs secure a U-turn here, they may be inclined to keep pushing for more concessions.

This is where the debate is really heading: to the question of what economic approach Starmer’s government should adopt. This week is likely to see deep unease on the Labour benches over welfare cuts that for many are the opposite of the reason they came into politics. But the question being asked is what is the alternative? Already some in the Labour party are suggesting more tax rises would be preferable or that Reeves should revisit her fiscal rules. The Chancellor has no plans to do the latter, and tax rises are for now seen as something to avoid given the last Budget hurt both business confidence and the UK’s growth prospects. Yet if enough Labour MPs lack the stomach for Starmer’s welfare cuts, a very difficult conversation looms on the government’s next steps.

Which Saint Patrick are we celebrating?

Time was, you knew where you were with the patron saint of Ireland whose feast is 17 March. He was a Briton and he tells us in his Confessions that, when he was a teenager, he was captured by Irish slave traders and taken to Ireland, where he herded sheep. He turned to God and was told that he would escape; he duly got a passage back home. But in a dream, he heard the Irish calling out to him to come back to Ireland and walk again among them, and he knew his mission was to bring them the gospel. So he had himself consecrated bishop, returned to Ireland in AD 432 and converted the Irish in short order, with many miracles. He drove the snakes out of Ireland and illustrated the doctrine of the Trinity by means of a shamrock: three persons in one God, as in the little trefoil – three leaves, one stem.

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That was the gist of the story and the crucial element was that there was just one Patrick. So picture the national disgruntlement when, in 1942, Professor Thomas O’Rahilly, a professor of Old Irish, dropped a bombshell. He identified two Patricks. His contention was that the earlier was Palladius, later known as Patrick; the second Patrick arrived later. Certainly, scholarly discussions on Patrick’s chronology have focused on the statement of Prosper of Aquitaine that Pope Celestine I (422–33) sent Palladius to be the ‘first bishop to the Irish believing in Christ’. No one doubted that Palladius existed, but the notion that he was Patrick 1.0 was a shock.

The writer James Plunkett said decades later: ‘I can still recall the great scandal of 1942, when a book called The Two Patricks was published by a learned Irish professor who advanced the theory that there was one Patrick (Palladius Patrick) whose mission lasted from 432 to 461, and another who arrived in 462 and died about 490. The suggestion caused a national upheaval. If the careers of the two Patricks, through scholarly bungling, had become inextricably entangled, who did what? And worse still – which of them was the patron saint? If you addressed a prayer to one, might it not be delivered by mistake to the other? There was a feeling abroad that any concession to the two Patricks theory would lead unfailingly to a theory of no Patrick at all.’

The dispute enlivened the celebrations for the 1,500th anniversary of St Patrick’s (supposed) death in 1961, which were observed (according to a British scholar) ‘with an outpouring of controversy, bilious writing, and deplorable behaviour’. The marking of the later potential anniversary in 1993 was seemlier.

The scholarly consensus – as opposed to the online debate – seems now to be that there was only one Patrick, who successfully converted the Irish, viz., the author of the Confessions. Indeed, the American scholar David Howlett says that ‘Patrick was not the bumbling semi-literate earlier scholars had supposed him to be, but a competent author’ – another myth (propagated by Patrick himself) demolished.

There are fewer takers these days for Professor O’Rahilly’s contention that Palladius was in fact Patrick; it seems Palladius’s mission didn’t get far, unlike that of the plucky former slave. But elements of Palladius’s life were absorbed by the saint’s biographers, which resulted in Patrick 2.0 apparently dying at an advanced, Mosaic age.

As the top Patrick expert, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, observed: ‘The patron saint is (or was) a composite in the sense that, e.g., Patrick’s supposed continental education was clearly taken over from Palladius’s early career. But we can at least be happy that we’ve jettisoned the notion (once described by Archbishop John Healy, in his 1905 biography of the saint as “the best established era in his history”) that Patrick died on Wednesday, 17 March, AD 493, aged 120 years.’

No one disputes that Patrick was in fact the author of his Confessions – which are a moving account of his experiences and motivation – and of a hot-tempered letter of rebuke to a Briton, Coroticus, who enslaved and killed some of Patrick’s Irish followers. In fact, we know much more about him than most other comparable figures of the era.

The good news for traditionalists is that the date of 17 March as his feast day looks safe, being based on a Continental source. The date of 432 for his arrival in Ireland, however, looks problematic – which is tricky since the 1,600th anniversary is coming up soon and sad, given it is one of those dates, like 1066 here, that everyone once knew. It all goes to show why Dáibhí Ó Cróinín says: ‘Almost everything anyone knows about St Patrick is wrong.’ OK, but let’s keep the snakes.

The problem with Starmer’s peacekeeping plan for Ukraine

Sir Keir Starmer has been tireless in his diplomatic efforts to construct a ‘coalition of the willing’ and send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine. At the weekend, he hosted a conference call with 29 other world leaders, and on Thursday the defence secretary, John Healey, will convene a meeting of military chiefs at the MoD’s Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood ‘to put strong and robust plans in place to swing in behind a peace deal and guarantee Ukraine’s future security’.

The Prime Minister’s commitment is firm and public. Along with likely partners France, Turkey, Canada and Australia, the United Kingdom is ready to contribute to a military force of up to 30,000 personnel to be deployed in Ukraine. The government has said that ‘it would be a long-term commitment, we are talking about years’. However clear and definitive these promises are, though, they are weirdly back-to-front and based on extremely dubious assumptions.

Ever since President Donald Trump disclosed in February that he had unilaterally spoken to Vladimir Putin to explore how to end the war in Ukraine, Starmer has pivoted energetically to posing as the champion and architect of a peacekeeping force for the conflict. It is a transparent attempt to find a global role and strategic relevance for the UK, but that is not inherently something to criticise the Prime Minister for. His vision of Britain as a ‘bridge’ between Europe and the United States is ambitious, although hardly novel, and it has given him a degree of standing in recent weeks.

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There is, however, a strange unreality about these discussions, a topsy-turvy sense of Alice Through The Looking Glass. Current discussions are focusing on the likely size of the force, which at 30,000 seems unlikely to be of much use. But how can planners possibly even anticipate how large it will need to be when, as Starmer and others admit, its role is not yet defined and it has no agreed rules of engagement? We do not yet know what the peacekeeping force is going to do, yet we are able to say how large it should be.

More broadly – and it is worrying that this needs to be said – there is currently no peace to be kept. There is a plan for a 30-day ceasefire, which President Putin has greeted with so many qualifications that it is effectively a rejection. But there is no clear vision of a settlement that has come close to being universally accepted which would see the war in Ukraine end. Starmer has made a tool, to use an analogy with which he may be familiar, without knowing what purpose it will be expected to perform.

There are other major practical hurdles to the coalition of the willing’s peacekeeping force. Russia has said repeatedly that it will not, under any circumstances, accept military personnel from Nato countries on the ground in Ukraine. President Macron has dismissed this, saying ‘If Ukraine asks allied forces to be on its territory it is not up to Russia to accept or not’. If his view and that of President Putin both hold firm, there will be and can be no peace settlement.

Starmer has also insisted that his commitment to the deployment of peacekeeping force is conditional on the United States providing a security guarantee to Ukraine. This American ‘backstop’, as he has described it, would be some kind of understanding that US military capabilities, especially air power, would be available in the event of Russia breaking the terms of a settlement. President Trump has ruled this out, arguing that the presence of American workers in Ukraine following a deal on access to minerals would provide its own guarantee.

It is also not clear how many troops the UK would provide, or how. In theory, the army is committed under Nato plans to the provision of the armoured 3rd (UK) Division for operational requirements, but it is widely accepted we cannot currently fulfil this commitment because of personnel and equipment shortages. Under Operation Cabrit, around 1,000 soldiers are currently deployed in Estonia and Poland as part of Nato’s enhanced forward presence. In addition to this and other deployments, generating, say, a brigade-sized formation of 4,500 would be challenging; anything more is unlikely to be possible.

There is a long way to go before a settlement that resolves all of these issues is negotiated; indeed, success is not guaranteed. The Prime Minister’s detailed discussions of the next steps blithely wave the obstacles away despite very firmly stated positions by Trump, Putin and others, and are dedicated to the execution of an as-yet-undefined task with unidentified resources. Starmer has started at the end and is working back, but will he ever meet reality?

How Friedrich Merz betrayed his voters

German politics has delivered yet another masterclass in how to betray your voters while maintaining a straight face. This time it is Friedrich Merz, the supposedly steel-spined conservative who spent years critiquing Angela Merkel’s drift leftward, who has now managed to outdo even his predecessor’s talent for abandonment of what he promised.

Merz’s capitulation on Germany’s constitutional debt brake – a cornerstone of his campaign – took precisely fourteen days. Not even Britain’s most notorious policy flip-floppers could match such efficiency. The CDU leader who thundered about fiscal discipline on the campaign trail has now, with indecent haste, embraced the Social Democrats’ spend-now-worry-later philosophy, leaving Germany’s vaunted Swabian housewife – that mythical guardian of Teutonic thrift – face down in the political gutter.

What is particularly infuriating is the asymmetry of this surrender. Merz’s CDU secured 28 per cent of the vote in February’s election – a mandate that, while hardly overwhelming, should have given him significant leverage in coalition negotiations. At least it should have given him confidence. Yet the Social Democrats, limping in with a humiliating 16 per cent (their worst showing since the 1890s), appear to be dictating terms as if they had won the election. One begins to appreciate the titanic achievement of former Finance Minister Christian Lindner and his now-ejected Free Democrats in maintaining some semblance of fiscal discipline against the spending impulses of Germany’s left-leaning parties.

But the true farce, the cherry atop of this capitulation, is that Merz has been comprehensively outmanoeuvred not merely by the SPD but by the Greens, who secured a paltry 11 per cent of the vote and aren’t even in his coalition. It’s no small irony that the very party Merz spent the campaign trail denouncing as left-wing lunatics lacking rational thought now holds the keys to his chancellorship. His Bavarian allies in the CSU were even more dismissive, labelling the Greens a discontinued model and political junk. Hell hath no fury, indeed, like a Green party scorned.

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On Tuesday evening last week, the CDU revealed its most dismal face: a conflict-averse, reform-allergic, thick-bottomed pseudo-conservatism that preserves nothing but the illusion that the German public can be shielded from harsh realities. This brand of conservatism shrinks from the very changes necessary to maintain Germany’s peace and prosperity.

The justification offered – a supposed new ‘turning point’ after Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office – is transparently a mere excuse. The second pretext, that several budgetary holes have suddenly been discovered, is equally unconvincing. Voters chose the CDU with its Bavarian sister, the CSU, for a change in policy direction. Instead, they’re getting what spineless conservatives do best: quivering at the prospect of necessary confrontation with Germany’s statist status quo, tax-funded elites, and debt-addicted, growth-hostile establishment.

Merz folded completely within hours of negotiations beginning. Economists rightly point out that for years – indeed decades – the German state has been swimming in money while shirking any meaningful reform out of post-heroic cowardice. Angela Merkel squandered the peace dividend on social frivolities and populist luxuries, neglecting both infrastructure and defence capability. Meanwhile, her Russia policy and the Nord Stream 2 debacle laid the groundwork for Ukraine’s current predicament.

The Greens, meanwhile, have played their weak hand with Machiavellian skill. When Merz and the SPD concocted their paradigm-shifting plan to take on what could be close to €1 trillion (£841 billion) in new debt over the next decade – a fiscal bazooka ostensibly aimed at boosting Germany’s defence and its stagnating economy – the Greens held their ground, refusing to simply acquiesce to security concerns about Putin and Trump.

The comedy of the situation would be perfect if it weren’t so devastating for German governance. Merz desperately needed the Greens to agree to his spending plan before 25 March, when the new Bundestag convenes and the pro-Kremlin AfD gain enough strength alongside The Left party to block changes to Germany’s debt rules in the constitution. In a spectacular display of political games, the Greens extracted substantial climate concessions from the very man who had vilified them throughout the campaign. What emerged looks suspiciously like a Green policy document with Merz’s signature hastily scrawled at the bottom.

What we’re now witnessing in this ‘KleiKo’ (a diminutive for the now very small coalition between CDU/CSU and SPD) is a debt-fuelled nuclear fusion of two fundamentally statist, social democratic parties, with Green fingerprints all over the detonator. This will only accelerate the German economy’s downward spiral and hand over a large number of voters to the far-right AfD. As economist Lars Feld emphasises, Germany is losing its function as a safe haven for bondholders. Germany is sliding into a lira-world of financial uncertainty.

The Union’s last hope for salvation would be to counter this shameful death of the debt brake with brutal and painful cuts to Germany’s grotesquely oversized social budget. A radical structural reform of the state’s consumptive social expenditure should be the foundation of any deal with the Social Democrats.

The quintessential irony is that Merz’s plan to reform constitutional debt rules, including a €500 billion (£420 billion) infrastructure fund, sounds precisely like something the Greens would have proposed themselves. His chancellorship was effectively doomed from the beginning without the blessing of a party he had spent months demonising. The Greens’ initial reluctance was merely a negotiating gambit to extract climate concessions. In the end, Friday’s agreement did deliver a lifeline for Ukraine by exempting aid to Kyiv from Germany’s constitutional spending restraints – perhaps the sole silver lining in this otherwise bleak capitulation.

There’s barely a hint of ‘Politikwechsel’ – policy change – in the exploratory paper released over the weekend. Fittingly, the meagre sentence about making savings as part of budget deliberations is the only line containing the word ‘save’. It’s almost elegant in its vacuousness, eerily reminiscent of Merkel’s infamous ‘We can do this’ line on migration. No structural reforms, no questioning of enormous state expenditures. Nothing.

This is hardly surprising: why would the SPD surrender its statist edge when the billions for everything have already been pocketed? The only thing more bitter than Friedrich Merz’ capitulation is the disappointment awaiting hitherto trusting Union voters: vote conservative, get social democracy. It’s the German perpetual motion machine.

What we’re witnessing is not merely a failure of political courage but a betrayal of an electorate that voted for change. The AfD, already buoyed by the election results, will find fertile ground among disillusioned conservative voters who see their party leadership caving to the very policies they sought to reject.

What makes this capitulation particularly egregious is the timing. As Europe faces its most serious security crisis since the Cold War and economic headwinds threaten to become a full-blown continental recession, Germany needed leadership that could make difficult choices. Instead, Merz has opted for the path of least resistance – a politically expedient sugar rush of deficit spending that will briefly mask structural problems while exacerbating them in the long term. The man who positioned himself as Germany’s Churchill has revealed himself to be nothing more than Neville Chamberlain with better tailoring.

History will record Merz’s first act as chancellor-designate as a political own goal of such spectacular proportions that even England’s penalty-takers would wince in sympathy. He has managed the remarkable feat of being comprehensively outplayed by two parties with less than half his electoral support combined. The Green party, with their 11 per cent showing, have effectively gained policy victories from the opposition that they couldn’t achieve in government. This is catastrophic not just for the CDU but for centrist politics in Germany as a whole. When voters discover that their ballot for fiscal sanity delivers instead a Green-tinged spending spree, the extremes will only grow stronger. Merz has salvaged his chancellorship at the cost of the very principles that might have made it worth having.

In defence of Ofsted’s Hamid Patel

We stand at a critical juncture. Over the past decade, England has ascended the global education rankings with remarkable momentum. In mathematics, we have surged from 21st to 7th in the Pisa rankings. Our performance in reading on the Pirls scale now positions us as a leader in the Western world.

Just last week, a delegation of 24 Flemish ministers and journalists visited Michaela Community School, where I am headteacher, and other high-performing schools, eager to glean insights from England’s educational success. Yet, paradoxically, our own Education Secretary remains indifferent to these achievements. Bridget Phillipson did not set foot last year in any of the country’s top 87 Progress 8 schools that have demonstrated an exceptional +1 improvement. This score measures how much a pupil improves between the end of primary school and the end of secondary school. So why didn’t Phillipson want to learn from their example?

Instead, she is quietly advancing a Bill through parliament that threatens to unravel a decade’s worth of progress. But no matter how much I shout about this, no one seems to care.

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The public discourse on education appears to be driven more by identity politics than by genuine concern for academic excellence. This weekend, I watched in dismay as social media erupted – not over curriculum reform or standards – but over the appointment of Sir Hamid Patel as interim Chair of Ofsted. Why is it that education only becomes a topic of interest when it intersects with race, religion, or gender?

Sir Hamid Patel is not only Muslim; he is a distinguished school leader who has been knighted for his services to British education. Under his leadership, Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High School in Blackburn has consistently ranked amongst the top five schools for Progress 8 since the measure was introduced. As CEO of Star Academies, Patel has transformed the futures of thousands of children. Yet his critics choose to focus on the fact that Muslim students at his school were encouraged to recite the Quran, as though such an expectation within a faith-based institution were an aberration.

Just as I have prohibited prayer in my secular school, Hamid Patel has upheld the traditions of his Islamic schools, encouraging girls to wear the hijab. What is perhaps most absurd is the overestimation of Patel’s influence. The position of Ofsted Chair is, in reality, a largely ceremonial role, amounting to no more than two days of work per week. It is a role that satisfies bureaucratic formalities rather than wielding executive power. And yet, a single image of Patel in Islamic clerical attire circulated on Twitter, igniting a wave of hysteria. The same individuals who previously showed little interest in the state of our schools suddenly became impassioned critics.

I find myself questioning the logic of these outbursts. Patel – who will serve up to five months in the role – has no overarching control over Britain’s schools, just as I, as the headmistress of Michaela, hold no dominion over the nation’s education system. Yet he is vilified for asking Muslim students to embrace their faith, just as I have been criticised for my commitment to discipline and academic rigour. But the reality is that it is the chief inspector of Ofsted, not the chair, who holds the power over schools via the possibility of inspection. 

But let us turn our attention to where the real power lies: with Bridget Phillipson, our Education Secretary. Unlike Patel, she possesses actual authority over policy and curriculum. It is she who is systematically dismantling the educational freedoms that have allowed schools like those in Star Academies to thrive. Social mobility, the very ladder that Patel and I and other school leaders of all colours strive to provide for students of all backgrounds, will be kicked away. I predict that Phillipson will dismantle the Progress 8 framework, making way for the erosion of rigorous academic subjects, to embrace the lowering of standards.

Sir Hamid Patel does right by his kids, as do I. Those in government are plotting against our successes. It is about time someone realises who the real enemy of standards is.

Is ‘good enough’ all we want from TV?

For those people with a therapeutic bent of mind, the phrase ‘good enough’ has an almost magical power. It says: don’t beat yourself up because your child isn’t a straight-A student, your marriage isn’t the best thing since Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, and your sobriety is patchy. Sure, you hit your kid – but you didn’t stab them. Sure, you hate your husband – but you haven’t plotted with a stranger to have him killed. Sure, you’re depressed – but you got up this morning and went to work like any other normie. All these instances of your fallibility are opportunities for growth. As they say in twelve-step programmes, it’s ‘progress not perfection’.

‘Good enough’, though, as a mantra, isn’t what we look for in the arts. What we look for there is the flash of genius – the chance to see someone else performing in whatever medium in a way that causes us awe and excitement. We can all be ‘good enough’: we hope that the creators of literature and film and painting and music, just a few of them, will show the rest of us what it is to be excellent.

And so to The Electric State, a science-fiction comedy family adventure film on Netflix starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. It cost $320 million (£248 million), which is perilously close to being serious money. It’s described as one of the most expensive films ever made. And it has, at once, flopped and not flopped. It has flopped in the eyes of the critics, who seem to be of one mind. ‘A turgid eyesore’; ‘top-dollar tedium’; ‘slick but dismally soulless’; ‘obvious, garish, and just plain dumb’; ‘the most banal way you can spend $320 million’; ‘an artistically neutered, sanitised boondoggle’; ‘generic, seen-it-all-before story’… many other similarly worded tributes have been applied to it. It sucks, evidently.

But here’s the thing: its creators are crying all the way to the bank. As the BBC headlined their report on it, capturing the situation perfectly, ‘Netflix’s $320m sci-fi blockbuster is “soulless”, “dumb” and a hit’. The moment the film was released, it went to number one on Netflix. The comparator its makers are hoping it will surpass is Netflix’s previous most popular movie, the incredibly forgettable thriller Red Notice, which garnered a reported 231 million views. The lameness, the slickness, obviousness, the dismal soullessness, the neutering and sanitising, the generic, seen-it-all-before-ness…These things are, as might be said, a feature and not a bug.

It seems to me to be a bellwether; a useful moment in recognising that what we want from art in the age of streaming isn’t what we flatter ourselves and think we want from it. We think we want great: in fact, as the metrics show, we want ‘good enough’. The algorithm doesn’t lie. We’ve always had art that seeks to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We’ve always had trash. But never has the data available to the makers of that art allowed it to be calibrated so precisely to the appetites of its audience of lazy schlubs: just bland enough to appeal to the widest possible demographic; just generic enough to kindle the interest of people who like that sort of thing; just intriguing enough to prevent you from turning it off.

I don’t write this, by the way, from a position of high-art snobbery. I’m as susceptible to ‘good enough’ as anyone else. Possibly more. Over the last year it has been my habit, once the children are down, to settle into bed and watch some nonsense on Netflix or Amazon Prime on my mobile phone. The Recruit. The Diplomat. The Night Agent. Departure. Any number of straight-to-streaming action thrillers, such that the algorithm now serves me whole categories such as ‘female assassins’ or ‘techno-conspiracies’.

I’ve been watching Reacher recently and – it being very marginally better than any of the aforementioned – feel like I should be wearing white tie to watch it. I find I actively prefer the utterly forgettable brain-rot. A 40 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes is the sweet spot. If its Wikipedia page suggests a series I’m considering was nominated for an award, I tend to ditch it in favour of something involving Jason Momoa.

But it is a bit dismaying to realise that the algorithmic calibration of entertainment – in this age in which we have more plentiful and more entertaining entertainment than at any time in human history – is telling us that ‘good enough’ is what the market will most perfectly absorb, and therefore that the generic and forgettable is where the money is going to go. Less and less will we see greatness and originality achieved even by accident. (Raymond Chandler and Dash Hammet, H P Lovecraft, and even Arthur Conan Doyle were writing pulp – but they couldn’t help themselves doing something interesting.)

Netflix and their ilk are giving us pabulum, Soma, or – in the case of the stuff generated by AI – Soylent Green. And our proven appetite for ‘good enough’ is, I suspect, what’s going to help the next generation of AI slop take over the world and kill human creativity for good. Heigh ho. I should confess, by way of full disclosure, that I haven’t watched The Electric State. But, y’know: I almost certainly will.

Britain has become a pioneer in Artificial Unintelligence

In some countries, the study and pursuit of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proceeds apace, while in this country the practice of Artificial Unintelligence (AU) becomes ever more widespread.

AU is the means by which people of perfectly adequate natural intelligence are transformed by policies, procedures and protocols into animate but inflexible cogs. They speak and behave, but do not think or decide. They are always only carrying out orders and stick to them through thick and thin.

AU is much in evidence in the organisation of the NHS. Its great advantage, from a certain point of view, is the multiplication of job opportunities for bureaucrats that it necessitates. But for patients, it often turns the simplest of tasks, such as the obtaining of a prescription, into a nightmarish labour of Hercules.

My wife’s situation was simple. She had seen a cardiologist who prescribed a medication for her which was effective. He gave her a prescription for two weeks, to be repeated by her general practitioner. Towards the end of the two weeks, the consultant’s letter had not arrived at the surgery and we were soon going abroad. My wife needed to talk to a doctor at the surgery to obtain a prescription, which no doctor would have refused, since the medication was a perfectly ordinary one in wide current use, and cheap as well.

The problem was the procedure, the policies, and the protocols. Over a period of several days, she was told by the staff of the surgery, inter alia:

• That the doctor could not prescribe her medicine without the consultant’s letter, an evident absurdity;
• That she could not consult a doctor in less than two weeks because the renewal of a prescription was not an urgent matter and therefore not eligible for an urgent appointment;
• That it was her responsibility to ensure that the consultant’s letter arrived, and also to phone every day at 8.30 a.m. sharp on the off-chance that there had been a cancelled appointment that she might take;
• That there was nothing that could be done because of the policies, procedures and protocols laid down, and that all patients had to be treated the same, irrespective of their situation.

When I went to the surgery, I asked the receptionist – making clear that I did not blame her personally – whether she did not think it shameful that it would have been easier and quicker for my wife to obtain her medication by going abroad than by walking 300 yards to the surgery from her house: to which the receptionist replied that she understood our frustration, but that the protocol was the protocol. My suggestion that she actually thought rather than followed a protocol seemed almost shocking to her, like a criticism of Mohammed’s character in a mosque.

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We had already discovered quite by chance, my wife and I, that e-mails apparently sent to the doctors in the surgery were diverted to some kind of computer, and were not read, as we had naively supposed. So I took a letter, couched in no uncertain terms, to the surgery to be handed in person to the senior partner, with a mild threat of further action if the request were not complied with.

At seven in the evening a telephone call from the surgery informed us that the doctor had written a prescription and sent it to the pharmacy. The Artificial Unintelligence of the staff, trained and enjoined never to think, had wasted hours of our and their time over a period of days, to say nothing of the misery it inflicted on us.

But it should not be thought that we were just unlucky. A friend of ours had a very similar experience and had to resort to a virtual sit-down to obtain what should have taken a fraction of a moment to obtain.

The whole country is rotted by AU, not least the police, but also schools, social services, town councils, universities and even private companies, especially large ones.

It is of no recent date. Some years ago, I was asked to investigate six untoward events – five murders and a suicide – that had happened in a hospital in a comparatively short time. Was there any single factor that accounted for this unexpected cluster?

In the event, I found that in only two of them were actually attributable to professional error, but what united them all was the evident stupidity of the staff. They were not so much stupid by nature, as stupefied by policy, procedure and protocol. For them, obeying procedure was their work, an end rather than a means.

I will always remember my interview with the medical director after I completed my inquiry.

‘I didn’t find anything in common in these cases,’ I said, ‘except the stupidity of your staff.

I expected him to get angry, but he maintained a Buddha-like calm.

‘Oh, I know,’ he replied, ‘but that is the standard expected now.’

I am rarely lost for words, but on this occasion I was. And he was right, of course – Artificial Unintelligence, or Bureaucracy-Induced Stupidity, is what we expect in Britain.   

Andrew Tate has no place on Spotify

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Matthew Lynn

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In common with many apps, it has a children’s version which blocks inappropriate content for younger audiences. But in common with many parents of secondary school-aged kids, I was persuaded to remove this feature so my 11-year-old son could listen to songs by some of his favourite artists, from Oasis to Harry Styles. I had no idea that this would open him up to exposure to a step-by-step guide on trafficking women.

Until last week, the full ‘Pimping Hoes Degree’ course by Andrew Tate – misogynistic influencer and alleged rapist – was freely available on Spotify. The ‘course’ – which takes its title from a sexist play on ‘PhD’ – features the 38-year-old spouting sexist ‘advice’, painting women as objects to be conquered and controlled and sharing explicit instructions on how to exploit women through coercion and deception. 

He barks in his signature frantic tone: ‘A woman must learn… that the easiest path is to obey. Some are more mouldable than others. The girl has to be smiling, she has to be happy. The men aren’t going on these to see some miserable bitch. Their wife is a miserable bitch, they’re spending money to see a happy girl.

‘If you want to understand women, I know what I know because I’ve fucked so many women. I’ve had smart ones, stupid ones, hot ones. I’ve had them all. No uglies you know. In the modern world, for every five girls you fuck, one will be a quality woman.’

And so it goes on. The material was uploaded to Spotify in 2023, but last week a string of the recordings disappeared. It followed a petition demanding their removal that had attracted more than 100,000 signatures. 

‘His content didn’t just offer misogynistic opinions – it was a step-by-step guide for wannabe pimps on how to manipulate and control women for profit,’ says Renee Chopping from Collective Shout, who started the petition. ‘This included grooming tactics to lure women in under false pretences, psychological and financial control methods to keep them dependent.

‘This isn’t just offensive – it’s dangerous. When major platforms like Spotify allow this content to spread, they contribute to a culture where the exploitation of women is seen as acceptable or even aspirational.’

It’s not the first controversy to strike Spotify, which has previously been accused of short-changing musicians by making it harder to generate royalties and using algorithms to promote fake artists and generic music to listeners. The platform has not responded to repeated requests for comment for this article.

The backlash over Tate’s Spotify recordings follows his failed ‘Hustler University’ programme which his ‘students’ paid almost $50 a month to be a part of, and which led to him being investigated for tax evasion as well as rape and human trafficking in both the UK and Romania. Tate – who was born in the US but grew up in the UK – denies all accusations against him. Despite the controversy surrounding this and his 2016 appearance on Big Brother, he’s built a huge online following in the ‘manosphere’ reaching teenagers and adults alike. 

A recent YouGov poll revealed that 84 per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds had heard of Tate – with almost one in four having a positive view of him. A University of York study released last month interviewed 200 teachers across secondary and primary schools in the UK and found one in four referenced male pupils discussing misogynistic influencers like Tate, or misogynistic movements from the internet, such as incels. One in three said they’d heard male pupils making misogynistic comments. 

It also emerged recently that triple murderer Kyle Clifford watched up to ten videos of Tate in the 24 hours before he killed his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah and their mother Carol last year. 

Professor Harriet Over, from the University of York’s department of psychology, says: ‘There has been an increase over the past 15 years in social media influencers or self-styled “life coaches” pushing a narrative that attempts to legitimise… acts of sexual violence, and verbal abuse. We can see from recent surveys that these views reach a wide online audience, which includes young people and children.’

Caroline Voaden MP, speaking in the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill debate in parliament this month, mentioned Tate’s influence and the role of legislators in protecting young boys from this. She said: ‘What is happening online is clearly impacting the everyday lives of children and teenagers, and we, as responsible adults and legislators, have a duty to try and mitigate those harms. I am thinking particularly of the horrible, dangerous misogyny of the likes of Andrew Tate, which is being lapped up by boys who are under his influence – boys who then spread his misogynistic hate speech.’

‘The mainstreaming of Andrew Tate’s content is deeply harmful because it normalises and legitimises the exploitation of women,’ adds Chopping, who works with survivors of sex trafficking. ‘When platforms like Spotify host this material, they give it a stamp of credibility, allowing dangerous ideas to spread unchecked and reach impressionable audiences – many of whom are young men still forming their worldviews.

‘Spotify’s decision to remove these courses is an important step, but it never should have been there in the first place. We need tech platforms to take proactive responsibility and stop enabling content that promotes abuse and exploitation.’

For me, Spotify’s decision to remove some of Tate’s recordings is all a bit too little too late. I, like many others horrified to see this content on the platform, have cancelled my family subscription. I know I can’t protect my boys from everything, but we can vote with our wallets and support those spaces that try harder to protect us from harmful content and push for greater legislation to tackle this. 

In writing this piece, I asked my son if he’d heard of Tate. He nodded. I asked him what he thought of him, he said: ‘Sexist idiot.’ At least he gets it.

What my Irish passport means to me

I’m now officially Irish – the proud recipient of a shiny red passport. It arrived, with the luck of the Irish, in time for St Patrick’s Day. But as I gaze fondly at the words ‘European Union’ and ‘Ireland’ embossed in gold on the front, I do feel the awkward guilt of the hypocrite. I may have voted Remain just to avoid any upheaval but I’ve never been much of a fan of the EU.

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And while I’m in the confessional box, I should perhaps mention that I’m not even properly Irish – my mum was English. I’ve seldom visited the green fields of Erin and have never finished a whole pint of Guinness. So I’m afraid Paddies don’t come more plastic than me.

But I do have a legitimate claim to that passport because my dad was from Dublin – and I grew up near the London enclave of ‘County Kilburn’ which, at the time, had the biggest Irish population in Britain.

St Patrick’s Day serves as an annual reminder of that. In the UK, it used to pass unnoticed. Irish culture was yet to go global because Ronald Reagan’s presidency was yet to go wrong. When it did, his aides advised him to court the Irish vote the way JFK had done. Reagan reluctantly agreed, went to Ireland and was famously photographed having a pint of Guinness in the Tipperary village where his great-grandfather was born.

That photo changed everything. When the world’s most powerful man was pictured proudly proclaiming his Irish heritage, it suddenly became fashionable to have some sort of connection to ‘the old country’.

Before that, to put it mildly, Ireland was cruelly viewed as poor, backward and bogged down in bigotry. During the Troubles, Irish people in London were often assumed to be IRA sympathisers and subjected to baseless hostility. Trust me, Harrow Road police station was not a nice place to produce your driving licence if, like me, you had an Irish surname.

For migrants like my dad who’d bequeathed Irish surnames to English children, there were two routes from the Emerald Isle to this Scepter’d one: either Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, or Rosslare to Fishguard. The Holyhead train came into Euston, the Fishguard train into Paddington. So Kilburn, lying conveniently between the two termini, attracted more Irish settlers than anywhere else in Britain.

In London’s Irish enclaves, St Patrick’s Day was huge. At primary school, we wore sprigs of shamrock and watched Riverdance jigs performed in assembly by clumsy, ginger-haired children whose future would not be on the West End stage.

In Irish pubs, ‘Paddy’s Night’ rivalled Christmas Eve as the busiest night of the year. I could wax lyrical – to tin whistle accompaniment – about places like Biddy Mulligan’s and The Cock. But in truth, most Kilburn pubs were grim, forbidding places favoured by fighty Irish labourers and sinister representatives of the ‘RA’. Just before closing time, everyone stood for the Irish national anthem and then the hat would be passed round. The man holding it would fix you with a baleful stare: ‘Money for the cause, lads, money for the cause.’ A very middle-class girl whom I once took to Biddy’s thought he wanted ‘Money for The Corrs’.

Kilburn High Road was – still is – the border between the London boroughs of Camden and Brent. Back in the 1980s, Brent was considered outer London so the pubs closed at 10.30 p.m.; Camden was inner London so the pubs closed at 11 p.m., and this led to a nightly ritual. At around 10.32, dozens of Irishmen would stagger across from Biddy’s on the Brent side to the Coopers Arms on the Camden side to get a couple more pints in.

Irish dancehalls such as the Galtymore in Cricklewood and the National Ballroom in Kilburn were always reeling and rocking, largely because they all had late licences. Kev Malone’s dad, hard enough to skate on, ran the door at the Galty. It meant nothing at the time but this fearsome bouncer’s name was Joe Malone, which now makes him sound more like a lime and basil scent diffuser. The craic, as we used to say, was 90.

All so different now. Young people no longer need to journey across the Irish Sea to find work. The suffocating choke of the Catholic Church in their homeland has long been loosened and led transformational prosperity. Ah, sure, that’s grand – as my passport now permits me to say – but what isn’t so grand is the way certain Dublin 4 denizens – smooth, successful and keen to be seen as ‘European’ – aren’t quite so keen to acknowledge their debt to the ‘Old Irish’.

There’s now little mention of those brave, pioneering migrants who came to England and did menial work for meagre reward. The people who kept Ireland afloat by sending so much of their money home. Their loyalty to their country, through hard and hostile times, seems to have been quickly and shamefully forgotten. Digging the roads in threadbare suits, they’re an uncomfortable reminder of Ireland’s immiserated, religious and recent past. It concerns me that, as they all die off, they risk being airbrushed out of history.

Obviously, my new passport will be a blessing. The older I get, the less willing I am to waste my life being punished by the EU and made to stand in lengthy airport queues. However, my principal reason for getting it was to honour my dad and others like him. That Irish passport is a poignant reminder of the hard life they endured in England; a life they didn’t want for their children.

Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Why no news is good news

I’m hiding from something I used to love: the news. It’s a common tendency these days – Loyd Grossman noted it in his Spectator diary recently, calling himself a ‘nonewsnik… unable to deal with a daily diet of misery and despair’. I understand the need to escape the depressing effects of war and economic turmoil. That’s part of my own reasoning too. But my main point is slightly different: it’s not so much that the news is depressing, it’s that the news is boring.

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We’ve been here before. Whatever the issue, we’ve faced the same old problems and run through the same old arguments. For my 50th birthday, a friend gave me a copy of the front page of the Times from the day I was born. Reading about those events in 1971, you shiver in a cold bath of déjà vu: job losses, industrial disputes, a rise in shoplifting, the US imposing trade tariffs. Politicians arguing in Northern Ireland, Israel arguing with the occupied territories, European governments arguing with themselves.

Then I think back to my childhood, all of which was spent under the threat of someone in Moscow wanting to start a war with the West. That threat went away for a bit, but it’s back now, joining its co-stars in the festival of doom. And so there comes a point in life when you think: ‘This isn’t going to change, is it? They haven’t solved any of these problems in the past 50 years, they’re not going to solve them in the next 50 either.’ It’s even a problem for news broadcasters themselves. I was recently talking to a BBC radio presenter, who admitted he found it harder and harder to think of new questions about the old topics.

True, we have had a particularly bad run in the past decade. The EU referendum led to four years of parliamentary shenanigans which would have had even Erskine May himself stifling a yawn. That was followed by two years in which the human race went mad, responding to a not particularly harmful virus with measures that destroyed everyday life and from which some people will never recover. The pandemic was when I really switched off the news, metaphorically and literally. Metaphorically because it showed how statistically illiterate most people are – how can I ever take a vox pop seriously again after that? And literally because the Today programme became too much to bear. I moved to Radio 3’s Breakfast and have never gone back. People are still making the same journey: presenter Petroc Trelawny recently welcomed new listeners who had got ‘fed up with the news’.

But it isn’t just the issues, it’s the way those issues are reported. When I was a kid, people read a newspaper in the morning, they watched a news programme in the evening, and that was that – for the rest of the time, you forgot that the news existed. Now, 24-hour TV and the internet have increased the supply, thereby decreasing the value. I used to really look forward to Newsnight: now I wouldn’t give you tuppence for it. Plus there’s social media, which means that everyone gets to pile on with their views. The quality of debate matches the Dog and Duck at half ten on a Friday night. You can only take so much of that.

What’s worse, as well as changing the way news is reported, social media has changed the news itself. The speed at which things happen has increased. A tweet at breakfast time is a petition by lunchtime is a reversal of government policy by teatime. It’s hysteria, a substance which, although it might seem alarming, is in the end merely tedious.

Don’t get me wrong, I still know roughly what’s going on in the world. You need to, for basic conversational purposes and so you know what the mortgage might do. I still buy a newspaper, usually the Times, though not every day and mainly for the sudoku. Staying in touch with the news is also good for writing quizzes, like the one I do every year in the Spectator pocket diary. ‘Who has released fragrances,’ for instance, ‘called “Success”, “Empire” and “Victory”?’ (Answer below.) And I still enjoy news commentary. Rod Liddle makes me laugh, so I need to know who’s featuring in his column and what they’ve been up to, otherwise I wouldn’t get the jokes.

But the daily grind of the daily news? Those details in the 14th paragraph? No thank you very much. I’m with Billy Connolly, who once commented that he finds the news ‘incredibly boring. God knows I’ve tried. Especially with politics – you get two pages in and you say “oh bollocks, who cares?”’. In the end that Times from 1971 is the only newspaper I need. I find it comforting rather than depressing. True, the problems are still here half a century later. But then so are we. People are still having fun, getting together, having kids. In 50 years’ time some of those kids will look back at 2025, and feel the same reassurance I feel now. Who needs the news when you’ve got that?

ANSWER: Donald Trump.

Sunday shows round-up: Wes Streeting says the NHS is ‘addicted to overspending’

This week, Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced their plan to abolish NHS England, which Starmer has said will ‘cut bureaucracy’ and bring management of the NHS ‘back into democratic control’. Today on Sky News, Streeting told Trevor Phillips that the size of NHS England had doubled since 2010, when the NHS had ‘the highest patient satisfaction ever’.

Streeting claimed that his restructuring would save hundreds of millions of pounds, and create a ‘smaller, leaner, more efficient head office’. Labour will also make big job culls elsewhere in the NHS, and Phillips asked Streeting whether it was right that the NHS’s 42 integrated care boards were being asked to cut their running costs by half. Streeting said that previous financial plans for the year had projected an overspend of £5 billion, and that the NHS has been ‘addicted to running up routine deficits.’

Streeting: There is an ‘over-diagnosis’ of mental health problems

Labour will also make cuts to disability benefits as part of their efforts to reduce the welfare bill. Plans include stricter eligibility criteria to claim Personal Independence Payments, and a potential freeze on PIP inflation rises, although Labour appears to be rowing back on this part after an internal backlash. Streeting was elusive on this when talking to Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC, saying, ‘the moral of the story is wait for the plans’. He did, however, agree with the sentiment that some mental health disorders are over-diagnosed, and claimed that too many people with health conditions were being ‘written-off’. Streeting said the government would recruit more mental health staff and provide mental health support in primary schools to give people ‘resilience and coping skills’, and said that ‘employment support’ combined with mental health support was a very powerful way of helping people stay in work.

Streeting: ‘Some of these DEI roles have really lost their way’

On GB News, Camilla Tominey asked Wes Streeting why the NHS was advertising for a diversity, equity and inclusion manager role on a £122,000 salary if the government wanted to bring down costs. Streeting said that he and new NHS England chief executive Jim Mackey are ‘slamming the brakes on overspending’, but that it has ‘taken a little while for some people in the NHS to get the message’. Streeting went on to argue that some diversity, equality and inclusion work is very important, referencing the fact that ‘poorer people are much more likely to die than rich people’, men die earlier than women, and that black women die more often in childbirth than white women. However, Streeting claimed he wanted to put a stop to ‘well meaning but totally misguided’ approaches to DEI.

Laura Trott: Pupils ‘love’ smartphone bans

Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott has tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to ban the use of mobile phones in schools nationwide. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Trott claimed previous guidance that phones shouldn’t be used in classrooms ‘hasn’t worked’, and said it was time to ‘make it law’. Kuenssberg asked why headteachers shouldn’t have the freedom to decide what works best for their schools. Trott suggested that ‘teachers, parents, and pupils’ are asking for this ban, and said students in schools which have already introduced a ban say they feel safer, and have the ‘freedom to learn’. Kuenssberg asked if the amendment had a chance of passing a vote. Trott said she had to ‘make the argument’, and claimed it would make a ‘massive difference’.

Finland President Alexander Stubb on Ukraine ceasefire: ‘The chances are abysmal’

Lastly, Laura Kuenssberg spoke with Finland President Alexander Stubb, after a week in which Starmer accused Putin of deliberately ‘dragging his feet’ over a ceasefire. Stubb told the BBC that it was too early for Finland to commit to concrete ways in which they could assist if a ceasefire was achieved. Stubb suggested that ‘Putin doesn’t want peace’, and that Russia still wants Ukraine to ‘cease to exist’, which is why it was crucial to ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’, and increase pressure on Putin with more sanctions. Kuenssberg asked whether Donald Trump was being ‘played’ by Putin. Stubb said, ‘don’t underestimate the capacity of… Donald Trump to negotiate a deal’, and added that he was sure ‘we’ll be moving in the right direction’.