-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
Dozens dead after Russian strike on the city of Sumy
Two Russian missiles loaded with cluster bombs hit the city centre of Sumy this morning – on Palm Sunday, when Ukrainians traditionally go to church ahead of Easter. At least 32 people were killed, including two children. More than 80 were injured. The deadliest hit was on a trolleybus, pictured above. After the strike, a Russian military blogger calling himself ‘Terem’ posted this: ‘My opinion as a good Christian – the Russians must destroy these people. They are preventing us from building the Third Rome… they must pay with their blood. The end justifies the means.’
The attack on Sumy comes just a week after another Russian Iskander missile, also filled with cluster bombs, struck a playground in Kryvyi Rih – Volodymy Zelensky’s hometown. It sliced through metal swings, shattered windows and tore through bodies. Twenty people died in total, including nine children. The youngest victim was three years old. Ukraine declared a day of national mourning while Russia’s Ministry of Defence claimed, in typical fashion, that it was a ‘successful’ strike on a gathering of Ukrainian and foreign military personnel. But there were no soldiers on the playground or in the restaurant nearby, only families.
This morning, Zelensky demanded a ‘strong response from the world,’ reminding everyone that it’s now been a month since Ukraine agreed to a full, unconditional 30-day ceasefire. ‘Without pressure on the aggressor, peace is impossible’, Zelensky said. ‘Talking has never stopped ballistic missiles and bombs. We need to treat Russia as a terrorist deserves.’ But his call is likely to go unanswered in Washington. Trump’s administration didn’t respond after the slaughter in Kryvyi Rih. Why would it now?
Just two days ago, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff was once again in Russia, placing his hand over his heart as he greeted Vladimir Putin – for the third time. And for the third time, the talks collapsed. Putin is in no rush. He feels comfortable enough to refuse Trump’s ceasefire proposal until Russian terms are met. The Kremlin is demanding that Kyiv stop conscripting men and has asked for military aid from the West to be cut off. Moscow is also demanding relief from sanctions and the installation of a ‘temporary’ government in Ukraine under UN supervision. Witkoff is said to have advised Trump that the fastest way to end the war would be to recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the four partially occupied regions of Ukraine.
In Kyiv, these proposals are seen as capitulation, dressed up as peace. So whatever hope Ukrainians had that the fighting and the dying might pause – at least for 30 days – has now vanished. Since the ceasefire was proposed, Russia has launched more than 70 missiles and 2,200 drones at Ukrainian cities. Its spring offensive in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions is now underway. The war keeps escalating. Trump, for his part, said Russia dragging its feet made him ‘very angry.’ He even threatened to put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia. But, in the end, he did nothing. No deadlines. No consequences. No Easter ceasefire.
Labour is destroying London’s nightlife
As a teenager back in the early 1960s, on Friday afternoon I would head down to Soho after school with friends. Our sanctuary was Les Enfants Terrible in Dean Street, a heaving bar and dark basement dance floor. With luck, we found girls who came along later that evening to any of the dozen other Soho music clubs, not least Le Kilt or the 100 Club in Wardour Street. That was the beginning of the unforgettable Swinging Sixties. Fifty years later, Soho’s wonderful nightlife has been destroyed by Westminster Council, the Mayor of London and the Labour government.
Welcome to the Twilight Twenties. Proof of Labour’s deliberate destruction of London’s music scene was the recent publication of Westminster Council’s ‘Draft Westminster After Dark Strategy Summary’. Filled with meaningless guff, the Labour councillors’ malice is exposed in paragraph ED6. The old-minded men and women elected to govern the borough want to move all of Soho’s night life to The Strand and Victoria Street, that soulless jungle of glass and concrete.
Just why those fuddy-duddies want to effectively close Soho down has become obvious. Eighty vociferous residents keep complaining about the late-night noise. Just why they moved to Soho for a peaceful life is bewildering, but they are no different from people buying homes underneath the flight path to Heathrow and then protesting about the noise.
For the council, keeping Soho open and safe at night needs policemen and that costs money. Closing Soho’s pubs and clubs saves the hassle of paying the police to control the ubiquitous drunks and druggies. Private members’ clubs charging hefty fees is not a solution. Young Londoners and tourists are automatically excluded.
Despite London’s entertainment businesses employing thousands of people and attracting millions of pounds for London’s economy, especially from young tourists, licencing committee councillors routinely refuse applications to extend late night licences. Westminster Council recently insisted that, ‘We grant the vast majority of licence applications.’ The statistics prove the opposite. A recent Times survey ranked Britain’s top 12 cities by how many premises are still open at 2 a.m. Top of the list was Manchester. Bottom was London.
Not surprisingly, tourism to London has still not recovered from pe-pandemic levels. Young people are going elsewhere. Labour councils’ destruction of London’s economy and wellbeing has been seismic. Nearly a quarter of all London’s pubs have closed over the past 20 years and the rate is accelerating.
Westminster’s determination to destroy Soho night life was exposed by their decision last November to close down the Groucho club after an alleged rape in a lavatory. The request for its closure, said the council, came from the police. Instead of telling the police in central London to stop the plague of muggings, phone thefts and shoplifting, the councillors were thrilled to comply. After one month, the club was allowed to reopen with ludicrous conditions, including an attendant checking the lavatories every 30 minutes. Can anyone imagine Selfridges being closed down for one month after an allegation of rape?
At this stage, the culturally lacklustre Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan appeared. Invisible over the past decade in London’s theatres, concert halls, museums and night clubs, Khan’s political self-interest meant he saw an opportunity to attack Westminster Council over its ‘After Dark Strategy’.
The Labour mayor doesn’t really care about London’s nightlife, but his current obsession is his ludicrous proposal to pedestrianise Oxford Street, sending hundreds of busses into narrow parallel roads. This is opposed by Westminster Council (not least because Khan’s traffic regulations have successfully transformed London into Europe’s most congested city). To neutralise his Labour opponents and impose the pedestrianisation, the mayor has created a supreme Mayoral Development Corporation.
Like everything the Mayor touches, the MDC will end badly. Just as Khan’s appointment of Amy Lamé in 2016 as London’s night czar ended in ridicule. After eight years in office, she retired last year from her £130,000 a year job as an outright failure. After nearly ten years in office, Khan has overseen a shocking decline in London’s economy. And that will accelerate as Labour’s taxes bite and prices soar. London’s rich have fled abroad, young families have gone west to find good schools and increased tourism is doubtful. London’s declining night life – perpetuated across the city by most Labour councils – has become Khan’s problem.
In his third term, Khan has yet to produce a legacy. Unlike Boris Johnson’s many capital projects including the Elizabeth Line and the Silvertown Tunnel, Khan has not initiated a single major development in the capital. Which explains Labour’s latest nightlife wheeze. In partnership with the Mayor, the government wants to restore London’s nightlife and crush Westminster’s councillors. Unable to invent a catchy title for their improvised initiative, it is called ‘The British Night Out’. Excitingly, Khan and Rachel Reeves want to boost Soho with ‘alfresco dining’ to get ‘a real buzz on high streets’. The government plans to grant Khan powers to overrule Westminster councillors and impose club friendly licencing regulations. Not surprisingly, Soho’s beleaguered hospitality chiefs are not impressed with what one big cheese calls ‘a load of night time crap produced by in-fighting Labour politicians.’ Can anyone save London from the Twilight Twenties?
Why are British lawyers acting for Hamas?
This week on Britain: The Decline Years, a firm of London solicitors has announced it is acting on behalf of Hamas in a legal challenge to the Islamist group’s inclusion on the UK government terror list. The paramilitary wing has been proscribed since 2001 and the political wing since 2021. It took the British political class 20 years to establish a link between the Hamas department that calls for the Jews to be blown up and the department that does the blowing up. This was in the days before streaming services, so Netflix couldn’t make a drama explaining the connection.
Riverway Law will lodge a 106-page application with the Home Office to have Hamas delisted. The application is signed by Mousa Abu Marzouk, the head of the terror group’s foreign relations office. In accordance with tradition, Marzouk lives in the ancient Palestinian city of Doha, to which many senior Hamas members can trace their bank accounts. Marzouk’s application calls the UK government’s ban ‘unjust’ and ‘symptomatic of its unwavering support for Zionism’. Britain is also, according to the application, guilty of ‘complicity in the genocide of our people’.
It’s important to note that ‘Hamas does not deny that its actions fall within the wide definition of “terrorism” under the Terrorism Act 2000,’ the application states. However, ‘it notes that the definition also covers all groups and organisations around the world that use violence to achieve political objectives, including the Israeli armed forces, the Ukrainian army and, indeed, the British armed forces’. Comparing British soldiers to bloodthirsty terrorists. You can see why this case would appeal to solicitors.
Nevertheless, the applicants contend that the terrorist designation contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights, on the grounds that it ‘unlawfully restricts the freedom of speech and assembly’ of Hamas sympathisers. If there’s one thing we know about Britain, it’s that assembling in public to express sympathy with Hamas is not tolerated.
There are those who might object to a British law firm, or at least a London one, taking on Hamas as a client, but we must all remember to respect the cab-rank rule. Admittedly, most taxi passengers don’t come with their own armed jihad wing, not even in London, but nonetheless a client is a client and they would say the decision to take this case has absolutely nothing to do with the politics of the solicitors involved.
It is interesting to see, however, that one of them tweeted on October 7, 2023:
For almost two decades “Israel” has trapped more than two million people in an open air prison for the “crime” of being insufficiently Jewish. We owe Palestinians our solidarity in their struggle against this naked racial domination. Victory to the intifada.
As one not learned in the law, I can’t say whether the application stands much of a chance, but I would note that, if it is rejected by Yvette Cooper, applicants will have recourse to the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission. The commission is headed by a senior English judge, so Hamas could come out of this with compensation, indefinite leave to remain, and a Palestinian state in Surrey.
As with so many problems that blight our suicidal nation, the origin of this one lies in foolhardy legislation, in this case section four of the Terrorism Act, which gives proscribed groups the right to appeal. There are several options open to parliament. MPs could repeal section four altogether, or they could retain the appeal process but abolish the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission and place the Home Secretary’s decision beyond the scope of judicial review. Parliament could also prohibit solicitors or barristers from acting on behalf of or to the direct benefit of proscribed organisations. Or maybe the time has come for some statutory tightening up of the regulation of the legal profession to prevent these sorts of cases from being taken on, perhaps even a change in the approved regulator.
A spokesperson for Riverway Law said:
Lawyers must not be identified with their clients or causes, as doing so endangers them for performing their duties. The UK has a history of breaching this principle, including the murders of Patrick Finucane and Rosemarie Nelson. In 2020, the Law Society and Bar Council had to warn Priti Patel after a far-right terrorist attacked an immigration firm following hostile rhetoric. Media outlets promoting such narratives put targets on our staff, who are already facing hate calls, threats, and doxxing. In the circumstances, we urge The Spectator to deal with the legal issues, rather than endanger the lawyers.
Why Spain is cosying up to China
‘You’ll be cutting your own throat,’ US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned countries thinking of aligning with China. The remarks were made just before Spain’s prime minister, socialist Pedro Sánchez, arrived in Beijing on Thursday with a delegation of ministers, seeking to boost trade, attract investment, and to position Spain as the EU’s chief interlocutor with China. Bessent’s threat came as no surprise. President Trump had just lifted global tariffs above 10 per cent for 90 days for everyone except China, which instead now faces a staggering 145 per cent rate. Bessent’s message couldn’t have been clearer: any friend of our enemy is an enemy.
To an extent the hostility is mutual: anti-American sentiment runs deep in Spain. There are traditionalists who have never forgotten the humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American war in 1898 which resulted in the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the last remnants of a once-great empire. That debacle is still referred to today as El Desastre (the Disaster).
Others continue to resent the United States for its support of Franco’s dictatorship in exchange for military bases during the Cold War. In 2003, just before becoming prime minister, Socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero sparked controversy by remaining ostentatiously seated as the American flag passed during a National Day parade. Today, some of the smaller parties propping up Pedro Sánchez’s fragile left-wing coalition want Spain to withdraw from Nato and fiercely oppose any increase in defence spending. For them Donald Trump is a ‘dangerous fascist’.
Perhaps it’s little wonder then that Spanish officials seemed unconcerned that they were antagonising Washington. Sánchez has never made any secret of his intention to confront ‘the international far right’, casting Spain and Europe as key players in the pushback against Trump-style politics. In February, claiming that Nazi salutes were seen at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Sánchez declared that Europe is the greatest haven of democracy in the world.
Last November, one of his deputy prime ministers, Yolanda Díaz, was equally blunt, describing Trump’s election victory as ‘bad news for everyone who understands politics as the means to improve lives rather than poison them with hate and misinformation’. Since then Sánchez has taunted Trump with claims that the European Union will ‘Make social media great again’ and pledged that rather than ‘Drill, baby, drill’ it’s going to be ‘Green, baby, green’. Indeed, Sánchez and Trump are in opposite corners on a whole range of issues ranging from Israel and Gaza to diversity, equity and inclusion regulations.
El País, Spain’s centre-left newspaper of record, recently suggested that Trump’s rhetoric has grown so extreme that Sánchez is now in regular contact with other world leaders and hinted that ‘an alternative grand coalition of unity to preserve the known world order is beginning to take shape.’
Foreign minister José Manuel Albares announced that ‘There is still a huge majority of us who support multilateralism and a rules-based world.’ Another minister put it more bluntly: ‘Everyone’s reorganising in order to depend less on the US… people are looking for alternatives. This is going to reduce the centrality of the US in global trade. It is an unstoppable path… the whole European Union knows it…’ before adding, ‘The US is going to lose a lot of international influence.’
It seems that Sánchez would welcome that shift. He is the first world leader to visit China since the tariff war broke out and this is his third visit in just over two years. His approach seems to align with Friday’s El País editorial: ‘Trump’s hostility towards the EU forces the EU27 to reformulate its trade relations with, for example, the Mercosur countries, Mexico, Malaysia and Vietnam. And with China…. After years of following Joe Biden’s policy on China, given the attitude of his successor, Europe must now develop its own.’
After his meeting with President Xi Jinping, Sánchez called for the US and China to stop the tit-for-tat tariff hikes: ‘Trade wars are bad for everyone… what the world needs is for the US and China to talk.’ But it seems his words fell on deaf ears: the Chinese president promptly escalated the conflict by increasing China’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods from 84 to 125 per cent.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what will come of Bessent’s threat.
What’s wrong with eating horse?
There’s not much to do in Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can take a peek at the pretty wooden Orthodox cathedral, which is possibly the world’s third tallest wooden building, and erected without nails around 1904. You could visit the site of Leon Trotsky’s house, where he lived in internal Soviet exile from 1928 to 1929. However the house itself has vanished, replaced by the Luckee Yu Chinese restaurant, a chic European ‘cheeseria’, and the Caspian University branch of Starbucks.
On the other hand, Almaty is a genuinely agreeable, hedonistic young city. The Tien Shan mountains loom right behind, like a row of Ku Klux Klansmen sprinkled with party glitter: a spectacular if slightly menacing backdrop. The leafy centre is full of fountains, cafes and beautiful young Kazakh women. And the restaurants of Kazakhstan’s vibrant cultural capital serve, I am told, the best horse meat in the world. Which I am intent on trying, as my motto in life is: ‘try everything twice’ (you may get it wrong the first time).
At this point, I imagine a few Spectator readers will be turning away in revulsion at the mere idea of hippophagy. Or maybe ennui in the sense of ‘been there done that’ – after all, our French cousins notoriously eat horse-meat with insouciance, alongside quite a few British tourists.
Nonetheless, I believe there is a special case for eating horse in Kazakhstan: because the long history of Kazakhstan is intimately braided with humanity’s storied and complex relationship with horses. Therefore, this vast country of steppes, grasslands, nuclear testing sites, decaying gulags, oil wealth, Alpine lakes, disappearing seas and quite decent wine may have something to teach us about our strange, schizo, eat-pray-love attitudes to equus caballus.
The very first people to domesticate the horse lived in what we now call Kazakhstan. They were the Botai, they thrived about 3000 BC. In Botai settlements archaeologists have unearthed huge middens of horse bones, proving that the Botai kept horses for meat, and for milk (kumiss – mare’s milk – is still prized in central Asia). The Botai were also, many experts believe, the first people to ride horses.
From this point in time and place, the domesticated horse spread throughout Asia into Europe and Arabia (in Africa it suffered because of the tsetse fly). It also crossed the Bering Straits, though it died out in the Americas around 10,000 BC, and only reappeared with the Conquistadors (Aztecs who encountered their first Spaniards on horseback thought they were seeing singular, fused, centaur-like creatures).
The early history of the horse in Kazakhstan also illustrates the very mixed and changing human relationship with these noble beasts. If the Botai were pragmatic horse-butchers and kumiss-men, the later Sintashta had an entirely different view – they pioneered the chariot (which first appears in Kazakhstan around 2000 BC) and thereby lauded horses as Godly creatures, able to make men fly like the wind – and conquer horse-less enemies. We know this because the Sintashta reverently buried entire chariots, plus horse skulls and harnesses. Horses by this time were heroic animals worthy of regal graves.
Many civilizations since the Sintashta have shown similar religious respect for the horse. The one Celtic God recruited into the Roman pantheon was Epona, the goddess of horses. To the east, the Indian Vedic kingdoms (around 1000 BC) sacrificed horses, but only after the chosen stallions had been allowed to wander freely for a year. In China, emperors of the Han Dynasty (circa 100 AD) lusted after prized steeds, like the ‘Heavenly Horses of Ferghana’ – a type of central Asian horse alleged to sweat the blood of dragons.
Not surprisingly as the horse grew in status, symbolism and military/political significance – the Mongols conquered half the world with brilliant horsemanship – edicts and taboos came into being, discouraging the casual killing and eating of them. In 732, Pope Gregory III condemned horse-eating – seeing it as a pagan taste popular with Teutonic tribes. In a letter to his contemporary, St Boniface, he called it a ‘filthy and abominable act’. This prohibition was reiterated by later pontiffs.
Meanwhile in Shinto-Buddhist Japan of the seventh century, horse eating was forbidden as a kind of heresy, the same happened in Buddhist India (where horses were almost as holy as cows). In Islam the eating of horses was allowed only under severe circumstances – such as wartime or famine – otherwise it was makruh, ‘discouraged’. Much later, in the English-speaking world, horse eating came to be viewed as disgusting, and immoral – for reasons too complex to untangle here, but surely related to class – horse-racing being the ‘sport of kings’.
Given all these anti-hippophagic diktats, how then has horse eating survived and thrived? One theory for the revived popularity of horsemeat in France is that the taboo was broken when Napoleon’s Grande Armée, starving in its frigid retreat from Moscow, began to eat its own horses (sometimes alive). The few remaining soldiers thus came home to France with a new relish for steak de cheval, and the rest is gastronomy.
As things stand, the pattern of horse-eating worldwide is as patchy as a dappled yearling. While it is still disdained in the Anglophone world, in Japan they got over their scruples and now enjoy basashi (raw horse meat sashimi); in northern Italy they love pastissada de caval – slow-cooked horse stew in wine. In Belgium they like an old nag in a banger, whereas in Eastern Europe they do a decent horse jerky. Further afield, the Chinese eat horse with noodles and the Argentinians scoff dobbin in empanadas.
Me? I’m having a horse tenderloin in one of Almaty’s trendiest steak restaurants (about five minutes from Trotsky’s disappeared house). My waiter advises me to have it rare, which turns out to be good advice as when my horse-steak is all devoured my plate is covered with blood.
Verdict? It’s good. With crunchy sea salt and a hint of paprika it’s decidedly good, lean but flavoursome, with a hint of gaminess. It’s basically venison meets beef, and goes really well with my double fried chips and padron peppers. Would I recommend everyone to try it? Of course not, although I think the moral arguments against eating it are absurd, especially for anyone happy to eat pigs, cows, ducks or little gambolling lambs. In short, my view is: each to his own, and horses for courses.
Can Trump reach a nuclear deal with Iran?
On Saturday, Iranian and American diplomats met in Oman to discuss a nuclear deal. The talks were a clash of styles, tone and substance.
In the past, talks in locations like Vienna allowed the international press to watch the Iranian and American delegations leaving and arriving at different hotels. This time, the discussions are hidden away from prying eyes and journalists inside Muscat’s palaces.
Iran’s foreign ministry began by seeking to tightly control and dominate the early media narrative. Iranian diplomats told media outlets that the talks took place in a positive atmosphere. These Iranian expressions of optimism were commonplace during the Iran nuclear deal revival negotiations from 2021 to 2022 under president Biden. It stretched out the process and enabled the regime to prop-up its deteriorating currency.
On one side of the current talks is foreign minister Abbas Araghchi. On the other is Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s longtime friend and a New York real estate investor who is a newcomer to the Iran nuclear file.
Araghchi has participated in nuclear talks with the US over several presidencies. But he is used to interacting with a rotating cast of familiar faces from the US government, namely officials who rose through the ranks during the Obama and Biden administrations. Witkoff is cut from a different cloth. Like President Trump, he comes from the business world – he makes deals by amassing leverage and wielding threats. As one profile of Witkoff noted, ‘he used to personally collect rent, while carrying a gun, from his tenants in The Bronx.’
His creative use of coercive diplomacy could come in handy against the Islamic Republic. This dynamic was missing in previous rounds of negotiations with the Iranians, who purposely dragged out talks to whittle away at US demands while not fearing any consequences.
By contrast, President Trump has imposed a two-month deadline for the talks. If used adroitly, this could advance US interests. The Ayatollah’s diplomats have a long track record of saying and doing enough to earn another meeting but not enough to reach a durable agreement.
Iranian media reported that Witkoff had a brief, direct conversation with Araghchi at the end of the discussions in Oman on Saturday. But this was a procedural gesture, not a substantive concession.
In terms of substance, there is a mismatch between US and Iranian demands. The current Trump doctrine on Iran centers on giving Iran a choice: that it dismantles its nuclear programme, or the US and/or Israel will dismantle it for Tehran. In recent interviews, Witkoff has indicated some flexibility in terms of compromises, but piecing together his and other Trump officials’ comments suggests that the Trump administration is seeking a stronger deal than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reached by President Obama. President Trump called the JCPOA ‘the worst deal ever’ in his first term.
Tehran is not interested in dismantling its nulear programme. It wants to lure the Trump administration into a deal that is based on the JCPOA, with a few minor modifications. Short of that, Iran is interested in an interim deal that involves temporary constraints on its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. President Biden backed this kind of deal in an informal diplomatic understanding with the Islamic Republic in 2023 to curtail its nuclear enrichment. It later fell apart.
An interim arrangement could quickly become a permanent one if the US is not careful and uses up its leverage. If Iran prevents sanctions being imposed, and the ideal conditions for a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme deteriorate, the US will no longer be a credible military threat to the nuclear programme. The Iranian strategy is all about buying time and surviving.
Some Iranians believe they can force the United States to agree to a JCPOA-like arrangement. In his first term, President Trump had been a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement. His replacement for it, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, was seen by the Iranians as ‘a new deal with no fundamental differences from its predecessor,’ according to commentary by one Islamic Republic news outlet.
Tehran is also making arguments designed to appeal to President Trump’s business instincts, hawking investment opportunities to American companies in Iran. Given though that US citizens who visited Iran after the signing of the JCPOA in 2015 were later taken hostage, it is hard to take these arguments seriously. Business investment is fanciful so long as the current regime is in power.
Iranian sources are also speaking to western media, portraying themselves as deescalating the region. Hezbollah is promising to talk with the Lebanese government about disarming, Iraqi militias are pledging the same, and Iran is reportedly reducing its support for the Houthis. But these are tactical and cosmetic gimmicks which should not be conflated with any changes to Iran’s grand strategy of pushing the United States out of the Middle East and eradicating the state of Israel. Those goals are not up for negotiation. It will be important for the United States to see through these Iranian contrivances.
The inconvenient truth is that the Islamic Republic’s opposition to the United States and Israel is ideological and not based on miscommunications or misconceptions. This is why diplomacy between the United States and Iran has failed for four decades. The Iranian regime has weaponised diplomatic processes to exhaust larger powers like the United States and neutralise pressure campaigns. The Trump administration now has a chance to show the Iranians that the US will not be extorted, exhausted, or cowed.
How could the HMP Frankland attack happen?
On Saturday, an awful assault took place at HMP Frankland. According to a statement from the Prison Officers’ Association (the union for frontline jail staff), Hashem Abedi, brother of the Manchester Arena bomber, allegedly committed an unprovoked attack on three prison officers. It seems he ‘threw hot cooking oil’ over them, and then used ‘home made weapons’ to stab them. According to the union, the officers ‘received life threatening injuries, including burns, scalds and stab wounds’. All three officers were rushed to hospital. As of 6 p.m. yesterday evening the Ministry of Justice confirmed that one officer, a woman, has been discharged, and two are still being treated.
The Lord Chancellor tweeted that she is ‘appalled by the attack of three brave officers at HMP Frankland today… I will be pushing for the strongest possible punishment’, while her Tory shadow, Robert Jenrick insisted ‘this must be a turning point’.
This attack should not have happened. Prison officers should not have to face attempts on their life by murderous jihadis. Abedi is serving a 55 year sentence for his key role in the plot to murder children attending an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017. He is held at HMP Frankland, one of the most secure jails in the country, and was housed in one of its ‘separation centres’. These are areas within high security prisons which house the most dangerous terrorist inmates. This is because we recognise that murderous jihadists are not like other prisoners, since, as explained by POA national chair Mark Fairhurst, they continue to pose a profound danger in their willingness to commit further attacks. In fact, Jonathan Hall KC produced a detailed report in 2022, warning of exactly these risks.
But just over a week ago it was reported that Frankland was so full of dangerous jihadists that the jail was using its separation centres to house those few prisoners who did not want to join the Muslim gangs. At the time the Ministry of Justice told me that these claims were ‘completely untrue’. In light of this awful attack a serious review of security and Muslim gang influence at Frankland must take place.
There’s a wider issue of culture and policy. The POA’s Mark Fairhurst said ‘we must now review the freedoms we allow separation centre prisoners to have. I am of the opinion that allowing access to cooking facilities and items that can threaten the lives of staff should be removed immediately.’
Fairhurst is right. Allowing such dangerous men to have access to weapons and the opportunity to harm staff seems unacceptably negligent. We need to take a realistic attitude to these prisoners. They are not like other inmates.
Hashem Abedi was known to MI5 and referred to Prevent years before the Manchester Arena bombing. The state failed his victims then, and it seems it has failed three more victims today.
As Mark Fairhurst said, men like Abedi ‘simply do not wish to alter their ideology’ and ‘we should concentrate on control and containment instead of attempting to appease them. Things have to change’. He’s absolutely correct. We should consider if the most dangerous jihadi terrorist should be held in something like a US ‘Supermax’ jail, where they are not allowed to associate with other prisoners, receive their meals in their cells and do not have the opportunity to assault and maim prison staff. Allowing the current chaos and appeasement makes further attacks seem likely.
Why do the French hate J.D. Vance so much?
At the start of the month, J.D. Vance delivered the address at the Heritage Foundation in Washington for the premiere of a documentary. ‘Live Not By Lies’ is based on the book by Rod Dreher, who is a friend of the American Vice President’s. Vance informed his audience that backstage Dreher told him of a recent interview he had given to a French newspaper. Broadcast on Le Figaro’s online channel, Dreher was described in the tagline as an ‘American intellectual and friend of J.D. Vance’. As Vance joked, maybe that ‘was meant to tarnish [him] in that country’.
It may have been. France does appear to have an axe to grind with Vance, even a centre-right newspaper like Le Figaro. The left-leaning media is more blatant in their hostility. ‘J.D. Vance, more dangerous than Donald Trump?’ asked the weekly magazine L’Express last month. It was the same question posed in November by Courrier International. Broadcasters have recently joined the attack, including the state-owned France Télévisions and the privately-owned BFMTV.
Catholicism has long been the enemy of this caste
Some of this animus is snobbery on the part of the notoriously elitist French media; working-class men like Vance don’t rise to positions of power in France. But there is another reason. As BFMTV mentioned in its report, Vance is a ‘fervent Catholic’.
His faith was scrutinised recently by the centrist magazine, Le Point, which said that Vance’s Catholicism ‘is the polar opposite of that embodied by Joe Biden’. Rather, it is closer to Viktor Orban’s. ‘He is clearly opposed to same-sex marriage, at war with those who defend gender, and hostile to abortion,’ commented the magazine.
A French senator recently described Elon Musk as a ‘buffoon on ketamine’ and Donald Trump as an ‘incendiary emperor’. Neither are regarded in France as ‘men of conviction’, rather as men interested only in money. Vance is different. It is his faith that makes him ‘dangerous’ for the Paris progressive elite.
Catholicism has long been the enemy of this caste. The frontrunner for the 2017 presidential election was the conservative Francois Fillon, who was proud of his faith and made it an important strand of his campaign in 2016. The left-wing press attacked his ‘values’, pointing out that they included opposition to the 2014 gay marriage bill.
In January 2017, a left-wing newspaper accused Fillon of malfeasance, and his campaign never recovered. He was subsequently convicted, but many on the centre-right remain convinced Fillon was targeted by the Paris elite. In 2020, the head of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office told a parliamentary inquiry investigating judicial independence that in the Fillon affair she had come under ‘enormous pressure’ from the public prosecutor’s office, which interfered ‘on a daily basis’.
Francois Fillon was referenced last week by Marion Maréchal, herself a practising Catholic and also the niece of Marine Le Pen. Reacting to her aunt’s five-year disqualification from politics, Marechal said the time had come for the right to form a united front in the face of what she implied was political persecution. ‘Remember, yesterday it was Francois Fillon,’ she said. ‘Today…it’s Marine Le Pen, tomorrow it will be Bruno Retailleau.’
Retailleau has been the Minister of the Interior since September, and in that time his straight-talking on immigration, Islamism and law and order has made him a hit with the silent majority. He says what they think, and increasingly he is being talked of in presidential terms. The disqualification of Le Pen has increased the speculation that Retailleau may be the only figure capable of uniting the conservative bourgeoise and the working-class vote in 2027.
But Retailleau has also been accumulating enemies in recent months. Left-wing newspapers have taken to describing him as ‘extreme-right’, and his Catholic faith is regularly brought up; so, too, is the fact that he was opposed to the Gay Marriage Bill in 2014.
Retailleau is in many ways a French Vance, and it was notable that he was the only member of the government to endorse what the American Vice President told Europeans in his now infamous speech in Munich. Retailleau agreed there that Europe is suffering a ‘democratic malaise’ because ‘leaders do not follow the aspirations of their people’.
Retailleau is also an implacable enemy of Islamism. Last week he was in London where he gave a keynote speech at the Policy Exchange entitled: ‘The Islamist challenge: how should free societies now respond?’
It was a bold address, far bolder than anything a British politician would dare give. ‘Political Islamism has managed to slip into the new clothes of wokism,’ warned Retailleau. ‘Because it has taken up the great victim narrative to present European Muslims as the new scapegoats, the new damned of the earth. Witness the misuse by political Islamism, like the woke ideology, of a term that the French and British are now familiar with: the term “Islamophobia”.’ Retailleau rejects the term ‘Islamophobia’, describing it as a strategy of the Islamists to ‘paralyse consciences and paralyse wills’.
Retailleau is a close friend of Francois Fillon, and he was one of his staunch supporters during his bid to become president. In an interview in November 2016, Retailleau warned prophetically that Fillon was ‘the target of the system’.
Might that same system soon target Retailleau? He may not be a friend of J.D. Vance’s, but Retailleau shares his faith and many of his convictions. In the eyes of the French elite, that makes him as ‘dangerous’ as the American VP.
North Korea will never give up its nuclear ambitions
Earlier this week, Kim Yo Jong proclaimed that North Korea has no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons. ‘If the US and its vassal forces continue to insist on anachronistic denuclearisation… it will only give unlimited justness and justification to the advance of the DPRK aspiring after the building of the strongest nuclear force for self-defence,’ she said, adding that North Korea’s nuclear status could ‘never be reversed by any physical strength or sly artifice’.
This may have been stating the obvious, but this declaration by Kim Jong Un’s vitriolic sister dashed any optimistic hopes that the arrival of a new administration in Washington could lead to Pyongyang treading one step along the path towards denuclearisation.
This does not mean that we should give North Korea what it wants
North Korea’s rapprochement with Russia – thanks only in part to the Ukraine war – has raised the price of any US-North Korea talks. As China continues to watch the relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang unfold – at a time when Chinese troops have been seen to be participating in Russia’s war – Beijing remains queasy about its neighbour’s growing nuclearisation. Nevertheless, it is willing to grit its teeth and bear the far lesser evil of the status quo. Even if another summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un comes to pass, North Korea’s intention of giving away its ‘treasured sword’ will be even lower than in the past – not that it really had any intention of doing so in the first place.
Since its establishment as a state separate to the capitalist South Korea in 1948, the hermit kingdom’s foreign policy has revolved around the logic of behaving badly to reap rewards, whilst giving away as few concessions as possible. This strategy became even more pronounced after it conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006. The result was hardly something to write home about, but five more nuclear tests would soon follow.
After Kim Jong Un took power in December 2011, the country accelerated its quest to become a nuclear-armed state and gain de facto recognition as such by the international community. While they are still waiting to conduct a seventh nuclear test, Pyongyang has been advancing its nuclear and missile capabilities slowly but surely. All the while, its intention to come to the negotiating table – let alone put these capabilities on said table – has only plummeted.
For as long as the Ukraine war continues, North Korea will fuel Russia with artillery, missiles, and manpower, and will treat all these goods as mere cannon fodder. Pyongyang hopes that in return, it can receive financial and food assistance and, most importantly, advanced missile and military technology. Few details are known about whether any such technology has actually entered the North’s hands, but the fact that Kim Jong Un wants this technology more than anything else has been known long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
It is not just North Korea which has deployed troops to fight for Russia, sending an additional 3,000 troops at the end of March, further to its initial dispatch of 11,000 in October 2024. This week’s revelation by Ukrainian President, Volodomyr Zelensky, that at least 155 Chinese soldiers were aiding Russia’s efforts, caught the world by surprise. After all, China claims to be a ‘neutral’ actor in the war.
China has yet to send any organised troops and has kept tight-lipped about the heightened cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow. Instead, Beijing’s acerbic Foreign Ministry spokespeople have doggedly repeated the same mantra, namely that the movement of North Korean troops in Russia’s direction is not Beijing’s business. In response to Kyiv’s claims that Beijing is aware of Chinese nationals fighting in the war, China offered a swift rebuke, calling on Ukraine to avoid making ‘irresponsible remarks’.
We do not know the exact origins of these Chinese soldiers, at least two of whom have been allegedly captured in eastern Ukraine. Instead of being sent under orders from the People’s Liberation Army, their involvement is more likely to be a result of Russia’s unofficial recruitment campaigns, skirting around official state-to-state ties.
As the wait for accurate information – which has hardly been at a premium on all sides during this now three-year war – commences, we must not lose sight of the bigger picture. China continues to enable Russia’s war by buying Russian oil and sending dual-use technologies to Russia, the latter of which accounts for over 80 per cent of Russia’s supply. What is more, Beijing also assists Pyongyang in evading sanctions, whether through illicit transfers of crude oil or hosting North Korean workers, many of whom endure conditions of slave labour in Chinese factories.
For all the middle kingdom’s vehement disdain for its northeast neighbour’s nuclear weapons, to claim that North Korea’s role in Russia is not China’s business would be a lie. China continues to engage behind the scenes in undermining international norms and institutions, even if it does not want to be seen by the West as doing so. Unlike China, Russia and North Korea have not been struck by Trump’s recent spate of tariffs. But even if Moscow and Pyongyang were to be dealt this economic blow, their behaviour would not change one iota.
By accusing the United States, South Korea, and Japan of being ‘lost in [a] past daydream’ in their calls for North Korea’s denuclearisation, Kim Yo Jong stressed not only that North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ambitions were here to stay, but that only North Korea – and not the West – can decide on Pyongyang’s foreign policies. This does not mean, however, that we should give North Korea what it wants and accept it as a nuclear state. For history has taught us – and will continue to teach us, as tensions between the West and China brew – that appeasing, even trusting, an enemy never ends well.
Small plates are a scam
The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated the restaurant world for more than two decades.
In Venice once, in the early 1990s, I ended up in a backstreet bacari, which is a booze and snack joint, as I couldn’t afford the restaurants in the centre. It was full of working men, and cheap as chips. Huge platters of cold mussels, cured ham, anchovies and crispy gnocchi sat behind a glass counter. Perched above the bar were a barrel of red, and one of white. The purpose of tapas is to soak up early evening booze. One bite, two at most. So how did this evolve into massive plates of meatballs?
The late Russell Norman is credited with having brought small plates to the UK with Polpo, which opened in Soho in 2009. There was a lot to love about his style of restaurant, and Brutto, his Florentine joint in Farringdon, continues to offer gorgeous simplicity as well as a £5 negroni. It dares to serve cold butter on bread, topped with tinned anchovies. Just like the wildfire now cooking your hispi cabbage, his concept spread out of control – and it is time for it to stop.
The worst words in restaurant parlance have to be ‘The dishes come out when they are ready’ (a rival to ‘Shall I explain the concept?’), and I suspect most of us are by now completely over the small-plate scam. Yet it remains beloved of restaurateurs because it maximises profits while allowing chefs to send out food in whatever order best suits the kitchen. The other day, I received a potato dish at the same time as dessert.
Not that I’m wedded to a starter, main course and dessert, but there are limits. And what I do find challenging is being expected to share plates of food with people whose eating habits are less scrupulous than my own.
This sharing is meant to bring you closer together, but it’s my idea of hell: leaning forward en masse, dropping splatters of whipped cod roe on to the wooden table (a tablecloth would, of course, be overly formal). Sticking used cutlery – or worse, fingers – into food is an abomination. It is the main reason I never had children.
Since tapas usually proffer three or four discreetly positioned portions on the plate, it does make sense to share. But what if it’s a chicken thigh, or worse, a small bowl of pasta? The inconsistency drives me mad. For example, a sizeable dish of potatoes that gets left on the table because all the things that go with it have already been scoffed. Playing pick-and-mix with dinner isn’t my idea of fun: it’s unhygienic and inconvenient.
It saves the kitchen – and not the diner. It works for Instagram, but not for me
A bit of Russian roulette is only to be expected when ordering food at a restaurant, and we all owe it to ourselves to order badly on occasion. But having a dozen small plates on the table only increases the scope for mistakes.
In addition to never arriving in the proper order, small plates never fit on the table all at once. For the restaurant, it’s a way of selling more, making more money, and getting you out quicker. It saves washing up, it saves on napkins, it saves the kitchen – and not the diner. It works for Instagram, but not for me.
The idea that you’ve got to try everything on the menu is as annoying as it is impractical. If you really like what you’ve eaten, go back another time. Why would you need to eat the entire menu? Do you do that with à la carte? You never get a sense of how big the portion will be, and sometimes the small plate at £26 is the same size as the one at £6.50.
When you’re out with a group of friends, the chances are some irritating person will have a food allergy, at least two will not eat either meat or fish, and another will eat fish and meat but not dairy. And on it goes – how are you expected to share 12 plates of food while accommodating all of these special needs?
Charred broccoli with a pistachio crumb is perfectly fine on a plate with some belly pork and a little sauce to help it along, but I am damned if I want to sit there at the end of the meal with it staring up at me amid a sea of empty, oh so small, plates.
Transport Minister admits texting while driving double-decker bus
Just what is it with Labour and transport? Less than five months after Louise Haigh was forced to resign as Secretary of State for her missing phone debacle, now another tech-loving transport minister is in hot water again. This time it is Peter Hendy, ennobled last summer and instilled as a junior minister at the Department for Transport. But it seems that roads could be the undoing of the new Rail Minister, according to the Times.
The paper reports that Hendy has now admitted using a mobile phone at the wheel of a double-decker bus before subsequently reporting himself to the police. He was spotted texting a friend by a passenger while driving his vintage Routemaster through central London for charity at rush hour in March; the Met has now opened inquiries. A spokesman for the former Transport for London boss told the Times that ‘Last month Peter Hendy used his phone while driving. He has apologised in full for this error of judgement and has contacted the police.’ Talk about government going off the rails.
In 2022 Tory minister Tom Tugendhat got a six-month ban for using his phone at the wheel. What might Hendy now get? Downing Street are reportedly waiting to see the findings of the Met investigation before deciding whether to launch an ethics probe. How brave! Hendy will just have to hope that the rozzers don’t find that he has run out of road…
The steel debate was an unseemly blame game
In the end, it was David Davis who said it best. Today’s emergency debate on how to save British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant amounted to a ‘nationalisation in all but name Bill’, with new measures amounting to a ‘reprieve, not a rescue’. Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, did a decent job of affecting reluctance at the sweeping powers being handed to him to order Chinese owners Jingye to buy the raw materials to keep the plant’s two blast furnaces going. ‘I do not want these powers any minute longer than is necessary, but I do need these powers to rectify and save this situation’, he told the House. But, in the key admission of today’s debate, Reynolds told MPs that nationalisation remains ‘the likely option’ in the long term.
That came as no surprise to the 300-odd MPs, hastily assembled for the first Saturday recall of the Commons since the Falklands War. Today’s set up was reminiscent of the Covid debates, with parliament presented with a fait accompli to rubber stump inevitable proposals, overwhelmingly supported by the public. As Daisy Cooper, speaking for the Lib Dems, remarked, the fact that even right-wing MPs were begrudgingly willing to back effective nationalisation ‘shows just how through the looking-glass we really are’. Some were more effusive than others: Richard Tice, speaking for Reform, urged Reynolds to ‘Be courageous, show your cojones, show some mettle, Mr Secretary of State… let’s go for it, let’s nationalise British Steel this weekend and make British Steel great again!’
With little disagreement then on the remedy for the Scunthorpe works, the debate instead centred on the cause of its ailments. Party politics loomed large here. With no vote expected, Alex Burghart instead led on the rushed handling of these measures, insisting that the government had ‘made a total pig’s breakfast… anyone who has been paying any attention to this story over the past few months has known this was coming down the track.’ His colleagues Andrew Griffith and Harriet Baldwin labelled the negotiations as ‘bungled’, claiming that Labour had ‘let the unions dictate their actions’. Sir Keir’s MPs did not take that lying down: Mark Ferguson was among the new boys who boasted that today’s measures showed ‘the difference a Labour government makes’.
For his part, Reynolds was determined to point the blame at both the last government and Jingye. ‘This issue should have been resolved years ago’, he said, rejecting Kemi Badenoch’s claim that, as Business Secretary, she had negotiated a modernisation plan. ‘I wish to make unequivocally clear to the House, the government inherited no such deal’, he said. ‘We could not renege on that deal because it did not exist.’ The Tory leader intervened to respond, insisting that the snap election halted a ‘functioning commercial deal’ ready for Scunthorpe, similar to the one at Port Talbot. Both though agreed on their frustration at Jingye’s handling of the plant, with Reynolds attacking their ‘excessive’ demands for funds and unreasonable rejections of UK government compromises.
Other MPs preferred to point the finger of blame at their favoured villains. Richard Tice blamed ‘net stupid zero’ and ‘short term thinking’ for the bail-out. Sir Iain Duncan Smith attacked Beijing, arguing that ‘too many countries like China, have abused the rules of the free market, have subsided their industries ridiculously and have used slave labour to produce their products. When that happens, the free market is dead’. Union-backed Labour MPs like Lawrence Turner focused on the Scunthorpe steelworkers, asking Reynolds to consider ‘a change in that day-to-day management’, given the breakdown of trust between Jingye and staff.
Unsurprisingly, both Welsh and Scottish MPs queued up too to ask whether Saturday sittings were only reserved for English jobs. ‘Where was this urgency when Welsh steel communities were crying out for support?’ asked David Chadwick, the only Lib Dem Welsh MP. He noted that the Port Talbot had both ‘more capacity and greater output’. Similarly, the SNP’s Stephen Flynn decried Westminster’s handling of the Grangemouth oil refinery. ‘Scotland’s interests matter and the people of Scotland are watching’, he cried to the packed Labour benches opposite.
With much of the debate focusing on the blame for Scunthorpe, far too little attention focused on the detail of the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill. It was left to Jeremy Wright, the ex-Tory Solicitor General, to note that in the absence of a committee stage or report stage: ‘It is not enough for this House just to agree we should do something. It is our responsibility to look at the detail of what the government is proposing and decide if it is properly targeted and appropriate for the task.’ He noted that the legislation gives ministers powers to seize assets, enter premises and inflict criminal penalties if the company does not follow their instructions. Compliance with said instructions, Wright noted, is likely to become a hugely contentious point in future.
Such warnings about future pitfalls highlight how today’s debate was merely another chapter in the unhappy story of the UK’s postwar industry. A handful of House of Commons veterans, including David Davis, will remember 1988 when British Steel was privatised, having been successively nationalised, denationalised and then renationalised by Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson in the 1940s, 50s and 60s respectively. Perhaps, in a generation’s time, steel will become a matter entirely for private industry and free enterprise once more. But judging by the contributions in today’s debate, those days look a long way off.
What is Xi Jinping planning?
Shanghai port is the busiest in the world. Activity there is closely monitored by financial analysts distrustful of official statistics and looking for clues as to what is really happening in the world’s second largest economy. For the past few days they will have been taken for a wild ride.
First there was mayhem as ships rushed to load up with containers, half of them destined to the United States, in an effort to beat tariff deadlines. By this weekend the place is reportedly at a near standstill. ‘Containers that missed the narrow window now sit idle in stacks along the docks. Many shippers are either pulling cargo back or scrambling for alternatives,’ according to the Chinese business magazine Caixin.
After a dizzying series of tit-for-tat increases, accumulated US tariffs on Chinese goods now stand at 145 per cent, while China has imposed 125 per cent on American imports. After its latest hike on Friday, Beijing suggested that it would be the last because at those levels it had effectively killed trade and there was no point in going higher. ‘Given that US exports to China are no longer commercially viable under the current tariff levels, if the US continues to raise tariffs on Chinese exports to the US, China will no longer respond,’ the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council said on its website. A Commerce Ministry spokesperson accused Washington of ‘weaponising and politicising tariffs to engage in bullying and coercion,’ calling the tactics a ‘joke’.
As Shanghai port was grinding to a halt, Xi Jinping was hosting Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing, telling him that ‘unity and cooperation’ were needed by the rest of the world. He will take much the same message to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia next week, urging them to stand together with China in face of the Trump wrecking ball and embrace a ‘shared [that is, a Chinese] future’. Chinese state media is presenting Xi as a champion of free trade and globalisation and pushing the need for ‘coalition building’ against Trump.
It is now clear that Beijing is not about to fold and is set on extracting maximum diplomatic advantage from the escalating trade war. Beijing’s accusations of ‘coercion’, ‘bullying’ and ‘rule-breaking’ against the US are of course breathtaking hypocrisy, since all three have been central to China’s rise. But Xi will be calculating that his blandishments will still be welcomed by a world shell-shocked by a rampant American president, who is alienating friends and foes alike.
He also needs markets for a tidal wave of cheap Chinese exports re-directed from the US, the world’s biggest consumer market and needs southeast Asia in particular to turn a blind eye to transhipments of Chinese goods, which often adds up to little more than re-labelling the products as made elsewhere. Supply chains are complicated – often a single product (an iPhone, for instance) has components from multiple sources, and Chinese logistics firms were very adept at ducking, diving and weaving around trade restrictions well before the latest hostilities. Those dark arts will now come into their own.
While Xi has drawn a line under further tariff increases, he has a tool box of other coercive measures waiting in the wings. For Trump, tariff is the ‘most beautiful word’, but the Chinese Communist party has whole vocabulary of bullying, built over decades of forcing foreign firms and pliant countries to kowtow as a price of doing business or to punish them for supposed sleights against China. There was a hint of this on Friday, when Beijing announced it would further restrict the number of US movies allowed to be screened in China. There is already a cap, and Hollywood has prostrated itself disgracefully in front of CCP censors with China-friendly scripts in order to gain entry. In the bigger scheme of things the latest restrictions will have limited economic impact, but its usefulness for Beijing lies in it being a high profile hit to a major US cultural export.
Other weapons in China’s coercive toolkit include targeted boycotts of US firms or goods, as already witnessed against clothing firms which have criticised the use of forced labour in Xinjiang’s cotton fields. Beijing may also step up regulatory investigations on spurious grounds, such as tax evasion, anti-trust or data security. Google and Du Pont are already facing investigations for unspecified monopolistic behaviour. A nightmare for foreign firms is hostage diplomacy, at which China is becoming increasingly adept. Under Xi there has been a worrying rise in exit bans, whereby foreign executives engaged in business disputes, real or imagined, are barred from leaving the country.
Beijing could abandon its modest cooperation on the flow of pre-curser chemicals that have helped fuel America’s fentanyl crisis, and the laundering of the proceeds, where Chinese banks have been implicated. It could target US service companies, law firms and banks for instance, where America enjoys a trade surplus with China. Watch out too for stepped up pressure on US companies, desperate to stay in Xi’s good books, to hand over intellectual property. Further restrictions on key exports on which the US is highly dependent, such as critical minerals used in the technology and defence industries, could come too.
Beijing could also manipulate its exchange rate to make its exports cheaper and dump Treasury bonds. China is the second largest holder of US debt after Japan and there has already been speculation – without hard evidence – that this week’s wild swings in the US bond markets were provoked by Chinese selling.
That turbulence, the largest surge in 30-year yields since the pandemic, appears to have been the reason why Trump blinked, pausing higher tariffs against the rest of the world (though they still have a minimum 10 per cent), while further hiking them against China. This was presented by some of this team as all part of a clever plan, with China was the real target all along, though that seems unlikely.
Xi so far is having a better trade war than many expected
Whatever the reason, the climbdown will have encouraged Beijing’s view that it can hold out longer than America. Financial analysts (when not panicking about the markets) have excelled themselves this week with analogies ranging from two prize-fighters in the ring to a pair of gunslingers at high noon, and even two racing cars racing towards each other in a deranged game of chicken. On paper at least the Chinese economy is fragile, still suffering from a property collapse, with heavy debts and tumbling inward investment. In the absence of meaningful economic reform, Xi has been counting on cheap exports to revive the economy.
It appears more vulnerable than the US. Yet China is also an autocracy, and its pain threshold is higher. It can impose more suffering on its people, and Xi is gambling that with higher inflation, job losses and other economic dislocation from the trade war, it is Trump who will face earlier and greater political and popular pressure to change course. The US is also a far more open economy than China, and as the bond market convulsions showed this week, it is much more exposed to market sentiments, however dismissive Trump has been of gyrations in the stock market.
While it is true that the CCP depends on its economic stewardship for legitimacy – performance legitimacy as it is often called – things would have to get a lot worse to provoke the sort of popular protests seen towards the end of China’s draconian Covid lockdowns, which forced Xi to abandon his stubborn Covid-zero policy. The Party is also resorting to a familiar tactic of whipping up nationalist sentiment, presenting the trade war with America as a patriotic struggle. This week the Foreign Ministry circulated a video of a famous 1953 speech by Mao about resolve in the Korean war against America. More jingoistic movies from that era seem sure to follow, as happened during 2019 trade tensions.
Chinese social media, where ‘patriotic’ voices are usually given more room, has been full of viral and often racist AI generated videos about Americans. Some have depicted overweight, sweaty and downcast American workers stitching together garments on miserable production lines in a post tariff world, where such tasks are no longer outsourced overseas. Beijing’s warning that ‘China will fight to the end’ has become a popular social media rallying point.
Separating the European Union from America is a long standing goal of CCP policy, and Xi will have been encouraged by the visit from Spanish prime minister. Sanchez, rarely one to stand up to autocrats, appeared happy to encourage this, saying he is in favour of ‘more balanced relations between the European Union and China’. Others will be more cautious. China’s support for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine casts a long shadow over EU-China relations, and these will not have been helped by the capture of two Chinese soldiers fighting for Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claims at least 155 Chinese citizens have joined Russia’s army, and while they appear to be mercenaries, there has been no clear explanation from Beijing.
Also buried under all the tariff noise this week was news that Xi has purged He Weidong, the number two general in the People’s Liberation Army. That follows the removal of a swath of other top military and defence officials – including two successive defence ministers. That suggests all is not well in the court of Xi Jinping, and his relationship with the army may be strained. Trump’s tariffs have given him a rallying point. Ten days after ‘liberation day’, whether by accident or design the battle has abruptly changed from Trump vs the world to Trump vs China. It is early days, but Xi so far is having a better trade war than many expected – though that may be more the result of the global chaos and confusion unleashed by an erratic Trump rather than anything done by Xi.
Nationalising British Steel won’t fix a thing
There will be some stirring speeches about saving jobs. There will be lots of grand rhetoric about securing a great British industry. Who knows, some of the more mischievous Labour backbenchers may even break out into a chorus on the Red Flag. Parliament will vote on Saturday in favour of an emergency bill that will effectively take British Steel back into public ownership, and pave the way for full-scale nationalisation. There is just one catch. It won’t actually solve anything.
British Steel has been in bad shape for more than a decade. Its Chinese owners, Jingye Group have decided it is no longer worth the vast losses it is racking up and have stopped delivering the supplies necessary to keep it open. As the last surviving blast furnace in Britain faces closure, even the slow learners in the Starmer government have suddenly worked out that in a world where it is ramping up military spending some steel might be quite useful, and in a world dominated by tariffs and trade wars it might be handy to make the metal at home. Very late in the day, it has decided to step in and keep the plant open. It is so urgent, it can’t even wait until Monday.
The trouble is, that won’t actually fix anything. Steel making has been under pressure in all the major developed economies, but in the UK it has faced two unique challenges. We now have the highest industrial energy prices in the world, with the cost of power for factories tripling from 2004 and 2021 and still going up. Industrial energy now costs 74 per cent more than it does in the US, and 32 per cent more than it does in France. For an energy intensive industry such as steel these are crushing costs that make it virtually impossible to make any money; depending on the process, energy accounts for 20 per cent to 40 per cent of the cost of making steel. On top of that, we have saddled the industry with green targets and net zero rules that have made it impossible to run the furnace efficiently. Understandably, the Chinese owners have decided they have had enough.
If Labour decided to fix those issues, it would have a queue of private sector buyers. Instead, it is simply planning to take the company into state ownership. But that won’t by itself do anything to fix the £200 million to £400 million it has been losing annually over the last few years. Indeed, it will only make it worse. The unions will block any redundancies, and the government will find it impossible to drop any of the net zero rules that are the fundamental problem it faces. All it will do is transfer the losses from the private sector to the taxpayer. What the UK needs is a profitable, efficient steel producer. Nationalisation won’t achieve that – it will only make the crisis even worse.
Trump tells Russia to ‘get moving’
With just under a week to go until the supposed Easter deadline, it appears that Donald Trump is no closer to securing a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The President’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff travelled to St Petersburg yesterday for talks on ‘aspects of a Ukraine settlement’ with Vladimir Putin. The fact that neither produced a read-out of the four and a half hour meeting afterwards implies that, yet again, Trump’s representative has come away without having achieved much meaningful progress.
While the Americans may have hoped yesterday’s meeting would perhaps bring Putin closer to the negotiating table with Ukraine, the Russians were clearly under no such illusion. Ahead of the meeting, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated: ‘There is no need to expect any breakthroughs here. The process of normalising relations and searching for grounds for entering the trajectory of a settlement around Ukraine is underway.’
Trump is clearly growing frustrated with what he sees as Russian foot-dragging – Peskov’s convoluted and opaque statement of ‘searching for grounds for entering the trajectory of a settlement around Ukraine’ (whatever that means exactly) being a case in point. Never one to beat around the bush, the American President is getting impatient. Taking to his social media platform Truth Social while Witkoff was in St Petersburg yesterday, Trump wrote:
Russia has to get moving. Too many people are DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war – A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!
Having famously boasted during his presidential campaign that he would be able to end the war in 24 hours, Trump is now nearly three months into his administration. This year, Easter lines up on the same dates in both the Orthodox and Western Christian calendars – which would have made for some nice symbolism had the President succeeded in brokering a truce. But having quietly moved the goalposts with a fresh aim to try and secure Putin’s agreement to a ceasefire by mid April, the White House admitted earlier this month that this too now looked unlikely.
Sources close to the White House suggest that Trump may consider hitting Russia with further sanctions on its oil exports and ‘shadow fleet’ of illegal oil tankers if Putin doesn’t come to the negotiating table by the end of this month.
Trump’s decision to appoint Witkoff to lead negotiations with the Kremlin has caused alarm among Ukraine and its allies – including some Russia-sceptic Republicans back in the States. It emerged yesterday that last week Witkoff met with the President in the Oval Office. He reportedly advised him that the quickest way to end the conflict would be to recognise Russian sovereignty of the four Ukrainian territories (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson) it currently occupies illegally – a maximalist Russian demand that Witkoff first endorsed back in March. Ukraine has repeatedly stated it would reject such terms of a truce and never agree to cede territory to Russia in this way.
Witkoff’s meeting with Trump came less than two days after he hosted Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation currently sanctioned by the US, at the White House for dinner. The two met again yesterday. With Russia as concerned as it is with getting the sanctions in place against it lifted, this suggests that Trump and his advisors are at least as happy to entertain discussions of ‘normalising’ diplomatic relations between America and Russia as they are securing an end to the conflict in Ukraine. It may well be that they even see bringing Moscow in from the cold as the first, easy step to achieving an end to the war – a strategy many of Ukraine’s western allies would no doubt take issue with.
Yesterday marked Witkoff’s third meeting with Putin in Russia in as many months. The last time the two met in March, their discussion was followed by a phone call between the Russian President and Trump, in which Putin agreed to stop Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure – a promise Kyiv accused him of breaking mere days later. This time around, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov that a phone call between both presidents could well follow once again. No doubt we won’t have to wait long to find out what Trump’s next step will be.
Greens grab victory in Lammy’s backyard
Westminster has a new tradition on Friday mornings: analysing council by-election results. These days, such contests rarely make for good reading for Keir Starmer, with Labour now losing votes to every other parties across the country. Two council wards were of particular note this week. The first in Longdendale, Tameside in Greater Manchester saw Reform storm to victory with 47 per cent of the vote, with Labour’s share collapsing to just 25 per cent. Watch out Ange….
But it was another contest in the nation’s capital that caught Steerpike’s eye. For on the same night that Labour was shedding votes up north, they were losing a safe seat down south too – in David Lammy’s backyard of Haringey. In the London ward of St Ann’s, the Starmer army suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of the Greens. Eco-warrior Ruairidh Paton triumphed here with 55.4 per cent of the vote, while Labour only mustered 30.8 per cent. Quite the feat in a left-leaning ward which has been staunchly red since its creation….
The victory comes after the resignation of Councillor Tammy Hymas, who quit in frustration at the Labour government’s handling of local authority funding, arguing it forced the council to make harmful cuts. Speaking after his victory, Paton declared that:
This isn’t just possible in Haringey. Greens and socialists can win across the country. It’ll be either us or Reform who capture the mood. It’s time to get to work.
Keirleaders can take some comfort from the fact that turnout was less than 29 per cent – but the margin of the Green victory will spook some certainly. As journalist and local resident Hamish Morrison pointed out: ‘The streets were positively swarming with Labour canvassers last night when I went out to cast my ballot. They looked worried – turns out with good reason.’
So much for a Labour safe seat eh?
Farage is leading Labour’s policy
For Reform’s supporters drawn from the right of the Conservative party, Nigel Farage’s call to nationalise British Steel never made much sense. Why return Britain to the days of pre-Thatcherite Britain, when loss-making industries were propped up by the taxpayer as they gradually became less and less competitive globally?
Yet the political value of Farage’s policy has now become plain. With the government recalling parliament to pass emergency legislation to take control of the ailing British Steel – said by its Chinese owners, Jingye, to be losing £700,000 a day – Farage can now be seen to be leading Labour party policy. He has given a huge kick to a project that Reform will need in order to win an election: to start drawing large numbers of supporters from the left as well as the right. Reform is never going to form a government if all it is doing is splitting the right-wing vote; appeal to the working-class voters who feel betrayed by Labour, on the other hand, and the party has a genuine chance of government.
Farage’s leadership on British Steel isn’t going to disappear after today’s emergency parliamentary session, either. What the government is proposing at the moment doesn’t make much sense – at least not without the government adopting another Reform policy: to drop net zero targets. How utterly bizarre that the government is now desperately trying to save a blast furnace, when it has spent the past year telling us that it is dirty, obsolete technology which needs to go in order for Britain to reach its net zero targets. The last government was no different on this issue. When the Port Talbot steelworks got into trouble, Rishi Sunak’s government stuffed it with £500 million to tear down the blast furnaces and replace them with an electric arc furnace. Those who protested that the new furnace would only be able to recycle steel, not manufacture it from scratch, were brushed aside. All that mattered was the net zero target.
It was the same with the raw materials. Part of today’s rescue package involves the government importing coking coal from Japan to keep the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe running. That is a material which should by now have been available from Cumbria, yet the previous government gave lukewarm support to a company wanting to develop a coking coal mine there – and then Ed Miliband delivered the coup de grâce to the project. Again, the net zero target was allowed to trample over all other concerns. Were it consistent, the government would be celebrating the demise of the Scunthorpe blast furnaces as another great step towards net zero. But it seems finally that the threat of mass job losses and the demise of Britain’s industrial base is beginning to cut through. Global trade war, and before that the pandemic, seem to have awoken ministers to the hazards of trying to rely on stretched supply chains.
The future of the UK steel industry is not going to be resolved today. Even with a government bailout, British Steel faces high producer costs. When the electric arc furnace in Port Talbot opens, it will find itself having to live with the highest electricity prices in the world – paying around four times as much for its power as US competitors, and significantly more than European rivals. Nor is today’s financial support – which the government says will stop short of nationalisation – likely to be enough to persuade Jingye to keep the works open. Full nationalisation will very likely be required at a later date. By then, Farage will well and truly be in control of Labour policy – and Labour’s blue-collar voters are not going to forget it.
Have we got worse at dealing with stress?
Barely a month seems to pass without a public exhortation to ‘raise awareness’ about the plight of some marginal section of society, or for some worthy cause on behalf of the vulnerable. If you find this trend tiresome, irritating or indeed stressful, then help is at hand: April has seen the arrival of Stress Awareness Month.
Bearing in mind that we are said to be undergoing a mental health crisis, with one in five 16-25 year-olds now citing poor mental health as a reason for not seeking work, the timing couldn’t be better. As a nation, we clearly aren’t coping, so some reflection and introspection is surely in order.
Stress is neither abnormal, nor is it inherently a bad thing
And help is indeed on hand. There is a whole host of guidance out there on how to reduce stress levels. Common advice includes identifying your problems and what’s been stressing you out, eating well, exercising, sticking to a routine, maintaining a regular sleep cycle, meeting your friends, having a chat.
If this advice sounds banal and obvious, that’s because it is. This owes to the fact that they are self-evident remedies to a likewise commonplace and incontrovertible truth: life itself is stressful.
Over the past few decades, there has been a gradual trend to medicalise ordinary feelings of unhappiness, loneliness and stress – emotions that every single one of us feel at some time, albeit some for a longer duration and with graver intensity than others – into ‘conditions’ or ‘diseases’. This is not to belittle those who suffer from clinical depression or acute mental illness. On the contrary, to pathologise normal emotions does a disservice to those who genuinely do suffer from conditions entirely beyond their control.
This idea that all negative emotions are ‘problems’, or that they are inherently bad for us, emerged towards the end of the 20th century. It was one consequence of a shift in Western society in which we came to understand ourselves as passive beings governed by emotions, rather than people guided by reason who weren’t doomed or trapped by circumstance. This shift was outlined by the sociologist Frank Furedi in his 2004 book Therapy Culture, a work that reads horribly relevantly today, in our time in which the language of damage, anxiety, addiction, vulnerability, fragility and, yes, stress, is more pervasive than ever.
The Covid pandemic, and more accurately, the lockdowns, are routinely held responsible for our mental health woes. The emergence of social media in the past quarter century has scarcely helped, either, what with it creating more acute feelings of disappointment and inadequacy that stem from the misperception that everyone else’s life is better than yours.
But the events of five years ago were imposed on a populace that had for decades been taught to feel fragile and vulnerable, one that had already learnt to see their emotions through the prism and language of medicine and therapy. Giving a label to one’s negative feelings, one which had a scientific ring to it, or calling it a ‘disease’ or ‘condition’, could not only add legitimacy, credibility and purpose to one’s sense of unhappiness, but also help to fend off accusations of laziness or malingering. It still serves that purpose.
Many young people today aren’t simply workshy. Many are genuinely unhappy and feel powerless. But that’s because they’ve been raised in a society that has instilled in them an ethos of passivity, that they can’t control social and economic forces exterior to them, or mental or physical conditions interior to them, ones which seemingly condemn them for life. The therapeutic language in common use today, that of ‘survival’, ‘coping’ and ‘recovering’, reinforces the belief that life is not something to be embraced, a challenge to be accepted, but an exercise in damage limitation.
This pathologisation of existence is an aberration, historically speaking. Our forefathers knew perfectly well that stress was a fact of life, something we necessarily had to deal with. The Stoics built an entire worldview on it. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer did likewise, albeit giving it a more gloomy emphasis. He thought that life fundamentally consisted of suffering, and believed it best if we all accepted this fate from the outset.
The young Friedrich Nietzsche initially agreed, but came to the opposite conclusion. Life does indeed consist of strife and struggle, Nietzsche wrote, but it behoves us to embrace adversity and overcome struggle to become freer and more vital, autonomous human beings. Hence his ideal Übermensch, the individual who dares to go over and beyond. Hence, too, his most famous saying: ‘That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.’
Stress is neither abnormal, nor is it inherently a bad thing. Stress is often good for us. It is a spur and inspiration. Without tension, pressure, hard work – or indeed, a looming deadline – nothing would ever get done.
Merz’s coalition treaty is an empty, promise-free shell
It took just over six weeks for the new German coalition to form. That is very quick: in the past it has often taken months for parties to come to an agreement after elections. So what has made this process so smooth? I would like to think it was a sense of urgency, but I suspect it’s more to do with the programme being easy to agree on. The coalition treaty put together by the CDU and SPD parties is decidedly non-committal and unimaginative – a far cry from the change voters were promised.
The 146-page document had barely been released on Wednesday before one of its architects warned that some of its content may not be deliverable. Lars Klingbeil, leader of the centre-left SPD, the junior partner in the new two-way coalition, said that many of the outlined projects hadn’t been costed. That is why the treaty says ‘we want to’ rather than ‘we will’ a lot, he explained. Indeed, the phrase ‘we want to’ appears 150 times, so pretty much on every page.
There’s no ambition hiding beneath the ambiguity
But the nice-to-haves are not just about funding. They are also about masking the differences between the election-winning conservative CDU/CSU that promised drastic centre-right change and their new coalition partner, which has been part of governments since 1998 with just one interruption. They want to defend the left-wing status quo. And so there are phrases like ‘we want to remain an industrial country and achieve net zero’ or ‘we want to show in the next few years that Germany can move forward again’.
Because the phrasing is so vacuous, the parties’ differences on how to fill it with meaning are already apparent. Take the issue of immigration. The coalition treaty says that the new government will deny entry to people without a valid visa at the borders even if they are asking for asylum, but it will only do so ‘in alignment with our European neighbours’. So what does ‘alignment’ mean exactly? Do they just inform Poland or Austria, or do they require their permission to close German borders to migrants?
Jens Spahn, a prominent conservative politician, emphasised that the paper says ‘alignment not agreement’ (‘Abstimmung’ not ‘Zustimmung’). Saskia Esken, the second SPD leader at the negotiating table, retorted that it was ‘highly dangerous’ to deny migrants entry without the consent of the affected neighbouring countries. She argued that that’s what the two parties had agreed to do when they negotiated behind closed doors ‘and that’s what we’ll stick with’. And the designated chancellor Friedrich Merz? He said his priority is ‘the safety of our own country’, but he also wants to avoid ‘unnecessary conflict’ with the other European states. The question remains unanswered.
One could argue that the coalition treaty is an act of strategic ambiguity. It allows the two coalition partners to get going and work things out along the way. After all, they have made sure they have enough cash to make it a smooth journey, agreeing to spend up to €1 trillion (£867 billion) of extra borrowing on infrastructure, defence and security. This should free them up to fund other projects out of the regular budget.
But there’s no ambition hiding beneath the ambiguity. Take Germany’s massive headache of energy procurement. Before the war in Ukraine, Germany imported over half its gas from Russia. Then sanctions kicked in and triggered an energy crisis as the country scrambled around the world market to replace Russian gas with alternatives, mostly from Norway and the US. It’s difficult to disentangle German energy imports from Europe’s in general because of the integrated energy network. However, the EU imports nearly 20 per cent of its gas from the US now, and of the LNG that arrives directly in German ports, 84 per cent is American.
With Donald Trump in the White House and Vladimir Putin in Moscow, it doesn’t take much to work out that relying on gas imports as heavily as Germany’s rapacious economy does is a rather precarious gamble. Instead of diversifying and improving domestic energy production, the previous government shut down the last perfectly functional nuclear reactors in 2023. This was a decision criticised by Merz and other conservatives at the time. Yet there is absolutely nothing in the coalition treaty on investing in nuclear energy, as many of Germany’s neighbours are, or finding other solutions to this dangerous conundrum.
Instead, the plan on energy is to build more gas plants and to invest more in renewables. That’s without knowing where the gas is going to come from or how Germany is going to negotiate a decent price for it when everyone knows it relies on gas imports. Renewables have also been expanded more quickly than the electricity network or storage solutions. The system came dangerously close to breaking down at times last year.
At other times, when there is no wind and no sun, Germany has had to take so much power out of the European network that it has affected other countries, particularly Norway and Sweden – badly – creating unnecessary conflict with them. This happens so frequently that there is a German word for such weather: ‘Dunkelflaute’.
What applies to energy applies to other areas of the coalition treaty: it’s a document of tweaks, not ‘policy change’, as the conservatives promised their voters. That’s why so many of them have turned to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in droves. The AfD was the most popular party in a major poll for the first time this week, and all other recent polls are unanimous in predicting it would gain close to a quarter of votes right now if there were another election.
If Merz, his coalition, and the political parties involved want to survive the next four years, they have to fill their shell of a coalition treaty with real meaning and quickly. Suffering from economic, political and social malaise of a scale not seen in recent history, Germany needs a government willing to take action and infuse the country with a sense of optimism. The coalition treaty is not exactly an inspiring start. There’s little ‘can do’ and far too much ‘might do…maybe.’
Orkney could be Britain’s gateway to the Arctic
Orkney is a charming archipelago of some 70 islands and skerries – 20 of which are inhabited – ten miles north of mainland Scotland. It’s closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to London. It is also at the heart of the wider geographic and cultural Nordic region, with Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands to its west and Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland to its east. North Ronaldsay, its northernmost island, is nearer to Tórshavn than it is to Glasgow, and to Bergen than it is to Dumfries.
As Arctic shipping routes become more navigable, Orkney’s strategic location between the North Sea and the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap may make it the most important gateway for ships coming in from the north and sailing onwards to the ports of western Europe or the North Atlantic. While Russia has several major ports along its Arctic coastline, northern European nations have only a few large deep-water ports that can serve the evolving needs of the High North as melting polar ice makes the Northwest passage and Northern Sea Route more navigable. The EU does not have direct access to the Arctic Ocean at all.
The rising geopolitical importance of Orkney cannot be overstated. It is home to 29 piers and harbours, including Scotland’s longest commercial deep-water berth at Hatston Pier. Scapa Flow, with an area of over 125 square miles and average depths of 30 to 40 metres, is the largest natural deep-water harbour in the northern hemisphere and the second largest in the world. It makes Orkney especially well-placed to serve northern shipping routes as Europe’s gateway to the Arctic.
As home over the centuries to settlers, sailors, explorers and whalers, Orkney’s Nordic and Arctic connections are hardly new. Norse sagas (such as Orkneyinga Saga) and sites (such as St Magnus Cathedral) highlight Orkney’s rich past as a seat of power in a Norse empire that wove together settlements from Newfoundland and Greenland to Scotland and Norway.
From the time Norse settlers first arrived in Orkney and Shetland in the late-eighth century, and King Harald Fairhair of Norway annexed the Northern Isles in 875, to the time when the Earldom of Orkney passed to the Kingdom of Scotland in lieu of a dowry payment in 1472, Orkney remained part of the Nordic world. Norse influences can still be seen in its genetic history, place names, dialect and vocabulary.
Over the next centuries, Orkney played a major role in the British exploration and settlement of North America. The Hudson’s Bay Company, formed in 1670, started recruiting in Orkney by 1702, with Orcadians accounting for three-quarters of the workforce by the late-18th century.
In 1780, Captain Cook’s ships Discovery and Resolution first stopped in Stromness after returning to Britain from their voyage in search of the Northwest Passage through the Bering Strait. In 1845, Sir John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror made their last stop in Britain in Stromness before their own search for the passage.
Over the 1840s and 1850s, John Rae – the son of an HBC agent in Stromness and himself a surgeon, clerk and later surveyor with the HBC in Canada – embarked on notable Arctic expeditions. He is credited with uncovering the fate of the Franklin expedition and discovering the final link in the Northwest Passage. His birthplace, Hall of Clestrain, still stands in Orphir. The John Rae Society bought it in 2016 and is now working to restore it.
During the two world wars, Scapa Flow served as the chief naval base of the British Grand Fleet and Home Fleet. It was where 74 ships of the German High Seas Fleet were famously interned after the armistice in 1918 and scuttled the following year. Later, it was where HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a U-Boat in 1939, and where Churchill ordered barriers built to block its eastern approaches.
After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Orkney served as a staging point for the Arctic convoys setting out for, what Churchill called, ‘the worst journey in the world.’ Between 1941 and 1945, these convoys transported critical supplies and armaments, all while coming under attack from sea and air, to the Arctic ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk to support Soviet resistance and war efforts on the eastern front.
Since the 1970s, Orkney has become a global energy powerhouse. Flotta Oil Terminal processed nearly 422,000 barrels a day of crude oil from North Sea oilfields at its peak in 1978 and exported over 2.6 billion barrels by 2017. Scapa Flow has safely transferred over 28 million barrels over the last decade.
Orkney has also been a world-leading centre of renewable energy. The first grid-connected wind turbine in the UK was tested in Orkney in 1951, and the world’s largest wind turbine was based in Orkney from 1984 to 2000. Today, Orkney has the highest concentration of small and micro wind turbines in the UK – more than 760, making up 10 per cent of the UK’s domestic wind turbines – alongside 12 large-scale turbines.
Orkney is also home to the European Marine Energy Centre, the world’s foremost wave and tidal power test facility, based in Stromness. In 2016, the world’s largest planned tidal stream power project – MeyGen – was launched in the Pentland Firth, south of Orkney, known to have some of the strongest and fastest tidal currents.
When outlining why he wished to acquire Greenland, Trump referred to the threat posed by increasing Russian and Chinese interest and activity in Arctic shipping routes. While these are legitimate concerns, there is little that can be solved through ownership and control of Greenland. It would make more sense to boost cooperation under existing arrangements instead – with Greenland, and with other allies and partners.
It would be helpful for the US to encourage its allies to develop deep-water ports across the region. This would include Nome in western Alaska, Grays Bay in western Nunavut, Finnafjord in eastern Iceland, Scapa Flow in Orkney and Kirkenes in northern Norway. The UK could join forces with its North American and European allies, as well as likeminded Asian partners (such as Japan, Korea and Singapore), to develop a world-class deep-water port, transshipment hub and refuelling station in Scapa Flow. This would be in the national and international interest.
In February, Highlands and Islands Enterprise approved a £5 million grant to support the development of a new deepwater quay at Scapa Flow for offshore wind projects in the North Sea. While this is welcome, any future development should have commercial and military uses as well. These could include establishing a terminal for containers and other cargo, and facilities for the monitoring and surveillance of subsea infrastructure and vessels and submarines transiting through the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap and the North Sea.
Orkney is home to many Arctic and Nordic cultural treasures. Its maritime capabilities, and energy innovation and expertise make it one of Britain’s strongest links to the Arctic and Nordic region today. Investing in developing a deep-water port at Scapa Flow principally for civilian and military use will be key to unleashing the full potential of Orkney. In doing so it could become Europe’s strategic gateway to the Arctic.