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The problem with putting US nukes in Poland
Nukes are becoming a big issue for Poland. One way or another, both the Polish president and prime minister want their country to host tactical nuclear weapons as a deterrent against President Putin’s Russia.
In the latest, but by no means the first, statement on this question, President Andrzej Duda has revealed he recently discussed locating American tactical nukes in Poland with Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy for Ukraine.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Duda said: ‘I think it’s not only that the time has come but that it would be safer if those weapons were already here.’
At the same time, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister and former president of the European Council, has indicated an interest in Poland developing its own nuclear weapons as well as building an army of half a million soldiers to stand up to potential Russian aggression in the future.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, nuclear rhetoric has become increasingly escalatory.
Putin has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, most recently justifying such use if long-range conventionally-armed missiles supplied by a western nuclear power – the US, France or the UK – posed an existential threat to Russia. (Tactical nukes are short-range and designed for the battlefield, as opposed to strategic weapons with a range of thousands of miles and capable of annihilating cities).
Putin, in making his case for why he invaded Ukraine, has blamed Nato for its expansion programme which absorbed all the eastern European countries that were formerly part of the Warsaw Pact. Two of his demands for a resolution to the war across Russia’s border is for Ukraine to be demilitarised and barred from ever joining the western alliance.
This is where nuclear weapons come in. Poland has adopted the most ambitious and, from the Kremlin’s point of view, most confrontational approach against Russia of its former satellites: it has built a base in the country for the permanent deployment of a US armoured division, hosted an America’s Aegis Ashore missile defence system (operational since December 2023 at Redzikowo in northern Poland), and now it has offered to house US air-launched tactical nukes.
The sense of urgency in the Polish president’s oft-repeated plea for American nukes gathered pace after Putin, without so much as a by-your-leave, deployed Russian tactical weapons to Belarus in the summer of 2023. Belarus is Russia’s strongest and most loyal ally which provided an additional launch pad for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
When Poland first raised the possibility of deploying US tactical nukes on Polish territory, President Joe Biden reacted without enthusiasm. His whole approach was not to make any move that might seem dangerously escalatory. This was why he delayed for so long sending long-range missiles to Ukraine and then, even when he changed his mind, imposing a limited use of them for striking targets inside Russia.
President Trump’s strategy is focused on ending the war and it seems unlikely he would announce he is contemplating installing tactical nuclear weapons in Poland as an added incentive to Putin to agree a peace settlement. In any case, it’s President Duda advocating this proposal, it’s not the official policy of Prime Minister Tusk’s government.
Nato has pledged it has ‘no intention’ to deploy nuclear weapons on the territories of member states which joined after 1997
As a member of Nato, Poland is represented on the alliance’s Nuclear Planning Group. Warsaw is, therefore, signed up to the nuclear-sharing strategy under which the US locates bomber-armed tactical nuclear weapons at installations throughout Europe.
An estimated 100-150 US B61 nuclear bombs are stored in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. There is one nuclear base in each country, with the exception of Italy which has two.
Under current policy, enshrined in commitments made to Moscow in the Nato-Russia Founding Act, signed in Paris on 27 May, 1997, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the alliance has pledged it has ‘no intention, no plan and no reason’ to deploy nuclear weapons on the territories of member states which joined the alliance after 1997.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were the first former Warsaw Pact countries to be accepted in the alliance, in 1999. They were followed five years later by another seven countries, including the three Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.
Allowing Poland to host US tactical nuclear weapons would abrogate the Founding Act, although the invasion of Ukraine and the fears of further Russian aggression in eastern Europe, have potentially created a new ‘reason’ for expanding or revising Nato’s nuclear-sharing strategy.
Sixty-three years ago, the attempt by the Soviet Union to station medium- and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles in Cuba led to the gravest confrontation between Moscow and Washington. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis has served as a benchmark ever since for the risks posed by nuclear brinkmanship.
Today, the confrontation with Moscow is not on such a world-threatening scale, in spite of Trump’s warning to Kyiv that it’s potentially provoking world war three.
Why couldn’t this elite school cope with my talk on anti-Semitism?
Perhaps it is a rite of passage these days for a journalist to be cancelled. But I never expected that an elite school – one designed to create tomorrow’s international leaders, founded by a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany – would be the ones to cancel a talk about anti-Semitism from me, the son of a Holocaust survivor.
My invitation was not controversial – at least, not at first
As a journalist and columnist with extensive experience reporting from Israel, covering terrorist attacks across Europe, and documenting the rise of anti-Semitism internationally, I have encountered hostility before. But I had not expected it to come from an institution dedicated to fostering global understanding.
The school in question is UWC Atlantic, a boarding school in Wales with an esteemed reputation. Founded in 1962 by Kurt Hahn, a German-Jewish educator who fled the Nazis, the college was meant to be a beacon of international cooperation, bringing together students from diverse backgrounds, including conflict zones, to engage in rigorous education and meaningful dialogue.
Hahn, who also founded Gordonstoun (where King Charles III was educated), believed in resilience, challenge, and the power of open discussion. Today, UWC Atlantic educates the Spanish royal family, alongside students from around the world, selected through scholarships to ensure a wide socio-economic and national diversity.
Yet, when a group of Jewish and Israeli-backgrounded students, feeling increasingly alienated and unheard, suggested that I come to speak, the school initially agreed but later crumbled under pressure.
My invitation was not controversial – at least, not at first. The school recognised the educational value of my work and sought to ensure that its students had access to a range of perspectives, particularly on the troubling rise of anti-Semitism since October 7th. I took part in extensive discussions with the school’s leadership, explaining my approach and ensuring that the event would be constructive and sensitive to all students.
I was more than willing to accommodate concerns. I acknowledged the diverse backgrounds of the student body, including those from regions directly affected by the Israel-Gaza war, and I was open to adapting my talk accordingly. My goal was not provocation but education. I was there to inform, not inflame.
Yet when some students began circulating my Spectator articles and expressing their distress at my mere presence, the school panicked. They cited concerns over students’ “emotional safety” and the difficulty of managing their reactions. The solution they proposed? That I record a pre-vetted video answering pre-approved questions, ensuring that my presence would be absent in every possible way.
A pre-recorded, pre-screened video is the antithesis of real engagement. The school had repeatedly stressed the importance of me gauging the room and being responsive to students’ feelings. But how could I possibly do that when I was to be reduced to a remote voice, unable to see or interact with my audience? The very essence of education – especially the kind Kurt Hahn championed – relies on dialogue, on the exchange of ideas, on the ability to respond dynamically to the people in the room.
I tried to reason with them, offering alternative formats, discussions, or additional safeguards to ensure a productive conversation. But the school had already made its decision. They had decided that certain students’ discomfort – not real harm, not threats, just discomfort – was enough to justify silencing a discussion that others had actively requested. In one discussion, I was told that some students might lose control of their emotions and say something “perceived as being anti-Semitic”. Their concern was that this might be “incriminating”, putting the student in a “vulnerable position”. The real risk was not anti-Semitic abuse, but how they would be judged for it. When faced with even the potential for a difficult conversation, they capitulate to those who shout the loudest.
How can these students be expected to lead if they cannot even listen to an opposing perspective? How can they claim to be global citizens if their response to a viewpoint they dislike is to demand its removal rather than its engagement? The world they will inherit will not accommodate their fragility. It will require resilience, the ability to debate, and the willingness to confront complexity.
Kurt Hahn understood that. That’s why he built schools that challenged students physically, intellectually, and emotionally. He believed in fostering strength, not fragility. But the adults now running his institution lack the courage he sought to instil in young people. A school founded by a Jewish refugee, dedicated to international understanding, has silenced a Jewish journalist speaking about anti-Semitism. They have not fostered peace or mutual respect; they have emboldened the idea that certain perspectives – Jewish perspectives, in particular – are too dangerous to be heard.
My presence at UWC Atlantic was never intended to upset or distress anyone. It was simply an opportunity to give voice to a very mainstream set of experiences and perspectives: those of Jewish people in the UK and around the world since October 7th. I also sought to share the accounts of the many Israelis I have met and spoken to, including those who survived the horrors of that day, some even as former hostages or as families of those still held captive in Gaza.
My intention was to present the very real fears, risks, and dangers facing Jews internationally at a time when anti-Semitism has reached terrifying levels not seen in most of our lifetimes. If such an outlook was deemed too provocative or too frightening – either for students or, perhaps, even for some of the teachers – that says more about them and the world they are trying to shape than it does about me.
A spokesperson for UWC Atlantic told The Spectator that the school ‘remains committed to fostering open and meaningful discussions that enhance our students’ understanding of important world issues’. If so, then my offer to speak on anti-Semitism still stands.
I am a proud Jew, and I stand for truth, reason, debate, and dialogue. That includes listening to others and engaging in difficult but necessary conversations. But I will never accept being shut down for doing so: because rational, calm, and sympathetic discussion will always be better than hatred, anti-Semitism, and terrorism.
Is the sugar tax to blame for the slushy drinks scare?
The alleged ‘success’ of Mexico’s tax on sugary drinks inspired George Osborne to announce a sugar tax for the UK in 2016. But the news that the tax has led to children being poisoned by drinking frozen slushy ice drinks suggests it – just like Mexico’s – could be doing more harm than good.
Mexico’s levy was said to have reduced demand for sugary drinks in the country – it would have been surprising if it didn’t. But it did not lead to Mexicans consuming fewer calories: rates of obesity have continued to climb since the tax was introduced in 2014. One of the little-known consequences of the Mexican sugar tax is that it led to ‘a significant 6.6 per cent increase in gastrointestinal disease rates in areas lacking safe drinking water’.
They have managed to turn a harmless treat into a genuine health hazard
Before the tax was introduced, the government promised to spend the revenue on improving the country’s water supply, but this appears to have been just a shaggy dog story to trick people into supporting the policy. Much like George Osborne’s broken promise to spend the tax revenue on school sports, the money was never spent as promised. Mexico’s tap water remained as wretched as ever while the tax nudged people away from consuming drinks that were sugary but had the virtue of not causing diarrhoea. All of this in the name of ‘public health’.
A similar unintended consequence was revealed in Britain this week. A study in Archives of Disease in Childhood identified 21 cases of children in the British Isles developing hypoglycaemia and suffering from what the authors describe as ‘an acute decrease in consciousness’ after drinking ‘slush ice drinks’ such as Slush Puppies. None of the children had a history of hypoglycaemia. None of them had an episode like this again, apart from one child who became ill after drinking another slushy ice drink.
The cause of their collapse was glycerol intoxication, and the finger of blame falls on the sugar tax. The researchers found only one case between 2009 and 2017. All the others occurred after the Soft Drinks Industry Levy came into force in 2018. This is not a coincidence, as the authors acknowledge:
A cause of the recent apparent surge in cases may be the reduced sugar content of these drinks, secondary to two main factors: first, public health and parental concerns about high sugar ingestion, and second, the introduction of a ‘sugar tax’ on high sugar (>5 per cent)-containing drinks.
To avoid Osborne’s tax, several soft drink companies replaced the sugar in the drinks with artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, but this was not possible for slushies. As the dietitian Duane Mellor explained in an article for The Conversation last year, sugar reduces the freezing point of water. Without it, Slush Puppies would be solid ice. Artificial sweeteners don’t provide the slush effect, but glycerol does. And so, to keep prices down and be seen as good corporate citizens, manufacturers switched out the sugar for glycerol, otherwise known as E422, a food additive that is generally recognised as safe by international regulators.
The problem, says Mellor, is that while the human body can produce insulin to regulate blood sugar, ‘there is no way for our body to simply start using more glycerol in cells in the way we can with glucose after a meal’. After consuming glycerol, ‘the plasma in blood becomes more concentrated and can draw water from other parts of the body, including the brain, which can lead to symptoms such as headache, nausea and dizziness’. Adults and older children are big enough to consume the amount of glycerol found in slushy drinks without suffering in any way, but for smaller children, it can be a problem.
I didn’t know any of this until this week and you probably didn’t either. I’d be prepared to bet that neither George Osborne nor any of the cheerleaders for the sugar tax (hello, Jamie Oliver) were aware of the mechanics of making slushy ice drinks when they demanded that it be rolled out to as many products as possible. One of the great lessons of free market economics is that knowledge in society is widely dispersed in millions of brains and that central planners will never have access to more than a fraction of it. This crucial observation was made by F. A. Hayek eighty years ago, yet politicians and single-issue campaigners continue to bumble in with their grand plans, not realising that some things are as they are for a good reason.
In this instance, they have managed to turn a harmless treat into a genuine health hazard and are now having to warn parents not to give slushy ice drinks to children under the age of eight. It would not be surprising if they started a campaign to ban the use of glycerol in drinks. The obvious solution of exempting these drinks from the Soft Drinks Industry Levy or, better still, getting rid of the regressive and ineffective sugar tax altogether, will probably never cross their minds.
Trump’s war on Europe should not surprise anyone
Has there been a more cataclysmic year than 2025 for US-Europe relations? It started with US Vice President J.D. Vance’s ‘sermon’ to EU leaders at the Munich security conference last month – in which he berated Western Europe for its policies on immigration and free speech. The year so far has also taken in the danger of the Nato alliance falling apart after 76 years of peace in Western Europe, with the White House apparently tilting towards Russia and Trump demanding that members of the alliance such as Germany, France and the UK massively up their defence spending.
This week, as the Trump regime imposes tariffs on Europe and Europe responds in kind, we’ve even seen the rumblings of a fully-fledged trade war. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s likely next chancellor, says it’s ‘clear that the Americans… this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe’. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Emmanuel Macron announced, in an address to the French nation last week, that ‘the innocence of the last thirty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is now over’.
Merkel is yesterday’s news. Trump is today’s
No one should be in the least surprised. As early as 1990, in a notorious interview with Playboy magazine, Donald Trump railed against German cars and complained about ‘being ripped off so badly by our so-called allies’. In Michael Wolff’s Siege: Trump under Fire, the President is described as long having wished ‘to undermine Nato’:
Trump wanted to undermine Europe as a whole. In his mind, if not also in some covert understanding, Trump had realigned the power axis from Europe to Russia, and was now, in Russia’s interest if not at its behest, trying to weaken Europe.
The book was published in 2019.
It was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the self-styled ‘Queen of Europe’, with whom Trump clashed in his previous term most visibly. Even before it, when in 2015 Time magazine named her Person of the Year, Trump howled in a tweet they had ‘picked [the] person who is ruining Germany’. As US elections approached in 2016, Germany’s press responded in kind, an article in Der Spiegel announcing Trump to be ‘the leader of a new, hate-filled authoritarian movement’. They added that ‘nothing would be more harmful to the idea of the West and world peace than if he were to be elected president’. French newspaper Liberation put it differently: ‘Trump,’ said the headline, ‘From nightmare to reality’.
It was a reality that Merkel soon had to deal with. From the outset, the chemistry between the two leaders seemed not so much absent as corrosive. Of her initial meeting with Trump in 2017, Merkel recalled that they ‘spoke on two different levels. Trump on an emotional level, me on a factual one… When he paid attention to my arguments, it was usually only in order to construct new accusations from them.’ Trump rebuffed a handshake from Merkel before the world’s press and, after the pack of journalists had departed, reportedly turned on her: ‘Angela,’ he’s alleged to have said, ‘You owe me one trillion dollars.’
Germany’s low contribution to Nato – about 1.25 per cent of GDP – had been an obsession of Trump’s for some time. While membership of the Atlantic alliance required each member to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence, only four European countries at the time – Estonia, Latvia, the UK and Greece – did so.
Nor was Trump’s exasperation anything new: Obama had voiced his own frustrations in 2014. One ‘senior German official’ later admitting to journalist Susan B. Glasser that ‘Not all of what [Trump] says is wrong… Europe has been free-riding for some time.’ It was more a matter with the open contempt and combativeness with which it was expressed.
When she left the meeting and flew back to Germany, Merkel said, ‘I didn’t have a good feeling. I concluded from my conversations: There would be no joint work for a networked world with Trump.’ Yet ‘joint work,’ in Trump’s eyes, meant Europe continuing to ‘rip off’ America with Nato underpayments and trade deficits while wishing simultaneously to take the moral high ground with him. It was, for Trump, a noxious combination, a double insult which stuck in the craw.
After a ‘discordant’ G7 summit in May that year, Merkel concluded that Europe needed to ‘really take our fate into our own hands… the times in which we could rely fully on others – they are somewhat over.’ This didn’t apply to her relationship with Germany’s friend in the east: when Trump scolded the Germans in 2018 for being too dependent on Russian gas, there was widespread sniggering among Merkel’s cabinet (in 2022, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that mirth would stop).
2018 was something of a bumper season for tensions between the White House and Europe, as Trump’s disagreements with Nato, the EU and Germany in particular ran like a thread through the year. At the G7 summit that June in Canada, Trump asked ‘Why do we need [Nato]?’ and demanded that Russia, following its annexation of Crimea, be allowed back into the G7 group. A stand-off between him and Merkel was captured on camera, Merkel resembling an exasperated schoolma’am, Trump a recalcitrant but blithely unconcerned adolescent. A few days later, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass, in a Berlin speech, attacked Trump’s ‘egoistic policy of “America First”’ and complained that ‘alliances dating back decades are being challenged in the time it takes to write a tweet’.
The US President was unrepentant. In July that year, in conversation with Jeff Glor on CBS’s Face the Nation, Trump described the European Union as ‘a foe, what they do to us in trade’. At an Iowa campaign rally that October, he added: ‘The European Union – sounds so nice, right?… They are brutal… They formed in order to take advantage of us.’
But it was in France the following month, at the Armistice Day centenary commemorations, that cracks between the US and EU seemed to yawn open. Macron had worked hard over the years, with a mixture of flattery and spectacle, to woo the US President. Here, it all foundered over the course of a couple of days which, writer Michael Wolff reported, were ‘among the most distraught and angry of his presidency’.
Trump, getting off the plane direct from an irate phone call with British PM Theresa May, found little in the French capital to improve his mood. His tone-deaf failure to attend a ceremony honouring US casualties in the first world war drew widespread condemnation, and he quickly found himself caught in a covert war of words with the French President. Macron called for the formation of a ‘true, European army,’ explaining that ‘we have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America’. ‘Very insulting,’ Trump tweeted back. ‘Perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of Nato, which the US subsidizes greatly.’
Worse was to come. As Macron addressed world leaders, he appeared to denounce the isolationism of Trump’s America, claiming: ‘Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying “Our interests first, who cares about the others,” we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values.’ At the Paris Peace Forum, Merkel echoed the sentiment: ‘If isolation wasn’t the solution a hundred years ago, how can it be today, in such an interconnected world?’
Macron posted an image of himself and Merkel clasping hands on Twitter with the caption ‘Unis’ (united). The contrast with Trump – and the message issued to him – could not have been clearer. Nor could Merkel’s feelings, last year, on Trump’s re-election. She felt ‘sorrow,’ she said, at her old adversary’s comeback, and would have liked ‘a different outcome’.
But Merkel is yesterday’s news. Trump is today’s, and the long tensions between Europe and his White House continue. Whether he genuinely intends to abandon Nato for a full-on tilt towards Russia, or is merely, in his own brutal way, trying to shock and awe European allies out of their long post-1989 slumber, remains to be seen. ‘There’s a new sheriff in town,’ J.D. Vance memorably announced in Munich, though worse than any new sheriff is an old one returned with scores to settle and a sense of unfinished business. High noon may be some way off for Europe, but it’s certainly time, as they say, to circle the wagons.
Good riddance to literary fiction
In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new authors, maybe the odd lucky midlister, while identifying the trends, writers and genres that conceal the ultra-precious kernel of hotness to come.
In today’s market it’s likely that buyers have been looking for visually rich comic books for children – enjoying a resurgence – and anything in a newish genre called ‘romantasy’ (think Fifty Shades of Grey meets Game of Thrones, with more vampires and less spanking). But what the buyers and agents won’t be looking for is literary fiction.
This is, of course, not news. The decline of literary fiction – the highbrow novels published by imprints like Picador and Granta, the look-at-me books you were keen to be seen clutching in a café, or on the train – has long been noted. But now this esteemed literary niche has virtually disappeared.
Once upon a time, literary novelists such as John Updike, Richard Ford, A.S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Ondaatje and many others were viewed as the pyramidion of literature. Nowadays such writers are published – if published at all – by little imprints, who offer advances that would barely cover Tom Wolfe’s dry cleaning bill: a typical pro writer in 2024 earns around £7,000, half the income of a decade before. Royalties have likewise plunged as sales have fallen off the bookshelf. What’s more, when these books do come out, they are given reviews no one reads, and then they disappear – unless they are fortunate enough to win a major prize, in which case they disappear.
In other words, the literary novel has gone the way of poetry. There was a time when a new poem by Tennyson would garner a splash in the Times. I am old enough to remember when a new Ian McEwan novel actually made the TV news (back when people watched TV news). Such a thing seems laughable now.
It’s at this point that the lament for literary fiction usually takes a judgmental edge, as the observer notes the increasing imbecility of the modern reader, dulled by smartphones, dazzled by TikTok and cursed with the attention span of a jittery teenage gnat on crack. But I am not of that ilk. I say good riddance to literary fiction – it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.
What makes this more poignant, for me, is that I once enjoyed this stuff. In my twenties and thirties I chortled over early Martin Amis, I admired Julian Barnes, I quite liked The World According to Garp, and I struggled manfully through Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Then, something happened, and that something was The Da Vinci Code. This book, which sold approximately 17 trillion copies, seemed to provoke an ire in literary folk out of all proportion to its possible merits. It made clever people weirdly angry. I particularly remember Stephen Fry saying it was ‘arse gravy’.
Could it really be that bad? One day I picked up The Da Vinci Code to see for myself. After about an hour of reading I was 150 pages in – and hooked. Not because of the prose, style or dialogue – that was all quite workmanlike – but because the book had a deviously intricate plot that kept you fiercely engaged, almost against your will. It had, in short, a cracking story.
And that’s when I decided I’d read pretty much my last work of literary fiction. Because when I read a novel what I really want is not beautiful sentences, but story. Indeed, we all want story. Why? Perhaps because human life is a story, with a definite beginning, middle and end. Perhaps because reality feels like a story.
I am old enough to remember when a new Ian McEwan novel actually made the TV news (back when people watched TV news)
Indeed, you could argue the entire universe is a brilliantly plotted thriller – it has the classic, violent inciting scene (the Big Bang), it has the turbulent, compelling and unpredictable middle – we’re in an especially riotous section right now – and the end is a mystery which we desperately wish to unravel. I hope it’s a wedding, not a funeral. Meanwhile, the author of the universe is more reclusive than J.D. Salinger.
How did literary fiction come to forsake story, plot and narrative? You could blame the modernists. Just as early 20th-century classical composers decided to abandon melody (the narrative of music) and thereby commercially cratered their art form, so modernist 20th-century writers decided to forego plot – with, in the end, similarly calamitous results.
Now, going plotless was OK if you were mid-season James Joyce writing Ulysses – because Joyce at his best wrote sentences better than God. The problem is 99.99997 per cent of writers are not James Joyce. There are some partial and noble exceptions – writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Donna Tartt, Cormac McCarthy, Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain) – who have managed to combine the joys of proper narrative with quite intellectual writing. But so many haven’t. Instead, they give us storyless literary fiction.
Will it one day return, the literary novel? The other day I decided to see if things have improved – by reading some recent litfic. I chose Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, as it is one of the most lauded novels of recent times. And what I found was a book that has a fine opening, with great promise… and then it takes the inevitable plotless turn, and it becomes a pointless, repetitive polyphony of discordant dead people shouting at poor old Abe. Reading it was like being trapped inside a Sir Harrison Birtwistle opera. And I speak as someone who has been trapped inside a Sir Harrison Birtwistle opera (seat F, row 9, Royal Opera House).
However, if this all sounds depressing, it shouldn’t. As the bustling London Book Fair shows, books are thriving – even if litfic is a dead star. People still crave stories, readers still open books with eager anticipation, there is still money, fun and fame to be made with your mind and mere words. Just make sure, if you’re a writer, that you don’t mistake prettiness for purpose, obscurity for profundity. And maybe insert a dead body around page 90.
We need a modern Wogan
Nowadays whenever an elderly celebrity dies – consider the death last month of Gene Hackman as a case in point – one of the first things that happens is that a chunky clip of them appearing on a talk show such as Wogan or Parkinson gets shared on social media.
Before you know it, you’ve spent three or four minutes listening to them regale television-watchers of the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s with a reflective anecdote or a personal story that reveals something important or even profound about their lives and animating passions or influences.
Often there’s even a humorous punchline, too – all the better for the slow, significant build-up – and, if there are other guests present, then you’ll usually see someone like Peter Ustinov, David Niven or Kenneth Williams chuckling good-humouredly along, accompanied by a ripple of polite applause from the audience.
The actor Robert Bathurst shared just such a clip of Gene Hackman from Wogan on X/Twitter the other day – it was brilliant and lasted a full five minutes with scarcely any interruption from the host, who instead made just the right encouraging noises to keep his guest going, like a professional footballer performing a seamless series of ‘keepie-uppies’.
Watching this section of the Hackman interview I was struck by two thoughts – first, what a legend (in the colloquial sense) Hackman was, because the anecdotes he told showed wit, humility, self-awareness and vulnerability. They truly humanised him. Second, I was struck by the complete absence of this television format today – and deeply saddened.
Because there is nothing comparable to Wogan or Parkinson on any of what we might call the main channels any more – no regular interview where a creative, sporting or political heavyweight is permitted to talk, uninterrupted for a minute or two or even longer, in answer to a series of questions, where they can properly discuss what they do and their story and their motivations. Amazingly enough, it’s true. For all the gazillions of hours of broadcast entertainment out there, there are no actual proper television interview shows left.
Instead we have utterly banal rip-off American-style talk shows where either Jonathan Ross or Graham Norton will give guests approximately 25 highly transactional seconds to answer a puff-related question about their latest projects before interrupting them with a smutty observation or two and asking them to perform prat-falls on the stage.
I’m sure it’s not Ross or Norton’s fault – both are capable of significantly more – but this is clearly what the commissioners of such dross think that the British public wants. They may be right, but it doesn’t change the fact that what’s broadcast is frankly demeaning – demeaning for the celebrated guests who are asked to say or do absurd things, but also demeaning for our wider culture because the programmes offer zero or parlously little actual human or creative insight. They’re just vulgar, ignorant extravaganzas that trade on a level of vacuity that is probably mathematically impossible to calculate. These talk shows are creative black holes sucking integrity and human profundity from the world. And they’re probably culturally lobotomising us – making us all collectively more ignorant and more stupid with each vile pivot of Graham Norton’s appalling red chair.
For all the gazillions of hours of broadcast entertainment out there, there are no actual proper television interview shows left
In the unremitting pursuit of ‘fun’ these shows have become abased and offer little or none of the infinitely more sincere and important quality that was available in the earlier iterations, namely that spark of human connection that we could feel with the great and the good because they – for a brief moment on Wogan’s sofa or Parkinson’s second leather swivel chair – allowed us into their minds, into their worlds.
But someone along the way thought they knew better. They decided that truth was less important than triviality. Wogan was axed in 1992 and Parkinson went when the great man retired in 2007, not to be replaced. And it still leaves a gaping hole in our cultural life – for all the efforts of Piers Morgan or Amol Rajan, both of whom are excellent interviewers.
So we need a modern Wogan or Parky. Perhaps now that we live in a more serious world – one where, as in the 1970s or 1980s, armageddon seems a present possibility – this apparently more demanding, seemingly serious format could appeal and hold water. Maybe the pressures of a more serious world will encourage us as a society to begin to take ourselves more seriously too? And maybe the controllers of mainstream television will have the courage or be brave enough to offer us something harder but better, something capable of reaching the parts that Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross currently cannot?
While the great raconteurs of old – the Ustinovs, the Nivens, the Williamses – are long gone, there are others who could carry the torch. Surely appearing on a reborn Wogan or Parky is in some respects Stephen Fry’s cultural destiny? Just as it would be for, say, Sandi Toksvig – or Ricky Gervais, who would brighten our lives with his own brilliant and peculiar humanity.
Which is why it’s time to bring back the proper TV interview show. Because we need it. We need a platform where some of our society’s greatest individuals can share their thoughts and in so doing help us navigate our changing world and explore what it means to be alive.
With the sunny sets, the lilting soapy questions from Terry or Parky, I think we were seduced into thinking that those talk shows of old were a little bit too lightweight. But how wrong we were. At least they could feel the effects of gravity – unlike the banal modern equivalents. We need a proper talk show back in our screens. It would do us the power of good.
American actor Gene Hackman has died, aged 95. In 1986, he was the guest of Terry Wogan, discussing his beginnings in showbusiness and his Oscar-winning role as Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection. pic.twitter.com/IIih9vCOGS
— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) February 27, 2025
Does Meghan Markle need another podcast?
‘Success’, Winston Churchill supposedly once remarked, ‘is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ If this is indeed the case, then Meghan Markle’s 2025 thus far represents a remarkable series of triumphs and victories.
After her recent Netflix series With Love, Meghan received reviews that ranged from the merely sarcastic and rude to the positively vituperative, it was promptly renewed for a second series. Never mind that the second instalment was commissioned (and filmed) at the same time as the first, or that the ratings for the much-maligned show have been considerably worse than Netflix’s Harry and Meghan, there will be more of the Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle tips and hints later in the year. Let joy be unconfined.
To this end, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that to celebrate this, Meghan has announced that she will be launching a new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, next month. Those of us who might have been hoping that its title was a homage to the much-loved Robin Askwith Confessions… sex comedies of the Seventies are likely to be disappointed.
Instead, she promises that ‘I’m so proud of what we’re creating, and the candid conversations that I’m able to have with other female founders as we unpack the twists and turns of building a business. Through my friendships and relationships, we’re able to dive into the type of insights that everyone wants to know as they’re building a business, and that I’m able to tap into as I’m building my own business with As Ever.’
Meghan’s pivot away from royal botherer extraordinaire to girlboss entrepreneur may seem like one of the more surprising volte-faces of recent times, but veteran observers of the duchess’s antics may have seen this coming from a considerable distance away.
While, to the uninitiated, it remains unclear as to why Netflix wants to spend a considerable amount of money promoting both her and her As Ever lifestyle brand, the podcast company Lemonada has firmly rowed in behind her.
The company’s chief creative officer and co-founder Stephanie Wittels Wachs has cooed that ‘Meghan is such a warm and welcoming person, and you feel that in her interviews. She creates a comfortable space for her guests to bring fascinating personal stories to the table and open up in a way they likely haven’t before publicly.’ Her colleague Jessica Cordova Kramer, meanwhile, has admiringly sighed that ‘As female founders ourselves, Steph and I are grateful to get a chance to build alongside Meghan the exact podcast we needed when we started Lemonada.’
All most admirable. Yet just as With Love, Meghan would never have existed without its subject’s considerable fame, it is tempting to wonder whether Confessions of a Female Founder will genuinely explore the behind-the-scenes exploits of a trendsetting female entrepreneur, or if Lemonada has simply attached itself to one of the most talked-about women in the world in order to raise its company’s profile. Certainly, this is not their first rodeo with Meghan. Last year, they distributed the Archetypes podcast that was originally commissioned by Spotify, before that company had an unfortunate parting of the ways with the Sussexes, best exemplified by the executive Bill Simmons announcing that they were ‘fucking grifters’.
Meghan’s new direction – a touchy-feely, earth mother vibe exemplified by her tradwife designation of herself as ‘Meghan Sussex’ – is considerably harder to dislike than her previous vituperative railing against the royal family. It may feel affected and precious, as well as self-conscious, but it is at least harmless. Yet even those who feel sympathetic towards the duchess may be inclined to see this latest podcast as a bit much, another barrage of publicity that is unlikely to change anyone’s opinions about its subject. This particular female founder may be striving to break new ground, but it is still unclear as to whether her desired audience will rush to join her, or will regard this new venture with the mild curiosity that second-hand items usually receive.
Is Putin really open to a ceasefire with Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin is apparently open to a ceasefire in the war against Ukraine. But is he really? Just like that, the response that America, Ukraine and its Western allies had been waiting for has arrived. Speaking this afternoon in a joint press conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, the Russian President commented for the first time on America’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in the conflict. ‘We agree with the proposal to stop military actions,’ he said. The truce, he said, should lead to ‘long-term peace and eliminate the root causes of the crisis’.
As with many statements which turn out to be too good to be true, the Russian President then followed this with a ‘but’: ‘There must be nuances,’ he added. What would happen during the ceasefire to the Ukrainian soldiers who remain on Russian soil in the Kursk region, which they had held successfully since August until earlier this week? How will things be dealt with along the front line, Putin asked, pointing out that ‘we are advancing almost everywhere’. How will the ceasefire be policed? Will Ukraine’s allies continue to arm it during that 30-day period?
Later today, Putin is meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the ceasefire proposal already agreed to by Ukraine, as well as a number of topics relating to the bilateral relationship between Russia and America. No doubt, he and Putin will discuss the questions the Russian President raised. But if Witkoff thinks that his meeting with the Russian President will be a breeze and that Putin is serious about agreeing and sticking to a ceasefire with Ukraine, he should think again.
The ‘root causes’ of the crisis Putin referred to today as wanting to eliminate are exactly those which he has spoken of many times before over the past three years of war. The Kremlin has repeatedly demanded a change of regime in Kyiv to one that is more Russia-friendly, a ban on Ukraine joining Nato and the recognition of those territories annexed by Moscow as being legally Russian.
It is certain that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will never agree to these conditions – although there is every chance that US President Donald Trump will apply pressure on him to. Indeed, Trump’s team have in recent weeks been parroting these lines exactly, calling on Zelensky to hold elections and US secretary of state Marco Rubio saying just two days ago that Ukraine would have to make territorial concessions to ‘prevent more suffering’.
Putin also knows that Ukraine will never agree to his maximalist demands of its own accord. There seems little prospect of the Russian President watering down his demands either. As such, the stage still seems set for Trump’s forceful truce plan to come crumbling down. The danger for Ukraine is that the Russian President will attempt to now flip the blame for wanting to continue the bloody conflict back onto Kyiv – a narrative Trump is at risk of falling for.
The truth is that while Russian troops are gaining ground in Ukraine and Kyiv’s soldiers remain on Russian soil, Putin has little incentive to agree to a ceasefire. If he does agree to a truce, there is no guarantee his ‘long-term peace’ would follow: thirty days would provide a convenient opportunity to rearm and replenish his troops before continuing to push further inland.
In the press conference, Putin stated he would have to discuss the ceasefire with Trump. This means the pressure will also now be on Europe to ready itself to potentially be made responsible for providing security guarantees or monitoring any truce that does come about, be that through peace-keepers on the ground (currently a red line for Russia) or being on standby to come to Ukraine’s aid should Putin break his promise. But to ring the bells for peace across Europe and or indulge Trump’s clamouring for a Nobel peace prize would still be too hasty.
The chequered leadership of Nicola Sturgeon
The news came on Wednesday that Scotland’s former first minister will not seek election to the Scottish Parliament for the first time since it was reconvened in 1999. Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement that she will stand down at the 2026 Holyrood election marks the end of an era for the most electorally dominant UK party leader since Tony Blair.
If her predecessor won Holyrood elections and precipitated a referendum he was never expected to win, Sturgeon undeniably brought sustained electoral success. At the same time, the former FM was having to react to events outwith her control – like Brexit – by marshalling the SNP coalition into a more durable one that could deliver sustained support for independence. Her towering achievement will be making it too risky for the UK government to allow another referendum, and thereby scorching the moderate unionist myth that the UK is a voluntary union.
As we approach the 10th anniversary of the historic 2015 general election victory that brought Sturgeon to the centre of UK politics, it can be tempting to assume that because many of the faces in the party are the same that nothing has changed. Yet it’s hard to overstate what a political earthquake that first UK victory was. My own example is as good as any: I sought the nomination in late 2014 for a seat that had never been won by the SNP and in which Labour had a 12,500 majority. In the rest of Glasgow, the party had never won a seat at a general election. Yet that night in May 2015, it won every seat in the city – including mine, where I achieved a scarcely believable majority of 12,269.
While many Labour figures would try to write it off as a freak result following the referendum, the numbers involved were jaw dropping: 50 per cent of all votes cast were for the SNP, in a greatly increased turnout of 71 per cent – the sort of dominance thought impossible in the modern era. Scottish Labour were only spared the ignominy of a complete wipeout by the combination of a scandal involving a twitter account called ‘Paco McSheepie’ and tactical voting from the decidedly non-red voters of douce Edinburgh South.
It wasn’t all plain sailing for Sturgeon’s SNP though: there was a partial reversal of these results in the 2017 election and opponents tasted blood in the water. Yet Scotland’s most ardent supporters of the Union continued to be let down by their comrades at Westminster, with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and Boris Johnson’s Tories being the perfect foil for an electoral operator like Sturgeon. By 2019 the party was back to 48 seats and 45 per cent of the vote.
Commentators fulminated about Scotland being a one-party state and lamented the autocratic pretentious of Scotland seemingly unassailable First Minister. Never mind the stolid, cooperative reality of a Scottish parliament where the SNP must do deals with other parties to pass legislation and budgets, of course. But, on reflection, the wider Brexit debate followed by Covid and these outlandish conspiracy theories meant the party skipped some difficult institution-building questions that such a period of dominance necessitated.
2015 would surely have been the ideal time for a long-standing chief executive like Peter Murrell to stand aside. I certainly never met anyone who thought it a particularly good idea that he did stay on, but not only is it hard to change a winning team, the pressures of UK and Europe-wide attention that Scotland’s First Minster was attracting must have made any change that little bit harder, even if it would’ve been the smart thing to do.
My fellow nationalists can be odd creatures, especially those like Nicola who came of age during the years when we were electoral also-rans. For many, mockery and condescension has led to a hard shell that can obviate self-reflection; the internalising of an outsider mentality has bred a flinty self-reliance that has made it difficult for some to be able to properly reach out to the Scots not as ‘flag and candle’ as the party’s base. In this instance, it led to a frighteningly small circle of two who were party to all machinations during this period, with others let in only when necessary. It meant that the Chinese walls between the discrete-but-connected realms of the party and Scottish government were torn down, damaging the ability of either to operate independently when required – and a Westminster group with dozens of MPs and millions in short money was almost completely ignored.
The internalising of an outsider mentality led to a frighteningly small circle of two who were party to all of the SNP’s machinations
Had Nicola Sturgeon listened more to a loyal lieutenant in then-Westminster leader Ian Blackford, she may have better understood that there was little hope of a UK government of any stripe granting another referendum on Scottish independence when there was a risk it might well lose. Instead, it may have appeared from Scotland like the ridiculous ‘de facto referendum’ ruse remained credible. To what extent she can be blamed for the fact that the UK, unlike the EU, has no equivalent to Article 50 is moot: she had run out of constitutional road, and it would be daft to pretend otherwise.
Ultimately, Sturgeon still left office in 2023 with a positive poll rating: even if that popularity was to take a battering with all that would follow. A rushed exit meant little time for succession planning and the elevation of the much-underprepared Humza Yousaf must substantially be laid at the former First Minister’s door – as must surely the subsequent stalling of an SNP engine that had been running on fumes for far too long.
Sometimes a hard shell can come in useful though: it was Nicola’s assurance and leadership that carried the SNP through a time of turbulence in UK politics that roiled both the main UK parties, even if our fall was to come later. The restrictions of high office removed, her shell has somewhat softened recently as she has enjoyed the opportunity to let her hair down after a long career of public service.
What Sturgeon can now do is demonstrate as best she can the correct way for a former SNP first minister’s career to unfold. Her ability to demonstrate leadership to the millions of Scots who voted for her – along with the millions who didn’t – did not end with her leaving Bute House and it won’t end with her leaving Holyrood. I look forward to seeing what she does next.
What Vladimir Putin really wants from Ukraine
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating all the parties on his own side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with superstructure intended to be jettisoned in the course of getting to yes. Or to put it another way, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things.
On the face of it, Russia’s first response to US proposals for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine contain several major deal-breakers that the Ukrainians could never swallow. First and foremost, the Kremlin demands international recognition that Ukraine’s Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhiye and Kherson provinces are now part of Russia. Given that Russia does not actually control the entirety of the latter four regions – including the provincial capitals of Zaporozhiye and Kherson cities – Moscow is technically demanding that Kyiv actually cede even more land than it has already lost.
Ukraine voluntarily handing even more territory to Putin is an obvious nonstarter, and the easiest of the Kremlin demands to throw overboard. But the formal recognition of a de jure redrawing of Ukraine’s international borders is almost as inconceivable. While many Ukrainians recognise that the occupied territories will never be returned, the formal partition of the nation’s borders is a humiliation too far. It’s also, as a matter of international law, not something that is in the gift even of Trump.
International borders are a matter for the United Nations. There are many partitions- most notoriously of Cyprus, Palestine and China/Taiwan – which are still not formally recognised by the UN. Other new nations, for instance South Sudan, Eritrea, or even Korea, are not acknowledged by their neighbours. India and Pakistan are still wrangling over Kashmir 75 years after their independence. So the Kremlin’s demand that the world recognise its newly-won sovereignty over occupied Ukraine is hardly realistic. The best that Moscow can hope for is an updated version of a formula already agreed at talks in Istanbul in March 2022 – an agreement by Kyiv to ‘review’ the status of the occupied territories in 15 years’ time.
Other Russian demands were already effectively conceded at the Istanbul talks – notably Ukraine’s future neutrality. Since imminent membership of Nato has never actually been on the cards for Ukraine either practically, politically or legally, this should be an easy concession to make. All that is actually being surrendered is Ukraine’s aspiration to join at some future date and not the actual prospect of membership, which is non-existent. In fact Ukraine was constitutionally neutral from 2010 until 2015. The sticking point is that neutrality is being imposed once more at Moscow’s demand, which is a clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Nonetheless, according to four participants at the Istanbul talks, staying out of Nato was a price Kyiv was willing to pay for peace.
Two Kremlin demands stalled the Istanbul talks: ‘de-militarisation’ and ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine. In practice, this meant restrictions on the size of Kyiv’s army and scrapping laws the Kremlin claimed discriminated against Russian speakers and insulted the memory of second world war veterans.
Limits on Ukraine’s armed forces – currently not only the biggest in Europe but larger by far than all of the European Union and Britain’s standing armies put together – are another deal-breaker. But a Korean-style demilitarised zone on both sides of the border may be a feasible work-around, as long as it’s far deeper than the 1.5 km buffer envisioned in the Minsk accords of 2014-15 which were honoured mostly in the breach.
The only truly new issue in the latest Russia-US talks that was not discussed in Istanbul three years ago are European peacekeepers. The Kremlin has been adamantly opposed. Russia’s abrasive foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been characteristically blunt and categorical in his insistence that no Nato troops should be stationed in Ukraine. Indeed, it is curious that the UK and France have spent so much effort gathering a ‘coalition of the willing’ of peacekeepers when this was obviously never going to be acceptable to the Kremlin.
Russia may be bogged down in Ukraine, but it remains undefeated militarily as Putin – or possibly the older of his body doubles – emphasised when he showed up in Kursk wearing military fatigues to celebrate the crushing of a Ukrainian incursion after five months of fighting. Trump claims to have a strategy in case Putin refuses to make a deal in the form of more painful sanctions. And indeed sanctioning importers of Russian oil and gas would cripple the Russian economy. But it would also cause energy prices to rocket and deprive Europe of a fifth of its oil and gas, which it continues to import from Russia.
In sum: Putin cannot be compelled to sign a peace deal. Neither can he be bullied, much as Trump would like to try. He must agree voluntarily. A briefing paper prepared by an FSB-adjacent think tank and leaked to the Financial Times yesterday by a European intelligence service advises the Kremlin to take a much harder line. Insisting on the ‘the complete dismantling’ of the current Ukrainian government is one suggested demand, plus wholly demilitarised zones on the Ukrainian side of the border only. By those hawkish standards, Putin is so far being relatively modest in his demands.
The outline of the path to peace – and the obstacles on that path – are now clear. They’re pretty much the same as were on the table in Istanbul – just as the front lines have changed little since the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv in April 2022. Back then it was Russian intransigence, rather than Boris Johnson’s message of European support, that caused the talks to break down and transformed the invasion into a grinding three-year war. This time round, it’s up to Trump to find a formula to persuade, or cajole, Putin into cutting his losses, give up his fantasies of controlling Ukraine and finally choosing peace.
Why John Lewis’s profits have soared
Growth has ground to a halt, manufacturing is collapsing, and the government is desperately scratching around for ways to save some money so it can balance the books. There is not much to make anyone feel optimistic about the state of the British economy right now. Except, that is, for the healthy performance of the UK’s traditional, mid-market retailers.
Marks & Spencer and Tesco are both in rude health. Now, John Lewis, which has reported a rise in pre-tax profits of 73 per cent to £97 million, is the latest retailer to demonstrate its ability to bounce back.
After years of steep losses under the hapless leadership of the former civil servant Dame Sharon White, John Lewis has finally turned the corner. Its first results under its new chairman Jason Tarry, which demonstrate a steep rise in profits, are nothing short of remarkable.
The firm’s famous staff bonus has not yet been restored, with John Lewis saying it wants to reinvest in its retail business and employees’ base pay. But what is clear is that this is a business on the mend: sales are back up again, both at its department store, and its Waitrose supermarket chain.
There is a growing list of traditional British retailers that have managed to turn around their fortunes. Tesco hit a crisis almost a decade ago, but it has since returned as the largest grocery retailer in the UK, and the share price has almost doubled over the last ten years. M&S at one point seemed close to collapse, with its odd mixture of slightly dowdy clothes and over-priced ready meals making little sense to consumers, but has successfully turned itself around, and the share price has risen by 258 per cent over the last five years. Next goes from strength to strength, snapping up less successful brands such as Fat Face and Reiss. Even Debenhams might be making a surprise comeback, with the fast fashion retailer Boohoo this week announcing that it was renaming itself after the department store it acquired in 2021 and turned into an online-only brand.
There is perhaps a lesson in that. Each turnaround has something in common. The management has given up on expanding abroad, or diversifying into finance, or property, or anything else, and just concentrated on selling tasteful, safe products at a fair price. After all, through the ups and downs of the economy, and despite plenty of disruption from technology, the British middle classes remain resilient, and they love to shop. An afternoon at the mall or on the high street, a coffee, buying something new to wear or for the house: this remains many people’s idea of a good weekend. The retailers who can meet that demand will always endure. Perhaps we are a nation of shopkeepers after all.
Are schools taking in too many international pupils?
Browse the website of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents some 1,400 schools teaching around 500,000 children, and it will tell you there are 26,195 overseas pupils at its UK member schools. They make up 4.7 per cent of the total student population.
The cosy percentages belie the truth. For rather like the growing importance of foreign students in keeping our universities financially afloat, so there are swathes of overseas pupils enrolled at public schools providing a similar financial cushion. And that was true even before the Labour government slapped 20 per cent VAT on the entire sector.
Concerns were already being raised that the level of foreign students was reaching a point where it was beginning to undermine the unique selling point of British public schools – namely that they are British, rather than simply being more generic, globalised international schools.
So what’s the true picture? A quick survey of public schools – particularly boarding schools – shows a much higher level of international participation than the ISC’s figure. At Bristol’s Clifton College, for example, 20 per cent of pupils are from overseas, ‘representing over 40 different countries’. Likewise, at Felsted School in Essex, its overseas intake is 20 per cent. At my alma mater, Ardingly College in West Sussex (located conveniently for Gatwick airport), around 25 per cent of the school is from overseas.
Even those numbers don’t quite tell you the true story. The reason is that the overseas cohort is overwhelmingly concentrated among a school’s boarders. As a result, education consultant Matthew Goldie-Smith says, you might discover that 30 or even 40 per cent of the boarding population of a given school is made up of international pupils. What’s more, of these more than half could quite easily come from one country – increasingly China. ‘That’s a problem,’ says Goldie-Smith, ‘because if you’re a family from mainland China and you’re sending your children to a British boarding school, in part it’s because you want cultural and language immersion, and you won’t be getting that if there are a lot of pupils from the same country. It’s also a challenge if you’re not an international pupil, or if you’re an English native speaker in a boarding house, and you’re one of the few children in the boarding house who are not from that one source country. There aren’t really any winners there.’
‘What makes a British school isn’t just about values or rules. It’s about how robust the education is’
When up to one in four pupils in the school is from overseas there is the genuine risk that the shared culture of the school will be changed. Which is ironic, since international parents are often attracted to the British school system because of those cultural enrichments – things like chapel, cadet corps parades, traditions and ceremonies, plus the wearing of uniform and seasonal sports such as cricket. If these fall away, it will be a bit like those idyllic Cornish fishing villages where there are only bankers at the weekends. It doesn’t quite work any more.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of schools are squeamish about discussing their number of international pupils. When they do, you’ll notice that they tend to stress the number of countries these pupils are from.
While the tension between the need for foreign pupils vs the loss of ‘Britishness’ is real enough, it’s actually the optics of the tension that are even worse. ‘It’s similar to a conversation we’ve been having about universities and it’s that narrative which a lot of independent schools don’t want to engage in,’ one wise schoolmaster tells me.
Another points out that international pupils needn’t undermine a school’s existing distinctiveness – so long as the parents and would-be pupils are aligned. ‘I make sure they understand the heritage of the school and what our values and rules are before they come over, so when they do come it’s with open eyes,’ he tells me. ‘It means they’ll be happy when they go because they’re not being mis-sold a product.’
For all of the potential harm of seeing the Carutherses, Sidebottoms, Joneses and Browns vanish from the register, this educationalist is not worried by the reliance on foreign pupils. Citing strong exam boards, the depth of A-level syllabuses, the integrity offered by unseen papers and the expertise of our teaching profession, he insists there is more to our schools than chapel, croquet and crumpets. ‘What makes a British school isn’t just about values or rules,’ he says. ‘It’s about how robust the education is.’
The all-boy Sherborne School in Somerset reports having a very respectable 11 per cent of international pupils out of its 575-strong, mainly boarding, population. Headmaster Matthew Jamieson, however, is well aware of the challenges facing the sector. He recalls noticing how visiting parents at a school he worked at previously looked at house photos to see how many international boarders there really were. ‘There is a tipping point,’ he says, albeit one you can’t put a blunt number on. ‘There is that tension but I would emphasise there are genuine benefits of having international pupils.’
His advice to prospective parents is to probe the figures that a school presents. ‘Look beyond the average number because it can be concentrated or diluted,’ he cautions. ‘Go and speak to the housemasters, go into the houses and speak to the boys that you meet there. That’s the only way that parents are going to tell. Look under the bonnet.’
The Tories should have scrapped NHS England
Listening to Keir Starmer announce this morning that he is going to abolish NHS England can only make the Conservatives wonder at what might have been. It should have been a Conservative prime minister making this sort of speech, declaring the civil service to be ‘flabby’ and cutting out masses of duplication in public administration.
Indeed, the Conservatives made a good start in increasing the efficiency of public services when they returned to office in coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010. Civil service numbers were cut by more than a fifth, from 492,000 in 2010 to 384,000 in 2016. But then something went desperately wrong, and Whitehall was allowed to run to fat again. In the last months of Rishi Sunak’s government, the civil service – at 513,000 – exceeded even the bloated blob that Gordon Brown left behind.
It is hard not to look at the U-shaped graph of civil service numbers over the past 15 years and compare it with the graph of the number of people on out-of-work benefits. It shows a similar shape, falling steadily until 2017 before jerking upwards again until it exceeded the levels that the Tories inherited from Brown.
What the coalition and then the standalone Conservative government achieved in the years between 2010 and 2016 was then steadily undone over the next eight years of Conservative government. By 2024, then, it was perfectly reasonable to wonder whether we had a centre-right government at all.
Brexit shares a lot of blame for the party losing all focus on what should be one of its biggest strengths
What happened? There is a very large, proverbial elephant trampling around here – and I don’t mean by that an unkind description of Theresa May, but the Brexit referendum.
Any successor to David Cameron might have struggled to maintain focus on domestic issues during the long, painful process of negotiations to leave the EU. Part of the rise in civil servants was even justified – temporarily – by the need to set up a Department for Exiting the EU and the extra work other departments need to do.
But the massive loss of concentration on the control of public spending outlived both the Brexit negotiations and the subsequent pandemic. Bloated Whitehall departments carried on sucking in extra recruits between 2022 and 2024. The language of cuts seemed to disappear from the Tories’ lexicon during the time of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Truss’ failure to propose spending cuts to match her tax cuts was especially bizarre – and cost her any trace of fiscal credibility.
It was as if the four Conservative prime ministers who succeed Cameron feared having the charge of ‘austerity’ shouted at them and decided that cuts would be electoral suicide. Starmer – if he really carries through what he has been proposing this week, for which there must be some doubt – may now go and prove the opposite: that controlling public spending by trimming the public sector is actually quite popular with many voters.
This was certainly the conclusion of Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham, whose report into the party’s failure to win the 2015 general election concluded that the Tories won not in spite of ‘austerity’ but because of it: voters wanted a balanced budget. Yet two years later, Theresa May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell concluded that austerity was what caused her to lose her majority. Soon afterwards, the then Chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced in his budget that austerity was over – somewhat undermining his predecessor, George Osborne, who would have said he was simply trying to balance the books.
Brexit has been blamed for the Tory in-fighting that brought the party to its knees, but it shares a lot of blame, too, for the party losing all focus on what should be one of its biggest strengths: responsibility with the public finances.
What is the point of abolishing NHS England?
What does Wes Streeting think the government will achieve by abolishing NHS England? The Health Secretary gave a statement to MPs this afternoon in which he confirmed that the health service will no longer be operationally independent from the government.
As Streeting made clear to the Commons, the NHS was given operational independence by the Conservatives, who regretted doing so for years. The Tories reversed many of the Andrew Lansley reforms in their Health and Care Act 2022, but the NHS remained independent, even though ministers were the ones answering for its performance and mistakes.
The Health Secretary today claimed that he ‘cannot count the number of Conservatives who have told me in private that they regret the 2012 reorganisation and wish they had reversed it when in office’, but had failed to do so because ‘they put it in the too difficult box while patients and taxpayers paid the price, because only Labour can reform the NHS.’
That point, that only Labour can deliver this reform, is borne out in polling and something that Streeting and his advisers are deeply aware of. When I interviewed him for my book on the history of the NHS, Alan Milburn told me that ‘when it comes to NHS reform, the right has the volition, but it doesn’t have the permission. The left has the permission, but then it lacks the volition.’
It is also probably fair to say that over the past few years, the right lacked the inspiration: they had largely argued that NHS operational independence was one of the few bits of the Lansley reforms that did make sense.
Streeting argued the reforms would ‘deliver a much leaner top of the NHS, making significant savings of hundreds of millions of pounds a year’. He added: ‘That money will flow down to the front line to cut waiting times faster and deliver our plan for change by slashing through the layers of red tape and ending the infantilisation of frontline NHS leaders.’ He also said the government would prioritise investment in technology, citing examples of doctors having to wait for computers to turn on or using multiple passwords just to enter a patient’s details.
This is all very well and good, but one of the other things that Labour is known for is its control freakery when it comes to the NHS, which could end up backfiring. That point was raised by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who asked: ‘Can I commend the boldness today? If the result of today is to replace bureaucratic overcentralisation with political overcentralisation, then it will fail. But if what happens today is that we move to the decentralised model of the police and schools, it could be the start of a real transformation… So will the Secretary of State for Health give more detail about the changes he has in mind? Are we actually going to get rid of these central targets that make the NHS the most micromanaged system in the world, making it possible for managers to develop a real change on the grounds as they work with about 100 operational targets?’
Streeting insisted the plan was to ‘decentralise’ the NHS, rather than control it, but added that ‘democratic accountability matters’.
That democratic accountability also means more risk for the government, of course. If an operationally independent NHS fails to improve, then ministers can blame officials. Once the health service is back in house, it really is Labour’s problem. So the government must really think that it can reform the NHS properly, as it will have to answer directly for any failure.
The trouble with Starmer’s plan for change
At his speech at a Hull business campus this morning, Keir Starmer was introduced by a man who proudly noted that the site was home to various brands, including Durex. So it was fitting that ‘protection’ was a constant theme throughout the Prime Minister’s speech on his planned reforms to the civil service – and his announcement that NHS England is to be scrapped.
‘National security for national renewal’, the PM promised, stressing the need to have an ‘active state’ to deal with challenges both abroad and at home. The beginning of the Ukraine war gave Boris Johnson’s premiership purpose in 2022; the conflict’s looming close offers Starmer a narrative for overhauling warfare and welfare.
It was a critique which will have many Tories nodding along in agreement.
To do this, Starmer wants public sector reform: that three-word phrase beloved of all politicians. In front of a group of beaming women, the PM declared he wanted to ‘tear down the walls of Westminster’, getting the state to ‘operate at maximum power’ by making it ‘closer to communities.’ Shirtsleeves rolled up, he paced back and forth, earnestly setting out his diagnosis to the nation’s ills. He noted how the state now employs more people than it has done for decades, yet, perversely, it is ‘weaker’ than ever before. This bloated, sprawling Leviathan tries to do too much and ends up, overstretched, unfocused and ‘unable to deliver the security people need.’ It was a critique which will have many Tories nodding along in agreement.
So what’s to be done about it? Starmer offered two solutions: a greater focus on growth and more control for ministers. He railed against regulation, citing examples of ‘jumping spiders’ and ‘cricket balls’ being used to stop new homes being built. With repeated reference to his party’s manifesto and talk of ‘democratically elected ministers’, he offered a much more Cromwellian view of executive power than that advocated by Lord Hermer. This led to the speech’s big flourish: the news that NHS England is to be abolished and taken back under ministerial control. Another top-down reorganisation of the NHS? Let’s see how this one fares.
There is already evidence to suggest that Starmer’s new-found loathing of red tape is working: his much-mocked letter to regulators appears to be the reason why DEI rules in the City are being dropped. Elite cues do matter and No. 10 is clearly intent on making the most of its bully pulpit. But there remains two tensions at the heart of Starmer’s much-touted ‘Plan for Change’.
The first is the refusal to say that Labour wants a smaller state – even though Starmer implied that 130,000 extra officials since Brexit is too many. The second is the innately authoritarian nature of government. Starmer told his audience today that he wants the state to ‘take the big decisions’ so ordinary people ‘can get on with their lives.’ Given his ministers’ plans on encryption, personal liberties and education, it seems implausible that his ‘strong state’ will really produce a politics that will ‘tread more lightly‘ on peoples’ lives.
Starmer scraps NHS England
It was widely briefed that the main focus of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech in Yorkshire today was his plan to do away with Whitehall red tape. What was kept under wraps was the Prime Minister’s plans for the NHS – specifically to scrap NHS England. In a bid to tackle bureaucracy in the health service, the PM this morning told reporters that the ‘arms-length NHS’ needed to go – adding that the move will ‘shift money to the front line’ and free the health service to ‘focus on patients’.
The move – which will see NHS England taken back under the control of the Department of Health in a re-politicising of the health service – is another step forward in Labour’s war on NHS management. The government has insisted that the abolition of the ‘world’s largest quango’ will ‘empower’ NHS staff and lead to better prioritisation of patient care. It’s a reversal of the 2012 restructuring of the service which Starmer’s government has slammed as having ‘created burdensome layers of bureaucracy without any clear lines of accountability’.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has called for the health service to employ ‘more doers and fewer checkers’, blasting the current set up as ‘setting [NHS staff] up to fail’. This morning’s move comes just weeks after news that NHS England chief Amanda Pritchard would stand down at the end of March. Last week, Professor Stephen Powis, the national medical director for NHS England, announcing he was quitting too. Today’s announcement sheds a little more light on the flux within the institution.
Will taking the system back under the control of the Department of Health lead to noticeable improvements? The NHS has long suffered from bureaucracy problems affecting the way the health service is managed, how funding is directed and the ability of medical professionals to carry out their jobs. With how the NHS has been performing in recent years – wait lists growing and A&E delays piling up – it makes sense for ministers to want to have more oversight of the service. Doctors are on side too – one senior physician said the move was ‘long overdue’. Another medic pointed out that the ramping up of management tiers in the NHS following the 2012 reforms lead to ‘clinicians being pushed out from decision-making’ with hospital managers ‘not understanding that the health service runs differently to most businesses’.
Former health secretary Alan Milburn will lead the restructuring, after he was appointed the lead non-executive director of Streeting’s department in October. The Tony-Blair era health adviser, who himself has links to private healthcare companies, has long been an advocate of the need for ‘big reforms’ in the NHS to make the service ‘fit for the future’. While questions remain over what exact legislation will be required for this shift, the general mood among both medics on the frontline is that something needed to change – and this is a step in the right direction.
Why should cohabitees get the benefits of marriage?
One way or another in life, we end up making choices, even if we think we’re choosing not to choose. The choice not to marry, to live with someone instead, is one example. Passing on the public commitment and going for sex plus domesticity is a choice, one in which, I imagine, the absence of commitment is part of the appeal. You don’t fancy the for-better-or-worse stuff, the Waterford glass wedding presents, the joint pension provision? Well, that’s just dandy, but complaining that you don’t have the perks of matrimony when your open-ended arrangement breaks up does seem to be trying to have it both ways.
And having it both ways is precisely what the government seems to want to encourage. It’s launching a consultation on giving greater rights to cohabitees. We all know, don’t we, what a consultation entails? It means going through the motions to arrive at the conclusions that you’ve already come to.
Labour has a manifesto commitment to reform the situation for cohabitees, especially women, in the event of the relationship breaking down, so we know where this is heading. At present, if you’ve been living with someone, you don’t have an automatic right to their property or their pension if he or she dies without a will or if you separate. You can claim for child support if there are children, but ownership of property is less clear cut than for married couples. Mind you, in Ireland I know of women who keep the house after separating on account of their children, even though the children may not be related to him.
In the Netherlands, cohabiters can claim much the same rights as married people, but you do have to register the relationship. And I imagine that’s a bit of a ball and chain – I mean, how do you preserve the illusion of perfect freedom when you’ve got to troop to the town hall to make the affair official? You may as well get married.
There are potentially an awful lot of people affected by this alleged reform – around 3.6 million couples in 2021, so probably more now. It’s not clear that Labour envisages people having to register in order to qualify for the new rights, so the status of the relationship would be for the courts to decide.
It all has a bearing on the primal relationship, the foundation of society, which is marriage, and less than half the adult population was married in 2022. As most of us know, a relationship that comes with a public commitment is better for children. The Centre for Policy Studies spelled it out in a report by Cristina Odone five years ago, and its conclusion still holds:
‘Married parents are twice as likely to stay together as cohabiting ones. By the time they turn five, 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents will have experienced their parents’ separation; among five-year-olds with married parents, this is 15 per cent… Even when controlling for income and education, children raised in unstable families suffer worse health, are more likely to be excluded, more likely to join a gang and end up as NEET.’
Would that situation change if cohabitees got more rights when there’s a separation? It might mean that children would be better provided for. But it may also mean that people will be even less likely to marry, less likely to commit, and less likely to stay together, if they think they’ll be looked after outside marriage – which is sub-optimal for the children.
Even for childless couples there’s something fundamentally odd about treating the unmarried the same as the married given they’ve decided not to commit. If the individuals concerned are grown up, they know there are consequences to sticking with an irregular union rather than making an honest wo/man of the other party.
The benefits of marriage, if this reform is enacted, will look even less obvious. Granted the Tories presided over the rot when they opted for no-fault divorce three years ago, a patently dishonest outcome, even in cases where it’s obvious to everyone that one party was at fault.
This reform will undermine an already rackety institution further. The government should be trying to make marriage look like the normal, grownup, regular, respectable thing to do, not rewarding what, in happier days, we called living in sin.
Defence cooperation with France would be a bad idea for Britain
Donald Trump’s recent decision to deny Ukraine access to American intelligence data in the war against Russia has concentrated minds on how the US could restrict Britain’s defence capability, from F-35 stealth jets to its independent nuclear deterrent. Some fears are well-founded. Others, such as the recent suggestion by a former French ambassador to the UK that a ‘dual key’ controls Britain’s submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, are a myth.
The idea is growing in some quarters that now is the moment for Britain to switch away from the US to Europe for defence equipment cooperation. One need not look too far to detect its motivation or to see its naivety. Like the US, European states such as Germany or France are also able to deny the UK use of military systems developed in collaboration, depending on the agreements and export control mechanisms in place.
Are we confident France would not restrict the deployment of joint weapons systems in our hour of need?
The Eurofighter Typhoon jet, a joint project between the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, saw Germany block British exports in 2023 to countries like Saudi Arabia over its role in the civil war in Yemen, stymying UK arms sales. With the exception of the US, we collaborate with France on more defence projects than any other nation. But are we truly confident that France (any more than America) will not restrict the deployment of joint weapons systems in our hour of need should French interests not align?
During the Brexit fishing negotiations in May 2021, Paris threatened to cut off the electricity supply to the Channel Islands, 95 per cent of which comes by underwater cables from France. During the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out, Emmanuel Macron and the French EU Commissioner Thierry Breton were behind the Commission’s introduction of export control mechanisms to deny Britain vaccines manufactured in Europe by the British pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca. The EU also triggered Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which, had it not been quickly rescinded, would have denied vaccine shipments to them too.
More recently, Marine Le Pen – leader of the national populist National Rally party – has emphasised that her potential presidency would see more hard-line ‘France first’ policies internationally. The far left, meanwhile, has made no bones about pursuing internationalist policies based on disarmament.
With European Union member states sliding ever rightwards, what becomes of Britain’s sovereign defence autonomy for military hardware and software developed in collaboration with EU nations with whom we no longer see eye to eye?
All this seems to be ignored in the Labour government’s rush to get its ‘EU reset’. In all the Trump-induced panic, Labour seems set on seizing this ‘divine surprise’ to implement its EU reset via the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review. But in tying Britain’s defence procurement to the EU, it would be a clear case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Most jointly developed military equipment is subject to export and end-user agreements which permit partners to legally restrict their use. The US has international traffic in arms regulations (ITAR), allowing Washington to veto the use or sale of US-origin technology. Britain may have similar clauses for its equipment with which to bargain. But it is highly unlikely that the 15 per cent of British components in a F-35 could be used to stop America using the jets when it wanted.
Britain and France also operate ITAR-like clauses in many of their defence collaboration agreements involving end-use controls, technology transfers and licensing restrictions. The MBDA Storm Shadow/SCALP missile, co-developed by the UK and France, is subject to joint export approval, meaning either country can block sales if they want to.
The British-led MBDA Brimstone missile, for example, required negotiation with European partners before London could supply it to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen’s opposition to the supply of powerful weaponry to Kyiv would surely have blocked it had her party been in power, as would a minority French government containing just a couple of radical left La France Insoumise ministers.
The same applies to the Franco-British future cruise/anti-ship weapon (FC/ASW) expected to replace Exocet and Harpoon missiles, or the maritime mine countermeasures (MMCM) developed by France’s Thales and Britain’s BAE Systems. Though not as restrictive as the US, France and Britain’s defence collaboration could in some cases impact sovereign defence decisions.
Were Britain to shift focus from its American Trident missiles to collaborate more closely with France on nuclear ballistic missiles, there would be little or no improvement. Worse still, the UK would jeopardise the colossal strategic benefit derived from collaboration with America in the longstanding and mutually beneficial Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership.
Rather than using this moment for an EU reset, Keir Starmer should be looking to develop Britain’s home-grown defence industry through serious funding. The Prime Minister should also look to restrict takeovers by foreign companies to ensure Britain retains at least a semblance of strategic defence autonomy.
Have we reached peak EDI?
As the old saying goes, ‘when American sneezes, England catches a cold’. This week, the two major city watchdogs announced they will be ditching planned ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ regulation.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the regulator for Britain’s financial services sector, first announced their plans to impose extensive new Diversity and Inclusion rules in 2023. After significant pushback at the time, they have finally declared it has ‘no plans to take the work further’. The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the Bank of England’s regulatory arm, has also issued a statement saying that they are not proceeding with similar proposals. Is this the first sign of a turning point in the creeping politicisation of business?
Much of the state is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to rowing back diversity initiatives
The FCA’s proposals represented some of the most damaging EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) requirements the financial sector may have seen. They intended to require all firms to put in place a ‘Diversity and Inclusion Strategy’ and expected companies to ‘set targets to address underrepresentation in their firms’. This would have taken place alongside mandatory reporting for larger firms on age, ethnicity, sex or gender identity, disability, religion, and sexual orientation.
Not only would this impose a huge cost to business – the FCA’s own impact assessment estimated £561 million in set up costs and annual ongoing costs of £317 million – it would also have politicised the workplace. Respondents to the FCA’s consultation warned that the proposals would have chilled free speech, caused the proliferation of ideological training schemes and undermined women’s sex-based rights.
The FCA and the PRA are the first UK regulators to take a step back from advancing EDI. Why have they done so? Across the pond, Donald Trump’s early Executive Orders directly targeted federal EDI (or DEI, as it is known in US) programmes. Major firms like Walmart, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs have followed suit, axing diversity orders – though others, such as Apple, have doubled down. Did our Financial Regulators realise that their proposals risked placing UK firms which operate in the US at a severe disadvantage?
Opposition to EDI is sometimes portrayed as ‘ideological’ or part of a ‘culture war’. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that such programmes place extensive costs on firms; they undermine their ability to do business by hindering companies from hiring the most qualified candidate for jobs, and distracting them from their broader goals with questionable ‘targets’ or unpopular political campaigns. Importantly, there is not public support for this sort of activism in the workplace.
Polling for Policy Exchange, which has been documenting the shift in the debate over EDI, revealed that 75 per cent of people, including a clear majority of non-white respondents, believe that companies should prioritise hiring on merit, regardless of race or gender, rather than hiring to create a diverse team. The decision to row back from its proposals sees the FCA fall more in line with public opinion.
Policy Exchange’s research shows regulation places a ceiling on UK productivity. Earlier this year, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves called on watchdogs to cease regulations that hamper growth. She is right to be concerned: growth is flatlining while unemployment, inflation, and the cost of living are rising.
It’s important to be cautious, however, of reading too much into one positive signal by two regulators. Much of the state is moving in the opposite direction. UK Research and Innovation, which funds research in universities, recently announced that they would be requiring all those they fund to ‘embed diversity and inclusion’; the new Sentencing Guidelines will enshrine two-tier justice into the criminal courts; and the government is pressing ahead with an expensive Employment Rights Bill, and a Race and Disability Equality Act which will generate huge legislative costs for business.
The FCA themselves are sending mixed messages. Diversity requirements are embedded within much of their existing regulations – such as a new requirement in 2022 for mandatory reporting on the ethnicity and gender makeup of senior roles. None of these are being rolled back. Looking at their justification for abandoning plans for further measures, they cite ‘a very active policy and legislative agenda, including on employment rights, gender action plans and disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting’. It is possible that the regulators are sufficiently confident that EDI will be pursued by the state, that they themselves no longer feel the need to go ahead with unpopular policy proposals.
This week may have been a tentative step forward, but a step forward, nonetheless. EDI is embedded in every aspect of the British State – and is advancing in more areas than it is in retreat.
If the government genuinely wishes to prioritise growth, reduce the burdens on business and avert a two-tier society, it will need to communicate clearly that these sorts of initiatives are neither welcome nor desirable. It must be willing to act to enforce this across all of its departments, regulators and arm’s length bodies.
Instead, ministers seem to be pressing ahead with harmful policies, such as commencing the socio-economic duty in section 1 of the Equality Act – which could prevent all public bodies from making any decisions without considering how they could reduce economic inequality. It is an unworkable and expensive measure that will generate huge costs in implementation. A key test of the government’s commitment to sensible policy will be whether they ditch it.
Watch: Reynolds grovels over solicitor claim
Well, well, well. After Guido Fawkes revealed that Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds had previously – and inaccurately – referred to himself as a solicitor, the Labour man has now been forced to rather publicly correct the record.
While the Stalybridge and Hyde MP did receive solicitor training at Addleshaw Goddard for ten months, he left without qualifying to pursue a political career. Yet, similar to another of his colleagues, Reynolds was later found to have embellished his CV – even referring to himself as a ‘solicitor’ in a spoken contribution in the Commons. Not only has Reynolds never been registered on the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s register, the job title is legally protected – and using it incorrectly puts one at odds with the Solicitors Act 1974.
The revelation prompted the SRA to open an investigation into the Business Secretary – and now Reynolds has been forced to come clean. Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, he confessed:
Madam Deputy Speaker, on a point of order, it has come to my attention that in a speech I gave on the 28th of April 2014, recorded in column 6.14 of Hansard on the subject of high speed rail, I made a reference to my experience of using our local transport system in Greater Manchester when I worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre. I should have made clear that specifically, Madam Deputy Speaker, that was a reference at the time to being a trainee solicitor. This was an inadvertent error and although this speech was over a decade ago, as it has been brought to my attention, I would like to formally correct the record.
Given the inaccuracy was also recorded on LinkedIn, election material and in the media, Reynolds certainly has a lot of correcting to do…
Watch the clip here: