Should Ukraine show more ‘gratitude’?

Ben Wallace thinks Ukraine needs to be careful. The West has used a whole load of political energy this week to try and bring Ukraine closer to Nato, and its government’s response has been a bit unthankful. ‘There is a slight word of caution here,’ Wallace told a gaggle of reporters this morning, on the sidelines of the Nato summit in Vilnius, ‘which is that whether we like it or not, people want to see gratitude.’ 

His comments come after Volodymyr Zelensky fumed on Tuesday that it was ‘absurd’ of Nato to not set a timeframe for when his country would become a member of the alliance. ‘Uncertainty is weakness’, he wrote on Twitter. Nato was about to release a communique saying it would allow Ukraine to join ‘when allies agree and conditions are met’. Zelensky had wanted an immediate invitation for Ukraine to become a member of the alliance, and had wanted to know exactly when that invitation could be redeemed.

But Wallace apparently didn’t want thanks for his own efforts this week, despite revealing that he once had to tell the Ukrainians that he was ‘not Amazon’ after they requested an exhaustive list of military equipment. The Defence Secretary instead appeared worried that Zelensky’s comments would upset the Americans. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to persuade lawmakers on the Hill in America,’ he continued to reporters today. ‘You’ve got to persuade doubting politicians in other countries that it’s worth it, and it’s worthwhile, and that they’re getting something for it.’

Throughout the last year, noisy and influential American politicians have questioned whether funding a war in Europe is a good idea. Well-known senators like Josh Hawley and J. D. Vance have, along with members of Congress like Matt Gaetz, seethed about both the expense and the political risk of arming the Ukrainians. (Don’t forget that Donald Trump says he would end the war in 24 hours.)

But at every Ukrainian appeal, regardless of the outcry, the Biden administration’s reply has been to spend more money, and to send more military gear. Ukraine needs to win over its doubters, and to thank its backers, the Defence Secretary seemed to be saying in Vilnius. At the same time as Wallace was making his comments, Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, was telling a crowd that the ‘American people deserve a degree of gratitude’ for backing Ukraine.

Now, at the summit’s close, it looks like the row is calming. Rishi Sunak said this afternoon that he knows Zelensky is grateful, and Zelensky just tweeted that Ukraine ‘tremendously’ appreciates America’s support. Can they hear that on the Hill?

This week’s Nato summit will embolden Putin

The Nato summit in Vilnius has not helped Ukraine. Rather than facilitating the country’s swift accession into Nato, the alliance introduced conditions for membership called the ‘Annual National Programme’: a fudge, in other words.

Nato leaders said they would continually ‘regularly assess progress… on [Ukraine’s] path towards future membership’. Ukraine would be invited to join the alliance only once ‘conditions are met’, the document stated. Those conditions are Ukraine’s progress on democratic and security sector reforms. Volodymyr Zelensky, who nearly lost his temper, said that Ukrainians would like the allies to be more specific. 

Kyiv had prepared for the likelihood of not receiving an immediate invitation to Nato membership, as the US and Germany have hinted their opposition. The White House’s stance could be explained by the desire to exchange peace for Ukraine’s non-membership in Nato in any negotiations with Russia. Zelensky has previously explored this path, but such an offer failed to deter Putin from invading last February. Zelensky applied for fast-track Nato membership in September – after Putin annexed four occupied regions in southern and eastern Ukraine – but to no success.

Ukraine wanted a deferred invitation to join Nato. Its integration obviously wouldn’t occur during the war with Russia, but that would allow ample time to implement the necessary reforms. However, Ukraine knows what it’s like to wait in vain. Back in Bucharest in 2008, Ukraine was told it would become a Nato member at some point in the future, but the promise was reviewed later that year, and requirements for Ukraine’s membership were never specified. 

Ukraine’s relations with Nato remain virtually unchanged after this week’s summit. The G7 declaration offering weapons and consultations in case of Russian aggression is reminiscent of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which left Ukraine fighting Russia alone. It is nowhere near the Israel-like security guarantees that have been touted.

The statement means little, since arms are already being supplied to Ukraine. The only difference is the promise from G7 leaders to do so ‘as much as it takes’, but it’s a sentiment already familiar to weary Ukrainians. 

The Kremlin feared that this Nato summit could give Ukraine stronger security guarantees, or sturdier defences in the face of a nuclear strike. Such a feeble position from the alliance has given Putin a green light to persist in its war against Ukraine. 

It was a bad day for Oliver Dowden at PMQs

Blindness, ignorance and folly were on fully display at PMQs. Rishi Sunak was absent in Vilnius where he’s busy discussing with his Nato chums how to prolong or escalate the war in Ukraine. His deputy, Oliver Dowden, tried to fend off some excellent, probing questions from Labour’s Angela Rayner. She berated the Tories for overseeing a rise of 75 per cent in the number of ‘homeless children.’ Dowden replied with a feeble scripted gag.

‘Her leader says he hates tree-huggers but they’ve been very keen on hugging that magic money tree.’

Labour members howled with derision at that daft quip. Bad day for Dowden.

The Alba party’s Kenny MacAskill complained about global warming which continues to ignore the shivering citizens of Scotland. Last winter was rather nippy up there, apparently, and the number of ambulance call-outs to hypothermia cases rose by 84 per cent in the far north. ‘One third of Scots in energy-rich Scotland live in fuel poverty,’ cried MacAskill, ‘and are literally freezing.’ He called this ‘a perversity.’ Which is true. Obvious answer: burn more North Sea oil. But the Scottish establishment wants to deny Scots the cheap fuel that will prevent them from freezing to death. Instead MacAskill proposed a ‘social tariff’ which sounds meaningless and probably is.

The latest insanity of the green cult was highlighted by Tory MP Jane Stevenson. A local care-home can’t meet the cost of new ‘environmental standards’ so it may have to close. In other words, green policies evict grannies.

Meanwhile Natural England is putting holiday-makers at risk in the Norfolk Broads. Duncan Baker revealed that some seagulls have nested in an important telephone mast but it can’t be touched until the birds move out. With the mast decommissioned, tourists may die because they can’t call 999 in an emergency. Natural England might use that as a slogan on their website. ‘Comfy seagulls. Dead citizens.’

The stock comic figure of the boastful military bore was immortalised by Shakespeare in the shape of John Falstaff. Colonel Bob Stewart keeps the joke alive. Today he praised the ‘gallantry’ of a heroic British regiment who rescued 2,000 citizens from Srebrenica in 1993. ‘It was very dangerous!’ he cried, jowls atremble. But which of us can name the fearless warrior who commanded that elite and courageous task-force? Colonel Bob knows the answer. Why, it’s Colonel Bob himself. In a well-governed state, dotty old narcissists would be discouraged from praising themselves in public. But in the UK they’re given a salary, a complement of staff and an office in Westminster.

Karen Bradley picked her words carefully when she referred to a luxury holiday club, funded by taxpayers, whose membership is restricted to MPs and their friends. Club members get to fly around the globe and meet other tax-suckers to discuss subjects like ‘governance’, ‘gender equality’ and similar bilge. The members-only club calls itself the Inter-Parliamentary Union and, like all unions, it serves its own interests while claiming to work for the universal good. But all is not well for the spongers and idlers who enjoy the club’s endless schedule of round-the-world freebies. The USA has quit the union! So our poor MPs can’t take paid jaunts to Washington any more.

‘Get the USA to rejoin this very important organisation,’ said Bradley pompously. Dowden, who is usually swift to condemn the corruption of unions, said he would add his voice to her campaign. Free holidays in America are not a privilege but a necessity (for MPs only, of course). That’s the message from parliament.

Why Nato shouldn’t let Ukraine in just yet

Deciding whether Ukraine should eventually join Nato is hotly debated. There are good reasons to favour its inclusion, but not now, while the war is ongoing. It would transform the war into a conflict between nuclear-tipped Great Powers and vastly increase the danger.

Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not happy with the uncertainty over his country’s membership. Actually, that’s an understatement. He is furious, according to reports. But that’s the decision taken by the allies meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Joe Biden led the side urging delay. 

In a tweet Tuesday morning, Zelensky said, ‘It’s unprecedented and absurd when [a] time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership.’ Zelensky’s anger is understandable, given his responsibility to defend Ukraine. But Biden and Nato are prudent to not accept Ukraine as a member yet, and not just because Finland and Sweden are, or soon will be, new members.  

The main reason for delay is that including Ukraine now, while it is fighting Russia, would immediately transform that war from one where Nato members are supporting Ukraine into one in which Nato members are fighting Russia directly. That’s a huge difference, and it carries enormous risks — unacceptable ones. 

After all, Russia is bristling with nuclear arms and has zero chance of defeating Nato’s combined military might with only conventional arms. With that avenue blocked, Russia’s only path to any compromise solution that would allow it to save face and preserve Putin’s regime would be to threaten a nuclear strike, or perhaps carry out a first one and threaten more. Even if that were a limited strike on rural Ukraine, it would involve Nato powers in a nuclear war. The immediate damage would be coupled with the risks of catastrophic escalation. 

Adding Ukraine to Nato now would also incorporate a new member with unsettled borders — militarily contested ones. True, almost no one (except a few Russian allies) recognises the Kremlin’s conquest of the Donbas and Crimea in 2014 or its unilateral annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts in 2022. The world and international law recognises those territories as part of a sovereign Ukraine. But Russian troops still occupy those regions, have established strong defensive lines to hold them, and must be expelled forcibly before Kyiv actually controls all of the land within its borders. 

If Ukraine were added to Nato now, it would expect western help in doing that. That means boots on the ground, fighter jets in the air and western missile crews across the country. Some would die. Yet refusing to send them to a Nato member in danger would weaken the alliance’s deterrent posture elsewhere. 

That credible deterrent is Nato’s greatest strength. It is based on two solid foundations: 

1. The allies’ combined military power and the interoperability of their forces, plus  
2. Their credible commitment, embodied in Nato’s Article 5, to treat an attack on one as an attack on all.

That deterrent has worked. No state has ever attacked a Nato member’s territory or forces north of the Tropic of Cancer since the alliance was formed in 1949. The alliance has had its problems, but they have been different: ‘free riding’ by European members, who knew they could skimp on defence because the US would foot the bill, and finding a strategic purpose after the USSR collapsed. 

Putin’s aggression solved those problems. Nato’s purpose today is to deter Russian aggression against its members and support allied states, such as Ukraine, where Russian aggression has occurred. European free riding has diminished now that they grasp the immediacy of the Russian threat and the weariness of America in continuing to pay more than its fair share. 

Those solutions are recent — and Putin has only himself to blame. How recent? Well, when he invaded Ukraine in 2014, President Barack Obama did nothing. That weakness undoubtedly factored into Putin’s thinking in 2022, since Biden had been Obama’s vice president. Biden’s own weakness and strategic incompetence also encouraged Putin’s aggression. Biden showed them in the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan and proposed defence budgets that declined in real terms. Putin also sensed weakness in the Biden White House as he built up forces on Ukraine’s border in 2021-22. The US did little to beef up Ukraine’s military to deter an invasion. 

Throughout these years, including the Trump presidency, the West’s posture toward Ukraine’s Nato membership was the worst of all possible worlds. The allies publicly dangled the prospect of Ukraine’s ‘likely membership’, but slow-walked the process. From the Kremlin’s viewpoint, that combination meant it would eventually face a Nato member on its border — perhaps in a decade or so — but not yet. Better to act before that prospect became real, not only because it posed a military challenge but it posed a political one for Putin’s regime. A prosperous Ukraine, tightly bound to the rich West, would threaten Russia’s impoverished, insular stability.

Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked invasion was the single most spectacular strategic blunder of the twenty-first century. It has yielded a bitter harvest, beginning with the hundreds of thousands dead and wounded on both sides. The invasion pumped new energy into Nato, expanded its membership to include states on his country’s doorstep (overturning the reason he gave for invading Ukraine), prompted major increases in European defence budgets, encouraged Nato members in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia (plus Britain) to lead the pushback against Russia — and ultimately endangered his rule by failing to win his own war of choice. 

Still, for all those missteps, Putin has avoided the catastrophic one of striking Nato directly. He knows all about Article 5, so he knows it would bring the alliance into the war, with its men and women on the frontlines. 

Putin has avoided that trap, and there is no reason Nato should step into it. That’s what it would do if it granted Ukraine membership while the fighting continues. 

Should people with big gardens pay more for their water?

According to Cathryn Ross, Thames Water’s co-interim chief executive, householders with large gardens should be paying a higher price for their water than people with small or no gardens.

Actually, they already almost certainly do. If they have a metered supply, their bills will be proportional to how much water they use – and will be bearing the full cost of watering the lawn or the flowerbeds. If they are unmetered they will be charged a rate that reflects the size of their property.

If, on the other hand, Ross means that people who own large gardens should be paying a higher rate for each unit of water they use, it might make sense for monopolistic suppliers to suggest this, as it would raise more cash for them in the politically easiest way. But it is otherwise illogical. It isn’t people with large gardens who should be paying more; it is people who don’t have absorbent lawns, flowerbeds and trees.

The biggest problem that water companies have right now is not with supplying water: it’s with preventing storm overflows. The problem dates from a fateful decision back in Victorian times to combine foul drainage with surface run-off in one sewer system. During periods of heavy rain the sewage treatment works cannot cope, with the result that water has to be released directly into rivers, bypassing the treatment works. That is what has been killing off fish and other wildlife, leaving rivers lifeless.

But the problem isn’t properties with large gardens in leafy suburbs. It is with densely-packed housing where every available surface has been paved-over. That speeds run-off water into the sewers, helping to overload them. We are used to hearing surface flooding in cities lazily blamed on climate change, but a more immediate cause is the intensification of urban development. Large gardens have been built over, front gardens paved for car parking, absorbent lawns replaced with patios and artificial grass.

There are supposed to be planning constraints preventing the wholesale paving-over of absorbent surfaces. But you wonder how well-enforced they are. Does anyone really check when a homeowner digs up a lawn and puts down artificial grass instead? If we want to reduce the risk of flooding in urban areas it would be better to introduce financial incentives. As well as charging customers for however much water they use, water companies ought to be basing sewage charges on how much paving there is at a property. If householders were charged for every square metre of non-absorbent land they own they would have a strong incentive to leave gardens as they are, or even to dig up their patio and lay it to grass or gravel instead. It might not be like progressive taxation – the owners of a small semi with paved-over garden might find themselves paying more than a country house-owner with rolling acres of parkland. But it would more properly link sewage bills with the cost that a property imposes on the system.

SNP in crisis, again

In fairness to the Nats, they never let things get too dull. Just days after losing his party’s whip, SNP MP and Salmond ally Angus MacNeil has now announced that he will sit as an independent candidate until at least October. MacNeil was seen in the Commons last week having a bust-up with Chief Whip Brendan O’Hara but time is yet to heal his wounds, judging by the fiery statement he has released this afternoon. 

‘I will only seek the SNP whip again if it is clear that the SNP are pursuing independence,’ sniped MacNeil. ‘At the moment, the SNP has become a brand name missing the key ingredient. The urgency for independence is absent.’ A dig at First Minister Humza Yousaf’s garbled new independence strategy, perhaps…?

Continuing his rant, MacNeil moaned:

The Scottish government went to the Supreme Court a year ago utterly clueless about how to pursue independence, [and] left the Supreme Court utterly clueless about how to pursue independence… The tricks of the last 6 years of kicking the can down the road have not served Scotland well.

Ouch. MacNeil’s outburst comes at a fractious point for the Westminster group, which is looking at an exodus of at least seven MPs at the next election. Among them are deputy leader Mhairi Black and former leader Ian Blackford. Of course, the drama has not been contained solely within the London-based group. MacNeil’s accusation that the SNP are not serious about their very raison d’être is directed at the top ranks of the party. And his comments will certainly have rankled SNP management – their lack of a coherent independence strategy is a rather large insecurity given the growing number of independence supporters no longer aligned with the SNP. Talk about twisting the knife, Angus…

The newly independent MacNeil has therefore delivered the party an effective ultimatum: ‘get your act together by the October party conference or I’m out’. As his Westminster colleagues descend into even further chaos, recess at Holyrood isn’t turning out to be quite the peaceful break Yousaf anticipated…

Labour vs the unions

The Labour party is preparing for power and the unions are deciding what role they might play. Friend or foe? Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has already incited their ire by refusing to commit to accepting independent pay-review body recommendations. Unite, the second-largest trade union, this week debated cutting ties with Labour and starting its opposition early.

The motion was, in the end, rejected. ‘The Labour party has decided we want to win,’ insisted one party figure. The union hit back. It insisted that Starmer has been ‘put on notice’ and that the union’s support (including a still-powerful get-out-the-vote operation) was not to be taken for granted. Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, went further, arguing the pre-election months represent ‘the moment of maximum leverage for the union where we can hold Labour to account’. There is growing anxiety from the left that Starmer is abandoning Labour’s traditions in the pursuit of power.

The Tories were quick to try to exploit the spat. It shows who really pulls the strings, they said. This is a familiar line from the Conservatives: under Jeremy Corbyn, the then Unite leader Len McCluskey was regularly portrayed as a puppet-master. Along with Karie Murphy, Seumas Milne and the former Communist party member Andrew Murray, he was part of a group that made up the ‘four Ms’ or ‘the quad’. Centrist Labour MPs blamed ‘the quad’ for everything from Corbyn’s fiscal ineptitude to his lukewarm support for staying in the EU.

Now there is a concerted effort to suggest the opposite. Starmer and his shadow cabinet are keen to show they can stand up to the unions, which is why Sam Tarry has been sacked for the seemingly minor offence of giving interviews on a picket line.

The boos that greeted Bridget Phillipson, shadow education secretary, on a National Education Union conference were also politically useful: they draw attention to the tearing up of a Corbyn-era pledge to abolish the schools inspectorate Ofsted. Meanwhile Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, has been revelling in the criticism of the British Medical Association, offering this as evidence that he is willing to take the hard decisions in office.

The unions see all of this quite clearly. Unite’s threat to disaffiliate is intended to be a warning to Starmer not to go too far. ‘They’re running a risk of pushing the unions so far away that they cut fees or eventually all ties,’ cautions one trade union figure. But while Starmer would rather the unions stay in the tent, he is in a position to gamble: his party received more money last year from private companies and donors than it did from the unions. ‘We’ve moved past the old days of trade union barons marching in and calling the shots,’ says one party figure. Big Labour donors include the Blairite donor Waheed Alli and the recruitment mogul Peter Hearn.

Starmer the longtime lawyer is not a natural trade unionist – but his deputy Angela Rayner has close links to Unison from her time as an official there. It’s one of the three most important unions alongside Unite and GMB. They are all affiliated, which means they donate money to Labour and vote on key party issues both at conference and on the national executive committee. Other unions such as the RMT – led by Mick Lynch – are not affiliated and have less influence.

Holding the balance of power on the committee is crucial to having party rules in one’s favour. It’s allowed Starmer to take control of the candidate selections with more input from central office (though some candidates will still have union support). ‘In the snap elections, the unions would gather and start going through who got what seat,’ explains one party old hand. While Reeves won’t make pay pledges, Rayner’s pledge for a charter on workers’ rights – including gig economy workers becoming eligible for sick pay – has been broadly welcomed and there is a plan to bring it in in the first 100 days. This is a key part of the offer to the unions.

At present, Unison – representing many health workers and carers – is generally the most supportive of the three unions, having been first to back Starmer in the leadership campaign. The GMB, representing workers in industrial sectors, is viewed as wielding the greatest influence on policy. This is in large part due to its leader, Gary Smith, who gets on with Reeves and wins admirers in unlikely places. ‘Gary’s a good guy,’ says one No. 10 aide, citing his pragmatism.

The union is pro-defence, pro-Trident and sceptical about ‘green jobs’, thinking their main contribution is in counting dead birds around wind turbines or filling London-based PR positions. The GMB influence can be seen in Labour softening its policies on new oil and gas licences, as well scaling down the £28 billion-a-year plan for green investment. ‘It needs to be industrial strategy,’ says one figure privy to conversations. That means the GMB is playing a role in the Labour debate about how far to row back on the green agenda, mindful of the voter backlash against it in Europe. ‘The green rose we almost had at Labour conference as a logo is a long time ago now,’ says one party figure. ‘It needs to be economy first, green second.’ Ed Miliband, backed by MPs on the left of the party, is still pushing for the green agenda to be a key priority but faces opposition.

Ahead of each election, the Labour shadow cabinet holds a formal manifesto meeting – know as Clause V – with its affiliated unions. In the past it has seen union leaders – when they meet after the election is called – debate the various parts of the manifesto and union representatives call for changes and tweaks. Next year, Starmer will likely feel emboldened to shrug many of these off. He has purged the Labour party of Corbynism and moved it into a position where he’s seen as being overwhelming likely to become prime minister – so for now, at least, the unions need him more than he needs them. It could be that the big showdown with the unions, in which the Tories had placed so much hope, has come and gone.

Liz Truss resurrects her pro-growth agenda

What will Liz Truss’s legacy be? The obvious answer is her 49-day stint in Downing Street. But she is determined not to settle for that. Today in Westminster, she oversaw the formal launch of her new project, The Growth Commission, dedicated to spreading the message she tried to convey as prime minister: the importance of growing the size of the economy.

Today’s launch was attended by Truss, who is stressed to have convened the commission but holds no formal role within it. The Telegraph’s Liam Halligan chaired a panel of four members of the commission: co-chairmen Douglas McWilliams and Shanker Singham, economist Tyler Cowen and senior trade economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers Christine McDaniel. All four panelists commented on the publication of the commission’s first report, entitled ‘The Growth Challenge’, which sets out what the commission has been set up to do – mainly to ‘investigate the causes of the slowing down in GDP per capita growth worldwide’. It also explains why this is going to be an uphill battle, especially in countries like the UK, which ‘is one of the few international economies where GDP per capita is actually falling’.  

The commission’s members have joined from all over the world, which means its first report, and its broader remit, are looking at economic growth in an international context, with emphasis on lagging growth across advanced economies. Whereas the G20 continues to show positive signs of growth, led largely by the ongoing economic progress in China and India, the G7 cannot boast the same optimistic story. Draw out these advanced economies, and GDP per capita growth by decade shows a serious slow down, dropping from 2.6 per cent per annum in the 1970s and 1980s, to just over 1 per cent in the 2010s. Given the ‘bigger trade openings in services’ that came in the mid-1990s, the authors argue the 2000s should have seen much better growth than actually occurred. This indicates to the commission that something is going badly wrong.

What are the answers? That is what the commission proposes to find out, through the use of long-term, dynamic modelling. Their ‘contention is that many official policy evaluation tools have an excessive short-term focus and take insufficient account of behaviour changes generated by the policy measures themselves'. With more than one joke made at the expense of the Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility during the launch, it was abundantly clear that the commission is not impressed with the official forecasting taking place now – an echo of the lead-up to Truss’s mini-Budget last year, when the OBR was sidelined from scoring her fiscal announcements. 

But rather than cut anyone out this time around, the Growth Commission is adding new players to the game, adding a bit more competition to economic forecasting. ‘'We’ve got better ways of looking at tax and fiscal policy in modelling,’ said Singham on the panel. ‘What we don’t have…is the impact of domestic regulation. We don’t have good models to determine those effects.’ This has been a gripe among free-marketeers for years, who note that the labour market reforms implemented during the David Cameron years were always underscored by the OBR.

There were also some hints that the commission would be looking at public sector efficiency and how that was impacting growth. Until there was a serious assessment of ‘small productivity growth in the public sector,’ said McWilliams, ‘we won’t quite see why our taxes are going up or why our productivity is going down.’ Cowen pointed towards areas he thought would be the main drivers of growth in the future: artificial intelligence, biomedical science, and green energy. But ‘will regulatory bureaucracy hold us back’ he asked. ‘Are we going to be afraid? Are we going to overregulate it? Are we going to make it easy to build?’

While the crux of the commission will be economic modelling, the narrative crafted around it is going to matter too. The headline numbers presented at today’s event tried to put into perspective the importance of economic growth, not as some jargony term, buy rather as the key driver of individual and collective prosperity. They argued that if UK GDP per capita could grow by 3 per cent a year, by 2040 it would be 65 per cent higher, and translate to an extra £24,000 in GDP per capita annually, or £35,000 of extra household spending. ‘It is the fate of Britain we are talking about,’ insisted Cowen, who argued that Britain's role in the world was made stronger by a healthy economy. ‘‘We need you, we need you as a wealthy nation.’

For all that went wrong during her short-lived premiership, Truss can take some credit for shifting the national conversation towards a more pro-growth agenda. Her attack on the ‘anti-growth coalition’ had Labour MPs flooding in with remarks about how much they wanted growth, too – a point they continue to make by hinting at supply-side reforms around housing. Today’s launch confirms she plans to grow the seeds she planted last year, putting further pressure on all political parties to commit themselves to pursuing higher GDP. But the extent to which they’ll listen will depend on how robust the commission's models turn out to be. And they’ve set a very high bar, planning to go toe-to-toe with the OBR from day one.

Barbie’s world: the normalisation of cosmetic surgery

If Barbie were a real woman, she wouldn’t be able to walk. Her enormous head would loll forward on her spindly neck, her tiny ankles would buckle under her elongated legs, and she would be forced to move about on all fours.

In the upcoming Barbie film, Margot Robbie nails her character’s toothy smile and blonde bouffant, but even she cannot come close to imitating Barbie’s monstrous proportions. More adventurous imitators have tried. It’s rumoured that the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc Barbie’ – a 37-year-old Moldovan by the name of Valeria Lukyanova, one of several plastic surgery addicts dubbed ‘human Barbies’ – had ribs removed and her eyelids trimmed in her efforts to look as much as possible like the real (or, rather, unreal) thing.

This is an extreme example, but what’s more worrying is the underlying trend. A generation brought up on social media, accustomed to projecting an idealised version of themselves, is buying into a certain ideal of beauty. In an era when editing photos of yourself is widespread, more people are starting to edit their actual selves with plastic surgery. Prices are crashing down: bigger lips from £200, a nose job for £3,500. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) says that 600 cosmetic procedures a week were performed last year, twice as many as the previous year.

On the high street, adverts offering botox, liposuction and fat transfer are taking their place alongside offers of the perfect smile or year-long suntan. Nose jobs, breast augmentation and tummy tucks are joined by a new range of techniques popularised by influencers on Instagram and reality TV. The ‘Barbie nose’, according to one Turkish clinic targeting British customers, consists of ‘shaping a small, elegant nose with smooth curves and an otherworldly flare, as if coming from a fairytale fantasy or an anime creation’.

The fastest-rising procedure is the Brazilian butt lift, or BBL: it’s not offered on the NHS but is popular enough to be explained on the health service’s website. Fat is removed from one part of the body (the thighs or tummy) and the wound closed with stitches. Fat is then injected into the bottom, to smooth or enlarge. Such ‘fat transfer’ procedures cost between £2,000 and £8,000 in Britain with some 1,600 operations carried out last year in the UK – a rise of 36 per cent.

Plastic surgery and injectables are well on their way to becoming a normal middle-class pursuit, with many angling for the kind of work that – if done properly – should be almost invisible. ‘Pretty much everybody in the public eye who is 50 and above has had work done,’ says Andrew Jacono, an American cosmetic surgeon. ‘If you see a celebrity who is in her early to mid-fifties and still looks youthful, she’s had surgery.’

Most deny it, of course. The most pernicious manifestation of medical aesthetics is not the monstrous ‘human Barbies’ but those who enjoy a gentle tweak here and there, carried out during a lunch break and which can be easily denied. This has a far more profound effect on what we think of as normal – a trend reflected and amplified by reality TV. Two decades ago we had MTV’s I Want a Famous Face and Channel 4’s 10 Years Younger,which presented cosmetic surgery as part of a toolkit to look more like your idol or younger self. And it’s not only women: men now account for 7 per cent of cosmetic surgery.

The Kardashian sisters, who range from their late thirties to their mid-forties, are the queens of this new beauty ideal. They have popularised a kind of ethnically ambiguous look that can best be understood as akin to Coca-Cola: it artificially blends together only the most delicious components to produce something super-normally attractive. So we see the big bottom of a West African woman achieved through fat injections; the long thick hair of a South Asian woman achieved through extensions; the small nose of a Northern European woman achieved through rhinoplasty.

Gone are the days when Paris Hilton could cheerfully describe Kim Kardashian’s bum as ‘cottage cheese inside a big trash bag’. The market has decreed that waifishness is out and voluptuousness is in, and this look can be yours for the right price. Aesthetics clinics all over the UK advertise the ‘Kylie Jenner package’ (named for the Kardashians’ half-sister), which includes fillers in the lips, chin, jawline, cheeks and nose.

The most popular clinic in the Midlands is Clinique Modele Aesthetics, whose website shows several human Barbies having various work done. The contours of the lips can be edited to achieve an indent just under the nose, known as a ‘cupid’s bow’. It also offered a version of the BBL until Wolverhampton Council stopped it from doing so a few weeks ago, saying its staff lacked the expertise for such a delicate manoeuvre. It was the first time any council has cracked down in this way. The council pointed out that there’s no such thing as a BBL licence. Technology is advancing faster than regulators can keep up.

The cause for concern is pretty obvious. When BBLs go wrong they can be fatal – as many as one in 3,000 of the procedures carried out worldwide result in death. And it is, increasingly, a global market. Turkey is positioning itself as Europe’s leader, offering BBLs at about a third of the UK price. Some 1.2 million health tourists spent more than $2 billion in Turkey last year, according to the country’s national statistics agency – not just on cosmetic tweaks but on weight loss surgery, dentistry and other procedures with long NHS waiting times. Ushas, a state-owned Turkish healthcare company, has identified England as its top target market.

The NHS often ends up footing the bill for repair when foreign operations go wrong. BAAPS says one patient who went overseas for a BBL returned home with a flesh-eating bacterial infection that cost the NHS an estimated £47,000 to remedy. The highest-profile victim is Danniella Westbrook, a former EastEnders actress, whose facial surgery in Turkey went so wrong that she offered to pay the NHS £500,000 to put it right. The UK government estimates that 24 Britons have died when seeking treatment in Turkey in the past four years.

A strange feature of this 21st-century beauty ideal is that it is better suited to 2D. On the handful of occasions on which I’ve met famous internet beauties in the flesh, I’ve been surprised by the uncanniness of their appearance: skin too smooth, lips too plump. It turns out that Instagram faces look better on Instagram than they do in real life.

Which is not to say that these online celebrities have made a mistake in pursuing android beauty. There are fortunes to be made in the world of 2D, and projectable beauty has always been a hot commodity. There’s no end of research suggesting that people who are generally considered to be ugly suffer all kinds of adversity at disproportionate rates – more often passed over for promotion, more likely to struggle to make friends. A 2021 study found that when hospitality staff were forced to wear face masks during Covid, less attractive staff were regarded more positively by customers, while beautiful staff saw a drop in customer satisfaction. In other words, a wildly unequal playing field was temporarily levelled out.

Children are not just aware of this, but bombarded by it in the Instagram age. A 2021 study using American data shows an ‘exponential rise’ worldwide in teenagers as young as 15 seeking consultations for cosmetic procedures driven, it said, by an ‘obsession with physical appearance’. (There are no equivalent figures for the UK, where data is sporadic and the regulatory regime opaque.) You can see the logic: if being ugly is seen to be a nontrivial misfortune, becoming less so – or even beautiful – can radically improve a person’s life. In this way, every would-be Kardashian is behaving perfectly rationally: looking prettier can make it easier to secure the most desirable partners and professional opportunities. If it looks a bit odd in real life, that matters less to a generation who interact – and, in many ways, exist – more on screens.

If beauty is seen as something you can buy, not just something you’re born with, the result can be an arms race. We see botox is sold as being part of a girl’s make-up kit (‘No different from mascara and blush,’ said one advert). Every time a new example of beauty tech arrives on the market, it is seized upon by the Instagram influencers, who promote it to their millions of followers. Women suddenly find that a ‘normal’ beauty regime goes well beyond manicures and hair dye and now includes regular trips to a surgical theatre, at a cost of tens of thousands a year.

My own suspicion is that this effect is partly a consequence of constant exposure to images of extraordinarily beautiful women – images amplified by filters, as well as aesthetic treatments – which alter a girl’s perception of her own pool of so-called ‘intrasexual competition’. Put differently, girls of the past would have looked at their peer group and seen a bunch of normal kids just as chubby and acne-scarred as themselves. Now, they look at their screens and ask: ‘How can I compete?

In a way, Barbie harks back to a more innocent world where children played with dolls without ever thinking they could or should look like them. But teenagers are now growing up exchanging edited pictures of each other. They’re brought up in a world where aesthetics appear to be the key to everything: status, stature, friendships, prospects, worth.

We should expect the global medical aesthetics industry to go on ratcheting up, since there’s no reason for it to stop. My generation of millennials are already too far gone in the plastic fantastic world of Barbie beauty to have any hope of returning to a natural ideal.

But there is a lesson in here for the parents of adolescents, and particularly of girls. A growing cadre of parents are refusing to buy smartphones for their children, fearing the effects on their mental health. It was a trend that began in Silicon Valley among exactly the parents who were busy developing this tech in their professional lives.

Perhaps the digital-free cohort will grow up without feeling the need for a Barbie nose, or any other facial edits. But what we have right now is a generation that feels more judged and defined by aesthetics than any generation that has gone before it.

The BBC and a 21st-century media madness

The story of the famous BBC television presenter who, at the time of writing, has still not been named, has all the elements of 21st-century-media madness – something allegedly sexual which may or not involve a person too young for such things; a desperate hue and cry to see who will dare to name the accused first; anonymous accusers; a clash between strong legal rules about the accused’s anonymity and the strong social media custom of ignoring them; a confusion as to whether the ‘victim’ is a victim or whether he/she even believes he/she is a victim; gabby lawyers; the Sun; an angry mum; a stepfather; ‘fresh allegations’; a ‘concerned’ government which does not exactly know what it is concerned about; show-off MPs who want to use parliamentary privilege to name the accused; a perplexed police wondering whether a crime has been committed; a ‘suspension’; a frightened BBC which says it may have ‘some learnings’ [whatever happened to the word ‘lessons’?] from the case; a lack of facts, and a readiness to comment all the same. I suppose this little item is itself another example of the last phenomenon.

If one complained about every example of woke, one would send oneself mad and everyone else to sleep. For this reason, I forbore to comment on the fact that, for the whole of Pride month, Coutts Bank filled its entire front in the Strand with an enormous piece of propaganda. Having walked past it a dozen times, however, I stopped to read what it actually said. I decided I would pass it on. The enormous headline, framed by the Adelphi stucco, said ‘CHAMPIONING THE POWER OF PRIDE’. ‘What started as a riot,’ it continued, ‘ignited an unstoppable force for good.’ Further elucidation followed: ‘We believe everything we do should play a part in benefitting the environment and people of all identities and backgrounds. Recognising our influence to make a positive difference for the LGBT+ community, we’re working to ensure that we do this every day, not just in Pride month.’ I have a few questions. Does Coutts’s chairman, fourth Baron Remnant, whom I vaguely remember from my schooldays, actually believe that riots are a good way of doing business? If so, what would he and his board of directors say to the bank’s ‘high net-worth’ customers who disagree, and think their money is safer in a culture where democracy and the rule of law, rather than riots, instigate ‘unstoppable social change’? Are they aware that Pride is not an uncontroversial welfare organisation but an advocate for a controversial ideology which is opposed by gender-critical feminists, some lesbians who believe the trans agenda threatens their identity and many moral conservatives who prefer more traditional attitudes? Why do they think a bank should adopt any political ideology? Why are they proud of Pride which, as is well known, comes before a fall?

Coutts also says it is proud to be ‘a B Corp’, which means a company signed up to a vast list of principles about ‘equity’, diversity, greenery and ‘being the change we want to see in the world’. I read on the Coutts website about eligibility for holding a Coutts account. The opening form is interested only in whether you have at least £1 million to invest or borrow or £3 million in savings. Google tells me that the average person in Britain has savings of £17,753. A further question for Lord Remnant and his board: do they realise that they look like hypocrites?

Although Sir Keir Starmer lacks the seductive charm of Tony Blair, he is pursuing a similar path to victory. He considers it advantageous to gather followers from the ranks of political opponents. Who will be his most glittering recruit? I was interested that, in his speech about education last week, Sir Keir went out of his way to praise Michael Gove, quoting his famous words (first attributed to George W. Bush) as education secretary about ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. I wonder if this means great expectations for Mr Gove. He has now been a cabinet minister for longer than any Tory since Margaret Thatcher (13 years, apart from a couple of short breaks). He has for some time been ‘on a journey’, praising equality and generally getting greener and redder. If Sir Keir wins next year, Mr Gove might reasonably calculate that he could do the state more service by lending lustre to Labour (or taking a non-political role under it) than as a shadow spokesman of tired Tories.

A friend who loves having breakfast in hotels recently noticed, in a central London one, that although the rest of the breakfast was very good, the scrambled eggs tasted of nothing. He asked the waiter why. He was told it is now considered injurious to health simply to crack open an egg and scramble it. The hotel’s guidance is that the eggs must be pasteurised before they can pass anyone’s lips. What is left is, as he puts it, no yolk.

It is rightly frowned upon, except in some cases of the extremely famous, for tickets to be issued for memorial services. The ideal is that anyone who wishes to pay tribute by turning up should feel free to do so. However, the human fact is that admirers who do not personally know the deceased often feel shy about doing so. It was different at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Monday. The place was packed to join his widow Catriona in celebrating with high honour the Low Life of Jeremy Clarke, who sent so many wonderful weekly letters, including on his approaching death, to Spectator readers. As the editor, Fraser Nelson, explained to the 600-strong congregation, this service was different because readers, not just friends and colleagues, had been invited. It was touching that so many felt such a connection with Jeremy. The only pity was that he was not there to see it. We columnists wonder, in dark moments, whether our readers actually exist. How he would have loved this proof that they did.

The BBC is self-destructing

There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware of the name of the BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager lots of money to look at pictures of their bottom and so on. Some of them are on the remote windswept island of Foula, I believe. The rest are members of the chap’s family.

I quite envy those who have not yet been told via that conduit for concentrated human misery, social media. There was a rather wonderful couple of days when the name was unknown and we had to guess, which was done, universally, with a sort of untrammelled, lascivious glee. ‘Please let it be…’ formed the preamble to every stab in the dark. I totted up the names of the (troubled? Vulnerable? Disgraced? Vile? Pick your favourite red-top epithet) presenters other people wanted it to be and while Rylan Clark and Graham Norton got the nod many times, Gary Lineker was way out in front. It never seemed likely to me, even before Lineker issued a very swift denial – much as did Clark. Poor old Jeremy Vine and the blameless Nicky Campbell also saw their names in the frame and raged about the ‘sewage’ emanating from social media. Well, sure, so what’s new? Social media is the rest of us and sewage is, unfortunately, what we do. Such was the antipathy to many of these names that I suspect even when the curtain is finally lifted, those who have had their hopes dashed will continue to believe that their own personal bête noire did the same sort of thing too and probably worse and it almost certainly involved goats as well.

It all leaves the BBC looking somewhat troubled. When I worked there I very occasionally solicited photographs of my colleagues’ arses – the ‘Thought for the Day’ presenters, the late Marmaduke Hussey – but only rarely was I afforded satisfaction. Perhaps a different ethos held sway at the corporation in those days, a greater sense of propriety.

There is the age-old question to be asked, mind: is there something in the lucrative accidie of television presenting – its mindlessness, its specious gravity and the bestowal of fame – that makes such a comparatively large proportion of its practitioners display weird sexual peccadilloes and perversions? Or is it simply the case that we know about these incidents because the people involved are famous – and in truth the same proportion of unanointed ordinary folks are also perpetually trawling Only Fans, craving a glimpse of some teenage chav bumhole. An eternal mystery. I cleave towards the first suggestion, that the weirdness of television is somehow implicated in this sexual dysphoria. But that’s maybe just because I don’t want to contemplate the idea that half the country is up to the same sort of thing. Your postman, or greengrocer, or insurance loss adjuster. All recipients of youthful anuses flying, like a flock of pinkish, bifurcated geese, through cyberspace.

You have the advantage over me – the advantage of time – in knowing how this imbroglio plays out. From where I’m sitting it seems as if the BBC has already gone into its habitual self-destruct mode. The point of the Sun’s original story was not that the presenter had done anything illegal, or even that he had done something unseemly – these days we are conjoined not to judge but instead to accept that all forms of behaviour, except racism or misgendering someone, add to the rich tapestry of life – but that the parents of the youngster had complained almost two months ago to the BBC about their suspicions and nothing whatsoever was done about it.

Regardless, then, of what to me seems to me to be an infraction of public morality, it is a question yet again about the BBC, terrified out of its wits, becoming defensive and withholding the truth from both the complainants and the general public.

It seems that quite a few BBC employees are aggrieved at the way in which the corporation has behaved, not least in its attempts to protect its star. We are told, too, that the director-general, Tim Davie, only learned of this issue comparatively recently and that the police have now been informed twice about the matter.

The problem, then, is that the BBC complaints procedure even now – after Jimmy Savile – is not designed to discover the truth and adjudicate appropriately, but to dissemble and fob off the general public as far as is humanly possible until one day, a long way down the line, when it really hits the fan, at which point the director-general resigns or something similar. In other words, it is not a genuine complaints procedure: it is not designed to give the licence-payer the satisfaction of knowing that his or her complaint has been taken seriously.

I know this from good experience, after once being subjected to a tirade of politically motivated abuse on Newsnight from its then presenter Emily Maitlis. Many people complained – and were told by the BBC to get stuffed. It was only through the decency and diligence of a very senior BBC exec that eventually the complaints were properly considered and it was decided that the interview did indeed suggest to viewers that Emily might be a bit biased. Not that anything was actually done after this finding, mind – the programme was ticked off a bit but it did not remotely change its approach to interviewing people with whom Emily dis-agreed politically. They still got dog’s abuse.

In the latest case it would seem that the BBC battened down the hatches and simply hoped to God that the story would go away. That the complaints unit did not tell the director-general that one of the corporation’s stars faced these allegations suggests to me a stupidity bordering on the criminal. And, of course, that despite all those promises and a sacked DG, nothing, since Savile, has actually changed at the BBC.

Portrait of the week: BBC presenter scandal, EasyJet cancellations and a baby boy for Boris

Home

The government pondered whether to accept pay-review bodies’ recommendations on rises in public sector salaries. ‘Delivering sound money is our number one focus,’ Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in his Mansion House speech. ‘That means taking responsible decisions on public finances, including public sector pay.’ Regular pay in the March to May period was 7.3 per cent higher than a year earlier, although it rose less than inflation. Unemployment rose from 3.8 per cent to 4 per cent; vacancies fell by 85,000 to 1,034,000. The average two-year fixed-rate mortgage rose to 6.7 per cent. Jeremy Hunt confirmed that he was refused a bank account with Monzo last year on the grounds that he was a ‘politically exposed person’. Two eight-year-old girls died after a Land Rover crashed into the Study preparatory school, Wimbledon. A teacher was stabbed at Tewkesbury Academy. The Commons rejected Lords amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill. Marius Draghici, 50, from Romania, admitted 39 counts of manslaughter over Vietnamese migrants who died in a lorry container in 2019; he was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison.

In three days, 1,339 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats: 686 on 7 July; 384 the next day; and 269 the next. EasyJet cancelled 1,700 flights to and from Gatwick during July, August and September. The train drivers’ union Aslef announced an overtime ban from 17 to 22 July. President Joe Biden, aged 80, had talks with Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, at Downing Street, and then met the King, aged 74, at Windsor, where financiers and philanthropists gathered to discuss climate change. Mr Biden was on his way to Vilnius for the two-day Nato summit. With Mr Sunak he discussed America’s gift to Ukraine of cluster bombs, against the use of which Britain and 122 other countries have signed a convention. England won the third Ashes Test at Headingley by three wickets. Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie gave birth to a son, Frank Alfred Odysseus.

A BBC presenter paid a teenager £35,000 for sexually explicit photos, beginning three years ago when the young person was 17, according to allegations published by the Sun. A complaint had been made to the police in April and to the BBC on 19 May; on 6 June the BBC rang the complainant but did not get through. The mother of the young person said the money went on crack cocaine. The suspect was suspended, but not before several well-known names had to make public statements declaring that they were not suspects. Lawyers for the young person then said that the parents’ account of events were ‘rubbish’ and that ‘nothing inappropriate or unlawful’ had taken place.

Abroad

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped Turkey’s opposition to Sweden joining Nato. The Nato summit in Vilnius discussed what protection could be given to Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said it was ‘absurd when a timeframe is set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership’. According to the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin of Russia met Yevgeny Prigozhin and his commanders five days after the head of the Wagner Group had shot down aircraft as he moved troops towards Moscow. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus said Prigozhin and his men were not in his country, despite preparations supposedly being made for them. Poland reinforced its border with Belarus with hundreds of extra guards. France banned the sale of fireworks before Bastille Day for fear of their use by rioters.

Police in Israel clashed with thousands of protestors opposed to government judicial reforms. Mark Rutte, who has spent 13 years as the Dutch prime minister, said he was leaving politics after the collapse of his coalition, divided over immigration. The Spanish coastguard rescued 86 people off the Canaries in a migrant boat from Senegal 1,000 miles away that had been missing for more than a week; two other boats with dozens aboard were also missing. Police arrested a man after six people including three children were stabbed to death at a kindergarten in Guangdong province. Police in Hong Kong raided the family home of Nathan Law, a pro-democracy campaigner exiled in Britain, taking his parents and one of his brothers away for questioning. The Pope named 21 new cardinals, including Bishop Stephen Sau-yan Chow of Hong Kong and Fr Luis Dri, 96, a Capuchin friar in Buenos Aires. More than 100 million users signed up to Threads, a rival to Twitter launched by Meta, which owns Facebook.

Tories will be missing Sunak at PMQs

Are you tiring of the stand-in routine at Prime Minister’s Questions? Oliver Dowden seems to be. When he first started this now regular gig for Rishi Sunak, the Deputy Prime Minister was clearly delighted that he could deliver the lines he’s been coaching other prime ministers to say for years. Today, as he stood in for Sunak for a second week running, he looked as though he could do with a break. His jokes were not well delivered: he teased Angela Rayner for wanting John Prescott’s old job (which she already has), and he also fluffed what was already a poor line about Keir Starmer hating tree huggers but being ‘very keen on hugging the magic money tree’. That was a reference to a reported put-down by the Labour leader of his shadow net zero secretary Ed Miliband. It was delivered so badly that Dowden appeared to be taking a chainsaw to his own tree joke.

Rayner was still enjoying the session, which she built around struggling families. She remarked that Dowden was ‘no Heseltine’, and said tens of thousands of families were facing their homes being repossessed due to the ‘Tory mortgage bombshell’. Labour seems to have decided to drop its rather less scary sounding ‘Tory mortgage penalty’ in favour of the ‘bombshell’. Continuing the theme of party history, Dowden retorted that without Margaret Thatcher, his parents wouldn’t have been able to buy their own home. Rayner also pressed him on how many children were at risk of homelessness, asking: ‘How many kids don’t have a permanent address today, compared to when Labour left office in 2010?’ And she attacked him on his use of statistics, saying: ‘I think he’s taking tips from the former prime minister on telling the facts.’

Dowden’s theme in his responses was that Labour was ‘just standing in everyone’s way’ because it backed Just Stop Oil, its ‘union paymasters’ were ‘stopping our trains’ and the ‘hated Ulez stopping cars across our capital.’

He did have a number of difficult questions to answer from the backbenches. The SNP’s Pete Wishart asked about what he described as the ‘grotesque’ story about ‘the painting over of Mickey Mouse on a children’s mural as was done by the Home Office at a detention centre’. Dowden didn’t fully engage with the question, instead telling Wishart that ‘real compassion’ involved ‘stopping the vile people smuggling trade across the channel’. There was also a question from Tory backbencher Bim Afolami about house building which pointed to the nerves in the party on declining home ownership and what it means for the voter base. Today won’t have calmed many nerves, but it might have made Tory MPs feel fonder of Rishi Sunak, and long for his return to the dispatch box.

Rishi Sunak is right about illegal migration

The Illegal Migration Bill is having a distorting effect on the Tory party. It has put Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith together on the side of liberal opinion – and Ken Clarke on the side of the Prime Minister.

This week, May and Duncan Smith sought to stop the government from overturning a Lords amendment which would prevent the deportation of those claiming to be victims of people-trafficking.

Rishi Sunak thinks that loopholes in the law have been exploited by people-traffickers. May and Duncan Smith disagree. It fell to Clarke, a fierce critic of the government since Brexit, to challenge the plan’s opponents to come up with a better way of addressing the illegal migration problem.

Clarke has a good point. Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’ is based on reasonable logic. The human trafficking industry charges between £2,000 and £15,000 for passage to Britain. The traffickers’ business model is based on the currently safe assumption that once migrants arrive onshore, there is little realistic prospect of their deportation. The government believes that high-profile deportations to Rwanda would shake this confidence and torpedo the model. Critics say it is inhumane. But is it not crueller to incentivise a criminal industry that exploits vulnerable people and often drowns them in the sea?

Any Tory hopes of a political recovery rest on Sunak’s ability to ‘stop the boats’, one of the five pledges he made in January. A sceptical country may wonder whether, after the debacle of last year, the Tories are still capable of accomplishing anything. Are they calm, hardworking and competent – the image Sunak seeks to project? Or are they a feuding rabble, prone to ganging up on each other and staging hissy-fit resignations over not getting into the House of Lords?

As former party leaders, May and Duncan Smith know how feuding fatally weakens the authority of a prime minister and a party. Both claim part-authorship of the modern slavery law, which this magazine vigorously supported. But both should recognise laws should be judged by their outcomes – and if a law is open to abuse, it needs to be reformed. Doing nothing, as Clarke says, will cement Britain’s reputation as a country that is especially easy to enter illegally. That has serious consequences for social cohesion in Britain.

It is very easy to be high-minded about refugees and asylum, and to earn virtue points by damning the government’s plans. But it is a luxury which can only be afforded by those who do not bear the responsibility for managing public services or the public finances. Government ministers – who do bear this responsibility – are well aware that the number of people who could potentially take advantage of a soft migration policy is virtually limitless. They come now because the third world is increasing in wealth – people have money to pay for this expensive but dangerous journey. How should a civilised country respond?

Sunak’s proposal is the only viable answer. Australia proved that the concept works: deportations destroy the people-trafficking business model.

Britain’s deal to send Albanians home saw a 99 per cent decline in their numbers arriving via small boats. The difficulty is that a solution to this modern problem rams up against laws designed for the last century. The 1951 Refugee Convention was intended to avoid a repeat of the 1930s when genuine refugees were turned away with fateful consequences.

Across Europe, we see the tension. Mark Rutte, the long-serving prime minister of the Netherlands, has just tendered his resignation after failing to get new refugee laws through parliament. The Danish never used their deal with Rwanda, perhaps fearing the response from Strasbourg courts. Voters are demanding that governments take action on illegal migration, but politicians seem incapable of implementing reforms that might work. A fundamental rethink is required.

The public’s resistance to unregulated immigration is not rooted in xenophobia. It is about fairness. One of the reasons there has been so much support in Britain for Ukrainian refugees is that they are predominantly women and children, while the men stay behind to fight for the survival of their country. Afghans and Hong Kong Chinese have been welcomed in large numbers. What irks British voters is the blatant and too often unchecked abuse of immigration laws.

As a rich country, Britain has a duty to help the world’s displaced people. According to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, more than half the Syrians who have had to leave their homes have not even left Syria itself – there are 15 million people out of a population of 22 million who require humanitarian help. That is where British aid efforts need to be focused: on dealing with humanitarian disasters as close to their origin as possible. That is how the greatest number of people can be helped – in getting food and setting up accommodation where it is most needed, rather than by waiting for people to arrive by dinghy on the Kent coast and then putting them up in hotels.

The government’s twin-pronged approach – improving our disaster response for refugees, bearing down on illegal immigration by economic migrants – is decent and rational. Anybody who disagrees should, as Ken Clarke suggests, come up with a better idea.

Britain should place a big bet on the petrol engine

Ministers should be hailing it as a major vote of confidence in the economy. King Charles should be clearing his diary to make sure he is available for the opening ceremony. And the broadcasters should be leading the news with it. In normal circumstances, you might expect the announcement that two major global corporations will headquarter their new €7 billion joint venture in the UK to be greeted as a huge win for the country.

The trouble is, the Renault joint-venture with China’s Geely has been designed to produce petrol and hybrid engines and not fashionable battery powered cars.

But hold on. With the rest of the world pouring vast subsidies into electric vehicles, spending money the UK cannot hope to compete with, it is increasingly obvious that the UK should make a big bet on petrol. It may not be popular with the green elite, but it is a lot more likely to be successful.

It is a rare piece of good news for the battered British economy, and its beleaguered car industry. The French giant Renault and the emerging Chinese automaker Geely want to manufacture these engines to supply to brands such as Volvo and Nissan. While EVs are taking an increasing slice of the market, the logic is that petrol will still have a big role to play, and there will be plenty of space for engines that still burn some fossil fuels, and preferably as little as possible, with minimal emissions. And they have decided to headquarter the new company in the UK.

If our political leaders were smart enough, they would jump on that. We hear a lot about how the UK is not competitive in electric vehicles. There are endless demands for more subsidies for battery plants and factories. The trouble is, it is hopeless. The United States is spending hundreds of billions of dollars in making itself a global leader in EVs, the EU is trying to match that spending, and now China is rapidly making inroads into the market with its own low-cost vehicles (most of them so good and so cheap we will all be driving them quite soon). For the UK, with an almost bankrupt government, and representing just 3.2 per cent of global GDP, to possibly think it can compete with this is, to put it mildly, completely batty.

Instead, it would be far better to accept that the internal combustion engine is likely to have a role in moving people and stuff around the place for quite a long time yet. Indeed, with questions emerging about whether EVs are genuinely better for the environment – given all the minerals extracted to make them and their relatively short life – it is increasingly open to debate whether they are really the answer to combating climate change. They may turn out to be a massive and expensive mistake. The UK should make a big bet on petrol, making itself a hub for a reinvented petrol engine, with Renault-Geely as a start. Right now it is likely to have the market to itself – and it might well be able to build a significant new industry.

In praise of Milan Kundera

The Czech-born writer Milan Kundera has died, at the age of 94. Four years ago, Toby Young wrote this tribute to Kundera.

I was surprised to learn that the novelist Milan Kundera celebrated his 90th birthday on Monday. I had no idea he was still alive. He has taken up residence in that old people’s home that many former luminaries of western culture now occupy — the one with the sign above the door saying ‘Forgotten, but not gone’. In Kundera’s case, his decline into obscurity is probably connected to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Czech émigré was all the rage in the mid-1980s when he was a critic of his country’s brutal regime. Now that the Soviet Union and its satellite states are a distant memory, he seems less relevant.

I think the time is ripe for a Kundera revival, although not for the obvious reason, which is that communism is back in vogue. I think a good case can be made along those lines — and, indeed, the novelist Ewan Morrison has made it. In a recent essay, Morrison points out that Kundera warned of the dangers of airbrushing inconvenient facts from history in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. We see this today with attempts to gloss over the genocides perpetrated by Stalin and Mao.

In China, for instance, there is only one memorial to the victims of the Great Famine (1959-62), in which up to 43 million people died — a homemade structure, built by a farmer, about the size of a garden shed. As Kundera wrote: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

But even more topical than The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is Kundera’s first novel, The Joke. Published in 1967, it concerns the fate of a student called Ludvik Jahn, who falls foul of the communist authorities when he makes an inappropriate joke. On a postcard he dashes off to his girlfriend, who is at a Communist party training camp, he writes: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’ When this is communicated to party officials back in Prague, he is dismissed from his post at the students’ union, then kicked out of his university.

That, in turn, means he can no longer defer his military service, and he soon finds himself in a special unit of the Czechoslovakian army reserved for young men considered ‘enemies of socialism’. As he’s labouring in a coal mine alongside his fellow ne’er-do-wells, he realises that a silly joke he didn’t give a moment’s thought to has completely changed his life — and not for the better.

A well-wisher sent me a copy of the book last year after I’d lost five positions as a result of making some stupid jokes on Twitter, including my full-time job, and it won’t surprise you to learn that it resonated deeply. During his initial interrogation, Ludvik is told that because he expressed these thoughts on a postcard, where they were publicly visible, they have an ‘objective significance’ that means they cannot be explained away as a momentary lapse in judgment. I was told the same by the people sitting in judgment on me — the fact that I’d said these inappropriate things on Twitter, where other people could see them, meant they were more reflective of who I really am than if I’d put them in a private letter. There are other similarities too: many of the people Ludvik considers friends end up joining the outrage mob; his enemies create a crude caricature of him that quickly acquires the status of immutable reality; the punishment is out of all proportion to the crime, etc.

But it isn’t just me, obviously. Scarcely a week passes without someone suffering a reversal of fortune when it’s discovered they made the wrong sort of joke, even if it was in the distant past. It’s symptomatic of a recent shift in Britain and America, whereby the left has acquired sweeping new powers in the cultural arena, in spite of losing at the ballot box.

What makes Kundera’s book so relevant is that he connects the intolerance of politically incorrect humour to the totalitarian mindset. He points out that we often laugh at inappropriate jokes. Indeed, it’s their tastelessness — the fact that the thoughts and feelings they express are at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy — that makes them so funny. Laughing at these ‘wrong’ jokes is a form of dissent. Little wonder, then, that the Maoist commissars of our era want to punish people for telling them. Milan Kundera’s book may be more than 50 years old, but it could not be more timely.

It’s time the SNP was honest about EU membership

There’s a school of thought that, since Scotland isn’t likely to become independent anytime soon, interrogating the SNP’s claims about what independence would mean in practical terms is hypothetical and academic. This view is usually expressed by Unionists rather than nationalists, and reflects a frustration with the refusal of the constitutional question to go away. Journalists and commentators, they complain, are artificially invigorating a debate that would otherwise fade to silence. 

Setting aside the wishful thinking required to sustain such a belief, there are two stories in the news that illustrate why continuing examination of the case for independence is necessary. First up is the Scottish Information Commissioner ruling against the SNP government in a freedom of information appeal.

An FOI lodged two years ago asked St Andrew’s House to provide ‘any analysis that the Scottish government have carried out, since 2016, which assesses the timeframe which would be required for an independent Scotland to rejoin the EU’. The Scottish government’s position is that an independent Scotland could ‘rejoin’ the EU quickly and without having to join the euro or disrupt trade with the UK. 

Ministers refused to disclose certain documents as part of the FOI request, including analysis of how long it had taken other countries to accede to the EU, on the grounds that they were ‘not relevant’. Outgoing Information Commissioner Daren Fitzhenry ruled against ministers and ordered them to hand over the documents. His reasoning was satisfyingly crisp: if the documents were irrelevant, why would the Scottish government be holding them? 

That the SNP is positively allergic to open government and transparency is barely news at this point, but this affair underlines the poverty of their contentions about independence and EU membership. The pitch to the 62 per cent who voted Remain in 2016 is: vote for independence to get back into the EU.

This is presented as guaranteed, the SNP having perfected baseless assertion as a mode of constitutional argument long before Vote Leave was even a twinkle in Matthew Elliott’s eye. Even their language is presumptive: they talk about ‘rejoining’ but Scotland has never been a member state of the EU, only part of the territory of a member state, and has never been signatory to an accession or other treaty. If it were ever to become independent, Scotland would be applying to join the EU for the first time. 

As for the speed at which any accession process would occur, there have been plenty of claims but not much else. Article 49 of the EU Treaty makes no provision for formally fast-tracking membership applications, though political goodwill might smooth an otherwise long and bureaucratic journey.

That presupposes that goodwill would be present, except Scotland would be rocking up with a list of demands for special treatment. For example, the SNP says an independent Scotland could join the EU without adopting the euro. Nationalists typically cite the example of Denmark, which is an EU member state but retains the krone as its currency and enjoys other opt-outs from treaty obligations. What they don’t mention is that Denmark was already a member of the European Communities when Maastricht was being agreed in 1992. While the Folketing endorsed the new treaty, the voters narrowly rejected it in a referendum, creating a political crisis for the community as the treaty could not come into effect until all member states had ratified it. 

A compromise was eventually reached, known as the Edinburgh Agreement, which granted Denmark an exemption and this new deal was successfully put to another referendum. None of the circumstances that led to the Denmark protocol would apply to an independent Scotland, which would be demanding opt-outs as an acceding country rather than one already inside the bloc. As the Denmark protocol makes clear, its arrangements ‘apply exclusively to Denmark and not to other existing or acceding member states’.

Scottish exceptionalism may be a powerful force in Scottish politics but it does not enjoy enough sway to make the European Union tear up its rules to grant Scottish membership on Scottish terms. Brussels could, in theory, agree to EU membership but any deal would be structured primarily around the EU’s interests, not Scotland’s. 

That neither treaties nor realpolitik guarantee the sort of international reception for an independent Scotland that the SNP describes is driven home by another news item. President Biden told CNN it was ‘premature’ to talk about Ukraine joining Nato since there wasn’t ‘unanimity’ for membership ‘in the middle of a war’. For ‘unanimity’, read: the United States is not yet prepared to allow it.

Washington does not want a hot war with Moscow, which is what Nato membership would mean while Russian forces are still occupying Ukrainian territory and waging war against the country and its citizens. Of course, Ukraine is not Scotland and an independent Scotland would present an entirely different prospect. However, Biden’s statement is a reminder of American dominance within Nato and the need for aspiring member states to win over the United States if it hopes to join the club. 

This places a question mark over the SNP’s commitment to remove Trident from Scottish waters. Doing so would disarm a key Nato member of its unilateral nuclear capability, likely for a significant period. That would create geostrategic problems for the US at a time when it can ill-afford any more. This is not to say that an independent Scotland would necessarily be denied Nato membership, but it might have to accept an unhappy compromise that dilutes, defers or drops any disarmament agenda. 

Where it engages on these points, the Scottish government has little of substance to say beyond reciting threadbare talking points. Framing Scottish independence as a smooth transition or a clearly-defined process is dishonest. It reflects a refusal by Nationalists to accept that their desire for Scotland to no longer be a part of the UK does not confer on it a right to be part of other unions or alliances. International cooperation is not rooted in the sense of victimhood and entitlement that animates Scottish nationalism but in relative power, realpolitik, shared interests, negotiation and practice feasibility. 

No one owes Scotland its preferred constitutional and international arrangements and in telling the voters otherwise, the SNP is sticking its independence prospectus on the side of a big red bus. An honest Scottish nationalism would decouple independence from interdependence and make a case in which both would be ideal but the former still desirable without the latter.

2610: 700 – solution

Each of the unclued lights (with the pair at 15/26) includes D C C (= 700).

First prize Rosamund Campbell, Woodstock, Oxon

Runners-up J. Smithies, Vale, Guernsey; William Devison, Shaldon, Devon

2613: Way off

The unclued lights (one of two words), all verifiable in Brewer, precede a word which appears as an abbreviation four times in the lower right-hand quadrant of the completed grid. Solvers should highlight all four examples. Ignore two apostrophes.

Across

1    All omelettes cooked with pesto and chives, first (8,3)

7    Furtwängler finally reveals this wood (3)

11    A few words from Romeo in poor shape (6)

13    Athlete swallows one more fluid (7)

15    New name given to one strait (5)

16    Look in morass for criminal (5)

17    Tufts of wool giving female bad colic (6)

18    Damage ground, parking in it (5)

20    Waterweed from East Anglian drainage channel surrounding open ditch (6)

21    Confused in the main (2,3)

22    Liveliness in progress (7)

30    Introduction to Romance language round Spain (4,2)

32    ‘The real’ Star Trek character (5)

36    A thousand left work, returning for the dance (5)

37    Dean regularly hands round old register (5)

38    Tries on pants off the shelf (2-5)

39    Weren’t accustomed to three-quarters of rioting students (6)

40    Diary’s regular date (3)

Down

1    With foot sore Gracie comes to Iowa’s extensive farming areas (10)

3    Asserted one’s right to lilac maid replanted (4,5)

5    Asian pastries saint and prophet like (7)

6    Dry duck takes in energy drink (8)

7    Tedium suggested by French playwright (5)

8    Graduate – popular principal (4)

9    Build new quarter in capital (6)

10    Love pleasant place for topping – but it’s of no use now! (2,3)

14    Wandering having gone off (12)

19    Tropical fruit one gets diced by servant (10)

21    Hors d’oeuvre from Spain a tot ordered (9)

23    Offer help and try to establish friendly relations (5,3)

24    It shows the way to authenticate mail (8)

26    Pay a quick visit from the States for bridge (7)

28    I never troubled the department (6)

31    Minor thespian’s point (5)

35    Drop live commercial (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 31 July. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2613, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

Spectator competition winners: verse obituaries for Berlusconi

In Competition No. 3207 you were invited to submit a verse obituary of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian former prime minister who, despite sex scandals and court battles, managed three stints as PM, died last month aged 86. His more startling gaffes included suggesting that Abruzzo earthquake survivors see their situation as ‘a weekend of camping’ and describing Obama as ‘young, handsome and tanned’. The winners, printed below, pocket £30 each.

Singular Silvio, Italy’s serial populist leader and
           prime-ministerial
Demagogue basked in the glow of funereal
           dignity, peacefully lying in state,
Though one could picture him post-existentially
           barking at archangels unreverentially,
Somewhere near Limbo but unpenitentially
           keeping things raucous and carnivalesque.

Now’s not the time for a crisp analytical, slightly
           judgmental or modestly critical
Tone when assessing the more-than-political
           ramifications of Silvio’s fate;
Try not to mention his cynical pandering, bullying,
           bribing and scurrilous slandering,
Or to opine if you found his philandering often
           disturbing and sometimes grotesque.

Strive not to dwell on his gross incivility, carnal
           excesses and want of humility
And, though perhaps with a sense of futility, make
           no allusion to Rome very Late;
Never mind scandals that made him seem weaselly,
           dubious power plays carried out sleazily,
Facelifts and transplants of hair that can easily
           make a man look a bit mannikin-esque.

This is the time when we ought to exclusively
           focus on singing his praises effusively,
Not letting facts and his record intrusively keep us
           from deeming some shred of him great;
Now’s not the moment to vent psychologically,
           pen a philippic or rant pedagogically,
Or to be joking that, etymologically,
           Berlusconismo is linked to burlesque.

Alex Steelsmith

Let’s have a dirge for Silvio Berlusconi
Born with a streak of passion in his hair,
A magnate from the land of macaroni.

He might have earned the title Al Caponi
For being Italy’s famous racketeer.
Let’s have a dirge for Silvio Berlusconi.

Always as playful as a Shetland pony
He romped through many a torrid love affair,
A magnate from the land of macaroni.

He little gained for being Putin’s crony,
His comrade and a fellow millionaire.
Let’s have a dirge for Silvio Berlusconi.

Doubtless, at last he found success is phoney
And fame as unsubstantial as the air.
Let’s have a dirge for Silvio Berlusconi,
A magnate from the land of macaroni.

Frank McDonald

Tax frauds, bribing, what a stack
of allegations – got the sack.
Bunga, bunga. Pausa lunga
then, good God, they brought him back.

Basement parties, all the rage,
signorinas, underage.
Bunga, bunga. Pausa lunga,
back he came to take the stage.

Little doubt corruption pays,
but then the parting of the ways.
Bunga, bunga. Pausa lunga,
back again – oh, happy days!

Now, in whatever hell he’ll burn
it’s still a matter of concern:
no Bunga, bunga, pausa lunga –
pray, this time, he won’t return.

Sylvia Fairley

Who was Silvio, who was he,
This Signor Berlusconi?
A major politician, or
Maybe a burlesque only?

It seems that he would get involved
In any kind of party,
A true Italian, out of the
Commedia dell’arte.

He thought that he was Harlequin
But he grew rich and louche,
And ended up as Pantaloon
Mixed up with Scaramouche.

Well, peace be on his re-thatched head,
And no self-righteous frowns!
Not only Italy elects
Crooks, charlatans or clowns.

Brian Murdoch

How doth the bunga-bunga boy
Invite the girls to play?
What favours may the boy enjoy,
What unattired display?

How doth the Mussolini fan-
Club president explain
That he, though strong, is not a man
Who flexes to cause pain.

How doth the cruise-ship crooner grow
To be a sports tycoon
On whom the Muses can bestow
A catchy football tune?

How doth the tarnished Silvio
Enliven Italy?
Tax dodges with a hot sideshow
And lukewarm penalty.

Chris O’Carroll

No. 3210: Who’s afraid of AI?

You are invited to submit a horror story on the theme of artificial intelligence. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 26 July.