Reintroducing wolves to Britain is pure insanity

Should we release packs of ravenous wolves into the English countryside? The answer is so obviously ‘of course not, are you insane?’ that I anticipated no disagreement when I scoffed at a pro-wolf Guardian article by George Monbiot last week.

Monbiot has found common cause with wolves because he hates sheep-farming and wants to ‘rewild’ Britain. His latest article uses deer as an excuse to promote the interests of the wolf lobby. There are too many of them, apparently, and the best way to deal with a surplus of deer is to have them torn apart by apex predators. 

Monbiot has been banging on about the benefits of wolves for twenty years. He accepts that wolves kill people from time to time, but says that depression also kills people and that ‘the excitement of knowing that they [man-eating predators] are out there somewhere’ could prevent depression and thereby save lives. One can only admire the creativity of this argument. 

Monbiot’s opinion is enjoyably eccentric and I assumed that no one else shared it, but it seems like the tide is turning. For several days I have been receiving messages assuring me that wolves have been unfairly maligned in fairy tales and want nothing more than to co-exist peacefully with sheep, cats and children. They only occasionally attack people and certainly kill fewer humans than dogs/cows/cars. Their reintroduction to Yellowstone national park was a tremendous success and they are only a minor problem where they survive in several European countries. Why can’t wolves and lambs just get along?  

Time and again I found myself asking ‘did a wolf write this?’. I have nothing against wolves per se. They are cool animals and, as with other cool animals (great white sharks, crocodiles, etc.), I have no desire to wipe them off the face of the earth. So long as they are kept away from farms and large populations, as they are in Yellowstone and Scandinavia, I say live and let live.

But the reason wolves are the bad guys in so many fairy tales is that they loomed large in the fears of pre-modern society – and they loomed large because they were a mortal threat to farmers and their livestock. They still are. 

It is true that some breeds of dog attack people, but the answer to that is banning dangerous dogs, not bringing back wolves. It would be interesting to know how many people who are (rightly) in favour of banning the Bully XL side with Monbiot on the wolf issue. It would also be interesting to know how many people who support the ban on hunting deer with dogs are in favour of deers being ripped limb from limb by wolves. 

Not that we can guarantee that wolves will stick to the script and only kill deer. In France, where wolves reappeared in the 1990s, ‘the number of livestock victims has been increasing linearly and almost constantly over the last 12 years’ as the number of wolves increases. The number of livestock deaths, mostly sheep, currently stands at around 15,000 per year. A French councillor was attacked by wolves in February and a wolf killed the pony of European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen last September. Perhaps those medieval peasants had a point?   

Insofar as deer are a problem, shooting them and eating venison strikes me as a better solution than unleashing wolves, hoping they only kill deer and then having to shoot the wolves when they predictably start killing livestock and people. The pro-wolf campaign – and the rewilding movement in general – only really makes sense if you disapprove of farming.  

If you are the kind of person who doesn’t see why farmers waste their time producing food in fields when they could simply buy it from a shop, the idea of turning vast swathes of the countryside into a wilderness may hold some appeal – even though you will almost certainly never visit it. George Monbiot is probably right when he says that city dwellers enjoy an occasional frisson of excitement from thinking that wolves are on the prowl somewhere, but this seems an insufficient reason to overrule the wishes of people in villages who will have to ‘co-exist’ with them. Rural management should not be dictated by whatever makes townies feel edgy. 

The last wolf in Britain was probably killed in the eighteenth century. Urbanisation in the years since has distanced the public from the realities of nature to such an extent that a creature that was once a justifiable object of terror is being reimagined as a doughty folk hero. The wolf is taking the place of the fox – a much lesser nuisance – as a symbol of what the countryside should be about to people who have never lived there, perhaps because the spread of urban foxes has made city dwellers aware that foxes are not as cute as they thought.  

Since London is over-run with foxes and city dwellers like the idea of wolves, an obvious solution presents itself. Let’s release wolves into the London suburbs and drop a few breeding pairs into Hyde Park and St James’s Park where they will no doubt enrich the ‘eco-system’ so beloved on the pro-wolf lobby. We will have to cross our fingers and hope that they only hunt foxes, but if they start killing children and pets there is always plan B: release the grizzly bears. 

Working from home is the new British disease

Over mighty trade unions. Short-termist management that prioritises profits over investment. And an education system that doesn’t produce enough scientists or engineers. There have been many different versions of the ‘British disease’ over the years to explain the consistent under-performance of our economy compared to some of our main rivals. But right now there is a new one: the British don’t want to go back to the office – and that is hitting output hard. 

According to a survey by the consultancy AWA published this week, the British are more reluctant to go back to the office than workers in almost any other major developed country. Even as bosses plead with them to go back in, the average office worker in this country is only showing up at their office 1.6 days a week, an attendance rate of 32 per cent, compared with 55 per cent in the European Union, 43 per cent in Latin America, and 36 per cent across the Asia-Pacific region (although in fairness supposed hard-working Americans are pretty reluctant to go back as well). 

It is not hard to understand why. Commuting in the UK is expensive and time consuming compared with most other countries. And most of us have plenty to be getting on with that is more fulfilling than catching up on the gossip around the water cooler or sitting through a tedious meeting with our colleagues. Another survey last week found that people were napping, trying their hand at some DIY, and having sex, or possibly some combination of all three, while they were meant to be ‘working from home’. 

The trouble is, that is terrible for the economy. Whatever its evangelists say, there is now clear evidence that home working is significantly less productive than clocking into the office every day. A study from MIT found that people were 18 per cent less productive when they were perched at a laptop on their kitchen table than they were in the office.

We can see that all around us. Ever since the Covid lockdown, the UK has conducted a massive experiment in home working and the results have been catastrophic. Productivity, especially in the public sector where WFH is most entrenched, has started to fall. The economy has stagnated. Inflation has risen, and living standards have fallen, while almost nothing seems to get done. The British are more reluctant to go back to the office than workers almost anywhere else in the world. Until that starts to change, there is little hope of the economy ever starting to recover. 

Will America eventually tire of Trump’s legal troubles?

In our age of mass attention deficit, the manifold legals trials against Donald Trump represent a big challenge. Maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to care when you can’t keep count.

The whole objective of ‘lawfare’, as it is called, is to bully your enemy into submission through overwhelming paperwork. It might work. That doesn’t make it just. 

Let’s be clear: calling the multi-dimensional legal campaign against Donald Trump ‘lawfare’ isn’t a statement of support for Trump, necessarily. It’s more a summary of observable reality. 

The latest of four criminal cases against the 45th president of the United States comes from Georgia. Last night, Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, rolled out her indictment – which comes on top of the hush-money tax record case in New York, the hoarding classified documents case in Florida, and the 6 January conspiracy charges in Washington DC. Four complex cases in four different districts, 91 criminal charges against the president who happens to be running for the White House again next year. Try to keep up. 

The Fulton County indictment has 41 charges, 13 of which are aimed at Trump. The added spice in this indictment is the introduction of 18 other defendants, including his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Trump lawyer and mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, and the notorious Sidney Powell, as well as the Willis’s use of the Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations) Act in the opening charges.

Fans of mafia films will know about Rico – the legal mechanism through which many American mobsters have been imprisoned. In this instance, Fulton County is using Georgia’s Rico Act, which mirrors the federal law in order to target organised crime at the state level. 

The charges levelled at Trump also include solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery, filing false documents, and conspiracy to impersonate a public officer. 

We shall have to wait for the trial to see how much evidence Fulton County can summon against their main target, but this indictment, similar to the 6 January one, also relies heavily on implicating Trump in ‘conspiracy’ charges. Proving Trump’s guilt there should mean having to show that Trump not only egged on illegal actions by claiming that the election was stolen, but that he wilfully took part in a criminal plot to make the election fraudulent. Given that Trump, by all accounts, still sincerely believes that the election was already fraudulent – ie, ‘stolen’ from him rather than the other way around – that could be very difficult for prosecutors. 

The key piece of evidence against Trump in the Fulton County case, that we know of, is his now notorious phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In it the then sitting president demanded that Raffensperger ‘find’ 11,700 votes – the amount needed to swing the election in Georgia back in his favour. The whole case could come down to the interpretation of that word. 

Trump says his call was ‘perfect’ and, while that’s typical Trumpian hyperbole, he may be right that it wasn’t illegal. He didn’t order Raffensperger to invent non-existent votes – again, as far as we know – indeed the word ‘find’ suggests that Trump sincerely believed the votes had been lost. 

Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, made quite a show of her impartiality yesterday, insisting repeatedly that the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ applies in this case, as any other. She also said that she would like the case to be processed within six months.  

But the Trump campaign calls Willis a ‘rabid partisan’ who has, like other prosecutors, ‘stalled her investigations’ for two and half years in order to roll out her indictment now to hamper her enemy’s presidential campaign. 

The irony here is that, at this stage, the legal warfare on Trump does the opposite: each indictment only increases his appeal among Republican voters, validates his talk of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against him, gives him another fundraising boost, and ensures that he will win the Republican Party nomination for the presidential election next year. 

That may change as the election draws closer. The Trump campaign is now reportedly spending 30 cents of every dollar on their candidate’s lawyer bills. With so many court dates coming up, and so many detailed charges to wade through and rebut, Trump may find himself so bogged down in legal warfare that he can’t wage an effective campaign.

Running for president is an exhausting mission for a man in his prime. For a 77-year-old, it’s a taller order still. Add to that the stresses of not one, not two, but four criminal trials, and the task becomes almost unimaginably demanding. 

Then again, Trump is no ordinary political candidate. His team already see the legal battles as a good PR opportunity to show Trump’s relative vigour in contrast to his likely opponent, the ailing 80-year-old Joe Biden.

Will that work? Or will the public become so bored of the court wrangling over Donald Trump that they lose interest? Will he be able to talk to the country about the issues that really matter to them – the economy, immigration, America’s position in the world – when so distracted? 

These questions may well decide who wins the White House next year.

Macron doesn’t care about migrants crossing the Channel

The British government is reportedly ‘frustrated’ with France for its failure to stem the numbers of migrants making their way illegally across the Channel. 

What’s new? It’s a gripe going back years and the solution has always been the same: to throw more money to France in return for a solemn promise from Paris that patrols will be increased to reduce the numbers looking to enter Britain illegally. 

In February 2016, for example, David Cameron’s government announced it was giving €20 million (£17.2 million) more to France – on top of the €60 million (£52 million) already funnelled across the water – in order to boost ‘fighting trafficking networks’. 

However, one junior minister in Francois Hollande’s government warned that the upcoming referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU could have an adverse effect on cross-Channel cooperation if the people voted to leave. The name of the minister who issued this veiled threat was one Emmanuel Macron. 

It was Macron, of course, who in March this year embraced Rishi Sunak warmly at an Anglo-French summit in Paris and then announced at a joint press conference that the two leaders had agreed a £480 million deal that would see the numbers of migrants drastically reduced. The numbers are slightly down on last year, when 45,000 migrants reached England, but over 16,000 have crossed in the first eight months of the year and last week 755 made the passage in one day.

But frankly, this was never going to reduce the numbers. Macron is a fervent believer in free movement, as evidenced by the rise in immigration during his six years in office. So what if three-quarters of the French don’t share his view? 

In an interview with Le Figaro this month, the president breezily declared that ‘France has always been a country of immigration and we will continue to be so’. This was a rebuke to his political opponents who attributed last month’s devastating nationwide riots to the failure of France’s immigration policy over the last half a century.

It was not the first time Macron has stated this fact. He did so in 2021 and was corrected by Michèle Tribalat, the former director of the National Institute of Demographic Studies. ‘No, France has not always been a country of immigration,’ she explained. ‘Immigration really began in the second half of the 19th century.’  

In 1872 there were 676,000 foreigners in France, 1.9 per cent of the population, a figure that stood at 1.16 million in 1911, just under 3 per cent of the population. In 2021 there were seven million, 10.3 per cent of the population.  

As Tribalat pointed out, the immigrants who arrived in France at the turn of the 20th Century were almost all Europeans: Belgians, Italians and Spanish. One hundred years later 48 per cent of immigrants in France were born in Africa, more often than not Algeria or Morocco.   

So in short, Britain should wise up and understand that Macron has no intention of helping to reduce the numbers of migrants crossing the Channel.  

The time has come to get tough, and implement a pushback policy, similar to the one deployed by the French police on their border with Italy since 2018. That year the Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini – now the deputy PM – claimed that French police were pushing back migrants across the border into Italy. This accusation had been verified by various human rights organisations, and only last week Médecins Sans Frontières issued a press release claiming that migrants were being ‘systematically pushed back at the Italian-French border by French police – often with violence, inhumane treatment as well as arbitrary detention’. 

This grave accusation barely made a ripple in the French media, even in those outlets that lean to the left, which expressed indignation about the British government’s amateurish attempt to fly migrants to Rwanda or the equally shambolic idea to house them on a barge. 

When Macron met Sunak in Paris in March there was much guff in the media about a ‘bromance’ between the two leaders. But from the moment he was elected president in May 2017 Macron has exhibited only a spiteful hauteur towards Britain. He is incapable of coming to terms with Brexit and, rather than respecting the decision of the majority of the British people, he has accused Leave voters of succumbing to ‘lies and false promises’. 

The French political class know all about false promises. They made one to their own electorate in 2005, vowing to respect the ‘Non’ result of the EU referendum, only to then ratify it as the repackaged Lisbon treaty. 

And they have been fobbing off various British governments for the last decade with promises to tackle the Channel migrant crisis once they have a few more coffers. 

Britain must turn off the money tap, and turn back the boats. Macron will of course express his indignation – to which Britain should respond by exposing his hypocrisy.   

Boris brings back cabinet tradition

When it comes to the Johnson government, ministers weren’t always judged to have done things by the book. But Mr S has done some digging and it turns out that the former PM did his bit to restore one of the lesser-known No. 10 traditions. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald began the practice of incumbent and departing ministers being asked to donate a book to the Prime Minister’s library. The collection lines the walls of the cabinet room, offering inspiration to the ministers sat around the table there.

In recent years though, the practice had fallen into abeyance. However Johnson was an enthusiast for the scheme and encouraged his ministers to resurrect the practice. Following a Freedom of Information request, Steerpike has now discovered that 17 books have now been added to the library since 2021. Among them includes Johnson’s sole donation: ‘The Churchill Factor: How one made history’ written by one, er, Boris Johnson. Both the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the Development minister Andrew Mitchell have followed his example by both modestly donating their own works too. 

Other ministers chose to look elsewhere for inspiration. Some reflected their departmental interests. Home Secretary Priti Patel donated a history of the police, with Alok Sharma, the former COP president, submitting David Attenborough’s work ‘A Life on Our Planet.’ Jacob Rees-Mogg preferred a familial connection, offering his father’s work ‘An Humbler Heaven.’ Perhaps reflecting their own interests, Nigel Adams went for Michael Dobbs’ classic ‘House of Cards’ while diehard monarchist Michael Ellis has given a copy of Robert Hardman’s work on the late Queen. Alister Jack and Mark Spencer meanwhile both plumped for Jeremy Clarkson’s bestseller ‘Diddly Squat.’

Some choices though perhaps offer a commentary on the administration in which the ministers served. Chris Heaton-Harris donated ‘The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes’ – appropriate for a former Chief Whip. Thérèse Coffey opted for ‘The Authority Gap’ by Mary Ann Sieghart, with Robert Buckland submitting Peter Green’s ‘Captured at Arnhem’. Jack also went for ‘The Minister of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ – an apt sentiment for a minister tasked with battling the SNP.

Good to see such true blue Tories being so well-read…

Public sector pay pushes wage growth to record high

Public sector pay growth has jumped 9.6 per cent, the fastest rate since current records began 22 years ago. Private sector wage growth, meanwhile, is slightly more modest at 7.9 per cent. The NHS bonus – a one-off payment of between £1,650 and £3,500 given in June – helped lift overall wages up by 8.2 per cent, higher than inflation (at 7.9 per cent), the first time that has happened since March last year. 

That bonus was agreed by the government in an attempt to put an end to industrial action among health workers. Around 160,000 working days were lost in June alone, the majority in the NHS. But with the bonus and the sheer size of the NHS payroll (at 1.4 million, it’s the largest workforce in Europe) overall national pay figures have been pushed up.

There is more to those wage figures than the NHS effect, however. Growth in pay excluding bonuses (7.8 per cent) was the highest seen in over two decades. Expect that to dominate the headlines today. But today’s data, released by the ONS, runs only to June – HMRC has its own, more timely figures, that suggest that wage growth is now slowing. This is just one indicator but it should relieve fears of a wage-price spiral.

What’s more, markets now expect the Bank of England to keep interest rates at 5.75 per cent until spring next year. Not so long ago, the rate was expected to hit 6.5 per cent. This is shown in the below expectations tracker, unique to The Spectator data hub.

Meanwhile, headlines suggest that unemployment has risen to 4.2 per cent. But this is deceptive. One of the main economic problems in the UK right now is that millions of working-age people are not actively seeking jobs. Combine that with those on out-of-work benefits and the true jobless figure is closer to 12 per cent of the total working age population. That figure is closer to 18 per cent in cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. That overall picture is updated later today, but so far here is the full stats.

The fact that this level of worklessness occurred at the same time as a labour shortage is quite the anomaly. It revealed a dysfunctional welfare system – one that may now be on the mend. Those looking for work have a decent chance in an economy where vacancies are still at historic highs.

Still, the most pressing problem is the number not looking for work citing long-term health problems: this figure is still trending upwards and has hit a record high of 2.6 million

Rishi Sunak was generous with furlough, hoping it would minimise the scarring effects of lockdown on the workforce and would encourage a quicker economic bounce back. Instead, the opposite happened: the UK is one of the few countries where the number of people in work has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, with sickness benefit the new problem (there are 4,000 new claims a day, almost twice pre-pandemic levels). Lockdown had a scrambling effect on the UK labour market, meaning the metrics normally followed now tell only part of the story. We’ll continue to bring the full story on the labour market tab in The Spectator data hub.

Germany shouldn’t ban the AfD

There are few countries in the world more conscious of the fragility of democracy than Germany. After the horrors of Nazism, the country vowed never again and, in August 1948, a constitution was drafted for West Germany that was designed to build a stable democracy and defend it. 75 years later, the same legal framework continues to uphold the same values, but the challenges mounted by increasing fanaticism are keenly felt. The temptation to use the constitution’s own heavy-handed tools to defend democracy is great, but politicians must resist it.

When the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier led the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of his country’s political inception last week, he warned the German people that ‘in the fight against extremism, there is a historical lesson that runs like a thread through the draft constitution… and that is still relevant today: a democracy has to be able to defend itself against its enemies. Never again must democratic rights be misused to abolish freedom and democracy.’

Alluding to the way the Nazi party was able to use its electoral support to destroy Germany’s interwar democracy, Steinmeier expressed his deep concern about the rise of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is currently polling as the second largest political force. As President, Steinmeier is bound to stand above party politics, so the AfD was not directly mentioned in his speech, but there was no doubt who he was talking about when he said, ‘the constitution cannot encompass those who are enemies of the constitution.’

To many observers, this sounded like a call to ban the AfD. The constitution allows this if a party or its members seek to undermine or destroy the existing framework of German democracy. But it is one of the bluntest tools in the box. Steinmeier undoubtedly hinted at such drastic measures out of genuine concern for the democratic order his country has so carefully sought to protect. But as head of state, his words carry weight and such threats may backfire, alienating and galvanising AfD voters rather than enticing them back into the mainstream.

The idea that political parties can or should be banned is profoundly undemocratic. The freedom of association enshrined in the German constitution allows everyone to found, support and join organisations, including political parties. In 1948, there was an argument for some kind of backstop, given how Nazism had pervaded every aspect of life – and there were still many Germans who believed in its ideals and might have been tempted to set up or vote for parties that embodied them.

The Federal Constitutional Court used its right to ban parties only twice: on a neo-Nazi group in 1952 and on the Communist party in 1956. Since then, decades have passed and German democracy built a reputation as a beacon of stability, but the ghosts of Germany’s past haven’t stopped haunting the nation. As inflation, party-political infighting and societal divisions plague the country, it is the same perception of crisis that is driving people into the arms of the AfD and causing the centrists to panic.

Many prominent political figures and institutions have joined the call for a ban on the AfD. Saskia Esken, co-leader of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SPD), told the German press that it was her view that the AfD had ‘anti-constitutional aims’ and if this could be proved, ‘this party should be banned.’ Marco Wanderwitz of the Christian Democrats, once Angela Merkel’s minister for eastern Germany, where the AfD is particularly strong, also argued that the party fulfilled all the requirements for a ban and that this would give ‘democracy breathing space’.

Even the influential political magazine Der Spiegel ran a leading article that called for the use of ‘the sharpest weapon available to a democracy ready to defend itself.’ Thomas Haldenwang, the head of the domestic intelligence agency, which would have to gather the evidence necessary for a legal ban, has also criticised the AfD in public, indicating that he would be happy to help pave the legal path towards such measures.

But a party ban would not only be ineffective, it would also prove that Germany’s democratic ecosystem is so out of kilter that the most drastic legal measure available is required to set it right.

For one thing, many AfD voters have turned to the party because they have lost trust in the established political parties and public institutions. When they see other parties, newspapers, the domestic spy agency and the President all singing from the same hymn sheet, it confirms feelings of persecution and fuels conspiracy theories. The party has already launched legal measures against Haldenwang and others as its polling figures hit record highs this summer.

A recent survey even indicated that 10 per cent of the AfD voters want their party banned because they think they can gain a political advantage from this. If the party didn’t formally exist, it would be much harder to monitor the activities of its members and supporters. When Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s first chancellor from 1871 to 1890 banned the SPD, that was exactly what happened. Members formed underground networks, stood as independent candidates in elections and galvanised their support base.

But most importantly, a party ban simply would not address the problem. If the surveys are correct, up to 21 per cent of the German electorate would currently vote for the AfD. That means millions of people are unhappy with the status quo –­ the vast majority of whom will have voted for mainstream parties in the past. While the party is rapidly radicalising, its supporters cannot be written off wholesale as irretrievable extremists. Taking the political vehicle of their discontent away would do nothing to alleviate the discontent itself. As one German political scientist put it: ‘you cannot place a ban on opinions and attitudes.’

Germany must resist the urge to reach for the political crutches that helped it make its first steps towards democracy after fascism and war. Seventy-five years have passed since then. It’s time for German democracy to confront its problems rather than silence their expression.

The Tories have invented a new philosophy – unpopulism

Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to take’. Phew.

Along the ministerial corridor, Kemi Badenoch says she would ‘never have guessed how much time I would spend looking at toilet policy,’ and that ‘increasingly, my job is spent legislating for common sense and stopping people determined to do destructive things’.

It has taken the Conservative government 13 years and 95 days to stagger breathlessly to this point. Thirteen years in which almost every public and private institution in the country has capitulated, to a lesser but usually greater extent, to the imported American ideology of intersectional progressivism. Everything – from the BBC to the National Trust to every library, gallery and museum in the land – is stuffed to the gills with this guff. The Tories outsourced sex education in schools and didn’t bother to check who was hired. They stood back and shuffled, tongue-tied, as progressivism gobbled up all before it.

It’s hard to do justice to the enormity of their failure on this front. Their recent noticing of this is a bit like the fall of Troy, but with King Priam holding up a finger and saying, ‘hang on a second, I think there might be something a bit fishy about that wooden horse’ as his wife is carted off over the shoulder of Agamemnon and chunks of toppled masonry smash into the strewn bodies of his slaughtered children.

What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell? Either answer – they were not in control, or they were not interested – is damning. Wilful blindness is not something one looks for in a politician. For Barclay to wake up now, to shake his head, suck air through his teeth and say ‘You’ve had some cowboys in here’ is unacceptable. You were one of the cowboys, Steve.

Kemi Badenoch, by contrast, is more clued up. It sometimes feels like she is, in fact, the only shield protecting the public from what she calls ‘destructive things’. Although she has many remarkable qualities, this feels somewhat precarious. It’s like sheltering in a downpour at night in a shop doorway – you may be just about dry, but it would be better to be inside.

The Tories’ long string of excuses for their culture failures – ‘well, it was the Lib Dems, you see, our hands were tied’, and then ‘well, Brexit took up all our time’, ‘and then there was Covid, oh and Ukraine’ – ring increasingly hollow. I suspect the real reason was the well-brought-up reluctance to avoid hyperbole, to swerve anything resembling a ‘scene’. They are embarrassed to be conservatives, ashamed to do things that might upset ‘nice’ people, which crippled them from the very beginning. They shied away from any confrontation – it took over a decade for them to address the blatant intimidation in academia, to notice that students were no longer the amiable geeks waving little gonks on Blockbusters.

Lest we forget, this nervous twitch was an impulse strong enough to make Boris Johnson shuffle in conciliatory embarrassment. The Tories didn’t want to notice what was clearly going on and – incredibly – are still shocked by it. They are ‘appalled’ that despite producing ‘guidance’, the antagonistic institutions take absolutely no notice of them. They are so complacent and disinterested that it’s left to the press to check up.

The hilarious irony is that the Conservative party is often accused by its enemies of populism. Luminaries such as Angela Eagle and Chris Bryant have accused them of ‘stoking a culture war’, which is so far from the truth it’s like pointing the finger of blame for world war two at Switzerland.

In fact, the Tories have invented a whole new philosophy – unpopulism. This is going full pelt at things that their voters hate; Net Zero, tax hikes, continuing mass immigration, turning a blind eye to the wreckers trashing the cultural inheritance of the nation and fomenting racial division.

There is much commissioning of reports and assessments, much issuing of guidance, much piddling about with details. Occasionally one of them goes over the top – Suella with her silly ‘tofu-eating wokerati’ speech – but almost nothing is ever actually done. If you didn’t know, you would assume the current Home Secretary was Harriet Harman. It might as well be.

There has also been the total failure to notice or to defuse the Blair-Brown era landmines of the Equality Act, in-work benefits, recording ‘non-crimes’, etc. They let themselves be played.

It’s far too late for the Tories to get over their fear of being seen as oafish, or to realise that nothing could be less important than how embarrassed they feel.

The importance of remembering the Omagh bombing

On this day, 25 years ago, not long after the ink had dried on the Good Friday Agreement, a car bomb exploded in the market town of Omagh in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The bomb had been set in the town’s busy main shopping area by dissident republican terrorists styling themselves as the ‘Real IRA’. The group had rejected the acceptance by Sinn Fein, the Provisional IRA’s political mouthpiece, that Irish unification could not be achieved by violence, and instead bathed a community in blood.

Twenty nine people were killed that day. It was a busy and sunny Saturday and the town, nestled in the foothills of the Sperrin mountains, was packed with shoppers and tourists. The warnings given ahead of the bombing were hopelessly inaccurate and led to victims being evacuated away from what was thought to be the target – the town’s courthouse – and into a killing zone that made it the worst single atrocity of the Troubles, a conflict people had fervently believed was over. 

Why is it so important to remember the victims of this attack? Twenty five years is, after all, an arbitrary measure of grief and loss. Yet there is something so profound and singular about this atrocity and its aftermath. It should haunt the minds of those who still say terrorism in the name of Irish unity was justified. It should give pause to anyone who supports the ongoing dissident threat in the country as somehow morally sane. It ought to inform the work of ‘mainland’ politicians and officials who are struggling to put the legacy of the Troubles to sleep with new legislation. 

The tragedy of the death of twenty nine people and a set of unborn twins cannot be encompassed by this one piece alone. They were children, students, tourists, Catholics, Protestants and workers, and they were torn to pieces in the service of fanatics desperate to feed their own inadequacies. All it took was an ordinary saloon car filled with explosives that could be put together in any rural hay shed containing fertiliser – and a mindset of depraved indifference to the awful consequences.

The Omagh bomb was also significant because, in the absence of enough evidence by police to charge well-known suspects shortly afterwards, the families of the bereaved made legal history. The police on both sides of the border had a mountain of circumstantial evidence but were hampered by a dearth of witnesses, who either would not or could not come forward. Northern Ireland has endured a number of terrorist outrages, many committed by the IRA where no perpetrator has ever faced criminal trial. This is the cause of much enduring hurt. But the victims’ families refused to be victimised again in this way and set about raising money for a civil action suit (where the standard of proof was lower) against the bombers. Writs were served just days before the statute of limitations on the attack ran out.

After a nine year battle, their lawyer Jason McCue made legal history when a Belfast High Court found four men – Liam Campbell, Seamus Daly, Colm Murphy and Michael McKevitt – liable for the outrage and ordered them to pay more than £1.6 million in damages to the victims and their relatives. The case was never about the money – incidentally not a penny has since been paid – but it rendered the new generation of dissident terrorists identifiable and touchable by the law.

In February this year, the government announced an independent inquiry into the Omagh bombing, part of which will investigate whether intelligence failures by state forces meant it could have been prevented. While this is welcomed by campaigners, it must not detract from the central fact that the moral responsibility for the bomb must rest with those who planted it. 

One of those found liable in the 2009 civil case, Michael McKevitt, died of cancer in 2021 following his release from prison in the Irish republic after a 20-year sentence for directing terrorism. While he won’t face earthy justice, it remains to be seen if the others will be held accountable with new and heavily contested government proposals to deal with legacy terrorism.

Twenty five years on from this awful day, the shadow of dissident republican terrorism still hangs over Northern Ireland. The ‘New IRA’ – another dismal permutation of the endless splintering within Irish republicanism – has been lethally active in the years after Omagh, murdering police officers who symbolise the normality they hate. 

In February this year, a squad of these interchangeable nihilists tried to kill off-duty senior detective John Caldwell in front of terrified children less than 15 minutes’ walk from Omagh’s blighted town centre. Trust in the police has been devasted by a security breach just last week that could see the personal details of thousands of Northern Irish police officers fall into the hands of these people. In Northern Ireland, great hatred still has plenty of room for manoeuvre. 

In her excellent book, Aftermath: The Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice, the writer Ruth Dudley Edwards follows the moving struggle of bereaved survivors for justice. She details the responses of then Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and his deputy, the IRA leader Martin McGuinness, to the families begging them to publicly support an appeal for people to give information on the bombers to the police. While they did dissociate themselves from the attack and condemned it, both declined, with McGuinness declaring ‘I’m not an informer’. 

The durability of this omerta is continuing to breathe life into the glowing embers of violent extremism that still exist in Northern Ireland to this day. While the terrorist threat there is vastly reduced, it is still potent enough for the security services to class it as ‘severe’, meaning an attack is highly likely. 

The Real IRA was smashed asunder by a group of ordinary people who refused to be cowed by fanatics. ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’ is a telling line from the poet Seamus Heaney who was raised on the other side of the Sperrins. If the violent extremism that animated Omagh’s horror is to be finally wiped from history, that tendency must die too.

My disturbing experience in a Paris lavatory

I am happy to add my name to many reactionary causes, but sorry, I draw the line at trying to save the urinal from the onward march of the unisex loo. On Sunday, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch published proposals to oblige every new building to incorporate separate toilet facilities for men and women. To be fair to her, she isn’t trying to prevent architects from designing unisex facilities where every loo is in effect a little private bathroom, with hand-washing facilities incorporated – her beef is with the subtly different ‘gender-neutral toilets’, which are large rooms full of toilets and sinks which can be used by members of either sex. In some cases, these have been known to force women to walk past men standing at urinals.

But I think Badenoch is on the wrong path. If we are going to have national standards for public lavatories and lavatories in commercial buildings, let’s ban the urinal and insist on all loos being unisex. For that half of the population that is unfamiliar with such things, urinals are bestial places. At their least-offensive – which tend to be in gentlemen’s clubs – they consist of elaborate ceramic structures with thick divisions between each standing space. More often, though, they are open bowls or simple aluminium troughs where you are expected to stand in close proximity to strangers and their todgers while you all relieve yourselves. They make a horrible racket and create a fair bit of splashback when the stream of piss hits the metal. Your kids are expected to use the same facilities – the only concession being that they might have access to a slightly lowered bowl.

Urinals are at least a little less awful than they used to be, thanks largely to Grindr. Before the gay dating app was available, a urinal was a kind of meat market for gay men. That was something I first discovered aged 15 when I snuck in a gap in the urinals in the ghastly Forum Les Halles shopping centre in Paris only to realise that the two men on either side of me were standing there proudly erect and looking down the line to see what others had to offer. The same then happened in London – in fact, even worse, since most of the clientele seemed to be waiting for something to happen: something like the events depicted in Prick Up Your Ears, the 1980s film about the life of Joe Orton, where a group of men gather in a public lavatory before one reaches up to unscrew a lightbulb and, well, you don’t see any more. For years afterwards, I literally could not use a urinal; I would clam up, which made the whole situation even worse because it sent the wrong message to others.         

There is a wonderful entry on Joe Orton’s diaries where he reports of a visit to the facilities in Oxford Circus or some other such place and described with disgust that ‘just four pissers’ came in while he was there. Thankfully, Grindr has provided other opportunities for men to hook up and us mere pissers can get on with it.  But even so, the urinal is a disgusting relic of another age. Let’s tear them all out and turn our toilets fully private and unisex. 

I escaped Totnes. But only just

Totnes is like any other small town in England insofar as there are limited shops and people will try to sell you mouldy produce at an ‘organic’ price. Other than that, it’s a different world. This is the same place that started its own currency – albeit unsuccessfully. The same place that fought back against Costa Coffee and won. And the place where, one day a year, people lose their minds over the prospect of an orange being rolled down a hill. Make of that what you will. 

I moved to Totnes after university. I grew up in London, which makes me pretentious and impatient. Totnes can also be pretentious, though it is certainly not impatient. I am incredibly grateful for my time there, no matter that I was left a tired and jaded drinker.  

I was lucky. I landed myself a job at the main bar in town: a social hub that was like a mix between Cheers and the pub from Hot Fuzz. It was the best bar job I’ve ever had. A till? No, a 1980s-style calculator. Lager? Just one, the other 16 taps are beautiful craft beers. Can the staff drink? Don’t ask any more stupid questions. 

And unlike most bar jobs, the staff didn’t drag themselves to work like extras from Metropolis. They enjoyed their jobs as much as they could. The regulars were welcoming. I met one group of locals at an open mic night. A fevered-looking 30-something-year-old invited me over. 

‘Are you a fan of Ted Hughes?’ he asked. Not your classic conversation starter.  

‘Do you mean his work or his character?’ I asked. 

‘Both.’ 

‘I can’t say that I am.’ 

He frowned.  

‘That’s a shame,’ he said, pointing at the group behind him, ‘we all believe in the work of Mr Hughes.’ 

‘Why’s that?’ I asked. 

It transpired that the group studied under a bearded man from a town over who rode topless on horses through Dartmoor and taught his disciples about the wonders of Ted Hughes and myth. As you do. Even after telling him that I wasn’t Hughes’s biggest fan, the stranger gave me a welcoming hug and told me that everything would be alright. Though perhaps I should have been the one to say that to him.  

The summer is a time of real debauchery in Totnes. The town’s population swells and people drink and spend time at the beach and listen to old men playing the fiddle while high on ketamine. Another important lesson: keep your private life private. It turns out everyone really does know everything in Totnes. Keep your shagging sequestered, your political views to yourself, and your opinions about the countryside concealed – unless you like being a social pariah. 

On one of my first shifts, I asked a colleague why a woman was happily kissing half the punters in the back garden when her boyfriend was inside. She said, ‘Zak, down here we share.’  

And share they do. And not just sexually. Totnes has a real disdain for hoarders of money. It seems a large proportion of Totnesians earn their money to spend it. I was the same. No one really saved. We even had a regular at the pub who would trade his paintings for pints. It got to the point where we had to start refusing them – the staff had too many pieces of his artwork at home. He was devaluing his own currency. 

But then the winter came, and I learnt a lesson about provincial solitude. The young friends I made all left for university or careers. Suddenly the drinking becomes a necessity. You find yourself standing at the bar hearing the same conversations about the same lamb roasts every Sunday and you wonder if this is all there is. And it’s dark. It’s wet. The church bells are no longer quaint, they’re oppressive. The local conspiracy theorists are no longer amusing, they’re belligerent. The hangovers are no longer justifiable, they’re scary. 

I received a text in December from a friend telling me he had a spare room in London. Did I want to take it? I looked at my bank account. All that money spent on having a good time. I said yes. I was going to have to leave if I was ever going to get my life in order. I loved the town, but unknowingly I had been sucked into it like a house spider up a hoover. I arrived a fresh-faced graduate with ideas above his station and left slightly battered by the intensity of Totnes’s subtle rhythms. 

I’ve been back to Totnes since. It will always have a hold on me. But very few of my friends have stayed. The town takes its toll on everyone. That’s partly its charm. It means that there will always be a continual rotation of new faces, new graduates, new couples, new bar staff, new versions of people like me. Everything changes in Totnes and everything stays the same. It’s an incredible place, but only for a while. 

So long to the father of Americana

Robbie Robertson, the revered songwriter who died last week aged 80, was an immensely important composer. Over six decades in the entertainment business, Robertson worked alongside a small galaxy of musicians and singers, most famously Bob Dylan, who probably spoke for many when he said the Toronto-born artist’s death came as ‘shocking news’ for those of them still left.

America’s ‘traditions, tragedies and joys’ were Robertson’s lyrical trade, according to his most frequent collaborator of the past 45 years, the film director Martin Scorsese. In a long conversation I had with Robertson in 1988, he told me that he thought of his recordings less as music and more as literature. His lyrics spoke of the deep history of his adopted American homeland. ‘What I’m really interested in is mythology,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in places and characters I haven’t met.’

He summoned a band – The Band – to assist him in the telling of these mythologies and it was Robertson’s great good fortune to have three smoking voices fit for the task – along with fellow Canadians Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the Arkansas-born Levon Helm. And while Robertson occasionally sang along, his relatively ordinary range was no match for the others, also including a barrel-chested multi-instrumentalist, Garth Hudson. His literary imaginings, however, were of a distinctly higher order.

The Band first started weaving Americana together in the 1960s. But the focus of Robertson’s songwriting always felt closer to the 1860s. Poverty-stricken farmers from another era appeared and vanished in his lines, snake-hipped Southern belles and windswept early pilgrims, too. And oh, Virgil, quick come and see, there goes Robert E. Lee.

Out of this primitive stuff they formed a slew of once-heard-never-forgotten albums (Music from Big Pink, The Band and, arguably, Stage Fright), along with the phantom sessions recorded in 1967 with Dylan in upstate New York and released eight years later as The Basement Tapes ­– all polished off with an extraordinary feeling of ageless classicism. As the writer Greil Marcus noted on that latter recording’s sleeve notes, there was ‘an absolute commitment by the singers and musicians to their material’.  

The Band eventually came unstuck with Robertson terminating their collaboration in 1976. The group’s final performance, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, is captured on the Martin Scorsese-directed concert film The Last Waltz. The rockumentary was produced by Robertson and in 2019 selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry for its cultural significance. Among the dozen guest performers were Ronnie Hawkins, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, the Staple Singers, and Muddy Waters, as well as a show-stopping appearance by Dylan toward the end, all artists with whom Robertson’s work had intersected.

Not everyone was entirely thrilled with the effort. ‘For two hours, we watched as the camera focussed almost exclusively on Robbie Robertson,’ former Band-mate Levon Helm later grizzled in his memoir, This Wheel’s On Fire, ‘long and loving close-ups of his heavily made-up face and expensive haircut.’

For Robertson, though, the new working relationship with Scorsese proved a boon. When he died, Robertson had just completed his fourteenth film composition for Scorsese on Killers of The Flower Moon.

Marshalling high-voltage talent around him was never really an optional extra for the father of Americana. His smattering of solo albums, virtuoso guitar riffs or no, sometimes faltered when he attempted to go it entirely alone or rely too heavily on his own voice, which only ever really alternated between a querulous murmur and a naked whisper. Working with ‘nothing but air’ had always been the starting point in his work, he told me, and he always knew how to find those who could help him.

WhatsApp is right to be angry about the UK’s encryption mess

The world’s biggest tech firms have lined up to lambast the latest incarnation of the Online Safety Bill and Investigatory Powers Act. Many, including Apple and Meta, are threatening to withdraw products and services from the UK if the proposed rules become law. The Home Office could become the ‘de facto global arbiter of what level of data security and encryption are permissible’, Apple says. They have a point.

The government wants to force companies to scan the content of its users’ encrypted messages for harmful content, as well as getting advanced notice to approve any future software updates that are security related. The aim – a noble one – is to ensure that bad actors don’t use encryption to get access to illegal content, in particular, the sharing of child sexual abuse material.

But all of this belies the original intent of encryption, namely, to guarantee the safety of our online lives. Almost everything we do on the web, from chatting with friends to sharing client data at work, relies on some form of encryption. It is a technology that armies of engineers have taken years to perfect.

The very principle of the technology, and the protections it affords that we all rely on, risk being unravelled in an attempt to make one area of the internet safer.

A recent open letter by academics on the danger of eroding encryption puts it best: ‘There is no technological solution to the contradiction inherent in both keeping information confidential from third parties and sharing that same information with third parties.’

That, in a nutshell, is the predicament the government faces: you either protect people from encryption or protect them with encryption, but you cannot do both.

Even if the government magically squares this circle, do we really trust the state to be the sole governor of our data and where it goes?

Only last week, the Electoral Commission admitted hackers had got access to the personal data of tens of millions of citizens by infiltrating its systems. That doesn’t exactly instil confidence.

There is also the minefield of deciphering when explicit content is legal and when it isn’t. Algorithms can be designed to do this with some accuracy, but none will be perfect. Police officers could end up viewing private imagery that breaks no laws – and who wants to give them permission to do that?

No one can doubt the importance of fighting against the spread of child sexual abuse material, and no one can doubt the good intentions of the proposed rules in this fight. Yet the tin-eared, slapdash approach to legislation by ministers and regulators is the latest example of the constant government overreach businesses complain about.

A key promise of the Leave campaign was that Brexit would unshackle the UK from burdensome regulations imposed by Brussels. So far though, that unshackling has liberated regulators to crack down on firms it doesn’t like.

The Competition and Markets Authority, has, embarrassingly, stood out like a sore thumb globally in its determination to block Microsoft’s Activision merger (the EU gave it a green light), while founders of London’s biggest fintechs tell me they are fed up with an increasingly ham-fisted approach to regulation, and are looking at options overseas to start their next business.

The government is in a constant muddle when it comes to big tech. One day, it cheers its success in welcoming the latest businesses to our shores, the next day, it cheers how successfully it is fending them all off. It needs to make its mind up.

Men don’t belong at lesbian speed dating events

Lesbian speed dating sounds fun. It reminds me of the old joke ‘What does a lesbian bring on her first date? Her cat, the toothbrush and a removal van.’ It refers to the outdated image of lesbians instantly committing to each other, falling madly in love, then taking seven years to split up.  

There is always truth in stereotypes, despite this one being more fun than fact. However, lesbians have recently had somewhat of a makeover – and not in a good way. According to some trans activists, egged on by the likes of Stonewall, some of us are in possession of a penis (and I don’t mean as a trophy à la Lorena Bobbitt).  

Which brings me back to speed dating, a process designed to enable singles to meet a large pool of new potential partners in a very short period of time. A woman called Jenny Watson runs weekly lesbian speed dating evenings in a London pub. Or at least she did, until trans activists complained to the management about – you guessed it – men being excluded, lipstick not withstanding. 

Following a number of incidents involving trans-identified males claiming to be lesbians attending her events, Jenny was compelled to remind would-be participants that ‘lesbians don’t have penises’. She even stated, ‘If you are male, please refrain from coming’ on the basis that the evening was for the ‘protection of sex-segregated spaces for lesbian women’. According to Jenny, one transwoman pushed himself against a lesbian in the toilets, and another, clad in purple lycra, was sporting a visible erection. 

The pub in Bloomsbury received a number of complaints about her comments, and as per usual, the venue chose to launch an ‘inquiry’, rather than support one of the city’s few lesbian social events. 

When Kathleen Stock and I founded the Lesbian Project in March this year it was to reassert the correct meaning of the word ‘lesbian’ as being reserved for same-sex attracted females. We were sick and tired of being lumped together with the rainbow soup of LGBTQIA+, and thought it was high time we were recognised as a distinct, and much neglected, minority. We were also aware that there was growing demand to include men in our community. For example, former firefighter turned barrister Lucy Masoud was banned from lesbian dating site Hinge after she said she was only interested in biological females. Having set her profile to ‘women seeking women’, she found every third or fourth match she was offered was a transwoman.  

Another stark example of this Orwellian madness came to light during the case brought by Mermaids against the LGB Alliance. Kate Harris, a co-founder of LGB Alliance, was asked by Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, whether some people might include fully intact transwoman within the category of ‘lesbian’. Harris’s response was unequivocal:  

‘I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world who are lesbians because we love other women… We will not be erased, and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.’ 

But this pressure on lesbians is endemic. Research by the lesbian feminist Angela Wild found that half of the 80 women who responded to a survey by campaigning group ‘Get the L Out’ had been pressured or coerced to accept a transwoman as a sexual partner, with the majority reporting that they felt intimidated, or had received threats, after rejecting the idea that lesbians should include transwomen in their dating pool. 

In reality, there isn’t a person on the planet that truly believes that it is possible for a lesbian to have a penis. Everybody knows that a lesbian is, by definition, a biological woman who is same-sex attracted. But for time immemorial, men that are bitterly resentful of the fact that some women reject them emotionally and sexually have decided that lesbians are only legitimate if a penis is part of the picture. As online porn shows, many men struggle with the idea that sex can happen at all sans penis – which is why lesbians are regularly asked, ‘What do you do in bed?’ 

Jenny Watson should be applauded for running a female-only event and sticking to her guns. Shame on those misogynists. They have decided lesbians should go back into the closet, and accept that we like penis after all. Some men just can’t get over the fact that we have no appetite for their meat and two veg. 

Should Britain send migrants to France’s former African colonies?

The cross-Channel migrant crisis would perhaps be solved in a single stroke if only French patrols would tow the boats back to their mainland, or allowed their British counterparts to do the same: after all, the Australians have eliminated the problem by adopting the same approach. But how can we, on this side of the Channel, prompt the French authorities to undertake this sensible and obvious course of action, one that would seem to be in everyone’s interest?

One way of doing so would be to relocate newly-arrived Channel migrants not just to Rwanda but to some of France’s former colonies. Our own government could reach out to some of France’s former territories in West Africa, for example. Some of these countries offer the migrants enough ‘health, security and wellbeing’ to avoid enraging our Human Rights Industry. Ivory Coast, Senegal and Benin are obvious candidates and perhaps, in the future, so will Niger.

Relocating our Channel migrants to such countries offers several advantages. On the one hand, it would help to solve the migration problem at source by persuading many would-be refugees not to make the journey to Europe in the first place. A very considerable number of migrants who head to the EU originate from sub-Saharan Africa, prompting Brussels to do deals with some unsavoury North African regimes to try and stop them leaving. But many will question the logic of travelling so far and at such high personal risk if they could later be returned to the same neck of the woods.

Other would-be migrants will be drawn to the thriving economies that such a migrant-hosting plan will help to build. It is easy to forget that our existing Rwanda plan gives the Kigali regime £120 million in development funding as well as ‘substantial investment to boost the development of Rwanda, including jobs, skills and opportunities to benefit both migrants and host communities’. So not only would such investment in West African states help pull migrants away from the EU’s doors, as well as the Channel beaches, it would also benefit local economies that need it. How ironic that the same people who criticise the Rwanda plan, and would condemn a similar West African programme, are largely the same people who call for more overseas aid.

But there is also one reason why France’s former colonies, in particular, now make very fitting partners for our government in its bid to resolve the migrant crisis, and why such a development, or even the mere threat of it, would quickly persuade Paris to change tack.

The reason is that the mere threat of such British involvement in their former colonies would cause alarm, consternation and shock in Paris. French officials regard their former colonies, in West Africa and elsewhere, as a Francosphere that defines their post-imperial grandeur. This Francophonie allows them to shake off a deeply held insecurity about the superiority of les Anglo-Saxons. Yes, we have fought and defeated them so many times, runs the thinking, and even liberated them from the Nazis, but at least we have a former empire from which the English are kept away.

Paris retains close links with its former colonies and, in some cases, maintains a strong grip over them. But these may not be quite close and strong enough to stop their governments feeling the lure of our own millions if, in return, they house our migrants. The mere threat of such a move would cause panic in Paris because it would be viewed, hardly without justification, as these countries taking the first step towards the Anglosphere. This would prompt a serious rethink of France’s existing approach.

As the number of small boats mount – causing serious social tensions within our own borders and migrant deaths on the seas – we have little to lose from taking such drastic measures. Not just against the criminal gangs who lie behind this trade, but also the French authorities who are allowing it to happen.

Do the police think ‘lesbian’ is a term of abuse?

Reading that a 16-year-old autistic girl had been dragged from her home by seven cops after reportedly saying a female officer looked like ‘a lesbian like nana’, I had to check that we weren’t back in the 1970s of my girlhood when ‘lezzer’ was the worst thing you could call a woman.

Yet here are the coppers going all Life on Mars on some poor neuro-divergent kiddy – who also suffers from spinal disability scoliosis – in her Leeds home after (irony of ironies) she was driven home by police officers attending a gay pride celebration. So far, so woke – but things turned non-inclusive when the young person made an apparently harmless comparison to her grandmother. She was then removed by aforesaid seven West Yorkshire police officers in the early hours, having been arrested on suspicion of ‘homophobic public order offence’ – in her own home, in front of her own mother, who begged the police to leave her alone, pleading ‘you’re going to remove her for what? She said the word lesbian? Her nana is a lesbian, she’s married to a woman. She’s not homophobic.’

If something sums up the shockingly bad state of modern policing, it’s this bizarre incident. I don’t know if the PC in question is a lesbian or not, but why on earth would a modern police-person take offence at this, considering their passionate championing of homosexuality in recent years? Or was it window-dressing all along – and could it be that when not sucking up to transvestites, the police are just as bigoted as they ever were? What a multitude of sins cross-dressing can cover.

Is it that ‘lesbian’ is now a dirty word again, being one of those shrinking parts of life kept solely for women, while dirty great men trample over everything else that was ours, from toilets to trophies? It’s a sad fact that the word has been ditched by those with the most claim to it and who could be most inspired by its history – young lesbians who prefer to be acceptably ‘queer’. Last year the American pop star JoJo Siwa said in an interview with Yahoo: ‘I don’t like the word [lesbian] itself. It’s just, like, a lot. At the end of the day, that’s what I am… but it’s like the word moist. It’s just like… ugh!’

If the girl had said that the policewoman was ‘queer like nana’, would she still have been set upon by seven adults in uniform who are paid to protect the public rather than police their language? Surely the key word here is ‘nana’ – everyone loves their nana, so I’m sure it wasn’t a diss. If anything, the police should have celebrated the teenager’s inclusive love for her non-hetero nana. But we’ve long given up expecting woke plod to recognise simple human emotions, so schooled have they been in the ways of silly and sinister offence-taking. When the child is screaming and hitting herself and her mother repeats ‘she’s autistic’, the cross cop responds ‘I don’t care.’ Once again we are faced with the proof that wokeness, far from being ‘kind’, is often just a shiny new way to bully people, a toxic mixture of the old snobbishness and the new sensitivities.

At a time when a good proportion of the Lionesses have made us aware again of how glamorous and inspirational lesbians can be, I’m curious about the policewoman at the centre of this furore. If she is gay, did that mean she felt gay shame on Pride day? And if she isn’t, is she a homophobe? Either way, it’s not a good look for our thoroughly inclusive ‘filth’.

Never mind – I’m sure that none of us mind the police taking offence on our time while leaving crime to run riot. We’re used to it now. But I can’t help wishing they’d bring back Dixon of Dock Green. And in case any policewomen are reading, I said ‘Dock’, not ‘Dyke’ – and I wasn’t looking at you.

Why Keir Starmer should be wary of Blair

During his successful 2020 leadership campaign Keir Starmer claimed he was his own man, saying, ‘I can think for myself, I don’t need to hug Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t need to hug Tony Blair or anybody else to make a decision.’ Having kicked Corbyn out of the parliamentary Labour party, Starmer is unlikely to seek or indeed receive many hugs from his immediate predecessor. Starmer has, however, increasingly and pretty blatantly sought to evoke comparisons between himself and Blair, the last Labour leader to win a general election. Recently Starmer even shared a platform with Blair at the latter’s Foundation for Global Change’s ‘Future of Britain’ conference, dubbed ‘Blairstock’ by wits. There are sound reasons for all this – but the Labour leader should be cautious of being enveloped by the undoubtedly warm and welcoming Blairite embrace. 

Blair led his party to three general election victories and served as prime minister for longer than any other Labour leader. He had notable achievements in Downing Street, in particular reducing child and pensioner poverty and improving levels of performance across the public sector, especially in the NHS. It would be ridiculous for Starmer, who lacks ministerial experience along with most of his shadow cabinet, to turn a deaf ear to any practical insights Blair might offer.

Even so, Blair was effectively forced to step down as leader in 2007 by a party which had grown disappointed in him. The 2005 election, Blair’s third victory in a row, saw Labour win just 35.2 per cent of the vote, the smallest of any majority government in British electoral history, also indicating the way the public was wearing of him. In the month he resigned Blair had a satisfaction rating of  -27 per cent. And it is certainly arguable that if any one person was responsible for the election of Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 it was Blair. Perhaps inevitably, as Enoch Powell famously noted, all political careers end in failure, but Blair’s most definitely did. It is therefore more useful for Starmer, if he truly wants to transform Britain, to focus on the reasons Blair failed – rather than Blair’s transient successes.

Looking back on Blair’s premiership, it appears more as an opportunity lost rather than a period of serious and lasting achievement. His two landside victories of 1997 and 2001, and the confusion that gripped the Conservatives as to how best to respond to them, along with an ever-growing economy, gave Blair – had he wished to exploit it – the political and financial space to change Britain. But he did not wish to exploit that space. Instead, he adhered to the basic Thatcherite orthodoxy which stipulates the market’s superiority over the state apart from in exceptional circumstances, even as many in his party were champing at the bit for change.

Blair was also afraid of losing his grip on Middle England voters, who determined the party’s fate in innumerable constituency contests in the South. This reinforced his strategic restraint, which then added fuel to the simmering discontent in what were then called Labour’s ‘Heartlands’, to be later rebadged the ‘Red Wall’.  Blair felt he could overlook demands for more collectivist measures to radically address inequality in former industrial communities, believing Labour’s traditional working-class supporters had nowhere else to go. As a result, many of Blair’s achievements in government were superficial and easily swept away after 2010.

There are some – notably Blair himself – who still believe that during his time as Labour leader he marked out the One True Path for the party. His approach certainly worked in the short-term for Labour and Britain. But Blair’s myopic electoral strategy and unqualified faith in the globalised free market ultimately had disastrous consequences, which any Starmer government will need to fix.

Blair left Downing Street nearly two decades ago, before the financial crash, austerity, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war. When he was in charge the unions were cowed, inflation and taxes were low and the economy growing. The context for Blair’s success has been changed in so many ways, and few of them good. It consequently seems odd that commentators still talk about Blair as a relevant contemporary actor, especially given the dark cloud of Iraq hanging over him. Harold Wilson did not consult Clement Attlee in 1964 about how he should conduct his government; nor was Jim Callaghan called on by Blair in 1997 as any kind of mentor. Perhaps Starmer might be best advised to take the same approach to Blair today.

The current Labour leader’s truly ambitious Five Missions for a Better Britain suggests he has a very un-Blairite desire to leave a permanent and decisive mark. Just now, however, the caution that defined Blair’s whole approach is echoed by Starmer’s current watering down of potentially transformative party policies. There is clearly a tension within Starmerism between caution and radicalism.

If he wishes to avoid Blair’s fate as a Labour prime minister of modest and temporary achievement – bookended by two prolonged periods of Conservative governments – he should beware that Blairite hug.

What’s behind Zelensky’s latest purge?

President Zelensky has announced that he is dismissing the heads of all Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices and replacing them with veterans who had served on the front line. He used a video address to say that a state investigation had turned up widespread corruption, including bribe-taking and help for draft dodgers to flee abroad. 

Sounding a notably tough note, Zelensky said: ‘This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason.’ He recommended recruitment officers who lost their jobs but were not subject to investigation should volunteer to fight while insisting that joining up would not free anyone from criminal responsibility. ‘Officials who confused epaulettes with perks,’ he said, ‘will definitely face trial.’

In one respect, Zelensky’s decision can be seen as the most pointed of his efforts to root out corruption, which was one of his election promises back in 2019 and is a theme that has surfaced intermittently during the war. But it is at least as significant for what it may say about the public mood and about how far Ukraine’s President is already trying to anticipate postwar Ukraine.

First, the public mood. It is hard to believe that Zelensky would have ordered a state investigation into recruitment, let alone across-the-board dismissals, had there not been substantial public disquiet about who is and who is not being called up to fight. Since Ukraine declared martial law after the Russian invasion, there has been a ban on most men between 16 and 60 leaving the country. But there are now noticeably more men joining their women and children outside the country, suggesting the ban may be less effective than it was. 

The order also suggests that Kyiv may face some difficulty keeping up force numbers – for which there could be many reasons. The volunteer spirit, so evident and admirable in the first months of the conflict, might not be quite what it was; a number of viral social media posts show some recruiters resorting to extreme measures, reminiscent of press-ganging, to fill their quotas; or perhaps the casualty toll, for all that the numbers remain a state secret, is starting to act as a deterrent – a recent survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 80 per cent of those Ukrainians asked knew of someone in their immediate circle who had died or been injured. 

Whatever the reasons, for the President to sack all military recruitment heads in the middle of a war is a pretty drastic course of action and surely not something any commander-in-chief would choose to do if he thought that a lesser measure would suffice. 

Second, though, there may also be a longer-term consideration behind Zelensky’s action. Whenever he or another senior Ukrainian official takes part in an international gathering, whether the Nato summit last month, or the G7 side meeting that followed, or the Ramstein meetings on military assistance, or the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London in June, there is invariably a subtext to what’s said on the western side. Those with experience of dealing with Ukraine are wary of corruption, having watched large sums of money simply disappear. Governments and potential private investors alike warn that Ukraine will have to clean up its act if it is to receive the massive help with reconstruction it will need, let alone qualify to join the European Union. 

Now many in Ukraine, including in Zelensky’s immediate team, would regard that criticism as unfair. Between his inauguration and the Russian invasion, Zelensky probably did more to address corruption than any before him. New legislation was passed; a special anti-corruption court was established; dodgy government officials were dismissed. It can also be argued that the war has, in fact, served to reduce the power and influence of many so-called oligarchs, which might be seen as clearing the way for a less corrupt Ukraine. 

So this is another reason why Zelensky may want to speak in harsh terms about corruption – to demonstrate his awareness of the scourge and his determination to address it. Announcing the sackings of military recruiters, for instance, he said that there were currently 112 criminal cases against recruitment officials in train, that some were taking cash and some crypto-currency, that ill-gotten gains were being laundered, and that people liable for military service were being ‘transferred across the border’. In other words, he wanted to show that he knew what was going on. 

It will always be hard, of course, to distinguish how much is being made public out of necessity and how much is out of choice. Zelensky’s order of mass dismissals came after reports that the recruitment chief in Odesa had amassed millions in foreign currency and held a property portfolio in Spain. There are reports circulating about a scandal to do with the procurement and pricing of military uniforms. And back in January, a deputy minister for infrastructure, Vasyl Lozynskiy, was detained on suspicion of embezzlement, with other members of the ministry implicated and losing their jobs, too. 

But there is a third aspect to the sackings Zelensky has announced, beyond the need to address public concerns about justice at home and his desire to reassure prospective donors abroad: does Zelensky have the authority, the actual power, to make these decisions stick? 

As a war leader, he has, in effect, autocratic power, beyond anything he would enjoy as an elected leader in peacetime – and he has shown himself willing to use it. A small example was his recent summary dismissal of Ukraine’s respected ambassador in London for remarks he appears to have regarded as disloyal. For the time being, Zelensky’s position appears unchallenged. Nor does there appear to be anyone better equipped than he is to tackle Ukrainian corruption.

Even with his war powers, corrupt practices continue to be exposed. In the first months after Russia invaded, Ukraine’s military recruiters could rely on patriotic fervour to supply the numbers. Latterly, that became more difficult and they reverted to pre-war habits; bribery and corruption are back. 

Zelensky has been careful to delegate responsibility for replacing the heads of regional recruitment. He has ordered the head of the military, General Valery Zaluzhny, to find the new batch of recruiters and the security services to vet them. But how effective will this be and how quickly can it happen? In announcing such a comprehensive purge, Zelensky is taking quite a risk. This is an issue of broad public concern in Ukraine and foreign donors – present and potential – will also be watching carefully. Zelensky’s success or otherwise could ultimately have a bearing both on his future and on that of Ukraine.  

Toilet politics needn’t be difficult

August is traditionally the silly season in politics but we seem to be stuck in silly decade of policy, and not in a funny way. Even ten years ago, few might have imagined that the minister for equalities would have needed to open up a debate on toilets. Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch announced that the government is publishing draft guidance that will protect the dignity, privacy and safety of all. In particular, she insisted that so-called gender-neutral toilets are no longer an option.

The problem is less about toilets than language and assumptions. As Badenoch pointed out, gender-neutral does not mean unisex. Unisex toilets have been around for generations. The facilities in my house are unisex, as is the toilet on the train I used to get home on Saturday. They are fully self-enclosed rooms with hand basins, soap and water. Some coffee shops with limited space might have only one unisex toilet for everyone to use. We all know where we stand, though it would be a lot better if men sat.

Gender-neutral toilets are a rather different experience. At best, each toilet is in a cubicle with floor-to-ceiling partitions, but all the hand basins are plumbed in alongside each other in a communal area. Privacy from the other sex is limited, to say the least. Aside from the valid concerns about predatory men taking advantage – or inconsiderate men not bothering to close the door – it’s awkward and embarrassing for both sexes to share those sorts of spaces.

That has not stopped public and private sector organisations from trumpeting gender-neutral facilities as some sort of progressive leap forward. Back in 2017, Sadiq Khan’s new London plan called for more gender-neutral toilets in the capital. The outcome was depressingly predictable – a reduction in the number of facilities reserved for women – but it’s one that the mob on social media would rather we didn’t hear about. When, in 2019, Sarah Ditum catalogued her experience at the Old Vic in The Stage, the online theatre website withdrew her piece following ‘strong responses’.

More recently, Joan Smith was confronted with a bank of five urinals when she braved the ‘all gender’ toilets at The Lyric Hammersmith Theatre. These are not the toilets that I want to see either. The argument, of course, has been that going gender-neutral is somehow kind to trans people like me. When he launched his grand plan, Khan suggested that it might make trans and non-binary people more comfortable. That is hardly likely to happen when others are decidedly uncomfortable – we are human beings and we pick up the signals.

Rather than throw everyone in together, the best outcome is surely to offer a mix of provision, as Badenoch proposes, ‘separate single-sex toilets for women and men and/or a self-contained, private toilet as a minimum.’ Communal facilities are segregated by sex, while individual unisex toilets protect the privacy of those who do not wish to share with other members of their sex, for whatever reason. Long before I transitioned, those spaces were useful to me when my children were very young. The goal, surely, is to satisfy everybody’s needs without compromising anyone else’s rights.

This is not rocket science. Where there is lots of space, several additional cubicles can go alongside the traditional men’s and women’s. At the other extreme, a single unisex toilet might well be the only answer. Those looking to create problems rather than find solutions will likely look for the difficult cases – old buildings, perhaps, where it is impossible to put anything alongside the established male and female toilets. If that’s genuinely the case then so be it, but whataboutery must not be allowed to hinder progress elsewhere.

We’ve never had American-style ‘bathroom bills’ in the UK. In this country, a woman would not be committing a criminal offence if she chose to use the cubicle in the men’s to avoid a long queue. But the British sense of fair play has been tested – to the limit in some cases – by images of people whom we all know to be men self-identifying their way into women’s toilets. That needs to stop. To those who complain that they ‘only want to pee’, let them do just that – but in the privacy of their own company.

The Greggs delusion

Everything about Greggs is fake. You can smell it as you walk down any British high street. There’s an astringency, a hint that what lingers in those ovens is more than butter, flour, eggs and salt – that their food has been adulterated with something unnatural. What you’re smelling is an approximation of pastry, an attempt by the Greggs customer development unit to ‘curate an authentic baked goods experience’. 

Of course, we all secretly know the food is fake. The texture of the baguettes suggest that they’ve been salvaged from a 1970s deep freezer found buried beneath a Midlands business park. And the fillings. All that slimy pink ham. The medical cross-sections of boiled egg. The industrially-developed salad, precision engineered to survive for weeks and taste of nothing. The thick, engorged slabs of white flesh, smeared with a compound of mayonnaise and the dregs of a packet of Bombay mix that is, somehow, labelled ‘tandoori chicken’.

And that’s before you get to the sausage rolls. Oh, the ‘cheeky’ Greggs sausage roll. Puff pastry is supposed to flake into fragile, translucent, golden shards. Yet the Greggs sausage roll is normally undercooked, most of the time it’s served cold and it is always, always greasy. It cloys to your tongue and the top of your mouth, clogging up the gap between your cheeks and teeth. Much like a Nandos, the adjective ‘cheeky’ really means ‘depressingly mediocre’.

I could go on. The sausage? I could describe the salty, strangely tasteless tube of meat in the middle of a Greggs sausage roll. I could tell you it isn’t worthy of the name ‘sausage’ or that it doesn’t really deserve the title ‘meat’ either. I could say that beneath the blandness sits the uncanny sweet tang of pounded gristle which you’d never find in a real butcher’s banger. I could tell you that there’s something horribly sad about those multi-packs of freezable Greggs sausage rolls – the fourth is free! – or I could say they’re a gastronomic Prozac for those Saturday mornings when you realise that no one really likes you. But you know all that. And deep down, you know that everyone else knows it too. 

Because in truth, Greggs is a phenomenal example of how good marketing can trump everything – even the lack of an enjoyable product. The company has managed to hijack a part of British identity using carefully designed gimmicks, like its jocular social media presence or Primark clothing range. 

Greggs is a catering chain that has built a confected version of the northern spirit; a FTSE250 company that wants you to think it’s an unflappable upstart, uninterested in poncey southern obsessions like flavour. What they sell is sugary, carby fuel that is, crucially, cheap (never mind the fact that a Greggs tuna crunch baguette costs £4 in London, almost on a par with Pret’s offering). Greggs wants you to think it’s a fun British staple and that its steak bakes belong alongside a pint of Stella or Madri. In fact, they’ve spent millions trying to convince you of their easy-going Englishness.

But I remember going to the local bakery after school with my mum and sisters to buy a Chelsea bun or sticky willy (an iced bun, to the more puritanical among us). The shop was technically an independent, although ‘independent bakery’ now means a place that provides only sourdough and usually for around £5 a loaf. Instead, this was a place that was run by a couple of kindly old ladies who sold pastries to schoolchildren and builders. Nothing fancy – but decent – and obviously long gone. 

I remember, too, when I first moved to London, seeing those old-fashioned sandwich shops. Inevitably they involved a panini press, a pile of chicken escalops and a tub of margarine. The sandwiches were laid out behind a glass counter and were clearly made that morning, probably next to the till. Since I joined The Spectator, three of the four that existed within a five-minute walk of the office have gone under. 

Greggs, I think, is partially to blame. It’s the equivalent of what Wetherspoons is to real pubs: a rip-off, mass-produced attempt to undercut a struggling part of British culture. But unlike Wetherspoons, which one enters with a sense of shame, Greggs asks us to revel in the pact of price over personality. You will buy your tasteless pastry – forgetting that you’re starving a family-run bakery or sandwich shop down the road – and you’ll enjoy it. After all, it’s just a cheeky Greggs.