Amanda Abbington is right: drag queens aren’t for children

The Transgender Thought Police are impossible to please. The sooner Amanda Abbington realises, the better. The star of Sherlock and Mr Selfridge is the latest woman to end up in the dock for voicing an opinion they deem to be unacceptable.

After the BBC announced that Abbington was the first celebrity contestant confirmed for Strictly Come Dancing 2023, the mob went wild. Her so-called crime? Back in March she tweeted:

‘I lost quite a few followers for saying that a semi-naked man in thigh high boots dancing in a highly sexualised way shouldn’t be performing in front of babies and it tells me everything I need to know about where society is heading. How do you not agree with me on this???’

Anyone who understands the need to protect children must surely agree with Abbington. As a teacher, I am more bothered about those who take issue with her. Whoever thought that it was a good idea for adult entertainers to perform in front of children? Drag Queen Story Hour hit the headlines last year, but it rumbles on in libraries across the UK. Earlier this summer, Douglas Ross MP – leader of the Scottish Tories – protested Moray council’s decision to host ‘Miss Lossie Mouth’ in a ‘fun and interactive show suitable for children aged 0 to 6.’

Unlike Ross – who was characteristically unequivocal – Abbington has felt the need to issue an explanation. In a seven-minute video, she clarified that she ‘loved drag’, but:

‘My tweet back in March was regarding a 12-year-old who was doing it in front of adults. And it just upset me because I saw a kid, a little kid, a 12-year-old, doing something very over-sexualised. And I didn’t think it was right… And that was my tweet. I didn’t associate that with the trans community, nor would I associate that with the trans community, because I think they’re two separate things.’

It wasn’t right and transsexuals like me are fed up to the back teeth of being associated with sexualised performances. I don’t like drag acts personally, but I wouldn’t try to stop other adults going to see them. My concern is children. But while I agree with Abbington and share in the widespread outrage at the intimidation she has faced since the BBC announcement, I’m not sure that the trans community and adult performers can currently be treated separately.

The LGBTQIA+ mob have been very successful in blurring the boundaries. Transsexuals might not want to be associated with adult entertainers, but they seem to want to be associated with us. No wonder, it gives them legitimacy. Cheering them on are some so-called progressives who seem to think that any lifestyle is just fine when it is wrapped up in a rainbow, sprinkled with sparkles and dragged under the ever-expanding transgender umbrella. Painting themselves as victims, they can then punch down with impunity on anyone who dares to question their assertions.

The calls for a boycott of Strictly are both ludicrous and tedious, but social media attacks are a choice weapon of the mob. Dripping with self-righteousness and a total lack of self-awareness, their attempts to cancel Abbington are unlikely to end with her explanation. They cannot be appeased, so it is pointless to even try.

Anyone who says what they think, for example, ‘you cannot have a penis and want to be referred to as a woman’ – another of Abbington’s old social media posts – will enrage that small group of noisy activists. But the forum that really matters is the court of public opinion. Ordinary people know the difference between men and women, and they can be compassionate to transsexuals without compromising the rights of women or the safeguarding of children. We might not hear so much from them but they are the people who watch Strictly and vote. Abbington should hold her nerve.

Sir Humphrey covers up, again

Good old Sir Humphrey. Tories, Labour, Lib Dems – whoever is in power, he always seems to win. In recent years, there appears to have been a veritable explosion in the number of leaks in Whitehall and, with them, the inevitable Cabinet Office inquiries.

In July 2022, one was launched by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case after Cabinet Office papers, which damaged Penny Mordaunt’s chances in the Conservative leadership race, were leaked. The year before that, another inquiry was set up to look into leaked text messages between Boris Johnson and James Dyson, detailing their conversations over ventilators during the pandemic. And, of course, there was the infamous ‘chatty rat’ leak in October 2020 over the second national lockdown.

But it appears that the Cabinet Office wants to reveal as little as possible as to the extent and nature of these inquiries. In response to a Freedom of Information request sent in by Mr Steerpike, they stonewalled in classic Whitehall-speak – by claiming that the request for the number and cost of these inquiries was exempt from disclosure under a number of conditions.

One of these was that the information apparently ‘contains details about the detection and prevention of crime which would assist criminals to plan and execute criminal acts and to avoid detection.’ This was weighed up against ‘the general public interest’, and it was determined that the information should be withheld in ‘the interest of safeguarding national security’, and ‘the defence of the country.’

So, no confirmation as to how many leak inquiries there have been and no figure as to how much this has cost the taxpayer? Good to see Sir Humphrey has not lost his touch – nor his habit of conflating the national interest with his own personal one…

The Tories are heading for electoral evisceration

‘Whoever wins in September, the party will be stuck. Even in power it remains incapable of generating and delivering credible policies, incapable of using its resources to tackle the challenges ahead. In an uncertain world it struggles to decide what it wants to do, and struggles to implement the few ideas it has. The party has become a machine for garnering headlines and votes but is now starting to stall. Insulated by a media which also focuses on the day-to-day rigmarole of politics as soap opera, our leaders are missing the signs of short- and long-term crisis which will soon hit. They are failing to adapt, failing to plan. The sirens are ringing, the ground is coming.’

So ended this piece, a year ago today. Since then, a lot has happened, but little has changed. The Conservative party has failed to arrest its decline. To stretch the analogy, it has broken through the cloud cover and is clipping the tops of the trees. The latent faults have become glaring cracks. In burning through the chaos of the last year, the party has shown its inadequacy. It has also ensured its electoral evisceration.

Since the start of this year, Labour has held an average lead of 20 points over the Conservatives. Despite the incredulity of many pundits, this points towards a defeat worse than in 1997. Talk of polls narrowing nearer election day is repeated as a heuristic without questioning the logic behind it. It seems just as likely that the economy will continue to bite, the party’s credibility will continue to erode, and there is every chance its short campaign could collapse into chaos.

The party now seems too impotent to address the failures that have led it here. It continues to be unable to achieve even the things it desires, opting for government by announcement rather than action. It would rather discuss the trivia which enrages its base than the pressing issues facing the country. The party would rather whinge about the things it sees holding it back – from civil servants to Just Stop Oil – than utilise anything in its power to address it.

More than that, the party has become disconnected from the future of the country it wishes to govern. The Conservatives have shrunk to an unprecedented position in the age split of their voters. Only in the over 65s do they have a plurality of support. The entire working-age electorate intends to reject them at the next election.

The figures are stark. Only around 6 per cent of under-24s intend to vote Tory, far lower than ever before. For the cohort above that, those 25-49, a group that includes working parents and those in settled careers and homes, it is less than 15 per cent. Even among those approaching retirement, the Conservatives can’t count on more than a third supporting them.

None of this should be surprising. The party offers these voters almost nothing. Neither its retail policies nor its rhetoric in any way appeals to these demographics. For the younger groups in particular, the party ignores or worsens their problems and tells them it hates them, then wonders why the feeling is mutual.

On housing, the Conservative party largely refuses to accept this is an issue. It ignores the calamitous reality that affects even the sort of young people who might otherwise be Conservative. Even the highest-paid young professionals in London live in grotty flatshares at the whim of landlords, before getting to the point where perhaps they might be able to shell out the best part of a million quid on a two-bed where it doesn’t feel safe to walk home, or a family home with a multi-hour commute.

Elsewhere, when the party talks of cutting tax it ignores perhaps the most significant tax it has imposed. Since 2012, the student fees system has acted as a de facto graduate tax, draining the incomes of those who went to university with an extra levy. The government takes 13 per cent more of the pay of a ‘Plan 2’ graduate earning £40,000 than someone without a degree. Caught between the Exchequer and their landlords, the young have little economic incentive to vote Conservative, even if they are out-earning most of the country.

On other pressing matters, the party just seems uninterested. In discussions on stagnant economic growth, it can employ old memes about tax cuts, but offers little else to unleash the economy. On immigration, it says one thing and does another. It has offered no real answer on the costs of social care or childcare. Nor does it have an answer to the looming rise of dependency ratios and escalating health costs. It has now begun to waiver on the issue of tackling climate change. Every impending major issue seems sidelined, kicked into the ‘Too hard’ pile and left to worsen.

The party is instead more often babbling about minutiae. Clutching at the issues that appeal to angry boomers in Facebook groups or seeking to ‘own the libs’. Railing against working from home, or managers in the NHS, without real thought for how these issues work. They party plays to the gallery on social media, their associations, or certain corners of the press, unaware of the huge challenges which are lurking on the horizon. Even its more centrist figures focus their energies against the sugar content of drinks or half-baked regulation of the internet.

Almost all of the optics of the party are now geared towards the ageing. Last week Rishi Sunak posed in Thatcher’s old Rover. No one under the age of 55 at the next election could have ever voted for a party led by her. Her first election was as far from us today as Baldwin was from hers. The tortured nostalgia for the half-remembered matriarch can be aimed only at voters collecting their pensions.

A change to inheritance tax too, seemingly the Tories’ big election idea, would be geared towards older voters – those whose parents are dying in their 80s and are starting to think of their own estate. Especially as absent any spending cuts it would mean shifting the burden further onto those of working age. The party is going all-in on gerontocracy.

The whole message is becoming repugnant to voters below the pensionable age. The party all too often seems to despise younger people and the way they live, blaming them for the structural issues that affect them, and ridiculing their values.

This presents a problem for the Tories beyond the next election. The demographic they rely on for support is naturally shrinking, and there is no guarantee that pensioners in a decade will vote like pensioners today. Indeed, there is every chance that they become more trenchantly anti-Tory unless the party pivots to offering them something more than a Culture War with Thatcherite cosplay.

It will be hard to win back the voters who feel let down by the Tories. The last decade or so of government has involved juggling and then disappointing a large electoral coalition. Now that coalition is coming together against them to produce a catastrophic defeat. Unless they do something to reverse this the party looks to be out of power for many years – it is simply impossible to win with deep unpopularity across all but one demographic.

It also becomes self-reinforcing. If the under-60s aren’t voting for you, they also aren’t becoming party members, officials, or candidates. Already most of the Tory selection meetings look like they are in the local nursing home. Active members are always a minority of the party, but the fewer votes it gets the more marginal, and frankly weird, that group becomes. This hampered the Tories on the return from 1997, but even then a quarter of young people were voting Tory.

Now, there is a real risk the party will age out, unable to replenish itself. With the party languishing among young people, the sorts you might expect to be the members, MPs and ministers of the 2040s probably don’t even vote Tory today. Those that do seem often begrudgingly drawn to it by some combination of sunk costs and vain hope. They certainly tell their friends that that party is a disaster, even if they don’t let on to CCHQ in case it stunts their political career.  

The party’s approach to itself looks quite like its approach to policy. It is inadequately prepared for the challenge ahead, blind to the looming crisis and its own mistakes. It is trapped on the daily point scoring irrelevancies, while struggling to follow through from diagnosis to action on the problems.  

Politics needs a spectrum of parties. It seems impossible that right-wing ideas and values can be simply vanquished from the scene. Conservatism has to survive in some form – and has to come up with compelling answers to the challenges of the future. Yet it is hard to see what role the Tory party plays in this without serious correction. It has in its favour the institutional inertia of existing parties, combined with the way our first past the post system entrenches incumbents against new start-up challengers.

The Tory party is one of the longest-lasting and most successful forces in global politics. It cannot, however, take its continued survival for granted. In the past it has survived because it has been able, largely, to ride the waves of social, political and policy change. It has adapted, pairing its long-standing philosophies with at times radical policy thinking and implementing them, broadly successfully. This takes effort and thought.

The party need not ever be universally loved. It must, however, have broad enough appeal to be able to win elections. It cannot simply become the political wing of the boomer-Facebook-complex. Nor can it become beholden to a narrow seam of angry reactionaries who simply seek to rail at the modern world.

The problem now is that the party seems largely to have given up. Its legislative agenda for the remaining term is light. Current policy announcements are weak and half-hearted. It is approaching the next election fight with little zeal or enthusiasm. It has let go of governing, it has let go of fighting – and, increasingly, has let go of thinking. The most interesting conversations about policy, and the future, are happening outside of it. It is not saving itself, nor giving anyone else a reason to.

The Tory party has always tried to moderate between tradition and modernity. It has sought to balance the legacy of those who have gone before with those yet to come. Now it risks failing to do this, slipping away from all but one generation – becoming utterly unwanted by the young, and in turn almost blind to the future of the country. This will result in an electoral reckoning, but it remains to be seen whether this shock will be conducive to its rejuvenation.

When a plane crashes, an entire industry bursts into life to study why and to prevent it from happening again. Vital lessons are gleaned from the wreckage and future problems are prevented. It is now clear to everyone that the Tories are going to crash. The question is whether the party will be in a state to fix its issues and focus on the future.

This article first appeared on John Oxley’s Substack.

Britain has a productivity problem

First the good news – the fall in living standards may be coming to an end, with wages starting to run ahead of inflation. Now the bad news: it is as much because wages are rising than inflation is falling – which suggests that high inflation is beginning to become embedded in workers’ expectations. Capital Economics is forecasting that next week’s inflation figures will show the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) at 6.8 per cent, down from 7.9 per cent last month. Average earnings figures, it predicts, will simultaneously rise to 7 per cent – up from 6.9 per cent last month and up from 6.1 per cent a year earlier.

This matters because the Bank of England’s strategy for tackling inflation has been based on the premise that the inflationary surge of the past two years is a one-off reaction to the economy’s re-emergence from the pandemic and to the Ukraine war. It has assumed that wages will not simply follow inflation upwards. Indeed, its Monetary Policy Report published last week forecasts that regular pay in the private sector will fall to 6.0 per cent by the end of the year, down from 7.7 per cent now. But will it? Now that regular pay rises have become an expectation there is every reason to suspect that workers will become more, not less, bold in their wage demands. The only thing that might change would be a recession with rising unemployment, making workers keen to hang onto their jobs at any wage.

The trouble is that with productivity growth non-existent in Britain at present there is no room for real-term wage rises. In the year to the first quarter of 2023 labour productivity per hour was down 0.6 per cent. It is now just 0.6 per cent higher than it was in 2019. In terms of output per worker, productivity is exactly where it was in 2019.  

Workers might think they deserve a real-terms pay rise because that is the way things have always been. But if they are not producing more, then sustainable real-terms pay rises simply are not possible – they will inevitably be eaten away by inflation as prices rise to reflect consumers’ extra purchasing power. Monetary policy might succeed in keeping a lid in inflation – although the Bank of England has failed miserably in this department over the past couple of years – but it cannot on its own generate real-terms wage growth. Britain’s problem is very much in the productivity department.

But to tackle that is going to require some hard questions about working practices. Since the pandemic there has been a concentration on work-life balance, with many workers now demanding the right to work from home if not to enjoy a cut from a five day to a four-day working week. Advocates of these measures often claim that working less improves productivity, but the evidence of the past four years hardly supports that assertion. If we want to return to real-terms wage rises productivity is going to have to dominate the debate.

Nicola Sturgeon’s splurges on airport VIP services

Despite it being the SNP’s main political goal, Scotland came no closer to becoming an independent state during Nicola Sturgeon’s long tenure as First Minister. Still, for Sturgeon, the SNP being in charge had at least one perk – it allowed her to cosplay as a world leader on the global stage. Who could forget the jet setting and endless summits, complete with awkward selfies with the great and good that defined her term?

Now, official spending receipts obtained by the Labour party show the extent to which taxpayers footed the bill for these foreign jamborees.

According to the documents, Scottish civil servants made 58,000 bank transactions using taxpayer funded cards between September 2019 and August last year. Officials purchased items such as nail polish, crockery, a leaving card, a ‘homedisco’ and even a driving theory test for a member of staff. There was also one payment of £4,182 for hospitality and accommodation at the five-star Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire.

Officials also spent nearly £10,000 on ‘VIP services’ used by the First Minister on her travels. According to the documents, the money was spent on ‘meet and greets’ for Sturgeon and her staff, with Ace Handling the most frequent company used, which promises to serve its clients ‘like royalty’ (or first ministers, perhaps). One of the services it offers is picking clients up ‘kerbside from their car, then whisked through the check-in, security procedures, to the VIP lounge, and then to the awaiting flight.’ The Scottish government said it could not comment on a first minister’s travel plans for security reasons.

Mr S understands of course that it makes sense for officials acting on behalf of the state to have their travel paid for. But it’s worth pointing out here that foreign affairs is a reserved matter – and so not the responsibility of the Scottish government at all. In other words, it appears that taxpayers ended up footing the ‘VIP’ bill for Nicola Sturgeon’s ego trips.

No wonder the SNP is in such a state…

We’re living through Barack Obama’s third term

One of the big questions in Washington and across the country as Joe Biden’s very public decline has accelerated is: who’s actually running the show at the White House? There have been various answers, including former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice; even Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff has been touted as having outsized influence. But the one name we ought to be paying more attention to is obvious – the man who cleared the 2020 field for Joe, tapped Kamala as his running mate and now hosts regular meetings at his 8,000-square-foot house just two miles from the Oval Office he used to occupy: Barack Obama.

Last week’s publication of an interview with biographer David J. Garrow by David Samuels in Tablet magazine went viral for a number of hot-button reasons, but this is the actual headline takeaway Americans ought to have for the piece: they’re living through Barack Obama’s third term. Samuels draws attention to this point particularly in the context of foreign policy:

The rest of the year, [Obama] lives in a large brick mansion in Kalorama. Doesn’t it strike you as weird that he’s an ex-president, he’s comparatively young and he’s living in the center of Washington, DC? The original excuse was that Sasha had to finish school. Then you could say, “Well, the opposition to Trump needs a figure to rally around.” But now Sasha has graduated from USC, Trump is gone, Joe Biden was elected present, but he’s still there…

Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, I have heard from more than one source that there are regular meetings at Obama’s house in Kalorama involving top figures in the current White House, with Secret Service and cars outside. I don’t write about it because it’s not my lane. There are over a thousand reporters in Washington, and yet there are zero stakeouts of Obama’s mansion, if only to tell us who is coming and going. But he clearly has his oar in.

I don’t follow the Iranian stuff super, super carefully, but I have been puzzled at the Biden administration’s continuing attachment to the Iran deal.

The easy explanation, of course, is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t.

This is an audacious violation of norms for ex-presidents. If true, it really would take allegations that Biden’s presidency is merely an old man serving as an Obama puppet to a new level. And it would be consistent with other things Obama has said. As he told Stephen Colbert when discussing the concept of a hypothetical third term back in 2015:

I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony. I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.

On its face, this would explain a great deal about the inconsistencies between the current president’s past approaches to any number of areas of policy — domestic, economic and foreign — but it would also particularly explain Biden’s embrace of modern wokeness as a trademark issue, despite not campaigning on it in 2020. It’s hard to imagine Joe Biden, marked by moderation on many hot-button issues in his Senate tenure, would so quickly turn to divisive culture war stances. But he’s done exactly that, without even an attempt to explain why.

Assuming that there is truth to this tale, why is the DC press corps so incurious about it? What would it take to stake out the Kalorama house of the former president to track the comings and goings of major administration figures? This sort of reporting was ubiquitous to the Trump era in DC, where journalists tracked relationships and followed interactions constantly, measuring who was on the inside and pushed aside by the president on a daily basis. When Joe Biden returned, somehow they just lost all interest. Isn’t it time to wonder: why?

This article first appeared in the Spectator’s World edition.

Conor McGregor is finished

The most recent UFC event, UFC 291, was a fascinating spectacle. Of all the compelling fights that took place, the final one, which saw Justin Gaethje face off against Dustin Poirier, was by far the best. Shortly after Gaethje stole the show with a devastating head-kick knockout of Poirier, Conor McGregor took to Twitter – sorry, X ­– to give his thoughts. More specifically, he took to X to warn Gaethje that, very soon, he would ‘slap’ him around. 

A few years ago, perhaps, such a threat would have carried some weight. It would have been met with a mixture of debate and excitement. In 2023, however, McGregor is a pale comparison to the fighter he once was. Twitter users mercilessly ridiculed McGregor, accusing him of being a washed-up has-been, a man who is forever barking but rarely, if ever, biting.  

When asked for his thoughts on McGregor’s laughable threat, and whether he would be interested in facing off against the Irishman, Gaethje told reporters that he likes ‘to fight big fights, I like exciting things, so it sounds pretty exciting to me.’ However, he added, ‘I’m not gonna fight someone on steroids. I’ve never taken steroids in my life, and I never will… I don’t want to fight someone who is cheating. And I probably shouldn’t even say that if I want the McGregor fight, but it’s the truth’.  

McGregor denies taking steroids, and there is no evidence to indicate that he has. But what is true is that no one believes McGregor would defeat Gaethje. Deep down, if he’s being honest, Conor probably doesn’t believe it either.

As an Irishman, I firmly believe that McGregor is one of Ireland’s greatest ever sporting exports. He’s up there with Roy Keane and Katie Taylor. Nevertheless, it’s time to have an honest discussion – a brutally honest discussion – about the Dubliner.

A decade ago, McGregor, then 25, made his UFC debut against Marcus Brimage. He won that fight in blistering fashion, finishing off Brimage in a little over 60 seconds. A year later, in just his third UFC appearance, he headlined a main event in Dublin. McGregor scored a first-round TKO over Diego Brandão. The crowd went wild. Then, just a few months later, he scored a first-round TKO of the aforementioned Dustin Poirier. On 11 July 2015, he secured a second-round TKO of Chad Mendes for the interim featherweight belt. Five months after that, he knocked out José Aldo in 13 seconds (the fastest finish in the history of UFC title fights) to unify the title. December 2015 was peak McGregor. Since then, by and large, it has all been downhill – a mixture of devastating injuries and devastating, even embarrassing, losses.  

The McGregor of today is not the McGregor of 2015. He’s not even the McGregor of 2020, the last time he won a professional fight. Even then, that victory came against Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone, a fighter who peaked more than a decade ago. 

In the years since his conquests in the Octagon, McGregor has made headlines for all the wrong reasons. When he’s not busy assaulting elderly men and smashing fans’ phones, he can be found flogging whisky of questionable quality. Today, it seems, McGregor’s name is associated with everything but actually fighting (fighting other UFC fighters, not Irish pensioners). 

Sure, McGregor has a nice lifestyle brand, and sure, he recently released yet another Netflix documentary, and yes, he’s worth a few hundred million dollars. But Conor McGregor is, first and foremost, a fighter – or at least he was up until fairly recently. 

A few years ago, if there was one word to describe McGregor, it would have been ‘emphatic’. In 2023, it’s ‘erratic’. If supreme athletes treat their bodies like temples, McGregor appears to treat his own like a refuse bin. He certainly has a fondness for alcohol. In February, while filming for The Ultimate Fighter in Las Vegas, a video of McGregor, one of the coaches on the show, surfaced. In it, The Notorious, seemingly inebriated, offered shots of his whisky to contestants – the very people he was hired to mentor. 

In many ways, his desire to get drunk is understandable. After all, we so often drink to forget. On The Ultimate Fighter, McGregor’s performance as a coach has been, for lack of a better word, shambolic. The contrast between McGregor and Chandler, the other coach on the show, couldn’t be more stark. The latter is a consummate professional, a gentleman, someone very much dedicated to the craft. He’s not interested in Netflix shows or flash cars. He is, like all great fighters, interested in winning as many contests as possible. Chandler is consistent. McGregor is chaotic.  

Throughout the entirety of the series, Chandler has offered unconditional support to his apprentices. McGregor, on the other hand, has offered platitudes, poor advice, and questionable training methods.  

Which leads us to the question: is McGregor done? Considering the Dubliner is 35, and many MMA fighters peak in their twenties, the answer appears to be yes. Moreover, McGregor’s life is a circus. The way he lives is not compatible with that of a supreme athlete. You don’t see Ronaldo stumbling around, blabbering incoherent nonsense. You don’t see Alexander Volkanovski, arguably the UFC’s best pound-for-pound fighter, being brought before a court of law. Truly great athletes are dedicated to the craft. They eat, sleep, and breathe their profession. They don’t spend inordinate amounts of time trolling people online. Conor McGregor risks becoming a caricature of himself, a sort of mash-up between Ray Winstone and Borat, part tough guy, part buffoon.  

Sure, he’s still got the swagger, and yes, he still knows how to trash talk. But fewer and fewer people actually want to hear what he has to say. Unfortunately, for McGregor at least, his days as a top-class fighter appear to be well and truly numbered.  

Just say no to sourdough

One Sunday morning, in an upmarket bakery packed to the hilt with women clutching yoga mats and men proudly carrying papoose-swaddled babies, I glanced around in search of a fresh loaf to serve for lunch. I saw the myriad of shapes, sizes, colours and textures of the loaves on display, and then noticed something. All but one, a seeded rye, were variations on the dreaded sourdough. When it was my turn to be served, I asked ‘Is there anything in the shop except for damned sourdough?’ Judging by the disgusted looks that came my way, I might as well have been asking whether anyone fancied kicking a few homeless people for a laugh.

Eating in a renowned Tuscan restaurant, I was appalled to be served sourdough alongside a bowl of olive oil for dipping. That’s like serving a chapati with rillettes. The monstrosity of sourdough cuts your mouth to ribbons with its razor-sharp crust and has been enjoying world domination since we all became home bakers in lockdown.

If you want to know more about the origins of this San-Franciscan import, you could always visit the Sourdough Museum in Belgium (I kid you not) where you will discover that the Egyptians were likely the first to discover fermentation.

I first heard of sourdough when reading the 2000 classic Kitchen Confidential by the late Anthony Bourdain:

The kitchen phone rang, followed by a beep, the little green light indicating that the hostess at the front desk had a call for me…

‘Call for the chef,’ she said. ‘Line two.’

‘Feed the bitch!’ said the voice on the phone. ‘Feed the bitch or she’ll die!’

The caller is an assistant chef too hungover to come to work at the restaurant. The ‘bitch’ was the sourdough starter sitting in a huge bucket in the pantry.

From this exchange, I discovered that sourdough is made not with yeast but by adding what is called a ‘starter’, a paste made from flour and water that captures and develops wild yeasts to create the basis of leavening. This paste will need ‘feeding’ with flour and water about every 12 hours and must be kept in a warm place for three to five days to become active. 

The absence of yeast is why, during the great yeast shortage of lockdown 2020 when bakeries were closed, sourdough became so popular. People began making it at home, and holiday and restaurant pics on Instagram were replaced with ugly, cracked loaves of home-baked bread.

It has its place (in my house, the bin) but not in every restaurant, sandwich bar or bakery shelf. Remember the days when appropriate bread would adorn the table? An oily focaccia studded with rosemary to accompany Italian fare or a crisp baguette for French cuisine.  

There are an estimated 315 varieties of bread in Spain, but guess what I was offered in every restaurant and hotel I visited during a recent visit to Barcelona? In a Greek café recently I asked for a slice of what is known as ‘country bread’ made with semolina, flour, honey, sesame seeds, and olive oil. The waiter told me they are constantly asked for sourdough.

It’s always been one of those great pleasures, trying the local bread when travelling, because it has grown up alongside the rest of the food. Think of the Armenian lavash, soft when fresh, crispy when dried, or the sumptuous paratha, a layered Indian flat bread made from wheat flour and glistening with ghee. Soda bread with a full Irish breakfast is a thing of beauty, as is grissini with a little prosciutto wrapped on the end.

Now think of sourdough. It is impossible to make a decent sandwich with it. Any filling gets drowned within the dense heavy bread and unless you have the teeth and jawline of a hippopotamus you will be chewing for a week.

Can I live with it? Given a choice between plastic, sugary white sliced bread and sourdough, I would opt for the latter. But that’s a low bar. Somebody once told me that I wasn’t allowed to dislike it because ‘this is how bread was made in the old days’. I don’t care.

Bread-bro culture is uber-macho and attracts the bearded man-bun crowd, like chilli-infused cocktails and kimchi. The dudes that used to obsess about pizza have now shifted to sourdough. In fact, it’s worse than that – they are now making pizza from sourdough. Perverts.

Watch Julie Bindel on The Week in 60 Minutes with Freddy Gray

How to spend 48 hours in Tangier

One of the few highlights of newly-released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a frantic chase through 1960s Tangier. It’s breathless, edge-of-the-seat stuff with tuk-tuks, motorcycles, a Jaguar and Mercedes tearing through the narrow streets of the medina, guns blazing and quips flying. I’m told so many tuk-tuks got mangled they needed dozens to shoot the scene. 

What a crushing disappointment, then, to discover that the sequence was filmed not in Tangier at all but in Fez and Oujda. The 1987 Bond film, The Living Daylights, was filmed in Tangier, as was its 2015 successor, Spectre. And there’s that nail-biting chase in the Bourne Ultimatum, of course, shot in cinéma vérité style. 

I learned all the above and more during a far-too-brief weekend in Tangier with Mrs Ray. I’d never been before. In fact, I’d never been to Morocco, although Mrs R dimly recollected a drunken girls’ trip to Marrakesh (dimly, I suspect, thanks to a touch too much kif in the Rif). But heck, I’d never even been to North Africa and was immediately smitten. 

Flights to Tangier aren’t frequent but they’re well-timed, in the same time zone and short. Indeed, our journey from Gatwick took barely two and a half hours. That’s about the same as Gatwick to Budapest, Helsinki or Rome and considerably shorter than Gatwick to Athens, Istanbul or Valletta. And we weren’t just in a different country: we were in a different continent. In time for dinner.

We stayed at the reassuringly swish Fairmont Tazi Palace, built (but never occupied) in the 1920s by an advisor to the sultan and launched as a hotel in December last year. Set in the hills above the medina in Jebel Kebir (a residential area known as the ‘Beverly Hills of Tangier’), it’s just a short cab ride from the airport. 

We took stock over a cocktail or so in the hotel’s 1920s-style Origin Bar, complete with wood-panelling, leather armchairs, spectacular green marble bar top, laudably well-stocked back bar and the aroma of expensive cigars. Smoking is encouraged here and, indeed, wasn’t that Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre puffing away on Cuban Cohibas in the corner? 

We dined in Crudo, the hotel’s farm-to-table restaurant where 90 per cent of its produce comes from Tangier or nearby. We did ourselves well with sharing plates of tuna tartare, whole roast cauliflower, roast sea bream, marinated octopus, braised lamb, sweet peppers and feta all washed down with a fine, fresh, creamy Moroccan Chardonnay and rich, fruity-yet-savoury Moroccan Syrah. 

Few guests bother to venture out of the hotel, I’m told. Certainly, there’s plenty to do with seven restaurants and bars, a vast outdoor swimming pool, fitness centre and spa, but it seems a bit feeble not to go and explore so, the following morning, woken by the call to early prayer, go and explore we did. 

We wandered around Perdicaris Park where, with great views of the Spanish coast and of Gibraltar shimmering across the Med, we saw three countries and two continents in one glance. We then cabbed it to the Caves of Hercules, where Hercules supposedly slept before completing the eleventh of his twelve labours: the stealing of golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. The cave is famed for its craggy, strangely-shaped opening which either looks like a map of Africa or the profile of a face in mid-shout. Either way, it’s a striking image. 

We took in the lighthouse at Cap Spartel – the most north-western point of Africa, where Atlantic and Mediterranean meet – and had an excellent plate of fresh fish and salad at Restaurant Cap Spartal. 

Back in the medina, we wandered the crammed, twisting streets full of bustling locals, tired dogs, stray cats and laughing children, passing tiny booths in which men spun silk and mended fraying jillabas; where barbers cut hair with room for just one customer, and where wizened old souls peddled cigarettes and sweets. 

We saw carpet sellers, greengrocers, haberdashers and wood-fired communal ovens where folk brought food to cook and collect later; stalls with great sacks of spices, pulses and dried fruit spilling onto the ground and butcher’s shops with legs of lamb hanging in the windows along with a single testicle to prove they only sold male meat. 

We popped into the tiny, shabby Café Baba, made famous by the Rolling Stones and full of twenty-somethings drinking Turkish coffee, mint tea and enjoying the ‘whole package’, that’s to say locally grown kif or hashish. 

We ducked into the Hotel Continental, favoured haunt of Barbara Hutton, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Humphrey Bogart, Winston Churchill & co and then, at sunset, strolled by the harbour watching the lights of the ferry as it slipped out towards Tarifa in Spain.  

Then it was back to the Tazi Palace for cocktails in the quirky, speakeasy-style Innocents Bar hidden behind an anonymous heavy door, followed by supper of lamb tagine, meatballs and beef kebabs and a couple of bottles of fine Moroccan red on the terrace of Parisa. 

And so, well, there we were, just two and a half hours from Gatwick, dining under the stars of an African night. How cool is that? 

Fairmont Tazi Palace, Tangier – prices start from £229 per room per night.

Scottish nationalists aren’t alone in seeing independence as an opportunity

It’s not every day a supporter of Scottish independence is in the running for a peerage, least of all from a Tory government. So no doubt the SNP will be congratulating Mark Littlewood, who could soon be Lord Littlewood thanks to Liz Truss’s resignation honours. The outgoing director of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) has distinguished himself in the world of London think tanks, where most are as uninterested in the fate of the Union as they are uninformed about Scottish politics. Not Littlewood, who is relaxed about the prospect of the Scots breaking away. 

During a February 2017 appearance on Question Time, he told the Glasgow audience: ‘I see no reason why Scotland can’t take its place as a proud independent nation.’ (In a demonstration of the BBC’s notorious Unionist bias, Littlewood was one of three pro-independence voices on the five-member panel, alongside the senior SNP politician John Swinney and nationalist luvvie Val McDermid.) At the time, the SNP was keen to welcome Littlewood to the cause. The party shared a video of his comments on its official Facebook page while the SNP’s head of digital posted the same video on Twitter. 

The following month, Littlewood popped up in the National, house journal of people who think Tesco is trying to brainwash them through fruit packaging, to expand on his views. He wrote that ‘whether through independence or devolution, more power must be taken from Westminster’ and contended that a go-it-alone Scotland could continue using the pound and join the European Union without adopting the euro. These two contentions are key SNP talking points.

Elsewhere, Littlewood has said a second independence referendum is ‘wholly justified’ by the UK’s vote for Brexit. He believes the ‘administrative difficulties’ of Scotland seceding have been ‘overstated’ by Unionists and suggests the UK’s departure from the EU as the model. After all Brexit, he asserts, has ‘gone relatively smoothly’. 

If it seems odd that a London-based free-marketeer would be mad keen on Scottish constitutional politics, it becomes less strange when you dig into Littlewood’s reasons for spruiking the benefits of independence. He notes: 

‘We don’t know how an independent Scotland would behave. Would it continue on its present public policy path, which I guess you could say is measurably to the left of centre, certainly compared to the rest of the United Kingdom, or would it rediscover the joys of Adam Smith?’

In his assessment:

If Scotland had not just the opportunity but the responsibility of standing on its own two feet, you would almost certainly get better public policy for Scotland.

You don’t have to be a Navajo code talker to decipher the ideological underpinnings of Littlewood’s argument, but in case you’re still in doubt, in arriving at his view, Littlewood says he has applied ‘a sensible classical liberal approach’ that says ‘smaller governments’ are closer to the people and ‘tend to make wiser decisions’. That’s already more red flags than a military parade at the Kremlin but here’s one more: Littlewood says a separate Scotland would need to take ‘an urgent approach to fiscal responsibility’. 

The joys of Adam Smith.

Standing on its own two feet.

A classical liberal approach. 

Smaller governments.

An urgent approach to fiscal responsibility. 

As Mrs Merton didn’t quite say, I wonder what it was that attracted the state-slashing libertarian Mark Littlewood to the cause of Scottish independence. 

Whatever one makes of his politics, there can be no doubt that Littlewood speaks from decades of experience in public policy and influencing government. He knows how politicians think, how they react to events and crises, and how this can ultimately inform policy and legislation. Like Scottish nationalists, he sees independence as an opportunity, but rather than protesting that the opportunity they see is very different, nationalists should ask themselves which one is more like to come to fruition: their bitter utopianism or the slick-sounding remedies of low taxes, fiscal restraint and a small state. 

If they are honest, they won’t like the answer, which is why they should have been a little more circumspect about the IEA director’s warm words for independence. Arise Lord Littlewood of Yes, in the county of Natland — Scottish nationalism’s first member of the House of Lords. 

Watch: Matt Hancock’s cringeworthy Barbie singalong

Can Matt Hancock sink any lower? Considering that only last year he lost the whip for abandoning his constituents to appear on I’m a Celebrity, and before that had his lockdown-busting affair exposed to the world, you would probably think not.

Even so, the former Health Secretary has managed to once again plumb new depths, this time after turning his talents to lip-syncing.

In a video released on his TikTok account this week, Hancock can be seen in a white shirt and shorts on a beach in an undisclosed location, singing along to the song ‘I’m just Ken’ from the recently released Barbie movie.

The film sees Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, journeying to the real world with Margot Robbie’s Barbie, where he discovers ‘the patriarchy’ and uses his knowledge to initiate a coup back home. Mr S wonders if it’s a coincidence that the disgraced former Health Secretary identifies so much with a plastic figurine who betrays all the women in his life…

Still, in one sense at least Mr S is impressed. Plenty of people just have a boring old mid-life crisis. Meanwhile Hancock is managing a mid-life apocalypse…

Watch here, if you can bear:

The politics of exam results

August always means an anxious wait for results days, but this year pupils will be feeling particularly apprehensive. England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, has said that national results will be lower than last year’s and are expected to be similar to those before Covid. Some reports estimate that around 50,000 A-level students will therefore miss out on getting the A* and A grades they could have expected if they took their exams last year. They will also face intense competition for top university places given the record numbers of international students applying too.

Readjusting after the grade inflation of the pandemic was always going to be painful. In 2019, 25.5 per cent of A-level results were grades A or A*; in 2021 this skyrocketed to 45 per cent, and then fell to 36.4 percent last year. If, as predicted, this falls another 11 percent or so, then there will be a lot of disappointed pupils who may feel penalised simply for not being born 12 months earlier. In their defence, they were also adversely affected by the pandemic: this cohort will have spent their GCSE years in and out of lockdowns, and will have only sat their first ever public exams in May and June as their exams were cancelled in 2021.

Dr Jo Saxton, the chief regulator of Ofqual, has hailed this ‘return to normal’ as ‘an important milestone’. But what does ‘normal’ even mean anymore? By constantly moving the grade boundaries goalposts, we undermine the objectivity of the exams process, and what should be an objective metric has instead become a political football. How am I supposed to tell my students that exams are a fair, standardised, reliable indicator of their achievements, when the standard they need to achieve varies so wildly from year to year? 

Goodhart’s Law states that ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.’ This is exactly what has happened with exam results. Quangos continue to set quotas which are often heavy-handed and ruthlessly statistical, designed to continually adjust the bell curve on the basis of political decisions and party optics. If a government wants to show schools are improving, then it has to accept a degree of grade inflation, but too much and the credibility of those results is questioned. Therefore, rather than accepting a degree of natural fluctuation from year to year, we have this incredibly complicated system of standardisation and intervention in order to mould results into a pre-ordained statistical shape. Behind this subtle tweaking is a lot of subjectivity.

Of course, we need exam regulators like Ofqual to ensure compatibility and comparability between exam boards. I have taught three different exam boards for English Literature A-level, all of which have startlingly different grade boundaries. For OCR, grade boundaries for A*s are often over 90 per cent; for Edexcel, they are closer to 75 per cent. The text choices and questions for Edexcel are not necessarily any more difficult, but I often have to adjust the generosity of my marking so that the result fits the grade rather than the other way around. As the grade boundaries fluctuate so much from year to year, it becomes increasingly more difficult to predict.

Some people may wonder why exam boards don’t just award grades on the basis of norm referencing: judging pupils’ performance in relation to the rest of their cohort and then fixing the percentages accordingly. For example, the top 5 per cent achieve A*s, then the next 10 per cent achieve As and so on. The problem is that such a system would encourage excellence, but also exclusivity: you have to accept a certain number of students always ‘failing’, and there is no way to track improvements or progress in schools. It also raises the question of what is more important: keeping the grade profile consistent, or giving grades consummate with how knowledgeable a particular cohort actually are. Instead, GCSEs and A-levels combine norm-referencing with criterion-referencing: measuring students’ performance against certain standards, which allows governments to, once again, turn measures into targets. For example, the government has said that it wants 90 per cent of Year 6 students to meet the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, and the average grade in GCSE English Language and Maths to increase to a 5.

There are no easy answers or quick fixes, and, whatever happens next week, young people deserve praise for their achievements in the face of years of disruption. Rather than nostalgically reminiscing about when ‘times were tougher’ and lamenting rampant grade inflation, we need to consider how we can depoliticise exam results so that they can truly reflect performance rather than perpetuate a particular narrative.

What does Scottish Labour stand for?

North of the border, the long-anticipated by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West has finally been confirmed. This constituency is classic SNP-Labour swing territory, and though an SNP-held seat until recently, polls have shown that Labour support in Scotland is on the rise. The by-election will put these predictions to the test: can Labour’s candidate Michael Shanks not just win, but win well and capture the mood for change? Possibly, but for this to happen, Labour needs to present Scottish voters with a better vision — instead of continuing to rely on SNP failures.

We can be assured that the longstanding SNP-Labour rivalry will come out in full force as the by-election date nears. The same tactics have all been used before. For years, the Labour party used to invoke the SNP’s role in bringing down Jim Callaghan’s Labour government in 1979, while another Labour mantra is to talk about ‘Scotland’s two failing governments’ — hereby establishing an equivalence between the UK Tories and SNP in charge in Scotland. But these clever soundbites don’t quite cut through as well as the party thinks, given Scottish centre-left politics is all about outdoing ones’ opponents in their hatred for the Tories.

SNP folk have found a special line in sneering at Labour in Scotland as ‘red Tories’ being ‘under the control of London’. The latest evidence supporting this perspective is the Electoral Commission assessment that Labour in Scotland is not completely autonomous, but is allowed to put the word ‘Scottish’ in front of their legal name (describing the party as an ‘accounting unit’ of the UK Labour party). Yet more proof, claim SNP supporters, that there is no such thing as ‘the Scottish Labour party’ and it is all a trick to hoodwink voters. 

Meanwhile, the nationalists have seized on a series of Labour policy u-turns as proof that there is no difference between Keir Starmer’s party and the Tories. They have been given fresh ammunition by Starmer’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap, a policy that Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has himself called ‘heinous’ — but one that is he is unable to do anything about. Not that the SNP don’t have problems of their own: their candidate Katy Loudon has to answer questions about whether Nicola Sturgeon is an electoral ‘asset’, and whether Loudon would welcome her campaigning in the seat. 

Yet the bigger challenge is that the laws of political gravity are catching up: after the SNP’s 16 years in office, voters are getting bored. The nationalists have little positive fuel left in the tank; their record in government is filled with holes, they are reduced to desperate whataboutery in relation to Westminster and the independence road has run out of tread for now. All the SNP have left, it seems, is their age-old grudge with Labour.

And what of the Scottish Labour offer? ‘Scottish Labour can be the change,’ the party claims, uniting a Scottish and UK message. Michael Shanks, the Labour candidate for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, has chosen a variant of this message — ‘a fresh start’ — for his own campaign tagline. After this, what is the Labour offer to Rutherglen and Hamilton West — and beyond? We know what the party is against: the SNP, the Tories and a second independence referendum. But trying to find anything positive that they represent is much more difficult.

To win this by-election well, to create momentum and a story, the Labour party needs to stand for something. The potential Labour terrain in Scotland is an obvious one. It needs to challenge the SNP on social justice (not too hard), question Scotland about exactly how centre-left it really is (a bit more difficult) and pose the Scottish Party as a battering ram for change across an increasingly divided and unequal UK (much more challenging).

Scotland needs a distinctive, positive Labour message — but Labour seems reluctant to provide one. While Starmer and Sarwar’s minimalist politics may be just enough to get their Labour candidate over the line in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, it seems unlikely they will convince voters to back them in a Westminster election. Oddly, Labour still believes that its age-old antagonism with the SNP should be enough for their successful return to their natural place as the rightful establishment party. It is strange that, even after 16 years in opposition, the party still finds being a convincing insurgent uncomfortable. 

Both the Labour party and the SNP posture as the natural inheritors of anti-Tory Scotland, yet what this anti-Toryism positively stands for is never quite made clear by either side. Both have shown a sense of entitlement in office, believing that they have a divine right to rule. They appear to think of voters as permanently in their camp, as ‘their voters’ come what may — a complacency that never ends well.

Above all, both Labour and SNP have become embodiments of conservative principles while pretending, rhetorically, otherwise. Eventually one of these two political forces will dare to break out of this dance and pose a more substantive politics. Just don’t expect it to happen in time for this by-election.

Mick Lynch is stuck in the past

Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival, he reveals that his parents moved here from Ireland during the war and settled in the Ladbroke Grove area of London where they raised him and his four siblings.

His father was ‘an archetypal Paddy’ who visited the pub six times a week including Sunday afternoons after Mass. In 1971 he went on strike for nine weeks and the family were reduced to living off jam sandwiches. His parents always referred to ‘the English’ as if they were foreigners and Lynch has never held a British passport. He’s an Irish citizen.

He looks back on the 1970s as a golden age of prosperity and security: ‘Things were getting better for the working classes.’ His dad worked in factories and for the Royal Mail and his mother had a job at Marks and Spencer where the management was ‘benign’ towards the staff. Leaving school at 15, in 1978, he began an electrical apprenticeship and joined a union. Work was plentiful back then and he describes his part of north-west London as ‘the biggest industrial area in Europe….we made things and people bought them and we exported them.’

Then along came Mrs Thatcher and she set about destroying this economic powerhouse in London – although Lynch doesn’t explain why she was so hostile to hard work, profit and exports. He’s deeply gloomy about our current socioeconomic position. ‘Wages are going to the bottom, the working-class is getting poorer, the housing market robs people blind.’ And the source of our woes? ‘Forty years of Thatcherism brought us to where we are today.’

Lynch is best known for leading the RMT during the 14-month-long rail dispute. He claims that ‘[the government] has lost the argument out there’ and that his strike retains wide public support. He condemns the government’s tactics as fundamentally unfair. The Treasury covers the losses incurred by the rail network during strike days so Lynch’s union can’t squeeze the bosses financially as they could in the past.

But is that unfair or nifty footwork by the government? The minimum level of service guarantee also curtails his power. ‘I have to provide the labour to break my own strike,’ he complains. And if he refuses, ‘they’ll shut down the union.’

The present sticking point involves 2,300 staff who work in ticket offices, ‘which are part of the hub that keeps the community going.’ And he finds the current deal unacceptable. ‘They say, if you let us cut 2,300 workers you can have a pay rise.’ Ultimately, he worries that strikes will be completely abolished, ‘as in China’, and that workers in future will exist like ‘battery chickens’ at Amazon warehouses.

He’s scathing about senior Tories, and he calls energy secretary Grant Shapps ‘a yappie dog’ and police minister Chris Philp ‘a failed businessman’. Both, he says, ‘are not captains of industry, they’re chancers’.

The RMT is unaffiliated to Labour so he feels free to criticise Keir Starmer. ‘He’s not an intellectual heavyweight. He hasn’t got a soul.’ Lynch’s advice is to promote Labour as the party of vision and moral probity as Clement Attlee did in 1945. ‘Churchill won on personality. Attlee crushed him with values.’ As for the Tories, Lynch summarises their policies in three words, ‘I hate foreigners.’

Brexit crops up and Lynch offers the Scottish audience a warning from Ireland. ‘Sovereignty belongs in Frankfurt. And EU policy is not made in the EU parliament but by the council of ministers.’ He still supports Brexit because the reforms favoured by Jeremy Corbyn, whom he evidently admires, ‘would be illegal in the EU’.

Asked about the future of unionism, his advice is stuck in the past. ‘Join a union. Get active in the workplace.’ And that’s it. He hopes for wider union membership in the digital industries but he seems unaware that this will accelerate the dash for AI.

Personally, he’s not a computer wizard and he still marvels at Zoom technology. ‘Talking to a person you can see on-screen is something for Spock, Bones and Kirk. Next, they’ll bring in the teleportation machine – and then the RMT will be in real trouble.’

Fining landlords over illegal migrants will make renting even worse

As part of a slew of measures to freeze illegal immigrants out of the economy, the Tories have announced tougher penalties for landlords who let out properties to those with no right to be in the country. This extension of the hostile environment could, however, simply worsen the lives of legitimate renters in an era where costs and competition for housing are increasing.

The plans are designed to make it harder to exist in the country without a right to be here, as well as punish those who exploit and facilitate illegal immigration. Under the proposals, fines for renting out properties unlawfully will rise from £80 per lodger and £1,000 per tenant for a first offence to up to £5,000 per lodger and £10,000 per tenant. Subsequent breaches will be up to £10,000 per lodger and £20,000 per tenant, up from £500 and £3,000 respectively.

The goal is to make it financially ruinous to support illegal migration. Ministers are worried that the current penalties aren’t being taken seriously enough. They feel that the relatively small punishments, as well as the low risk of enforcement, means that many rogue landlords price this in as the cost of doing business. Similar changes are proposed to deal with rogue employers who may collaborate with landlords and people smugglers to subvert migration law and exploit asylum seekers.

It’s right of the government to try to cauterise the issue in this way, but the risk is that the regulatory burden falls hard on genuine landlords, and in turn, is passed onto tenants. To avoid being caught out, those renting property will have to insist on proper identity checks for those renting their properties – and these come with a cost.

Tightening of rules over the last few years means the government requires more and more stringent checks on ID, especially for foreign renters. Though the Home Office provides a free way of checking, this requires administration time, and will often be outsourced and charged for by a lettings agency. Though these fees can’t be passed directly onto tenants, they are likely to be swept up in rent increases as landlords know the market will bear them.

Across the country, and especially in major cities, rents are rising rapidly and demand hugely outstrips supply. Earlier this year, London rents hit a record high, yet it is not uncommon for new properties to attract hundreds of enquiries and be off the market in days. Landlords know that their escalating costs can easily be converted into even higher rents. On the fringes, these costs combined with rising mortgages might push landlords to give up renting altogether.

At the same time, the extra burden of proving identity will mean landlords can be fussier with who they let to. Anyone whose identity cannot easily be verified may find themselves shunted to the bottom of the pile and struggling to obtain housing. Foreign nationals may be the obvious victims of this, but it could equally happen to Brits who lack easily verifiable forms of ID like passports. These will be disproportionately older and poorer renters.

These measures are framed around punishing rogue landlords, but in reality, they are outsourcing the enforcement of migration rules to landlords and businesses. This suits the government and saves its resources, but simply creates more regulatory interference for those who rent out properties, and their tenants.

Since the original fines were introduced in 2018, only 230 landlords have been punished. This is less than one a week when it is known that tens of thousands of people overstay visas each year. Research from the Pew Center suggests that there could be around 1.2 million undocumented migrants in the UK – likely meaning hundreds of thousands of landlords breaching the rules.

The Tories should instinctively be wary of the unintended consequences of regulation. Measures like this seem to do little to prevent illegal migration, nor do they seem to worry the ‘unscrupulous facilitators’ that the government are seeking to deter. Instead, it is likely to put further cost and complexity onto landlords, and therefore renters. With the rental market already overheated, it is likely the latter who will suffer the most.

Nato membership for Ukraine would guarantee peace in Europe

Although Western support to Ukraine’s defence effort continues unabated, the honeymoon between Kyiv and even its staunchest allies is decidedly over. In a recent interview, President Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, said that Ukraine sees Poland as its close friend ‘until the end of the war.’ Then, he added, ‘competition between the countries will begin.’

The quote, which was immediately seized upon by Russian propaganda as evidence of a fracture in Ukraine’s key relationship, came off the back of a spat between Warsaw and Kyiv over the ban on imports of Ukrainian grain to Poland. The policy is due to remain in place until at least mid-September, even as Ukraine’s maritime export infrastructure is being destroyed by Russian bombing.

Ukrainian protests against the ban prompted Marcin Przydacz, secretary of state in the chancellery of the Polish president, to question Ukraine’s gratitude for Poland’s support. In retaliation, Kyiv summoned Poland’s ambassador – one of the few Western diplomats who had remained in the city in the early days of the Russian invasion.

In reality, there is nothing inherently wrong about frictions between Ukraine and its neighbours, driven by divergent interests. It is important, however, that Ukraine be included at the earliest possible moment into political structures designed specifically to manage such frictions: Nato and the EU. 

From the perspective of Poland and similar countries, Ukraine has long been a black hole of sorts, relevant only as a transit country for Russian oil and gas. Today, though, it is becoming a self-confident, heavily armed nation that has captured the world’s imagination by humiliating (supposedly) the world’s second largest military. 

As soon as it emerges from the war, Ukraine undoubtedly will strive to present itself as an attractive destination for foreign investment, enticing new projects away from countries such as Poland, Romania, or Hungary. With Western investment and access to new technology, its sizeable agricultural sector will only become more competitive and put downward pressure on crop prices across the EU.

Economic interests aside, the region’s history has never been an idyl. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth may be seen as a point of pride by Poles, and not without reason, but Ukrainians often see it through the prism of their subjugation to Polish Roman Catholic nobles. For Ukrainians, a figure such as Bogdan Khmelnytsky, a 17th-century noblemen who led a revolt against Polish authorities, is seen as a precursor to modern Ukrainian nationhood. For Poles, he is a villain who set in motion a series of crises that eventually led to the Commonwealth’s demise.

The 20th century offers even more salient examples, including the massacres of Poles in Volhynia by Banderite groups during the second world war – which was commemorated in a moving ceremony by Presidents Zelenskyy and Duda recently. Similarly, there was the loss of the historically Polish territories of Galicia and Volhyniam, including the magnificent city of Lviv, to the Ukrainian SSR after the war.

There is nothing new about the clash of national interests, or painful memories haunting European nations. It is precisely Europe’s unromantic state of affairs that makes the continent’s political structures, the EU, and Nato valuable. Toxic politics of ethnic resentment drove former Yugoslavia to a war. The main reason why a similarly tragic outcome was unthinkable in the countries of central Europe – think Hungary and its neighbours or former Czechoslovakia – had to do with a shared understanding that joining Western systems of alliances and integration structures was paramount. 

Today, there may be occasional toxic rhetoric coming from, for example, Viktor Orbán’s Budapest, still nurturing fever dreams of a Greater Hungary, dismembered at Trianon in 1920. Yet, Hungary’s membership in the EU and Nato, shared with its neighbours, all but guarantees that any posturing is firmly contained.

The case for Ukraine’s Nato and EU memberships does not revolve solely around the need to deter Russian aggression in the future or deliver on the demands made by the Ukrainian people in the 2014 Maidan Revolution. It is primarily a way of managing the rise of a new European power in a peaceful, non-disruptive way.

Kyiv and its neighbours will continue to clash over their material interests and over the interpretation of past events. Already, there has been little love lost between Ukraine and the united Belarusian opposition in exile, which believes, rightly or wrongly, that the war has unhelpfully eclipsed the needs of Belarusians in the West. 

One way, and arguably the only known way to prevent such tensions from getting the better of Ukraine and its neighbours is to bring all of them into the fold. Failing to do so means foregoing Western leverage and setting the region up for a cycle of instability and conflict – even if Vladimir Putin’s Russia is soundly defeated in the months to come.

Is Alex Salmond dreaming of a comeback?

Alex Salmond is hosting a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this week. It’s called ‘The Ayes Have It’ and features special guests such as old mucker David Davis, trusty lieutenant Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and former Commons sparring partner John Bercow. SNP notables Kate Forbes and Fergus Ewing are popping up and there will be a guest appearance from former first minister Henry McLeish. Salmond, some suspect, might be dreaming of a political comeback – but is a return realistic?

Salmond is probably the only independence supporting politician in Scotland who could mount a show like this without fear of outright ridicule. By contrast, former first minister and festival regular Nicola Sturgeon has just one low key appearance, while Humza Yousaf won’t be participating at all. That is probably wise. It’s hard to imagine any takers for an audience with the anodyne current first minister.

The first show – featuring David Davis – was certainly more entertaining than many of the political offerings at the Fringe. Davis had a hard time from the crowd during his appearance. ‘I’m clearly here for the villain part,’ he told the crowd. Even if SNP supporters in the audience didn’t like it, his appearance also showed this is no indie love in. Salmond clearly anticipated some push back from the audience as he has appealed for supporters to come along to counter any unionist festival bias.

So should unionists be worried about Salmond? There is some reason to take his third coming seriously. There is a gaping hole at the centre of the independence movement crying out for a big beast untainted by the recent financial controversies of the SNP. And even his detractors would probably agree that Salmond is a far more substantial figure than Sturgeon, one with a genuine career, in finance, behind him and a breadth of experience and political know-how.

Salmond’s friendship with David Davis proves his ability to reach out beyond the separatist zealots and at least engage with those with other viewpoints. He may be a Scottish nationalist to his bones yet he doesn’t seem to have the marrow deep hatred of Conservatives of his successor. Salmond would never have said anything so self-defeatingly crass and unpleasant as ‘I detest the Tories and everything they stand for’ as Sturgeon once did in an interview, thus alienating nearly a quarter of the Scottish electorate in the process. 

Salmond can also point to a track record of presiding over a reasonably competent administration at Holyrood: a night and day contrast to what followed. The Salmond-led government largely avoided scandal, managed not to alienate business, and would surely never have entertained such loopy ideas as gender self-id, the deposit return scheme or the abandonment of Scotland’s remaining oil and gas resources.

On the other hand, another Salmond comeback? Meh…might be the reaction of many, which may be why his show hasn’t sold out and why his alternative independence Alba party has hardly set the heather on fire, depending on defections rather than elections for its representatives. Alba received 1.7 per cent of the vote at the last Holyrood election and 0.7 per cent at last year’s council elections.

Salmond is such a ‘well kent’ figure that his renaissance is likely to be less the breath of fresh air the cause is crying out for and more a gust of rather stale wind. He remains divisive: those that love him, always will and those that don’t aren’t likely to revise that opinion. And while his legal troubles may be behind him and his innocence established by a jury he will remain a toxic figure.

To truly return to significance, Salmond would need, surely, to come to some sort of accommodation with his former party, which would involve a major shake up and the sharp snapping of the strings currently pulled by Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Greens. A repackaged SNP/Alba vehicle headed by Salmond, with the saner elements of his former party (Joanna Cherry, Angus McNeil, Kate Forbes), who were frozen out of influence by the Sturgeon regime, rehabilitated, might just prove viable. The presence of Forbes, Ewing and Michelle Thompson in his Edinburgh show suggests that at least a faction of the SNP might be open to the idea.

Salmond has already signalled that he recognises he needs to move in this direction by imploring Yousaf to agree to field an ‘Independence’ candidate in the upcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election. That Alba have postponed a decision on whether they will field a candidate at all suggests that they lack confidence not just in their ability to win, but perhaps even retain their deposit. 

Which rather vividly highlights Salmond’s problem. A big beast perhaps but on the loose, on the prowl, unable to exert dominance over his former realm. If his Edinburgh show gets him some good press and burnishes a reputation for popular appeal it might boost his cause. And if the SNP bomb at the upcoming by election, the beleaguered party might just agree to find a role for their former leading man.

Sunak can’t blame landlords for not stopping illegal immigration

Small companies will face massive fines for not checking the papers of everyone they hire. Landlords will be put out of business for renting rooms to anyone without permission to be in the UK. With its Rwanda policy stalled, and with the numbers of illegal immigrants still at record highs, the government has a big new idea for trying to stem the numbers of people coming into the country. It will get small businesses to police the system. The only trouble is, that will damage the economy, and we will all suffer from that. 

The government’s latest big idea for controlling immigration is to make it a lot harder for anyone who is here illegally to work or find somewhere to live. According to the minister in charge, Robert Jenrick, fines will be tripled for employers who hire anyone without the right paperwork. Likewise, landlords who rent out rooms to illegal immigrants will face huge increases in the penalties for doing so. Anyone who breaks the rules will be ‘bankrupted’ and ‘put out of business’, apparently.

Of course, on one level it is not hard to see where the government is coming from. If you can’t work, or find somewhere to live, the UK will be less attractive to illegal migrants. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the relative ease with which illegal immigrants can find work and accommodation is one of the reasons why so many come here despite the risks. And there may well be a handful of small businesses in sectors such as agriculture or hospitality where employers turn a blind eye to someone’s precise immigration status if it means they can get the work done cheaply. 

And yet, there are three big problems. First, many small businesses and landlords may not know how to check residency status. It can be a tricky process and one where it is easy to make mistakes. Next, even if they do know what they are required to do, it will cost time and money which a small business, or a landlord with one or two properties, may not be able to afford. Finally, it will add to an increasingly bewildering set of legal obligations imposed on small companies. In reality, we have already piled far too many burdens on businesses and landlords. Many landlords have already given up, and decided it is no longer worth the hassle of renting out a property, and quit the market, and that has driven rents up to record highs. Likewise, many small businesses will soon give up if we put any more responsibilities on them. 

There is something worrying about a Conservative government, or any government come to think of it, threatening to put small employers out of business. In fact, it is the job of the government to control the borders, not the task of companies or landlords. We can push that on to businesses if we want to. But we can’t be surprised if many of them eventually conclude that the UK is not a country where it is worth the bother of renting out a property or trying to employ someone and give up completely. And we will all be poorer for that.

Suella’s Ascension Island plan doesn’t go far enough

There is nothing new under the sun. The idea of opening an asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island has been knocking around for 20 years, but reports in today’s papers suggest it is suddenly all the rage again. Ministers are scrambling to find a ‘plan B’ in case the Supreme Court confirms the Appeal Court’s controversial view that the long-delayed Rwanda policy is unlawful.

Way back in 2005, the Conservatives made a commitment in their manifesto that ‘asylum seekers’ applications will be processed outside Britain’. In the run up to that year’s election, Mark Reckless, then a researcher at Conservative Central Office, conducted a scoping exercise to identify a site for overseas processing. Ascension Island came out top of his list. But it turned out that the answer to Michael Howard’s question to the electorate ‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ was ‘no’. The Tories lost the election, and the policy was later ditched by David Cameron.

The Ascension Island plan was revived three years ago by Priti Patel when she was a home secretary looking for a way to stem the flow of small boats. But the Treasury blocked it on cost grounds, ruling that the required investment in the island’s power supply and new desalination facilities would prove exorbitant.

That these financial worries have gone away is a measure of the priority the government has had to give to the small boats issue. It’s under massive pressure from those who voted Tory in 2019 but are not presently inclined to do so again. A month ago, on these very pages, I called for the Ascension plan to be revived to form the core of a new ‘Port Refuge’ policy that would offer indefinite shelter to illegal migrants well away from the UK, and would help find them permanent resettlement elsewhere.

It ill-behoves me to throw cold water on this idea now, but the iteration of Ascension now being looked at by Suella Braverman – Patel’s successor as Home Secretary charged with untangling this Gordian knot within the European human rights framework – appears to be somewhat different to the original plan.

Reports suggest that the island will only be used as a holding centre until a migrant’s asylum application is adjudicated back in the UK, and that applicants will come back to Britain for settlement if their applications are successful. It is unclear where those rejected will end up. The deterrent effect of being transported 4,000 miles from Kent to the mid-Atlantic will be much less pronounced with the prospect of permanent settlement in the UK – expressly ruled out under the Rwanda plan – still in the mix.

Yet a centre on Ascension would create superb pre-election optics for the government – an ongoing convoy of illegal migrants being taken to the middle of nowhere while do-gooding open borders advocates in the House of Lords and elsewhere emit helpful squeals of outrage. No doubt somebody would liken it to ‘Britain’s Guantanamo’, and it is not beyond the bounds that a left-wing peer would use the phrase ‘concentration camp’, either. The plan going ahead would also be an example of Rishi Sunak making good on his pledge to ‘strain every sinew’ to stop the boats. As such, it could form the platform for a credible Tory manifesto commitment next year to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and other obsolete international agreements.

But will any of this be enough for Tory-leaning voters who have looked askance for years at failed ministerial efforts to get a grip on abuse of the asylum system? So long as Keir Starmer ensures his own frontbench oppose the Government in a low-key way on grounds of the ineffectiveness of its policies, rather than taking a pompous stand on the ethics of the matter, that seems doubtful.

Cynicism among Tory-leaning voters is now so heightened that it will surely take an actual breakthrough – a plummeting in illegal immigration via small boats – to win their approval. Rishi Sunak may say a lot of the right things about stopping the boats, but he has never yet quite convinced the Tory tribe that he is willing to brave the full wrath of the liberal establishment. If a facility is built on Ascension Island in the coming months – and I very much hope that it will be - then one can’t help thinking that it will be a different Conservative prime minister who ultimately ends up using it to decisive effect.

Could Corbyn derail Sadiq’s mayoral campaign?

Since the election date for next year’s London mayoral election was announced, Sadiq Khan has been putting on a show of confidence that his re-election is in the bag with his supporters pointing to polling that suggests Labour enjoy a 40-point lead in the capital. However, the Ulez expansion – which Keir Starmer blamed on his failure to take Uxbridge in last month’s by-election – has certainly put a spring in the step of his Tory mayoral opponent Susan Hall.

Now could a fresh nightmare be heading his way? It appears the incumbent Mayor of London might have an unwelcome challenger at next year’s election in the shape of none other than former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Speaking on a panel at the Edinburgh Fringe this weekend, Corbyn gave an enigmatic hint that he might put himself forward as a candidate for Mayor.

Asked if he would consider throwing his hat into the ring, Corbyn replied: ‘Well let’s have a think about it, shall we?’ With words that might well make Khan quake, he continued, ‘I want to see change in our society. I’m not disappearing, I’m not going away. I look at my diary and I’m more active than I have ever been at any other time in my life.’ Now that sounds like a challenge.

Corbyn, currently sitting as an independent MP for Islington North, was thrown out of the Labour party earlier this year after refusing to apologise for the antisemitism row that engulfed it. His expulsion divided the party membership, and Corbyn still commands considerable support within the local Labour party and constituency – with many unhappy that he is being blocked from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election.

Could Corbyn now take his independent approach London-wide to the mayoral contest? This is a scenario that has long worried Labour figures. Such a move could see the Labour vote split – thereby helping the Tories even if Corbyn himself is likely to fall short. It’s why the hope in Labour circles is that Corbyn will fail to find the funds to embark on such a campaign.