The agony of grief: Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

Margaret Atwood has often resisted auto-biographical interpretations of her work, but it is impossible to read her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood without acknowledging the death in 2019 of her long-term partner Graeme Gibson. Death permeates every page of the book.

Reaching for a comforting layer of fiction, Atwood revives two characters who have appeared previously in her work as stand-ins for herself and her partner: Nell and Tig. The collection’s first third contains stories of the two together, while the end is about Nell on her own after Tig’s death.

Between these is an interlude of unrelated tales, which makes Old Babes something of a patchy work. There are experiments, not all of them successful, such as the imagined conversation between the author and George Orwell via a medium. Or the recycled story ‘Freeforall’, first published just after The Handmaid’s Tale, which reads like an abandoned idea for an alternative to Gilead. Presumably someone thought to include it now because it is a post-pandemic dystopia.

Other stories earn their keep, such as the wonderful ‘My Evil Mother’, about a suburban single mum purportedly practising witchcraft. But it is in the return to Nell in the final section that the book really finds its focus. The death of Tig prompts four excellent pieces that reckon with the agony of grief, even as Atwood refrains from melodramatics. ‘One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself,’ the widowed Nell observes.

A highlight is ‘A Dusty Lunch’, about the life of Tig’s father, a Canadian war hero, whose poetry passes into Nell’s possession along with the family china. She obsesses over the poems, and other fragments of paper, now left contextless by the loss of their author. These final stories seem overwhelmed by notes, random possessions, unfinished tasks and the rest of life’s detritus. The narrator sees them as messages from the dead, but finds no satisfactory answer to the question of what to do with them.

Is this why Atwood appears to be getting her own papers in order, both with this book and last year’s essay collection? Is she clearing her desk? It’s a maudlin thought about a writer who is still so sparky and brilliant in the sudden ways she tips you into despair or delight. Whatever she’s up to, I’ll take more if it’s going.

The eeriness of lockdown: To Battersea Park, by Philip Hensher, reviewed

We never quite make it to Battersea Park. By the time the narrator and his husband reach its gates, it’s time for them, and us, to return home.

The narrator is a writer, living just that little bit too far away from the park, inspired by eeriness of the Covid lockdown regime but also horribly blocked. All kinds of approaches to fiction beckon to him in his plight, and we are treated to not a few of them here. 

Each section of this novel embodies a literary device. We begin, maddeningly, in ‘The Iterative Mood’ (‘I would have’, ‘She would normally have’ ,‘They used to’) and we end in ‘Entrelacement’, with its overlapping stories offering strange resolutions to this polyphonous, increasingly surreal account of lockdown. Every technique the narrator employs is an attempt to witness strange times using ordinary words.

Philip Hensher didn’t just pluck this idea out of the void. Fiction has a nasty habit of pratfalling again and again at the feet of a contemporary crisis. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (about the Blitz) dribbles away into an underpowered spy thriller; Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (about 9/11) only gets going in the last few dozen pages, when the protagonist quits New York for the poker tournament circuit. Mind you, indirection may prove to be a winning strategy in itself. The most enjoyable section of To Battersea Park is the ‘hero’s journey’, set in post-apocalyptic Whitstable. Hensher nails perfectly the way we distance ourselves from a crisis by romanticising it.

Milan Kundera wrote about this – about how ‘the monster comes from outside and is called History’ – impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible and above all inescapable. Hensher speaks to the same idea, and ends up writing the kind of book Kundera wrote: one that appeals, first of all – almost, I would say, exclusively – to other writers.

In the middle of the book there’s a short scene in which a journalist interviews a novelist called Henry Ricks Bailey, and Bailey says:

When people talk about novels, if they talk at all, they talk about the subject of those novels, or they talk about the life of the person who wrote it. This is a wonderful book, they say. It’s about a couple who fall in love during the Rwandan genocide, they say… It’s as if all one had to do to write a novel is pick up a big box of stuff in one room and move it into the next.

This (of course, and by design) borders on the infantile: the writer boo-hooing because the reader has had the temerity to beg a moral.

Hensher is more circumspect: he understands that the more you do right by events – the endless ‘and-then’-ness of everything – the less you’re going to be able to interest a reader, who has after all paid good money to bathe in causes and consequences, in ‘becauses’ and ‘buts’.

To Battersea Park reveals all the ways we try to understand a world that isn’t good or fair or causal or even comprehensible. It’s about how we reduce the otherwise ungraspable world using conventions, often of our own devising. An elderly man fills half his house with a model railway. A dangerously brittle paterfamilias pumps the air out of his marriage. A blocked writer experiments with a set of literary devices. A horrified child sets sail in an imaginary boat. It’s a revelation: a comedy of suburban manners slowed to the point of nightmare.

That said, I get nervous around art that is so directly addressed to the practitioners of that art. It’s a novel that teaches more than it inspires, and a small triumph in a world that I can’t help but feel is gasping for big ones.

The relationship between self and singer

The professional performer is the tree in the philosopher’s human forest. If there’s no opportunity to sing or act or dance in front of an audience, are they still a performer at all? In the spring of 2020, when most of his colleagues shrugged and started making banana bread, the tenor Ian Bostridge took an altogether more existential approach to isolation, writing a series of lectures for the University of Chicago exploring the relationship between self and singer, silence and song. Now they form the basis of his latest book.

Song & Self is a slim volume. Early on, Bostridge invokes the essay’s origins in Montaigne – the idea of essayer (to try), the form as a space for experimentation and exploration, for provisional attempts rather than finished thoughts or arguments. It’s framed as an apologia; Bostridge’s writing is an ‘open-ended performance’, ‘improvisatory rather than systemically theorised’. The book comes to life when it does precisely that: shakes free of thesis and academic jargon and stops scaffolding itself with critical theory.

Before he was a professional singer, Bostridge was a historian and Oxford research fellow. If you fancy an unexpected diversion from listening to his impressive and much-awarded recording catalogue, you could read his monograph Witchcraft and its Transformations c.1650-c.1750. It’s as though, in lockdown, Bostridge reverted to this earlier self. While his previous A Singer’s Notebook and Schubert’s Winter Journey smuggle profundity in under the jumper and jeans of relaxed, readable prose, Song and Self wears its scholarship as a suit of armour – and not one that’s been oiled recently.

There’s quite a lot of problematising, historicising and ‘othering’, a healthy dollop of Fanon and Gramsci, and not much by way of translations (so best brush up your French and German before you start). Bostridge’s aim is to ‘examine performative constructions of identity in music through the lens of gender, politics or the ultimate paradoxical grounding and denial of identity: death’. But it’s definitely not a thesis, OK?

The thing is, when Bostridge forgets he’s an academic and just writes, it’s magic. His ability not only to sing this vast repertoire (the book roams from Monteverdi to Benjamin Britten, by way of Schumann and Ravel) but also to stand back from it and unpick the hows and whys of performance – translating his instinctive reactions and resistances into fully fleshed-out arguments, all rooted in a gloriously broad frame of cultural reference – is singular. His potted histories of French colonialism and the traditions of Japanese theatre are interesting, but his ability to perch on his own shoulder as a performer and expose the process, the profession itself, to us onlookers is much more so.

How, he asks, does the role of the singer change from opera to song? If opera is acting, concealing self behind a character, then where does that leave the singer (not to mention the pianist) in the concert hall, caught somewhere between ventriloquist and dummy? And then there’s the question of interpretation, which we tend to take for granted in classical music, because the alternative could set the whole lot toppling down on us. Bostridge risks poking at the foundations of what he describes as the ‘part shamanic, part scientific quest for the “right” performance’, and the dust cloud he sends up suggests he’s found the right spot.

He admits the tensions within his project in his final and most ambitious essay, ‘Meditations on Death’. ‘As so often in the song repertoire,’ he writes, ‘formal analysis… tells us one thing, performance another.’ It’s performance’s perspective that’s often absent elsewhere, and this that Bostridge does so well. There’s a bracing plunge into the conflicts of Britten’s ‘The Holy Sonnets of John Donne’ that mines ‘Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?’ for fragments of concealed meaning, playing text and music off against each other thrillingly, as well as a passing glance at the postlude of Schumann’s cycle Frauenliebe und Leben that will send you straight back to listen (and think) again.

Monteverdi’s opera-in-miniature Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda gives up some of its strange and sensual secrets (even if things do get a bit heavy-handed when it comes to ‘challenging the trope of heteronormativity’), while Bostridge’s own experience of performing Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, with their complicated layers of colonial history and racial perspective, throws uneasy personal light on a cycle no programme note can ever fully hope – or perhaps want – to contextualise. Best of all is the writing on Britten – a composer whose musical language Bostridge has such an affinity for, both on and off stage.

Song & Self is at its best when it tinkers around inside the engine, lends the reader some critical tools and invites one to have a go too. Who wouldn’t rather join a master-craftsman in his workshop, shadow him at his art and eavesdrop on his inner monologue than hear it analysed at arm’s length in the lecture hall?

The chaos of coronations over the centuries

In January 1559 an Italian envoy wrote of Elizabeth I’s coronation that ‘they are preparing for [the ceremony] and work both day and night’. More than four and a half centuries later much the same could be said of the imminent investiture of Charles III – an event overshadowed, at the time of writing, by the uncertainty as to whether his publicity-shy younger son and wilting violet of a wife will be attending. But, as Ian Lloyd describes in The Throne, there have been many more dramatic build-ups to coronations, some culminating in injury or even death.

The scene is set in this brisk, gossipy history by William the Conqueror’s crowning, which took place at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, just two months after the Battle of Hastings – William’s hurry stemming from fear that his claim would be challenged. So tense was the atmosphere, the ceremony was interrupted by a guard torching nearby buildings after hearing noises of celebration, which he assumed to be a riot – meaning that the king’s consecration had to be completed amid looting and mass panic.

The first coronation for which any detailed records exist, Richard I’s on 3 September 1189, suffered from the bad omen of a bat fluttering around the throne – which was apparently borne out by the arrival of group of Jews bearing gifts for the new king. They were barred, and anti-Semitic riots erupted throughout the country. Centuries later, the same uneasiness prevailed at Mary Tudor’s coronation, her surly mood caused by fear of anti-Catholic rioting. In 1603, the paranoid James I hired 500 soldiers as a personal bodyguard to shield him against ‘any tumults and disorder’.

But not all monarchs regarded their investitures so grimly. King John displayed ‘unseemly levity’ at his, and left before receiving the sacrament. William IV requested a ‘short and cheap’ ceremony – soon dubbed the ‘penny coronation’ and ‘half crown-ation’. Despite costing £43,159, it was a fraction of the sum his extravagant brother George IV lavished on his own affair, which amounted to £238,000.

In 40 short chapters, depicting 38 coronations, and two (for Edward V and Edward VIII) which were planned but never took place, Lloyd offers many amusing anecdotes. We learn that Edward II’s was masterminded by Piers Gaveston, the king’s lover, who arrived, according to one chronicler, ‘so decked out that he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal’. But his powers of organisation failed to match his sartorial flair: part of a wall collapsed during the event, killing a knight, and the banquet was delayed so long that the food was all but inedible when it arrived.

Lloyd relishes the human details. A joust to celebrate Elizabeth I’s coronation was postponed, as the queen was ‘feeling rather tired’ – and much the same problem was apparent when Charles II was crowned in 1661. Samuel Pepys, after too many toasts to the monarch’s health, ‘waked in the morning with my head in a sad taking through the last night’s drink’. The chaos at Victoria’s unrehearsed coronation was increased by an incompetent Archbishop of Canterbury, champagne-drinking peers with their coronets askew and guests rolling down staircases owing to infirmity. But Lord Melbourne had assured her that ‘you’ll like it when you’re there’ – and she would describe the day as ‘the proudest of my life’.

Though Lloyd’s colloquial tone can grate (one king is described as looking ‘like death warmed up’, and an altar piece as ‘humongous’), The Throne is good fun. But amid the accounts of which animals were eaten at which banquets, and which vehicle conveyed which monarch to the ceremony (with a running joke on the miseries of travelling in the notoriously uncomfortable gold state coach), there’s not much reflection about the wider symbolic purpose of it all. One of the credited sources is Roy Strong’s magisterial Coronation (2005), which gave the subject real weight and depth. Lloyd’s clearly hastily written book will divert for a few hours, but is unlikely to linger in the memory.

No happy ever afters: White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link, reviewed

Kelly Link’s latest collection of short stories riffs wildly on traditional fairy tales, filleting out their morphological structures and transposing them. She ranges from a space-set ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to a same-sex version of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and much more besides. Like Angela Carter, Link understands the psychological (and narratological) powers of her raw material, and makes thrilling shapes while also dissecting modern society, our fears and our fantasies.

Each of these scintillating stories (not a dud among them) concerns lost characters in search of truth about themselves or the world. Sometimes they find it; more often they don’t. Link’s lucid prose moves the reader unerringly onwards through the forested thickets of her imagination. In ‘The White Cat’s Divorce’ (based on ‘The White Cat’, a version of the ‘Animal Bride’ trope) an ageing bazillionaire finds his three growing sons an affront to his mortality, so he sends them off on impossible missions. The youngest wins all the tasks, with the aid of humanoid white cats who run a cannabis farm. He falls in love with their leader, the White Cat, who tells him that he must do everything she asks – including chopping off her head – at which point she transforms into a beautiful woman. So far, so fairy tale. But instead of having the White Cat marry the youngest of the brothers, Link renders her ending delightfully ambiguous, with not one but two surprises that leave the reader pondering the nature of feminism.

Two stories concern death: ‘The White Road’ achieves a creepiness worthy of Robert Aickman. The titular road appears; mysterious beings travel down it and tear humans apart; society collapses into a quasi-medieval state. The invaders can be kept away by the presence of a corpse – which raises complicated questions about the provision of said corpses. I haven’t read anything quite so terrifying (and oddly moving) in a while. The final story, ‘Skinder’s Veil’, sees a disillusioned graduate student unwittingly house sitting for Death. There are moments of startling luminescence (as when two magnificent deer enter the house) as well as subtle fear. Mist rises from the ground, strange people and talking bears come and go, and the student must confront Death, and himself.

Link’s writing has been gradually growing in power. White Cat, Black Dog marks a glittering new height in the literature of the weird. Don’t come looking for happy ever afters.

Can the Bank of England escape the blame for the inflation spike?

Who, or what, is responsible for the UK’s sky-high inflation rate? Not me, says the Bank of England’s governor. Andrew Bailey has pointed the finger at a number of causes: pandemic and lockdowns, Russia’s war against Ukraine and Britain’s tight labour market. But he singled out one group in particular – early retirees – as a contributing factor for the recent inflation spike:

‘If those workers have accumulated enough savings to sustain a desired level of consumption much like the one they had before their early retirement, at least for a while, aggregate demand will not have fallen by as much as aggregate supply…we should expect this to put upward pressure on inflation in a way that would call for a higher level of interest rates to dampen demand.’

Is Bailey right in shying away from the Bank’s role in failing to tackle inflation? His comments at the London School of Economics certainly raise a number of questions, not least whether the absence of older workers from the workforce is responsible for the labour crunch? And is the overall labour shortage to blame for inflation?

On the first point: while the economy is missing the contributions of older workers after the pandemic, The Spectator’s Data Hub shows how early retirement is a relatively small loss compared to workers off on long-term sick leave since Covid hit. The number of working-age people out of the workforce today due to retirement is actually lower now, by 12,000 people, than it was before the pandemic; meanwhile, the number of workers who have left due to long-term sickness is up by 400,000.

Arguably the absence of older workers is more acutely felt in their relationship to those who are off sick. The early retirement of doctors and medical professionals has made it harder to dent the 7.2 million waiting list on NHS England. This was the main reason for chancellor Jeremy Hunt scrapping the Lifetime Allowance in his Budget earlier this month, in the hope that this would attract some of those highly-paid doctors back to work. Bailey described Hunt’s full back-to-work package as ‘very welcome and important,’ given the impact it’s having on inflation.

But is this laser-focus on the labour market just another excuse for the Bank, which denied the possibility of price spirals until it was too late to keep a lid on the headline inflation rate?

Bailey is right that the labour market is part of the inflation equation. The UK has been deeply unlucky: it’s suffered both the energy crunch that Europe has faced, and also the labour market crunch that the US has experienced. But Bailey’s omission of the Bank’s incredibly slow response to price hikes seems curious. The Bank was still pretending this was a ‘transitory’ blip in December 2021, when inflation was already more than double the Bank’s target of 2 per cent. 

The Bank’s role in printing vast amounts of money during the pandemic (printing almost as much in the first year of the pandemic as it did in the decade leading up to the pandemic) and its decision to keep interest rates ultra-low for so long both deserve to be at the top of list of reasons for why inflation remains in the double digits. So long as these factors are played down, it is hard to take Bailey too seriously when he points the finger of blame elsewhere.

As special enclaves proliferate, what are the consequences for democracy?

When the British announced the withdrawal of their navy from Singapore in 1967, a Dutch adviser from the United Nations, Albert Winsemius, offered the Singapore government two pieces of advice.

The first was to crush the communists:

I am not interested in what you do with them. You can throw them in jail, throw them out of the country, you can even kill them. As an economist, it does not interest me; but I have to tell you, if you don’t eliminate them in government, in unions, in the streets, forget about economic development.

The second piece of advice was to let the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, remain standing. The Singaporeans should not repeat the error of the Indonesian freedom fighters, who tore down a statue of a hated Dutch colonial officer. The Raffles statue would be testimony ‘that you accept the heritage of the British’, and serve as a beacon to western companies.

Singapore is just one of the many jurisdictions described in Quinn Slobodian’s lively book. The city state combines free market principles with tough authoritarian discipline. The dream of many free marketeers in the 20th century was to create independent states which, by a mixture of low taxation and light regulation, could foster enterprise and prosperity.

Crack-Up Capitalism is an engaging and fluently written account of the dreams of many philosophers, economists and, frankly, oddballs who have grown impatient with the shackles of the big state. Characters such as Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Peter Thiel and, closer to home, William Rees-Mogg grace its pages. What united them was a yearning for freedom and a passion to preserve the sovereign nature of the individual. What they fought against was socialism in all its forms, and high taxes that stifle growth and initiative.

The book is a whistle-stop tour through – in no particular order – Hong Kong, the City of London, Singapore, Dubai, Silicon Valley, Somalia and Bantustan. The geographical spread is evidence of a common desire among people to lead their own lives free from the tight grip of state control.

While the yearning is simple and admirable, the road map to reaching utopia is quite complicated. In the case of Singapore, the low-tax, economically vibrant city state depends to a large degree on state planning and direct government intervention. Margaret Thatcher was distinctly aware of this paradox. She wrote to a friend suggesting that Britain should turn away from Europe to become ‘a kind of free trade and non-interventionist “Singapore” ’. Beyond authoritarianism (as found in Singapore), Slobodian is keen to highlight the often anti-democratic impulses of libertarian thinkers.

In the late 1970s, Milton Friedman arrived in Hong Kong and was deeply impressed by what he saw. Globally, the outlook was gloomy. By 1978, inflation was high and rising in the United States. Britain was entering its winter of discontent, with a record number of strikes. Unrest rumbled in Iran, where revolutionary leftist students joined with religious zealots to overthrow the government. Vast swathes of South America were in the grip of military dictatorship. The world was facing a ‘crisis of democracy’. In such conditions, Friedman found Hong Kong’s dynamism and economic success remarkable and praiseworthy. Filming his popular American TV show Free to Choose, he smiled into the camera while gesturing at the white skyscrapers glittering against the backdrop of the South China Sea. He celebrated Hong Kong as a hub of capitalism. It provided a stark contrast to much of what he saw in the western world.

Since the 1950s, Hong Kong had been permitted to set its own trade and tax policies. Colonial governors kept tariffs low, and taxes were also low. In 1978, the top rate of income tax in Britain was 83 per cent. In the US it was 70 per cent. But in Hong Kong there were no taxes on capital gains or inheritance, and a flat income tax of 15 per cent.

The model was so successful that China simply copied it, and created its own special economic zone (SEZ) in Shenzhen. Of course, as far as the Chinese were concerned, democracy was irrelevant. They focused exclusively on economic success. For many years, arriving in Shenzhen felt like entering a different world. It was ringed by barbed-wire fences, and even Chinese citizens needed visas to gain access. The Chinese took the cautious approach of ‘experimental gradualism’. They built Shenzhen slowly; but by 2020 its population had reached 20 million, with a GDP greater than that of Hong Kong or Singapore. The zone became the template for a ‘China of enclaves’.

A key theme of Slobodian’s book is, of course, the relationship between democracy and economic freedom. In the late 1980s, Friedman was openly ambivalent about the need for democracy: ‘I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for a democratic society; but I also believe there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy.’

Crack-up Capitalism features a wide range of eccentrics and idealists. Michael van Notten, a Dutch lawyer, is described as ‘a generic foot soldier in the neo-liberal war of ideas’. The practical aim of his theorising was to create a utopia in Somalia – somewhere he saw as a ‘huge network of hundreds, if not thousands, of mini-governments, each wholly independent of the others’. Once industrial capitalism and democracy collapsed, he believed, people would turn to mercenaries, private companies and freelancers ‘for infrastructure and services in the new state of anarchy’. ‘It is at that moment,’ he wrote, ‘that the Somali experience can offer us some guidance.’

The creation of utopias has always beguiled political philosophers. Now the modern world offers people the chance to fulfil those fantasies. Unsurprisingly, we meet internet utopians such as Balaji Srinivasan, an American born in 1980 to Indian immigrant parents. Together with accomplices, he has sought to build a new internet that would come closer to his vision of society run as a business. He calls it the ‘cloud country’, stemming from the idea of people finding new kindred spirits online, the internet having made it possible to create meaningful bonds without physical contact that can exist across lines of gender, class and nationality.

Slobodian relishes descriptions of fantasists and so-called ‘anarcho-capitalists’. It is easy to laugh at apparent craziness and mania, and he treats the spirit which has animated these libertarians lightly. One gets the feeling that he sees the yearning for freedom as a bit of a joke. But there are serious questions under-lying the ideas of even the most crackbrained libertarians. How can economic growth be generated? How can we preserve individual freedom in a more bureaucratic world? While Slobodian paints these neo-liberals as enemies of democracy itself, it must not be forgotten that the development of capitalist theories and democratic ideals often came from the same sources, such as Locke, Montesquieu and the original framers of the American constitution.

The schemes of van Notten and Srinivasan can seem absurd. The notion that Honduras could be put up for sale, or that Liechtenstein could be bought by Bill Gates, is certainly fanciful. But none of this should detract from the real challenge of creating prosperous societies which can unite democratic principles with genuine economic growth.

Despising democracy, China has failed to do this, despite the methodical way it has developed its capitalism. Anaemic growth levels continue to dog western Europe. America aspires to global leadership in championing the values of capitalism and democracy, but anyone can see the problems that geopolitical colossus faces. Reading this book makes one realise how easy it is to mouth the slogans of neo-liberalism. A practical plan to achieve even some of those goals has proved far more difficult.

We should support Oxford’s crackdown on motorists

Now that Morse has cracked his final case, Oxford’s streets will be freed from the annual disruption caused by successive Jaguars and their attendant film crews. But that’s of little comfort to residents facing a new source of gridlock – one, ironically, caused by those protesting efforts to reduce the city’s notorious congestion. Last month 2,000 eclectic protestors descended on the city centre to oppose, amongst other things, Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), 15-minute cities, and ‘climate lockdowns’.  

As a former resident and council candidate, I’m much too familiar with Oxford’s traffic trouble. A medieval city spared the Luftwaffe-induced redevelopment of many other English urban areas, it has long debated, but done little to alleviate, the problem of ever-greater car numbers. Notorious plans to replace Christ Church Meadow with a motorway were fortunately seen off in the 1960s. The city eventually became the first in Britain to introduce a Park and Ride in 1973. 

Various traffic filters have since been introduced. But still the jams come. Hence Oxfordshire County Council’s latest wheeze: six new traffic filters on connecting roads around the city which will use cameras to filter vehicles’ ability to pass through. Designed to discourage unnecessary car journeys, with exemptions for buses, blue badge holders, and the like, locals will be provided with 100-day annual permits to cross the boundaries, or will otherwise be fined £70 for not using the ring roads. 

Similar schemes are working in Ghent and Groningen and have been proposed for Canterbury and Birmingham. They will undoubtedly make life more expensive for some motorists. But defending the right to drive unimpeded through central Oxford usually means defending your right to sit in traffic. Many will welcome any attempt to alleviate congestion. So why has it sent the unlikely alliance of Piers Corbyn, Jordan Peterson, and countless internet outriders into such paroxysms of fury? 

Undoubtedly, Tory opposition councillors are right to highlight the Council’s somewhat shifty attitude to disclosing the scheme’s purported impact on congestion. The puritanical Labour-Liberal-Democrat-Green coalition, in place since 2021, is leading crusades against smoking, meat-eating, and Jeremy Clarkson. But their traffic policies’ newfound notoriety is spawned by a confusion about several over-lapping ideas and jurisdictions – and provides a welcome opportunity for local Conservatives.

The city already has several LTNs, with various traffic-reducing filters. These, like the proposed new measures, are under Oxfordshire County Council’s control. This been confused with the City Council’s objective to introduce 15-minute neighbourhoods into Oxford by 2040. Simply put, this is an objective to make everything required in your daily life – shops, GPs, schools, etc – within 15 minutes’ walk or cycle away. The concept is both long-standing and, according to YouGov, popular. 

There is obvious overlap with the County Council’s desire to reduce congestion. But this is not an attempt to lock residents into a 15-minute zones, as some online have suggested. Both councils reference Net Zero, but so does most government policy. This is no ‘climate lockdown’ – residents will obviously be free to come and go from their neighbourhoods as they wish. Similar proposals are being trialled across the world, including in Paris and Melbourne. 

This internationalism naturally appeals to those fond of conspiracies blaming the world’s ills on Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. But opposition is far from limited to conspiracy theorists – and also comes from within my own party. The MP Nick Fletcher labelled 15-minute cities as an ‘international socialist concept’ last month. Local county councillors described the city as a ‘troublingly democracy-free zone’. Owing partially to my failure to campaign a tad harder two years ago, there are currently no Conservatives on the City Council.

Nonetheless, I think my fellow Tories are wrong to damn these proposals so vociferously. The ambition behind 15-minute cities is fundamentally conservative. For too long, we have unthinkingly defended the rights of the motorists and ignored their challenge to many of our basic beliefs. They are noisy, polluting, and destructive; they cause cities to be shaped around vehicles, not people. More traffic is associated with weaker communities, worse air quality, and unhappier lives. 

Of course, we can challenge the details of future schemes. Many motorists will lose out, and we should always remain attentive to their concerns. But that should not stop us from seizing the initiative. We should aim to make cities as nice as possible to walk and cycle around. In Oxford, the pandemic-era pedestrianisation of Broad Street should be extended, and more street trees and green spaces introduced. We should ensure new construction reflects the city’s historic and beautiful character. 

Conservatives in Oxford and across the country should see this as an opportunity to prove the urban Tory is not a dying breed. We should not leave the debate on redeveloping our cities to left-wing idealists and the internet’s unhappy fringe. By placing people, neighbourhoods, and the environment, not cars, at the centre of our urban areas, we can outline a Conservative vision for the 21st century city – an agenda of which the late Roger Scruton would surely have approved.

It will take a lot for the dollar to die

The end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency has been predicted so many times that it is tempting to nod along with Jay Powell, Federal Reserve chairman, who pronounced last week that there is no immediate threat. But with high inflation in the US and China cuddling up with Russia, is it something the world should be taking seriously?     

If the dollar was dumped then it would have serious consequences for the global economy. The status of the dollar allows the US to borrow much more cheaply than other countries, allowing it to sustain public debt of more than 100 per cent of GDP for the past decade. If that were to unwind, it would push up the cost of servicing US debt.

Recent developments have made some analysts uneasy. It doesn’t help that American banks have been failing and that Joe Biden has been helicoptering money into households. It’s starting to look like the dollar is being debased for short-term political gain.

Two years ago the IMF pointed out that the dollar has been in decline as a reserve currency all this century. When the euro was introduced in 1999, 71 per cent of currency reserves held by the world’s central banks were in the form of dollars. By 2021, that was down to 59 per cent.

Yet there is no obvious challenger to the dollar. Anyone who hoped the euro would supplant it has been bitterly disappointed: the proportion of global reserves made up of euros has held steady at around 20 per cent for the past two decades. No other currency comes close: in the third quarter of last year, sterling made up 4.6 per cent of reserves; the yen 5.3 per cent. The Chinese renminbi makes up only 2.8 per cent – which is remarkably low considering it is the world’s second largest economy.   

The biggest threat to the dollar lies in the renminbi dramatically increasing its modest share, in particular as a result of western sanctions against Russia. While western countries might be boycotting Russian oil and gas, Europe is still buying it in some quantities: China and India are upping their imports. Given western sanctions, Russian oil and gas comes at a discount to other global supplies. These deals are not being settled – as once they might have been – in dollars. The danger is that once the dollar becomes established that countries don’t need it in order to trade, it will provoke a fall in holdings around the world.

Then again, it was not too long ago that Donald Trump was accusing China of currency manipulation by holding too many dollars. The US might relish the advantages that come with having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but there is a downside to having an overly strong currency. The US will not worry too much if central banks reduce their holdings of dollars in future: by reducing the value of the dollar it will help make US exports more attractive.   

New Zealand has much to learn from the treatment of Posie Parker

A promotional clip for New Zealand uploaded to social media the other day looked like the usual decorous fare churned out by the country’s tourism agency: all deep-blue skies, golden sands and soaring mountains. The words were another matter.

There was no come-hither voice enjoining visitors to experience ‘pure New Zealand’. Rather there was the miserable sound of Auckland this past weekend as the women who gathered to hear the biological sex campaigner Posie Parker were confronted by a much burlier mob determined to ‘turf the Terfs’, as one of their placards had it. 

The mash-up clip and hundreds of other appalling publicity items like it have appeared over recent days on Twitter under the trending hashtag #NZHatesWomen. ‘Having witnessed the treatment of women trying to speak in a public place in Auckland, I won’t be visiting New Zealand anytime soon,’ said one Twitter user. Another offered: ‘To the world, don’t come to New Zealand for a holiday, don’t waste your money on us.’

As Tourism New Zealand hastily deleted the tidal wave of similar tweets that appeared on its own account, even opponents of the British activist’s recent visit were left wondering if their success in shutting down last Saturday’s event had not been a massive own goal. Was this not confirmation of pretty much everything that had been said about the need for women to have their own spaces without fear of molestation?

Parker, otherwise known as Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull, was sent packing after a much larger counter-protest involving thousands overwhelmed the couple of hundred or so fans who turned out for her. They upended barriers and threw punches as they went, before dousing Parker herself in tomato juice.

The campaigner ended up cutting short her two-city visit and got on the next available plane back to London. But the country that briefly hosted her hasn’t come out of the affair looking too flash. A nation that prides itself on having been the first to give women the vote is now rather more looking like the latest to give women the boot.

Not a bad day’s work for a visitor who even a few weeks ago might have been generally thought of in mainstream New Zealand – if she were thought of at all – as little more than a middle-aged Brit with Monroesque looks, curious views and a bit of a thing for bright red trouser suits.

While Parker appeared to have emerged from the ordeal with ‘priceless branding’ for her cause, the country had been left with ‘immense and international’ egg on its supposedly liberal face, the Kiwi journalist Sam Clements wrote. Fellow opponents of the visit who may have spent the past few days ‘congratulating themselves over their raucous, aggressive, bullying behaviour, ought to navel gaze a little and look up the definition of hypocrisy’, Clements believes. 

Even prominent media personalities who had cheered on the counter-protests before the event were left nonplussed. Lloyd Burr, a national radio host, used his platform last week to encourage listeners ‘stand in solidarity’ with him on the day against Parker. This week, however, he was having second thoughts, sorrowing over how subsequent events had lost any support from the vast majority ‘who don’t care what’s between your legs nor how you define yourself’.  

The New Zealand Herald, whose own coverage leading up to the visit made much of Parker’s ‘repugnant’ views, was forced to agree. In a paywalled editorial, it conceded that the speaker had gained far more than her critics. Possibly more than the Kiwis care to admit about deeply anti-female currents within their own culture, too.

Reasonable people may disagree over the merits of what Parker says, as players inevitably must in balancing the apparent maddening conflicts of interest between trans rights activism and gender-critical feminists. But New Zealand’s own record tallies somewhat with Parker’s view of it being ‘the worst place for women’ she had ever visited.  

Recent academic research, published earlier in the month to mark International Women’s Day, suggests that more than half of women living there have experienced some kind of abuse by an intimate partner. Each year in that country of five million, local police conduct more than 100,000 investigations into family violence, mostly perpetrated by men, according to the Ministry of Justice.

And while New Zealand enjoys a reputation as a generally safe place for women to visit – on a par with Iceland or Ireland – many will be aware of the violence foreign women have intermittently suffered as well.

And now there’s another, sort of. Speaking with journalists today, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he didn’t ‘want to spend a lot of time’ getting into the ramifications of the Parker visit for the land of dreamy sunsets.

Should the issues raised by her all-too-fleeting time here become as polarising as they have been abroad, Hipkins declared, that wouldn’t be ‘very helpful’. Has that not happened already?

Watch: Jeremy Corbyn snaps at journalist

The magic grandpa is back in the headlines. Keir Starmer’s decision to move against his predecessor means an unwelcome return to the spotlight for Jeremy Corbyn, who has never been a great fan of the fourth estate. Starmer has proposed a motion to Labour’s ruling body to bar Jezza for standing for the party again, citing his disastrous leadership as the justification for this. Big news you might think – and one worth seeking Corbyn’s views on.

Yet when Sky’s Liz Bates – one of the more genial members of the lobby – approached Corbyn for comment outside parliament, it seems that the ex-Labour MP was in no mood to talk. Bates politely asked the septuagenarian socialist if he intended to stand again as an independent candidate. Jezza deflected by saying he was off to a protest (quelle surprise) but Bates persisted, prompting Corbyn to bark back at her. ‘Thank you very much’ he shouted – a polite expression belied by the venom with which he spoke.

Whatever happened to kinder, gentler, politics eh?

Humza Yousaf and the myth about Britain’s diversity problem

Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister of Scotland after his victory in the SNP leadership election, deserves his moment in the sun. Yousaf is Scotland’s first ethnic minority leader and the first Muslim leader of the governing party. Legitimate questions about whether he is up to the job must wait while credit is given for the scale of his achievement in reaching the top of Scottish politics at the tender age of 37. Yousaf’s triumph heralds another significant milestone in the rapidly changing political complexion of the United Kingdom: the barriers to progress for those from non-white backgrounds are disappearing, a remarkable development that would have been implausible just a generation ago.

This transformation has come about in a uniquely understated British way and makes a mockery of those who suggest that the UK is an irredeemably racist society. The backgrounds of those now occupying the highest offices in the land tell a different story.

Rishi Sunak, a Hindu whose parents arrived as immigrants to this country, became the youngest British prime minister of modern times when he moved into Downing Street last year at the age of 42; Sadiq Khan, a Muslim from an immigrant working-class family, has been the mayor of London since 2016; Anas Sarwar became the first Muslim to lead the Scottish Labour party just over two years ago.

A succession of ethnic minority ministers — including Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Kwasi Kwarteng, James Cleverly and Suella Braverman — have all occupied some of the most senior posts in government in recent years. There is no modern democratic society anywhere that matches Britain when it comes to this kind of equality and opportunity at the very top of politics.

Europe’s leaders, often quick to suggest that their own countries do things better than Britain, should take note. In France, for example, there is almost no chance of an ethnic minority president occupying the Elysee Palace anytime soon. Diversity in president Macron’s cabinet comes in relatively junior positions, in the form of Rima Abdul Malak, the culture minister, whose family fled Lebanon during its civil war, and the education minister, Pap Ndiaye, whose father is Senegalese.

Italy gained its first black cabinet minister as recently as 2013, when Cecile Kyenge, who was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, became integration minister; she suffered death threats and vicious racial slurs. Cem Ozdemir was appointed to the food and agriculture ministry in Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition, becoming Germany’s first federal government minister of Turkish origin.

The UK is simply in a different league to its European neighbours, due to strong anti-discrimination legislation as well as a history of collecting relevant data in critical areas such as education and employment. Much of this remarkable progress has come under recent Tory governments: Boris Johnson, whatever his other failings, led the most ethnically diverse administration in British political history. Sunak’s government has largely followed a similar trend. This is in sharp contrast to Labour which continues to trail far behind the Tories, hampered by its inability to escape the ideological clutches of divisive identity politics as the only answer to inequalities. 

Now that there are a significant number of people in power from all walks of life, the focus is moving away from their backgrounds and more questions are being asked about their policy positions and actual performance in the job. Rishi Sunak’s time in office will be judged on whether he can tackle the small boats crisis, combat inflation and rescue the economy. His Hindu faith is very much secondary to this.

In Scotland, Humza Yousaf inherits a bulging in-tray, with a struggling NHS, the economy in crisis and considerable in-fighting at SNP headquarters. Is there anything in his past record of underperformance as a minister that suggests he can succeed in the top job? Can he reverse the Scottish government’s dire record on public services? Is he capable of imposing his authority over a fractious party?

It is hard to be optimistic and doubts have been reinforced by Yousaf’s lacklustre leadership campaign. The brutal reality is that there are no prizes in politics for diversity alone. It is competence that voters value above all else in their politicians, whatever their background — and that is exactly as it should be. 

Rishi Sunak is right to be concerned about laughing gas

Laughing gas appears initially to be a fairly harmless drug. It doesn’t have a giveaway smell or any obvious adverse side effects – and it’s cheap. Post-pandemic there has been a huge rise in the number of teenagers and young adults taking it: today there are more than 600,000 regular users in the UK. After the Notting Hill Carnival, there were more than 3.5 tonnes of canisters left behind. Which is why, yesterday, Rishi Sunak has pledged to make laughing gas a class C drug by the end of the year in a move to ban the substance. The Prime Minister has come under some immediate criticism for choosing to focus efforts on a drug assumed to be benign, but the nitrous oxide’s debilitating long-term consequences have received much less attention.

Inhaling the substance gives users a fleeting high, its effects lasting only seconds. Then it’s straight back to normality. It’s popular because it’s such a quick hit. However, prolonged use can have devastating consequences, causing nerve damage, paralysis, and, in extreme (and rare) cases, death.

‘One of my patients came to hospital paralysed. He is now beginning to walk, but he can’t run,’ Nikos Evangelou, a consultant neurologist based in Nottingham, tells me. ‘The last couple of guys I saw were also paralysed when they presented to hospital. People are slow to present because they think the tingling and numbness is the “normal action” of the drug.’

Laughing gas induced nerve damage is, in fact, fast becoming an epidemic. In a recent TikTok video, Consultant neurologist David Nicholl said he’d seen a significant uptick in cases presenting in hospital post-pandemic. ‘In the last 20 years,’ he said, ‘a consultant would maybe see one or two cases, but then it started picking up in the pandemic, so during lockdowns we would maybe see a case every couple of months or so but now we see one every week. I would describe it as an epidemic, and that’s not just me saying that: colleagues would too.’

The gas, referred to as ‘NOS’, ‘balloons’ and, in certain newspapers, ‘hippy crack’, is formally known as nitrous oxide. Joseph Priestley discovered it in 1772. Today it’s used as a dental anaesthetic and in cooking for making whipped cream. (Internet data will, no doubt, be able to show there’s a raft of teenagers very into dessert toppings.) 

Once it came in small silver canisters called ‘whippets’. Now, the canisters on the streets are much larger – and more dangerous as a result. They cost as little as £30 and can be bought legally online; there are even QR codes on some canisters that give users a discount for their next purchase. Whereas ‘whippets’ gave a single hit, users today no longer know how much they are taking and are therefore much more likely to inhale greater amounts of the drug. ‘People are getting much higher doses than what they’re used to,’ one doctor says. ‘For that reason, we’re seeing many more people coming in with complications.’

How does the drug work? Nitrous oxide causes changes in the body when it’s inhaled. The process – ‘oxidation’ – inactivates vitamin B12, which is an important substance necessary for the formation of brain and nerve cells. In its inactive form, B12 cannot produce important parts of nerve cells, called myelin, or help to produce DNA. When neurons ‘demyelinate’, they cannot transmit nerve signals effectively. This manifests as spinal cord lesions and neuropathies, causing serious neurological disease.

At first, B12 deficiency may seem harmless: users’ hands and feet might tingle. But, as it progresses, it gets far more serious. The initial ‘buzzing’ sensation in the user’s feet evolves to become a loss of sensation in their limbs, causing difficulty walking. Dr Stephen Keddie, a senior neurology doctor working in East London, describes how bad it can get: ‘We’ve had people come in with complete loss of sensation in the lower limbs, with difficulty walking because they’ve got no idea where their limbs are in space – we call that proprioceptive loss – and that can make them walk with a very broad-based gait.’

And it’s not just lower limbs that are impacted: patients find the tingling and numbness can occur in their hands, causing a loss in their manual dexterity. As a result, people have reported difficulties putting on makeup, playing computer games, typing or using a computer mouse, and even writing.

The brain is affected too: patients’ cognitive processes slow down. Some can’t talk properly; others suffer memory problems. ‘Because the drug affects the spinal cord, it’s not just walking that’s affected. I’ve seen many people who are incontinent, and people who have erectile dysfunction,’ Dr Keddie says. ‘These are all things that are underreported.’ Worst of all? Nerve damage caused by B12 deficiency is not fully reversible.

So could youngsters, once perfectly healthy, permanently lose their ability to walk or run as a result of abusing nitrous oxide? ‘It’s conceivable if you have severe enough damage in your spinal cord’, a neurologist tells me, ‘that you could remain wheelchair-bound for life.’

‘It’s devastating,’ another neurologist says as he recalls the patients that he’s seen. ‘These are young people who have their whole lives ahead of them, unable to walk or go to the toilet by themselves as a result of using NOS.’

Patients who are treated in hospital receive intravenous vitamin B12 injections until they can at least walk with the aid of a stick. Once discharged, they will continue on oral B12 medication at home. While some see an improvement in symptoms, a full recovery isn’t thought possible; many remain disabled in some way. One 25-year-old from London said that her laughing gas use has caused damage to her back, and now, her dad is her full-time carer. ‘I know there’s no way of reversing the damage I’ve done, and I feel like my life’s over – and I’m only 25,’ she told the Sun.

Laughing gas is not thought to be physiologically addictive, like heroin. Yet several doctors I spoke to said that they saw their patients continue to take it even after suffering serious mobility and nerve damage. One user, Billie Dee, said that coming off laughing gas was harder than coming off other substances. ‘Having been addicted to MDMA and cocaine,’ she said. ‘I can honestly say nitrous oxide for me was far more addictive than any other class A drug.’

It has reportedly become the preferred drug of choice in many Asian communities. Dr Keddie says that many of those presenting in his East London clinic are from Asian backgrounds. ‘You do tend to see quite a lot of people who are Muslim.’ Youngsters from these backgrounds who can’t drink are likely using laughing gas because it is hard to spot. While cannabis has a characteristic smell, and often causes its users’ eyes to go red, laughing gas is not at all conspicuous. It’s a convenient high: short-lived and lacking in side effects, initially anyway.

The sad reality is that we are stabbing in the dark when it comes to dealing with laughing gas; long-term data has not been collected, and many studies are only just beginning now. ‘The spectrum of disease is so varied,’ Dr Keddie says, ‘and we don’t know what the risk factors are. Using evidence from friends as a reason why you think you’re going to be okay is absolutely not evidence-based whatsoever.’

A number of doctors told me that their patients often didn’t turn up for their follow-up appointments either, meaning that they don’t see how they’re doing several months on and cannot fully predict how long-lasting or severe the impacts of the drug are. Even Prince Harry has admitted to taking ‘slow, penetrating hits’ of nitrous oxide — while his son was being born, despite it usually being the person actually giving birth requiring light anaesthetic — though this revelation has been brushed aside as the media focuses on his admission to using stronger substances.

It was made illegal to buy laughing gas for recreational use seven years ago. But walk down almost any street on a Saturday morning and you’ll see canisters littering the roads. During Notting Hill carnival, teenagers strolled through west London inhaling the stuff with impunity. Have the police turned a blind eye to what is, in fact, a highly dangerous substance? Even in Holland, where cannabis is legal, the sale of laughing gas is tightly regulated.

The British Compressed Gases Association (BCGA) has been campaigning heavily for the government to ban its retail sale. Indeed, recent data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that around 230,000 adults between the age of 16 and 24 said they had taken the substance in the last year. Some UK doctors have been working with the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to better inform the government of the harms caused by laughing gas and to push the argument for the reconsideration of its the legal status, though they advised last month that ‘no single recommendation on its own is likely to be sufficient to successfully reduce the harms associated with nitrous oxide use’. 

There had been murmurings under the previous home secretary Priti Patel of steps to be taken to stop young people coming to harm from nitrous oxide. Now though, it is at long last that Rishi Sunak’s government has announced plans for a ban that looks to prevent not only the littering of canisters across our streets — but the horrifically debilitating effects of the drug.

Humza Yousaf’s election should concern us all

Scotland has been deprived of the opportunity for a fresh start. Humza Yousaf has been elected leader of the Scottish National party, and he is set to be confirmed as first minister today in the Scottish parliament. 

Yousaf defeated runner-up Kate Forbes by 52 to 48 per cent on second preference votes. The margin of victory is somewhat ironic, considering that, when the UK voted to leave the European Union by the same ratio, the SNP argued this was not a sufficient mandate and there should be another vote. Despite this, Scotland will now have to prepare for life under a new first minister. And Yousaf’s election should concern us all. 

Yousaf has stated throughout the election campaign that he wants to push social justice and progressive values as first minister. He has disturbing form for engaging in personal attacks against those he disagrees with, accusing rivals who have raised serious and legitimate concerns about the impact his ideology will have on society as ‘lurching to the right’.  

In the Q&A following his victory speech he made a point of accusing the UK government of engaging in a ‘power grab’ regarding their use of Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to block the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. He went on to say that he will launch a legal challenge against the UK government to allow the Bill to go ahead. 

It has been clear for some time that the Bill poses significant threats to safeguarding across the entirety of the UK. It would lower the age at which someone can legally change their sex in Scotland from 18 to 16; reduce the required period of time someone must have lived in their acquired ‘gender’ from two years to just three months; and would remove the requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

In essence, it would introduce self-ID, watering down existing checks and balances designed to ensure that those who wish to ‘transition’ are genuine. All polling has demonstrated that it is opposed by most Scots. Yet Yousaf has now committed to championing the legislation, even if it throws women and child safeguarding under the bus. 

The ramifications of this ideological policy were made clear when the convicted male rapist Isla Bryson (formerly Adam Graham), was initially placed in a female-only prison. On this, Yousaf’s response was completely nonsensical. Despite supporting the Gender Bill, which would make it easier for biological men to be housed in female prisons, he also accused Bryson of not being a ‘genuine transwoman’. This, in and of itself, demonstrates the problem with self-ID. Who exactly is to judge whether someone is ‘genuine’ or not? 

Yousaf has held senior cabinet positions (including health minister) in a government that has aggressively pushed gender ideology. In Glasgow, the Sandyford gender identity clinic has continued to operate without proper political or clinical scrutiny, despite recent shocking admissions within the clinic regarding child safeguarding. When treating those with gender dysphoria, the Scottish NHS continues to openly rely on guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a trans-activist organisation. Last year, the Scottish government even published educational guidance that purports to support schools keeping pupils’ gender transition secret from their parents.

It’s not just on gender ideology that Yousaf has a disturbing record. Equally worrying is his approach to free speech. He has committed to pushing forward with legislation to ban ‘conversion therapy’ in Scotland, notwithstanding the significant concerns many have about the chilling effect it could have on therapists, potentially forcing them to affirm a child who says they are trans into going through medical transition. This flies in the face of ethical therapy, which should be explorative in nature. We have already seen the serious ramifications of this type of legislation. In Victoria, Australia, where ‘conversion therapy’ was recently banned, it is now potentially a criminal offence if a parent does not affirm their child into taking puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. 

As justice minister he introduced the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill. This included provisions on ‘stirring up hatred’, which pose a significant risk to free speech, and may even criminalise private conversations in Scots’ own homes. Thankfully, the Bill was at least amended during its passage through the Scottish parliament to remove prosecution for cases of unintentionally stirring up hate, which could have criminalised libraries for stocking contentious books. It’s lucky for Yousaf as well that the legislation is not yet in force. He was reportedly referred to the police for ‘misgendering’ the rapist Bryson, which would arguably have fallen foul of his Hate Crime Bill if it had been law. 

For an individual who claims to oppose the ‘culture wars’, Yousaf has shown himself more than happy to stoke its flames. In a speech in the Scottish parliament, he recently engaged in what can only be described as a rant, listing senior public positions in Scotland held by people who are white, seemingly forgetting the fact that 96 per cent of the Scottish population are white as well. 

He has also been happy to cosy-up to the Scottish Greens, whose co-convenor, Maggie Chapman, has previously said that eight-year-olds should be able to change sex and that ‘sex is not binary or immutable.’

There are some silver linings to Yousaf’s leadership, at least. He is gaffe prone. Just six months into his brief as transport minister, he received a fine of £300 and six penalty points after he was stopped by the police while driving a friend’s car without holding the proper insurance. And only a few weeks ago, during the election campaign, he jokingly asked a group of Ukrainian women in Edinburgh ‘where are all the men?’. It had to be pointed out to Yousaf that their partners were in Ukraine fighting the war. 

If Scotland is lucky, this could be a very short-lived premiership. Many are already calling for a general election. A significant proportion of both the SNP membership and the country as a whole are opposed to his leadership. Many prominent voices, including JK Rowling, have his card firmly marked, while those rushing to his support include organisations engulfed in controversy, such as Mermaids. 

Last year, a clip of Yousaf went viral after he fell off a scooter he was riding through the Scottish parliament. For the sake of free speech and sanity in Scotland, it is hopefully only a matter of time before Yousaf and the SNP come tumbling down in the same way.  

The very British Kinks

It’s been 60 years since Muswell Hill brothers Ray and Dave Davies – then 19 and 15 respectively – formed The Kinks. What is now known as the ‘catalogue’ division of record companies love an anniversary, particularly when fans of the band are likely to be edging into pensionable disposable-income territory. And so, a new compilation titled The Journey has arrived, with 36 tracks curated by the brothers from across The Kinks’ 30 years of active service, which have been scrubbed up to sound better than ever. It’s fitting that a band which sang a lot about heritage and preservation – very unusually for the young men that they were at the time – should, in turn, be added to that heritage and preserved. 

Listening to these songs again, I’m struck by how vital and varied they are, and how, unlike most pop music (which rightly lives only for its moment), The Kinks transcended their time to capture the British character more completely than almost anything and anybody else. 

It must be very irritating for Ray Davies to reflect on how, if The Beatles hadn’t come along, he’d be regarded as the greatest songwriter of his age. I have always preferred The Kinks – for me The Beatles lose a point for always sounding so strangely clean. No matter how hard John Lennon tried, The Beatles are an amiable listen. Any group that contains a member as loveable and sane as Ringo cannot really frighten the horses. By contrast, The Rolling Stones are all about sex, even in their quieter moments. 

The Kinks combine the two extremes of melody and raunch and add something that could only be their own. Despite their name, they are not sexy in themselves (though Dave has his moments). Their first hits were punkishly raucous and erotically charged by the standards of 1964, but they spread their wings very soon afterwards, blooming into a remarkably versatile musical unit that could turn from country to stadium rock to lightweight pop to blues to music hall at the click of Ray’s fingers. The dynamic between the two very different brothers is the fuel for it all. Ray looks worried even when he is promising to love you all day (and all of the night). Dave looks like he’s won the pools even when he’s singing about an alcoholic clown expiring alone. 

In the 90s The Kinks were briefly name-dropped by and stamped with the approval of certain elements of the Britpop scene, but this was reducing something to one aspect when it contains multitudes. The elegiac quality of some of their most familiar hits – Waterloo Sunset, Shangri-La or Days – is a key part of their appeal. But only a part. 

To some listeners, an album such as The Village Green Preservation Society might seem positively fogeyish and nimbyish – but we must remember that Ray was only 23 years old when he wrote it. These songs are not rose-tinted personal recollections of long-ago youth, but a celebration of Britishness.

They say that the world of the past, which in the era of modernity can be both so recent and so different, is worth evaluating and remembering. Songs such as Harry Rag (an ode to cigarettes), Where Are They Now (a lament for the 60s released in 1973) or Come Dancing (an unbearably poignant remembrance of one of Ray and Dave’s older sisters) each contain the richness of a novel; impressive given that these observations come in the form of three-minute pop ditties.  

A sensitivity reader (thankfully they haven’t moved into the musical publishing arena, yet) would splutter at the lyrics to songs like Victoria (‘For this land, I shall die / Let her sun never set’) and Living on a Thin Line (‘All the stories have been told / Of kings and days of old / But there’s no England now’). 

Out of context they sound almost Enoch Powellian – but this is putting the wrong frame around the picture. The Kinks are equal opportunities haters, their body of work very much a cry of a plague on all political houses – against the ‘corruption’ of the ‘money-go-round’ and also against the welfare state. The sprawling triple album Preservation showcases two appalling demagogues of right and left, Mr Flash and Mr Black. The Kinks also have a big heart, with compassion for the cruel and drunken taxed-to-nothing lord of the manor of Sunny Afternoon and for the wretched left-behinds of Dead End Street. 

The Journey is just the first half of a new greatest hits album, each disc curated around a different theme. Some of the bangers are missing, but they will arrive in part two, presumably. 

Hopefully my personal favourite, Sweet Lady Genevieve, will be included; how it wasn’t a number one hit (it didn’t even chart) I’ll never fathom. Maybe the lyrics – this is a love song which confesses ‘I told you never ending lies’ in its first line – are just too painful and emotionally complex for a singalong. The first half of The Journey is focused on emotions and relationships; I presume the second half will contain the social comment. 

Many have laid claim to being the voice of the British people, but for my money the Kinks are the closest there’s been. The suspicion of the state, the distrust of big ideas, the strong sense of place and continuity – all the things nobody in culture speaks up for today but which turn up in polling again and again. The Kinks can’t be claimed by anyone. They were, and are, their own men. Anyone who wants to understand the British – or the British to understand ourselves – should listen.

In defence of Rishi Sunak’s crackdown on beggars

When Rishi Sunak presented the latest attempt by a prime minister to get tough on anti-social behaviour, it wasn’t the graffiti-cleaning or the ‘gotcha’ fly-tip cameras or the labelled jumpsuits that caught my eye. It was the inclusion of begging. 

Admittedly, you had to go pretty far down his pledge list before you found it. Perhaps someone with a longer institutional memory than the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, had warned him of the drubbing John Major received from the great and the good – and many well-meaning liberals – when he launched his drive against ‘aggressive’ begging in 1994. 

It will be made an offence for criminal gangs to organise begging networks for extra cash, which is often used to facilitate illegal activities. To ensure police and local councils can address activity which is intimidating or causes the public distress, they will have the tools to direct people causing nuisance on the street – including by obstructing shop doorways and begging by cash points – towards the support they need, such as accommodation or mental health and substance misuse services. Any debris and paraphernalia will then be cleared away.

But there it was. A new offence could be introduced to deal with gangs who run networks of beggars, and the police would be given new powers to move people if they are causing a ‘public nuisance’ by blocking shop doorways or – wait for it – ‘begging by cashpoints’. This last, I admit, is a particular bugbear of mine. When I returned from a decade working abroad, I could not believe that what seemed like every cash machine, at least in big cities, had acquired its own guardian-beggar, how the police turned a blind eye, and how people almost took it for granted.  

I am sorry, but I never have. To find someone sitting by a cashpoint with a cap in front of them, less often with an outstretched hand, has always seemed to me to be highly intimidating. Now it is not just beside cash machines, but outside the small neighbourhood supermarkets that have proliferated in cities in recent years. A boon in most respects, they soon acquired relays of people begging for all the hours they were open.

The team ‘staffing’ the pavement space outside my local mini-market includes someone in an (expensive) wheelchair who clearly needs it; someone who gets up out of his wheelchair and pushes it away when his shift is done, someone who – local rumour has it – goes home to a council flat just around the corner and several individuals who seem to be taxi-ed in and out. At times there have been whole encampments. On occasion there has been a couple who set up an ‘art’ exhibition on the pavement opposite. Most come with a range of unhygienic accoutrements from blankets and quilts to bowls and beakers, which they sometimes take with them when they go, unlike the piles of litter that remain. 

I have to admire their persistence ­– and their time-keeping. Rain or shine, heat or cold, someone will be there. But I still don’t like it. Nor, it seems, do many local residents. But they feel embarrassed to object – partly because they know that if they did, it would not make a ha’porth of difference. Like me, they may have tried to prod the local constabulary into some sort of action (on the rare occasion an officer passes by, only to be told that it is nothing to do with them). Contact the local authority and it is nothing to do with them, either. Contact the charities, they say, sometimes offering a phone number. 

This black hole in responsibility is also, praise be, reflected in Sunak’s announcement, in which he said a new ‘one-stop’ digital shop will be developed to ‘help address problems people have faced when trying to report these sorts of crimes because of a lack of clarity around how to raise an issue or who to speak to, or a lack of confidence that these crimes will be dealt with seriously’ . Well, yes. Let’s see. 

One difficulty in taking action against begging is that it is almost always associated with rough-sleeping and homelessness. And the logic from this – as many of those objecting to the proposed measures pointed out – is that being homeless should not be considered a crime, except perhaps on the part of local governments and the social order that leaves some without a roof over their head. Therefore, so the argument goes, begging – except when attended by assault or menaces – should not be regarded as an offence either. 

But the two things are not the same. While there may indeed be some overlap between begging and homelessness, not everyone who begs is homeless, and vice versa. One of those who distinguishes clearly between the two is Baroness Casey – she of the recent excoriating report on the Metropolitan Police.  She masterminded the ‘Everyone In’ operation during the pandemic and spent much of her earlier career involved one way or another in homelessness, including in the civil service and via charities such as St Mungo’s and Shelter. Few know the field, and the dilemmas, better than she does. 

Having always regarded her as socially liberal – she was recruited to government first by Tony Blair, then taken on again by David ‘Big Society’ Cameron – I was surprised by some of what she said in a discussion on rough sleeping in the wake of the pandemic. On the complexities of reducing rough sleeping, she spoke with great engagement and empathy. But her tone changed completely when she turned to begging. She said, as I recall, that she detested it and that far more should be done to stop it. 

Hooray, I thought. Maybe something will finally be done. But with the whole anti-social behaviour discussion it has, once again, taken a very long time for the powers-that-be to recognise the importance of this in the eyes of ‘ordinary’ voters. My local (Conservative) MP, for instance, seemed amazed to find that anti-social behaviour loomed so large in her constituents’ concerns when she took the trouble to ask. The point is, I suspect, that many people simply gave up complaining because their worries were dismissed as intolerance or over-reaction – or were simply ignored. 

Many people may not like rough-sleeping and believe more could be done, but many more, I would venture, detest begging. We find it – to return to John Major – ‘offensive’. Like him, we ask why a country with a social safety net tolerates begging to the extent that it does (or at least why its law enforcement does).  And I doubt I am alone in finding the cashpoint-watchers especially intimidating. 

The 1824 Vagrancy Act – which criminalised both rough-sleeping and begging – was repealed in April last year on the reasonable grounds that homelessness should not be a crime. But it had long gone unenforced. The new measures against anti-social behaviour are intended, in part, to replace that law. But enforcement will be key. Major said the law should be ‘rigorous’ as regards begging, although it never happened. We will see whether Sunak has correctly judged public frustration – and if has the determination to see his crackdown through. 

In defence of the 15-minute city

At the end of last year, the subject of the ‘15-minute city’ began to creep into neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, interrupting the usual discussion of lost cats, car crime and blocked drains. Oxfordshire County Council had proposed a traffic-zoning scheme to reduce car usage in the city – and suggested that to address unnecessary journeys, every resident should have ‘all the essentials (shops, healthcare, parks) within a 15-minute walk of their home’. But critics up and down the country hit on the proposals as an example of the ‘international conspiracy’ and ‘tyranny’ of the 15-minute city – which, they warned, is probably coming to a neighbourhood near you soon. 

Although the term only gained traction four years ago, the 15-minute city is nothing new in town-planning theory. The idea of urban areas where amenities can be reached within a 15-minute walk or cycle has been shaping neighbourhoods across Europe for decades, and there are flourishing examples across the UK and beyond. As well as Oxford, governments in locations including Bristol, Birmingham, Canterbury, Ipswich and Sheffield have recently said they hope to implement a 15-minute city plan.

Yet over the past few months, conspiracy theorists have condemned this urban-planning model as a ‘Stalinist’ method of controlling the population by stopping free movement and infringing residents’ rights, claiming the ultimate goal is to confine people to their neighbourhoods. It was called an ‘international socialist concept’ by Conservative Party MP Nick Fletcher during a parliamentary debate last month, and arguments over its merits (or lack thereof) are raging on Twitter. So what’s the truth?

Jorge Beroiz, a design specialist at architect CRTKL, says that the modern 15-minute city theory is motivated by the goal of cultivating vibrant local neighbourhoods and reducing carbon emissions. ‘Historically cities have been primarily designed around cars, but the 15-minute city puts pedestrians first,’ he explains. ‘The aim is not to seal off communities and limit them to a 15-minute boundary.’

The concept has been evolving since the 1920s, when American Clarence Perry championed the idea of walkable cities. But it was Franco-Colombian Carlos Moreno of Sorbonne University in Paris who is credited with coining the term ‘15-minute city’ in 2019. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, incorporated it into her 2020 re-election campaign, and since then Paris has banned cars from parts of the Seine and built new cycling routes.

During the pandemic, the appeal of walkable neighbourhoods was brought into focus as many urban dwellers reset their routines, cut out the commute and rediscovered what was on their doorsteps. In some areas, newly pedestrianised seating areas outside restaurants went on to become permanent features – as did hybrid working patterns. All of this has contributed to a shift in what people want from the places in which they live. A recent YouGov survey found that 62 per cent of people would like their area to become a 15-minute neighbourhood, naming easy access to bus stops, post boxes and medical facilities as their priorities. Which makes moves in this direction sound less like a conspiracy and more like paying attention to what communities actually want.

What the critics also seem to have overlooked is that in many parts of the UK and abroad, the 15-minute city concept is working well already. One established self-sufficient community is Poundbury in Dorchester, championed by King Charles, who coined the term ‘urban village’ 20 years ago. And there are many more in the planning, including Fawley Waterside, a live-work-play community on the site of the former Fawley power station on the Solent. The self-contained, predominantly car-free town will include 1,500 new homes for sale next year.

At The Phoenix in Lewes, East Sussex, the focus will be on shared amenities within a 15-minute walkable radius. These will include a mobility hub, electric car club, communal gardens and community canteen – along with 700 homes on the brownfield site, running entirely on renewable energy.

Another developer, Ballymore, applies the 15-minute city principles to all new schemes, explains sales director James Boyce. ‘People want easy access to GP surgeries, food shops and green space, but the challenge is to ensure that people are able to move between them without having to get in the car,’ he says. ‘On top, of course, is creating a public realm that offers people the opportunity to stop, dwell and socialise.’ At the Brentford Project, the firm’s major regeneration scheme in west London, 876 new homes (from £470,000) will sit alongside a revitalised high street reconnecting it with the waterfront. 

One vibrant 15-minute neighbourhood that has evolved over two decades is Wembley Park – an 85-acre live-work space around the stadium with more than 5,000 new homes by Quintain. A newer example can be found in north London’s Brent Cross Town, a mixed-use regeneration scheme from Related Argent with 6,700 new homes (from £400,000), offices, shops and restaurants next to Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Connectivity – another essential for 15-minute cities – is via a new Thameslink station.

Beyond the UK, there are plenty more examples of thriving 15-minute cities, too. Milan’s futuristic miniature live-work city of Porta Nuova has been growing since 2005, and is home to the distinctive Bosco Verticale complex – two ‘vertical forest’ apartment towers. Kelly Russell Catella of developer COIMA says: ‘Placing nature and humans at the centre of all our developments leads to the creation of more sustainable and vibrant communities.’

In Athens, the city’s old international airport is an impressively hi-tech 15-minute smart city, The Ellinikon, and the country’s largest regeneration project. Poland’s first ‘15-minute city’ is Pleszew, south of Poznan, which has a new network of bike paths that connect schools, commerce and recreation; while Copenhagen’s harbourfront Nordhavn will follow a ‘five minutes to everything’ model. Meanwhile Barcelona’s Superblock model plans to divvy up the city into 503 nine-block clusters to provide more space for people and less for cars. 

Sweden’s ‘one-minute city’ has taken the approach to a hyper-local level, with the Street Moves initiative by Think Tank ArkDes transforming individual streets into social hubs and green ‘parklets’. They provide a toolkit of street furniture ready for installation with planters, seating, play spaces and bike racks. Perhaps that’s another idea for a lively debate on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group.

But with this many success stories around the world and a growing need for communities to cut their car use, it seems unlikely 15-minute cities are going anywhere – however much the concept gets hijacked by conspiracy theorists.

Read all about it: 12 of the best novels about journalism

A recently published novel, Becky by Sarah May, is the latest in a long tradition of fiction based on journalism – and a good excuse to think again about the great books from that sub-genre. May’s is a curious hybrid of the life story of News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks and a repurposing of Vanity Fair. George Cochrane, reviewing it for The Spectator, called Becky ‘a good novel dwarfed by a great one’. 

He was referring to the Thackeray, but he might just as easily have been talking about another classic English novel: Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. That comic masterpiece from 1938 is the book against which all other fictional evocations of journalists and journalism are judged – and is almost invariably the first on any list of the best of such books. 

Scoop, a constantly hilarious absurdist send-up of the haplessness of reporters and the chaos of newspaper offices, is worthy of its place at the top of the tree. But there are countless other examples in a field that’s ever expanding – no doubt because there can be few other professions whose members are more likely to write fiction themselves. Here, in order of date of publication, are a dozen recommended books that aren’t Scoop, which feature journalists at work and play. 

Bel Ami, Guy de Maupassant (1885)

A soldier discharged from colonial military service rocks up in Paris seeking new opportunities and bumps into an old acquaintance who is now writing for a newspaper, La Vie Française. He is persuaded to try the journalism game himself, quickly graduates from writing news nibs to leaders and is soon vying for the editorship. Almost every character is odious and it’s stacked with sexual and political intrigue and affairs – in other words it’s decades ahead of its time.

New Grub Street, George Gissing (1891)

This is a good dark and foggy London counterpoint to the glittering Paris of Guy de Maupassant. George Gissing’s hack writers are all locked in penury rather than success, dreaming of acclaim as novelists while struggling to get enough pieces published in various low circulation periodicals to pay the rent; it foreshadows the 21st century world of the freelance journalist in that regard. The self-delusion among Gissing’s characters gives this its bitter comedy. 

Psmith, Journalist, P.G. Wodehouse (1915)

This takes P.G. Wodehouse’s blustering hero from spectacular japes in the City of London to New York and life on a struggling tabloid. There he covers the teeming city life of boxers, gangsters and crooked politicians. Psmith’s convoluted speech is in joyous contrast to the fast-talking locals; his manners make him a man apart. It’s Wodehouse meets Damon Runyon – a comic delight. 

Picture Palace, Malcolm Muggeridge (1934)

A curio in that it was written in the early 1930s but, because of fears of libel action, not actually published for another 50 years. Muggeridge had worked on what was then the Manchester Guardian and the legal concerns were over his portrayal of its senior editors as chin-stroking and self-satisfied while Europe burned – something no reader would recognise in the Guardian of today, surely. His veteran leader-writer succumbing to dementia with mealy-mouthed phrases like ‘it is greatly to be hoped’ always swirling around his mind is both droll and terrifying. 

King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Hergé (1939)

Tintin is probably the most famous fictional journalist of them all – but you never see him cited as one. And that’s probably because he not only never files any copy but never even takes a note. This adventure is as close as he gets to feeling like a true foreign correspondent, probing a plot which hinges on media representation and could see middle Europe plunged into war.  

The Paper Palace, Robert Harling (1951)

A portrait of Fleet Street at its bustling post-war zenith that is enduringly gripping – even if now out of print (you’ll have to hunt down a copy from the library or second-hand). Boozing, sex scandal, politics – and a brilliantly drawn press baron called, er, The Baron. Robert Harling himself was ex-Daily Mail and would go on to edit magazines. The title was recently reappropriated (pinched in other words) by a 2021 international best-seller, further pushing Harling’s version into the shade on Google. Perhaps one only for aficionados of Private Eye’s ‘Street of Shame’, but worth seeking out if that’s you.

My Turn to Make the Tea, Monica Dickens (1951)

From the same year as The Paper Palace but wildly different: where that is all sex, money, power and scandal, Tea is more celibacy, impecuniousness, drudgery and torpor. It’s an insight into the slow-turning ways of the provincial press when it was at its most read. Monica Dickens had been a junior reporter on a long-dead local paper in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. A charming evocation of a lost world both culturally and journalistically.  

The Quiet American, Graham Greene (1955)

One of the very best Graham Greene novels (which is also to say one of the best English novels of the century), this was based on his own experiences as a foreign correspondent in what was then French Indochina in the early 1950s. It centres on a three-way relationship between a British journalist, Fowler, a CIA agent and a local young woman. And, unlike many novels with a journalist character, it does have the sense that Fowler is actually working for a foreign desk and filing stories – which anticipate the Vietnam War.

Towards the End of Morning, Michael Frayn (1967)

If any journalism book can give Scoop a run for its money, it’s this – the choice of the cognoscenti in the field. Anyone who has seen Noises Off – currently being revived in the West End yet again – will know what a master of comedy Michel Frayn is, and his touch doesn’t fail him here. Frayn, who worked on the Observer for most of the 1960s, assembles the usual ingredients of hapless hacks, dead-end jobs and pubs and booze but somehow creates something completely fresh. 

Pratt of the Argus, David Nobbs (1988)

Not dissimilar to the Malcolm Muggeridge above in that it was published in the 1980s but set decades earlier, in the provincial press of early 1950s Yorkshire. David Nobbs, best known as the creator of that 1970s comic titan Reggie Perrin, had been a junior reporter on a Sheffield daily and here he recreates that world vividly: it’s all too much beer in pubs, bad food and sexual and professional misadventures. The running gag of his misprinted news stories is fantastic. 

The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (1993)

A series of bloody disasters sees the hapless Quoyle give up on life in the US to return to his ancestral home on the Newfoundland coast of Canada, where the only work going to support him is as a reporter on the local paper, the Gammy Bird. The film version of this international best-seller boils down journalism training in one memorable scene. Thee proprietor points Quoyle at a gathering storm and tells him that’s his story: ‘Imminent storm threatens village.’ Asked what happens if the storm passes by, he replies: ‘Village spared from deadly storm.’ The title comes from Quoyle’s column detailing maritime comings and goings. 

Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams (2019)

A young black girl from South London manages to talk her way on to a national broadsheet only to be disappointed that a glamorous international lifestyle isn’t immediately forthcoming – so makes up for it with a series of outrageous night-time adventures often of a sexual nature. In detailing these intimately it satirises the confessional nature of so much (mainly female) features content – and it’s a hoot. 

Diary of a digital nomad

As the pandemic gently recedes into history, many of us have been embracing the liberties that have followed. For anyone whose work relied on a desk, a chair and a computer, video-conferencing services such as Zoom left us questioning long-held assumptions about the need for those increasingly anachronistic offices to which we once trudged. The thought of traipsing across town to sit in front of the same computer perched on a slightly different desk suddenly felt absurdly outdated.  

But just as we became accustomed to typing in our slippers, more adventurous feet began to itch. Being stuck in a corner of the sitting room all day could be just as stifling as those open-plan offices we thought we’d escaped. Why would we limit ourselves to the over-familiarity of home when we could just as easily work from a host of other, more congenial home-from-homes?

For those of us with a visceral aversion to spending half the year imprisoned beneath a damp grey mop, the idea of being somewhere sunnier and brighter was always going to be hard to resist. The first few months of the year can be especially bleak and with UK infrastructure collapsing around our ears, now would seem the perfect time to skedaddle.

Becoming a digital nomad is a two-way street, of course; while we get to enjoy better weather, better food and infrastructures that actually work, host countries get to boost their economies, create new jobs and increase trade turnover. The good news is countries are falling over themselves to welcome refugees from failed states like ours – so why languish in your damp cell a moment longer?

One destination in particular has been busily laying down the red carpet for UK escapees: Portugal. Prices here are generally lower than in the UK, while the temperature rarely falls below spring-like. The beaches are long and languorous, the architecture exceptional, and the chocolate mousse – well, if you haven’t tried it you are in for a treat. 

If all that wasn’t enough to encourage you out of your stupor, Portugal offers generous tax breaks for potential digital nomads. Once you’ve taken the leap and relocated, freelancers can obtain an NHR (non-habitual resident) status, which offers several advantages such as zero tax on foreign income and 20 per cent tax on income earned in Portugal compared with standard Portuguese income tax rates of up to 48 per cent. It’s important to note that NHR status can only be granted to new tax residents and is valid for ten years. 

So convinced are they of our feverish desire to escape that Portuguese authorities have built entire digital villages designed especially for fleeing remote workers. Ponta do Sol in Madeira is the most famous with villas, public spaces, co-working stations and infrastructure built around the specific needs of us nomads.

Those looking for a more authentic Portuguese lifestyle should head directly to the delightful coastal enclave of Cascais (pronounced Cashcaish) on the western tip of the country. A short train ride from Lisbon, the town is full of character with an interesting mix of locals and expats. There’s a thriving Brazilian population largely made up of poorer immigrants escaping Jair Bolsonaro’s clutches along with a few super-rich tax exiles. Restaurants are cheap, plentiful and varied (Japanese/Venezuelan fusion anyone?) and there’s a real night-time buzz. 

A few minutes up the coast and you’re in the wilds of Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, a 145 square km protected area with wide sandy beaches, pretty villages and dramatic coastal views. Development is extremely limited here so real estate prices are astronomical – Cristiano Ronaldo’s mansion is still under construction four years after authorities gave it the red light. The strip of coast between Cascais and Cabo da Roca has a definite whiff of Malibu about it, with multimillion-pound glass fronted houses hidden behind protective gates and rows of skinny palms.  

Of course, nomads come in many different guises. For me, the main motivation is escaping the UK winter, meaning I’m rarely away for more than about three months of the year. Renting out my London flat means I can usually afford a modest condo in a cheaper part of the world. 

In Cascais, short-term rentals are hard to come by, although local estate agents assure me that the market will expand in time as more people like me opt to spend the winter in the region. For the time being, if you are determined to live on the platinum-plated coast, I’d recommend checking some of the larger hotels that offer deals for extended stays. The stylishly cavernous Oitavos has enormous airy rooms with balconies, decent wifi and large workspaces. There’s a hearty breakfast buffet, a fine restaurant and a world-renowned 18-hole golf course for those who want to keep their hand in. The Sheraton also has deals for longer stays but is a bit further from the beach.  

Cascais has an array of workspace options such as Luna House, a charming B&B that provides plenty of desk space and a good range of healthy food options. Named after the resident three-legged dog (a definite pull) this feels more like someone’s stylish home than a regular guesthouse, and it’s only a ten-minute stroll to the beach. You’ll pay around 150 euros a month to use the facilities. Slightly further out is LACS, a large co-worker hub set inside a sleek warehouse. Private studios here cost from 250 euros a month with communal co-working spaces from 120 euros a month. 

Be warned, this whole region can become extremely busy in the summer – so if you’re here to work remotely, definitely come sooner rather than later, when prices are lower but temperatures remain refreshingly high. Oh, and that legendary chocolate mousse tastes good all year round.

Can Humza Yousaf unite the SNP?

It was announced to a particularly tense room at 2 p.m. that Humza Yousaf had won the SNP leadership race. The contest was expected to be close and many people assumed that if second preferences were accounted for, Kate Forbes would most likely prevail. Ash Regan’s voters didn’t quite manage to swing it in Forbes’s favour and Yousaf won by just over 2,000 votes.

He is set to become both the youngest first minister of Scotland, and the first Muslim leader in the UK. For him, this election win means breaking records and perhaps Yousaf thought this pattern would continue when he made his first move as leader of the Scottish National party: Yousaf said he would be asking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for a Section 30 order ‘right away’ which would allow Scotland to hold an independence referendum. But, just as calls for another independence vote have been rejected in the past, Yousaf’s luck was to be no different. Sunak promptly rejected the request. 

Not a great start, then. But what other first steps is Yousaf planning to take? While he was the establishment’s favourite to succeed Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf differs from his predecessor on a key issue: his approach to independence. Where Sturgeon wanted to pursue the strategy of a de facto referendum, Yousaf – like Forbes – more cautious in his approach. He believes that spending time persuading No voters of the merits of independence is the best way to proceed. In today’s speech, Yousaf addressed those opposed to separating from the Union: ‘I will aim to earn your trust by continuing to govern well, and earn your respect as First Minister by focusing on the priorities that matter to us all’, while telling Yes voters that ‘we will only win by making the case on the doorsteps’.

Other policy commitments will take top priority, Yousaf said, despite his immediate Section 30 request: ‘My immediate priority will be to continue to protect every Scot as far as we can from the harm inflicted by the cost of living crisis, to recover and reform our NHS and other vital public services, to support our wellbeing economy and to improve the life chances of people across our country.’ Yousaf faces an uphill struggle though given his track record in government – particularly on the health service – isn’t unblemished. 

And perhaps one of the biggest problems Yousaf faces is one that Sturgeon didn’t need to deal with: the issue of party unity. Presenting himself as a modest winner, Humza nodded to his competitors, both of whom he has exchanged sharp words with during the race, saying: ‘There will be no Team Humza, there will be no Team Kate, there will be no Team Ash: there will be Team SNP.’ Will this be enough to convince the party membership, and indeed the wider general public, that those wounds torn open during the contest can be so easily fixed? 

Kate Forbes told the media huddle that she believes Humza Yousaf is committed to ensuring party unity, referencing his promise to speak to both herself and Ash Regan straightaway. ‘Uniformity is not unity,’ the runner up said in a statement on Yousaf’s win. ‘We can debate and disagree well, and then work together.’ 

Ash Regan’s statement was a little less supportive: ‘Ash Regan believes that while unity is essential, the party must also engage in open and honest discussions about its policies and future direction.’ A nod to the party’s more controversial policies that Regan had stood in protest of, namely the gender bill and the deposit return scheme, the statement continued: ‘She urges Humza Yousaf to create an inclusive environment where all party members’ voices are heard and valued, fostering a culture of transparency and accountability.’

What is clear from the results of the vote is that the SNP are indeed facing a divided party. Not only is the membership split, almost half-and-half, between the pursuit of a progressive agenda versus social conservatism, but many senior politicians – most of whom lent their support to Yousaf – appear to be at odds with half of the members that voted. And further still, it is striking to see that a third of the existing SNP membership didn’t even bother to cast a vote. For a party that has recently had its declining membership exposed, despite resistance from the SNP, the vote breakdown appears to indicate that the dwindling engagement levels amongst a large proportion of those remaining members.

Yousaf may have won the leadership contest, but this is only the beginning for him and his party. As the SNP move into a new era, voters will be watching closely to see whether a man who was labelled ‘incompetent’ as a cabinet minister can handle leading the country as First Minister.