Should we be looking at geo-engineering the climate?

Has a well-meaning international effort to cut pollution from ships contributed to a sudden warming of the waters in the north Atlantic this year? That is the extraordinary claim made this week in an article in Science magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It asserts that limits on the sulphur content of fuels used by ships have helped reduce sulphur pollution from those vessels by 80 per cent – but at the inadvertent cost of reducing cloud formation over the oceans and so speeding global warming.  

Previously, well-used corridors of the Atlantic Ocean were covered with ‘ships tracks’ – yellowish, elongated clouds which followed the paths of passing ships. Now, the clouds have been diminished, and the waters are exposed to the full power of the sun, resulting in record sea surface temperatures. As Michael Diamond of Florida State University puts it, ‘It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year.’ Sulphur Dioxide emissions from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991, for example, have been claimed to have reduced global temperatures by 0.3 Celsius for three years. 

The world is better off without the air above the oceans polluted with sulphur. It was sulphur emissions from coal-burning power stations which was responsible for acid rain. Yet the theory that ocean-warming has been exacerbated by a fall in clouds generated by ships’ exhausts has rekindled the question: should we be employing ‘geo-engineering’ in order to try to combat climate change?  

The idea has been around a long time. Experiments in cloud-seeding by spraying silver iodide or other chemicals into the atmosphere have been carried out since the 1940s – with conflicting claims as to their success. But in recent years there has been a revival in fantastical ideas of engineering the climate. In 2015 the US National Academy of Sciences looked into the possibility of cooling the Earth by interfering with the ‘albedo’ of the Earth’s atmosphere – albedo being the proportion of solar energy absorbed, where 0 is total absorption and 1 total reflection. This could be achieved, it suggested, by regularly injecting aerosol-forming gases into the stratosphere. This, the report concluded, could help moderate temperatures in the Earth’s surface by “at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of decarbonising the global economy”. However, it also concluded that “proposed albedo modification approaches introduce environmental, ethical, social, political, economic, and legal risks associated with intended and unintended consequences”. The unintended consequences, it suggested, could consist of damage to the ozone layer, changes in patterns of precipitation and increased growth in forests.  

It was damage to the ozone layer, after all, which led to the banning of CFC gases in aerosol sprays, fridges and other products in the 1980s – it would be somewhat perverse now if we went back to spraying aerosols into the stratosphere which could cause damage to the ozone layer. Incidentally, the removal of man-made aerosols from the atmosphere has been claimed by some to be responsible for the sharp increase in global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s. 

In other words, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that while it might be cost-effective to try to limit global warming by tinkering with the Earth’s albedo, it was associated with the same kind of risks of global warming itself. If it is going to change rainfall patterns, causing flooding in some places and drought in others, isn’t that exactly the kind of thing which we are told we risk from rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere?  

Cloud-seeding experiments died a similar death, in Britain at least, after being blamed for the Lynmouth flood disaster of 1952, when nine inches of rain fell on parts of Exmoor in 24 hours, resulting in a torrent of water washing away part of the town and the loss of 35 lives. In spite of official denials that cloud-seeding experiments were underway at the time, documents later revealed that Operation Cumulus – a cloud-seeding experiment by the RAF – had indeed been taking place in Southern England between 4 and 15 August 1952 – the latter date being the day of the Lynmouth flood. Put like that, it sounds damning – except that Operation Cumulus was being conducted over Bedfordshire – 150 miles away from Exmoor. Operation Cumulus does, however, appear to have come to an abrupt halt after the Lynmouth flood – suggesting that those in charge feared its consequences. That the experiments were conducted by the RAF rather than a civilian body does also say something: that cloud-seeding was seen in Britain as much as a potential weapon as a useful means of say, alleviating drought. The practice is, however, still carried out by US ski resorts hoping to increase snow cover and by the Chinese – who are reported to have used it to deflect rain from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 

 Cloud-seeding, at least, takes place in the lower atmosphere. To conduct experiments into changing the Earth’s albedo by spraying materials into the stratosphere would have much further-reaching consequences, with the potential for generating global conflict. There is already a political movement demanding climate reparations for historic greenhouse gas emissions. That should give a clue as to what would lie in store in the event of efforts to geo-engineer our way out of global warming. 

Harry Kane should have gone to Saudi Arabia

It’s official, folks: Harry Kane is off to Germany.

England’s captain this morning joined Bayern Munich for an initial £86.4 million. The 30-year-old will sign a four-year contract. The Germans are understandably excited. In the UK, though, most football fans were left scratching their heads. Bayern Munich? Why?

Some will say they’re a club with a loyal fanbase and a strong history. Yes, but the same can be said of Leeds United and Celtic, so don’t pull that card. If this were the year 2000, Kane’s move would make complete sense. But this is 2023, a time when no one outside of Germany really cares about the Bundesliga – and for good reason. It’s a rubbish league that hasn’t been relevant for decades. 

Kane could have taken a leaf out of Messi’s book and headed to Major League Soccer. Sure, the quality of football isn’t great there. But it would have been an interesting move. Or, if he was feeling particularly adventurous, Kane could have gone to Saudi Arabia and played alongside the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Sadio Mane. Imagine that front three. Again, at least that would have been interesting. Kane would have made history as the first person to score 200 goals in one season.

Alas, though, he’s off to Munich, where he will at least get the chance to play Champions League football. But he won’t win the Champions League with Bayern. That’s because the Germans are not Champions League contenders. They haven’t been for many years.

Kane is not going to win any trophies of significance during his time in Germany. Again, just as very few care about the Bundesliga, very few care if Kane lifts the Meisterschale. Kane probably isn’t that pushed either. Going to Bayern Munich and not winning the Bundesliga is, of course, unthinkable. That doesn’t mean it’s unlikely. Last season, Bayern won the league on the final day of the season, after a late 2-1 win at Cologne. Up until that last-gasp goal, Borussia Dortmund looked likely to be crowned champions.

But, others will say, Harry had no choice. At least he will win something in Germany. If he stayed at Spurs, his trophy cabinet would remain trophyless. Playing for Bayern is, on the whole, probably better than playing for Spurs, an utter shambles of a club. Keep an eye out for the way in which they attempt to ‘reinvest’ the money from Kane’s sale. The last time they sold a big name player (Gareth Bale to Real Madrid), they tried to replace the Welshman with a handful of bang-average players. Let’s see if they make the same mistake again (it’s Spurs, don’t bet against it).

However, Kane, who will wear the No. 9 shirt at Bayern, only had 12 months left on his Spurs contract. He could have run it down and had his pick of any major club in Europe: PSG, Real, Barca, you name it. As anyone with even the mildest interest in football knows, Harry Kane is a supreme talent. What club wouldn’t want him as their frontman? Instead, arguably England’s greatest-ever striker chose to satisfy his impatience and play in a league that generates very little excitement.

Harry Kane has committed the equivalent of career harakiri. I, for one, feel thoroughly underwhelmed by the move. If Harry is being brutally honest, he probably does too.

The FOI response that exposed the SNP’s EU delusion

Tony Blair famously regretted his government’s introduction of freedom of information laws. ‘You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it,’ he wrote in his memoirs.

Blair complained that FOI is not used by ‘the people’ but by journalists as a mallet to beat the government over the head with. But in recent years in Scotland, FOI has at times been used by the public to reveal critical information the SNP administration at Holyrood would rather keep secret.

An extraordinary FOI response was published this week, outlining secret advice on the prospects for an independent Scotland joining the EU. It confirms that SNP politicians who claim that secession creates a pathway for Scots to reclaim their EU citizenship are misleading the electorate. One section of a report to Scottish ministers reads:

There may be areas in which Scotland, upon independence, is not ready to take on full requirements of EU membership. Key among those is the currency question.

Another part states that ‘some commentators’ have suggested it could take as little as three-to-four years to negotiate accession — before going on to say that ‘timing will also depend on how the Scottish government approaches other policy issues, including the question of an independent currency.’ The report also informs ministers that new members states are ‘committed to be able to adopt the euro in due course after membership’.

The SNP’s post-secession currency position is for Scotland to continue to use the pound sterling informally (also known as ‘sterlingisation’) for a number of years after separation, before eventually introducing its own new currency. It has always been clear that sterlingisation is incompatible with meeting EU entry requirements — but the SNP has steadfastly refused to acknowledge this.

The nationalists are also reluctant to accept the economic implications of introducing a hard trade border with England. Yet the FOI response revealed briefings which drew heavily from an Institute for Government (IfG) report on the Anglo-Scottish border after independence. The report explained that Scottish exports to the rest of the UK are worth three times as much as exports to the EU. There would be a direct trade-off, the report makes clear, between an independent Scotland’s integration into the EU and cooperation with the rest of the UK.

The twin processes of Scotland seceding from the UK and acceding to the EU would be highly complex. Separation negotiations with the UK would probably need to be concluded before accession negotiations with the EU could begin. The IfG paper concludes that ‘Scotland’s path back to EU membership could take the best part of a decade’.

The FOI request was submitted in December 2021. The length of time it has taken for the response to finally be published tells its own story — one of the Scottish government’s lack of openness about the realities of independence.

Also interesting is the note the Scottish government published as part of its response:

Following the Scottish Information Commissioner’s decision about the applicability of exemptions in this case, and about the scope of the request, the Scottish government is now publishing this information in full. However, it should be noted that much of this information, some of which was written several years ago, was never seen by ministers and does not reflect current government thinking. The policy proposals in these documents were never approved by ministers and it would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that any of the details within reflect past or present government policy.

It reads like a clumsy attempt by the Scottish government to cover its tracks on its dishonesty about the realities of EU accession — while leaving the door open for future misdirection. Does it really expect people to believe that Scottish ministers are not reading briefings on the feasibility of their key policy?

I have written previously about the SNP’s readiness to mislead on the realities of an independent Scotland joining the EU — and how it shows contempt for both the Scottish electorate and the EU itself. This latest FOI, and the Scottish government’s shiftiness around its publication, signals a continuation of that approach and a chronic inability to deal with reality. Tony Blair may have come to hate the FOI laws he introduced. In Scotland, however, they have emerged as a key tool for shining a light on the actions of a mendacious government.

Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan

‘Today was hard. I can’t imagine what it was like for the families of those we left behind.’

That was an email from a friend who’d served in Afghanistan, sent as the chaos of the western withdrawal from Afghanistan played out on rolling news almost exactly two years ago.

His grief – mirrored across the military and the media establishment on both sides of the Atlantic – now feels a long time ago, at least to those detached from the 20-year fight against the Taliban. Like many a separation, however, over time it becomes clear it was the right thing to do.

The US had spent almost a trillion dollars fighting and nation building in Afghanistan. They’d lost more than 2,000 men. And as events post-withdrawal were to quickly and tragically prove, they had little more than a Potemkin village of an Afghan government to show for all that treasure and blood.

What was the war for? The same could be asked of almost every American intervention of the last few decades. As Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes has written:

Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged. Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Somalia. Libya. Every one of those countries is worse off today in some fashion. The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there.

In the case of Afghanistan, it’s hard to argue that remaining would have made things worse. According to the UN, the country now presents the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. Nineteen million people are going hungry. China and Russia have a free pass to the playground. And girls are banned from secondary schools. Sanctions were imposed in response. The ban remains. There are heart-breaking reports of girls staying on at primary school just to keep themselves stimulated while their fellow male pupils move on, in the hope the Taliban will eventually allow half the population an education. 

An ongoing western presence would probably have prevented some of this. But President Biden was not caught unawares by what filled the vacuum. He just didn’t think it was America’s responsibility.

According to George Packer’s magnificent biography of the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Holbrooke tackled Biden on the fate of girls, should the US bring their boys home.

The then Vice-President erupted: ‘I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights, it just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.’

No matter how you feel for the awful plight of Afghan women, any father is entitled to ask why his son or daughter should put his or her life on the line. The President is also entitled to ask the same question as Commander-in-Chief. It’s not as if oppression in other parts of the world is considered worthy of American lives. 

Biden brutally – and, given the chaos of the exit, clumsily – bought Afghanistan into line with the rest of US foreign policy: the human rights of the citizens of other countries are not a casus belli. 

The argument that Afghanistan is different because the West went in might hold a few years into the operation. Once a generation has passed, the point starts to lose force. ‘You broke it, you fix it’ doesn’t quite work as justification for western involvement in Afghanistan – since the state was already dysfunctional before the war and, after 20 years of botched western fixing, it was still broken.

Even in the Obama years, Biden saw the West’s mission in Afghanistan as a ghastly case of mission creep. A surgical operation to remove al-Qaeda in the wake of 9/11 became a sprawling Wilsonian attempt at nation building – at vast cost in terms of both blood and treasure. 

The Trump years offered an out-of-office Biden little reassurance that any mission had been accomplished.

Indeed, his four-year sabbatical would have given him the time to realise that re-ordering of America’s overseas priorities was imperative.

Bush and Blair went into Afghanistan not because of 9/11, but because of the threat they perceived that 9/11 represented. They saw al-Qaeda as an asymmetric challenge to the very existence of the west. Islamist ideology, allied with modern technology, made them a foe akin to the USSR, and fascism before that. That was the root of the war on terror. 

On becoming President, Biden could fairly conclude that Bush and Blair were profoundly wrong.

Islamic terrorism has exacted a hideous cost in terms of human life. From Manchester Arena to Bali to Parsons Green, passers-by have become senseless casualties. But at no stage have our institutions and societal norms been under threat. During the cold war, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, Prague and of course Kabul. Entire nations were subjugated. Bin Laden was a mass murderer but never a dictator.

That is in part due to the western response. For all the talk of the failure in Afghanistan, security services have had some success in keeping mass terrorism at bay. There are recriminations when lone wolves on the radar do their worst with home-made explosives, knives, cars and at its worse in Paris in 2015 – guns. But the number of victims is now often mercifully small. In America, Congress passing tighter gun laws would save many more American lives than any number of boots on the ground in Helmand.

Even at peak al-Qaeda in the Noughties, the global economy barely blinked. By contrast, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the eurozone into recession, and left the UK limping along with huge debts and anaemic growth. The consequences of economic stagnation are harder to quantify than a bomb in a rucksack, but it’s far from fanciful to claim that Russian troops in Kherson have led to lives lost here, as the elderly struggle to keep the heating on.

Biden realised – perhaps always knew – that nation states present the real danger, not cells of fanatics. The consequence of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and the choking of the global semiconductor supply that might follow would be enormous.  North Korea and Iran are far nearer nuclear technology than any mullah in Kandahar. The current President’s understanding of clear and present dangers is far firmer than the generation of 9/11 statesmen. 

Perhaps Biden’s age – the thing most likely to block a second term – helped. He is a cold war politician. That experience gave him a context in which to better place the horror that sharked across a cloudless New York sky in 2001. Terrifying and tragic. But manageable and limited in scope.

The world of the 21st century is more similar to that of the 20th than Blair, Bush et al realised. Russia, China and a handful of other states are the ‘enemy’ that can truly scar every part of our lives.  Unless we are desperately unlucky, the terrorists can’t. 

Plenty of leaders could see that. It took Biden to do something about it. His opponents, those now saying he was wrong, wish he’d kept on haemorrhaging cash, blood and political capital in support of a mission that for 20 years had failed. And all the while distracting a rising superpower, China, that threatens us all.

The withdrawal itself was a mess, but it’s no easy task to end a war.  Critics should acknowledge Biden’s political acumen. Biden was once warned of the political risks facing an administration that cuts and runs.

‘Fuck that,’ he replied. ‘We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.’

In the weeks after August 2021, his approval rating slipped by six points. But a year after the scuttle out of Kabul, Democrats enjoyed by any standards a decent mid-term result for a party holding the White House. 

Afghanistan doesn’t figure in the now steady torrent of pre-2024 election analysis. Trump will swear, of course, that he never would let the Taliban seize all that American hardware or let America be so humiliated on the global stage. But, on foreign policy especially, Americans prefer to forget embarrassments. Afghanistan will not be a major talking point in the 2024 elections. That’s a point in Biden’s favour.  

I replied to my friend on that day, apologising vaguely for my insensitive inquiry as Afghans clung on to the fuselages of planes taking off from Kabul airport’s runways. I don’t really know what I’d say to him now.  But I’m glad he and his men are no longer there, and the western alliance can focus on Putin and Xi, the adversaries who never went away.

The unbearable strangeness of the Ukraine war

As a journalist, I’ve been on the periphery of quite a few wars: for example, I went to Bosnia as the war ended in 1995 (at a time when snipers were still a threat). I was in Egypt during its 2011 revolution, with its jubilant but scary air of lawlessness. And smouldering buildings in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. 

Just once, before now, I have plunged into the heart of a war, when, with a photographer friend, we persuaded a reluctant cab driver to take us from Beirut to south Lebanon during one of the Israeli invasions. As soon as we arrived, in a small mountain town called Machgharah, we were seized by gun-toting Hezbollah soldiers. They thought we were Israeli assassins posing as idiot tourists. They interrogated us in the neighbourhood Hezbollah HQ, even as the Israeli forces bombarded the town all around.

I know, therefore, that war produces moments of jarring strangeness. The normal butts up against the madly abnormal. One moment you are actually enjoying a kebab given you by a sympathetic local, the next you are anticipating death as a shell lands nearby, evoking terrible screams, and the Hezbollah fighters casually discuss whether they should shoot you (in the end, miraculously, they let us go, with a warning never to return).

Nonetheless after two weeks in Ukraine, this war feels stranger than any.

Where did this strangeness begin? Probably before I even crossed the border. In the stately, ex-Habsburg, Polish frontier town of Przemysl I was having an al fresco wheat-beer in a popular bar and realised I was sitting next to a peculiar couple, comprising two young guys: one a wiry, hard-looking Ukranian, adorned with facial tatts, the other a skinny British lad with a faintly posh accent.

Blithely, I presumed the Ukrainian was some kind of soldier grabbing a weekend of RnR (as the last stop before Putin’s war, Przemysl is full of military types, special forces, and Nato ‘advisors’); I similarly assumed the young Brit was having a particularly exciting gap year volunteering for Ukrainian charities (there are many of these people).

I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I eavesdropped, it became clear the Ukrainian was a guilt-ridden draft dodger, and the British lad was a soldier for one of the international regiments. As I exited the bar, the Brit was saying, loudly and drunkenly, ‘I bought a Kalashnikov in Kherson. It’s easy. Come back with me to Ukraine! Come back and fight Putin!’

The next day I saw the Briton again, in the long queue for the Przemysl-Lviv train. He was alone.

I made friends on the train. Ukrainians like to make friends, especially now, and especially with Brits (we are popular, because of Boris and British military help). As we rattled across the moonlit Polish-Ukrainian frontier I met 50-something Tania, who lives in Toronto. She told me, unprompted, that she was taking a 20-hour rail journey to go rescue her elderly and terrified parents in Odesa, and escort them to Canada. Somehow. She exuded despair, panic and stoicism all at once. 

I also met Yulia, a woman in her early 40s, from London, who described how her husband, who works in IT, had ended up stuck in Kyiv. As she bluntly put it: ‘He is Ukrainian citizen. Men aged 18-60 cannot leave country.’ It was at that point I belatedly realised the train, in terms of passengers, was 90 per cent women.

The next days in Lviv felt, at first, strangely ordinary. It’s a handsome Austro-Hungarian city, with airy cafes and pubs full of chattering young people scrolling their iPhones. At first glance you could be in Vienna, Budapest, or Munich. But then you encounter all the young men in slings, or with missing limbs. You notice the abundant weddings in the sandbagged Orthodox churches: weddings with few guests, a pretty and probably tearful bride, and a young man with a military crew cut. Then you sharply realise he is probably going back to the front line tomorrow. Hence the hurried nuptials.

All very striking, and sometimes strange. However, the strangeness came to a peak when I moved on, determined to explore more of the home front, and I made for a place called Chernivtsi.

Chernivtsi, 30 miles from the Romanian border, is another Austro-Hungarian city. It is the birthplace of the ‘Holocaust’ poet Paul Celan (‘black milk of dawn we drink you at night’), and the Italo-Austrian author Gregor von Rezzori (Memoirs of an Anti-Semite). It is gracious and quaint, with its trio of cathedrals, its streets of Belle Époque brasseries, its pseudo-Byzantine redbrick university. And, at its heart, there is something decidedly odd.

I first realised that something was up when I arrived late at night, asked the cabbie to take me to the Victoria Deluxe Hotel. Booking.com was telling me this was by far the best in town, with a 9.5 rating. Yet the cab driver had never heard of it. He spent 30 minutes tootling pointlessly around, then he called the hotel, and eventually we found my gaff hidden away behind a gate. The hotel was not on Google Maps, nor was it on Apple Maps.

Besides being near unfindable, the hotel it turned out, was seriously luxe. The chic restaurant offered oysters, champagne, and soft-shell-crab sushi. The clientele, which came and went all the time, was a mix of bewildered locals, extremely beautiful young women, silent security types with Rolex watches, inexplicable groups of Italian men speaking English, and billionaires who parked their Rolls Royce SUVs in the gated drive, just in time for the special ‘gastro’ nights of whole imported bluefin tuna.

A few days later, right next door to my hotel, I found a big glowing deli, with a fine selection of Barolos, Brunellos and Gran Reserva Riojas, and bottles of ultra-rare malt whisky for £800. And all of this in provincial Ukraine, which is at war, and which has a GDP per capita of £3,500? The story got even more peculiar when I did some sleuthing, and discovered that the hotel opened in… July 2022. Months after the war began. 

Who opens a hotel a few months into a devastating war? With likely the most opulent menu in the war-torn country?

I spent a week in the Victoria Deluxe hotel, hypnotised by it all, looking at these people who either had lots of money already, or were making money out of the war. I watched them guzzle their caviar and fin de claires. For a day or two it all felt wrong. Like I was observing a crime scene. 

And then one evening I saw two handsome young Ukrainian boys, polite and kind and joking on the terrace, aged about 17, and I realised that even for the rich people of Ukraine – even for the war profiteers – if that is what they are – this war is cruel. Those kids obviously had parents. Those parents would be struggling with the urge to ship those boys across the border, to spirit them to safety, before they turn 18, and get drafted, and then possibly get mutilated or killed. By some estimates, Ukraine now has as many amputees as Britain or Germany did in mid-1918.

In the end I was so compelled by Chernivtsi I ran out of time. So I departed my hotel, and caught an obscure border-crossing bus to Seceavu in Romania, with the resolution to come back to Odesa later. 

As we set off, the driver made a long speech in Ukrainian to the passengers. I didn’t understand a word so I lifted my phone and sort-of caught it with Google Translate. At one point he seemed to rhapsodise, angrily, about a soldier friend – or relative, or brother – left behind at the front line. ‘Buses don’t go anywhere. Pray for our country. I left us one of the meals, so that we could think about returning to him because we are strong. Rains like his, the honour of events to you – with cottage cheese.’

It was basically unintelligible. Yet somehow, absolutely right. Perhaps because it was so decidedly strange.

National service is a bad idea that won’t go away

My father did National Service and was lucky enough to end up in Trieste, which was probably the best posting around. He was assigned to the intelligence corps, his job to track down former members of the Croatian Ustaše, a pro-Nazi collaboration regime known for bloodthirstiness so extreme that even visiting Gestapo were shocked by their inhumanity.

I’m not sure if dad managed to get any Nazis brought to justice, but it inspired a love of Yugoslavia which led him to move to Sarajevo and become fluent in Serbo-Croat, and for the rest of his life he was obsessed with the Balkans – always a healthy pastime.

Not everyone was so lucky; his best friend got sent to Aden, which was hell on earth, enduring a terrifying insurgency in the desert, while another pal was posted to Cyprus, where he was killed by EOKA.

National Service was abolished in 1960, the last forced recruit bowing out in 1963, by which time Britain had wiggled out of most of its empire. But most countries retained it for long afterwards: Belgium didn’t abolish mandatory military service until 1992, the Netherlands until 1993 and Germany only abandoned the system in 2011 – and since the war in Ukraine some countries have pondered reintroducing it.

In Britain, reintroducing National Service used to be an obsession of the law-and-order right, seen as a solution to the hooliganism that began to become a feature of British society in the 1960s: Mods and Rockers, long-haired bohemian rock stars exemplified by Mick and Keith, and later football thugs. A spell in the army would knock some sense into them, so the argument went.

More recently, however, at least since the Blair era, National Service has become more a favourite of a particular strand of the centre-left, a remedy for a fractured country divided along lines of class, race and religion.

The idea featured in a recent article by former foreign secretary William Hague, a piece which exemplified the mindset of notional Conservatives who simply want to go back to their country house and sign the surrender papers.

In his call for us to just accept our country is going to be lost to us, because doing anything would be a bad look, Hague wrote: ‘If the future is one of continuing high levels of migration, the promotion of shared identity becomes even more important. Britain has done better on this than many of our neighbours – look at how many of our political leaders are children of immigrants. But we should not be complacent. The coming age of migration is another reason to ensure citizenship carries obligations as well as rights. Labour’s David Lammy put it well in advocating compulsory national service to “break down the divides that are becoming entrenched in modern society”. Such proposals for integration will be important. The age of migration is upon us. Political ideas need to be updated for it if deep polarisation and division are to be averted.’

His essential argument is that, while immigration will lead us to become more divided, and make our lives less pleasant, perhaps this can be remedied by forcing young people to sacrifice a year or two of their lives in the name of ‘cohesion’.

National Service has also been advocated by Adrian Pabst, one of the handful of thoughtful Blue Labour philosophers who want to reintroduce ideas of faith and family into the Left.

Pabst recently wrote that: ‘One way to renew social ties would be to introduce a year of national civic service for all adults. This could consist of two distinct strands: first, a national nature service, modelled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), dedicated to cleaning up our polluted rivers, building flood defences, tree-planting, restoring biodiversity and domestic heating conversion. Roosevelt’s CCC was credited with improving the well-being and employability of young people – exactly what our labour market and our society need.

‘The second strand would be a national community service dedicated to helping understaffed hospitals and schools, teaching English to new arrivals, cleaning up graffiti and rebuilding communal space like village halls, playgrounds or parks which are often the target of anti-social behaviour. Social order is not the sole preserve of the police or the local council, but should be built by ordinary citizens in the places they call home.’

Such a service would need to be ‘universal and compulsory, so that people from all class and cultural backgrounds can come together and associate around a common purpose – serving their communities and their country’.

Pabst wrote that this will need ‘funding and institutions to deliver it’, but ‘If, after two devastating world wars Britain was capable of building the NHS and the welfare state, now is the moment to create a National Civic Service.’

Ben Sixsmith called the idea of all able-bodied Britons doing compulsory work ‘unswallowable’. The problem, and I tend to agree with him on this, is that ‘many of these problems stem from government itself’.

‘Cleaning up graffiti’ is good, for example, but it would boil my guts if I was compelled to do it while the cops remained blissfully incapable of doing anything to avert property crime and antisocial behaviour. Cleaning rivers is virtuous as well, but reforming Thames Water sounds like a more efficient and effective plan than forcing random people to do the job.

‘British governments have done a lot to pull Britons apart. It is state institutions, not citizens, which have encouraged more immigration than is assimilable, enabled the dire ubiquity of crime, imposed protracted lockdowns which bankrupted local businesses and starved civic institutions of funds. There is a significant extent, in other words, to which instead of putting citizens to work, politicians should be doing their own darn job.’

Few people of my father’s generation actually enjoyed National Service, but there was at least a purpose to it. Britain had an empire to run, or at least extract itself from, and a standing army had become normalised by the war. None of these issues exist today. We don’t have an empire, and while our military is underfunded, we don’t need a large standing army; conscript armies tend to be quite ineffective at any rate, and the US experience of conscription during the Vietnam era does not suggest it’s a remedy for cohesion problems. During that period America suffered from heightened levels of political violence – far worse than today – and the draft played a huge part.

I’m not sure if conscription would have reduced Britain’s rising crime rates in the 1960s, except by the simple process of incapacitating much of the male population. We could have achieved the same goals by simply jailing every young man for a couple of years, and like Sixsmith I dislike the collective punishment aspect of military service. Indeed, it is similar to the argument that children should remain in schools for longer stretches of time, punishing the well-behaved as much as troublemakers.

I’m not sure we would have gained anything as a society by forcing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones to waste a couple of years fighting some pointless colonial war, except denying us much loved music and making John Lennon even more bitter than he already was.

The years between 18 and 25 should be the happiest of a person’s life, and people should enjoy them before the weight of the world crushes their spirit. If there’s no need to sacrifice your best years for self-defence, there’s certainly no need to do so for ‘social solidarity’. Why should everyone suffer because governments have encouraged unwise and divisive levels of immigration?

We also don’t have a lot of young people. It’s strange that, in an article in which the former Conservative Party leader stated that we need more migrants to make up for our labour shortage, he then suggests taking millions of young people out of the labour market in the name of social solidarity.

Realistically they couldn’t do anything useful that couldn’t be better achieved through the market. Most of the rest of the time, apart from perhaps getting fitter, they would no doubt be indoctrinated in the ‘British values’ of the establishment, being lectured on the tenets of equality and diversity.

As Sixsmith argues: ‘I would bet at least half of my internal organs that a Labour government, and perhaps even a Conservative government, would have hapless Britons working for the sake of various corrosive political causes. You’d imagine building a ramp for the disabled and find yourself taking down statues and organising hideous performance poetry events. This is not Professor Pabst’s intention, of course, but many are the well-intentioned ideas that have been misused by opportunistic activists and politicians.’

People get a sense of purpose out of communal activities, and it’s when we’re most happy; I’m a great believer in the idea there is an oxytocin deficit and that explains a lot of unhappiness. But those communal events are best done voluntarily and naturally; those organised by the state tend to be either insipid or horrible.

Much of the desire for National Service comes down to an understandable nostalgia for the Attlee years, the urge to return to the hormonal rush of the 1940s when Britain was all in it together, a sense of solidarity we have never been able to recreate. This came across very strongly during lockdown, when there was overwhelming support for measures which were authoritarian and punishing, but applied equally.

The second world war may have brought an unprecedented level of social capital to British society, and raised equality levels, but the war communism of the 1940s was done out of necessity and under duress. We can’t reproduce it in peacetime, and we wouldn’t benefit in any way.

While many people still see the solidarity of 1939-45 as the apex of British patriotism, historically it was incredibly alien to us as a people. As A. J. P. Taylor famously observed, ‘until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman’.

That was a country in which most people had no association with the Army – indeed many pubs didn’t even allow troops in – a civilian society which also enjoyed incredibly high levels of social solidarity. It’s also worth noting that the main reason why Britain won almost every major war between about 1700 and 1914 was not because of state-enforced unity, but because we were rich, and therefore able to raise huge amounts of money through the City of London (and pay other people to fight for us).

The state is not effective at raising social capital outside of wartime, and being shouted at by a sergeant major or, more likely, lectured to and harangued about systemic racism, is not going to install any sense of national community – beyond a shared sense of resentment among the young.

Brighton rock bottom: How the Greens nearly destroyed the city I love

When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too.

I love living in Brighton and wouldn’t dream of moving anywhere else. But I am privileged to do a thing I love for a living, when and where I want; for people who need to get around it on a daily basis, Brighton is an increasingly unpleasant place to be. A good deal of this is the fault of the Green council, the UK’s first ever; looking back on their recently ended rule, it feels like the city was overcome by an invading force who tried their best to destroy it, leaving residents looking around in dazed disbelief.

Oddly, considering the party’s name, the natural world appears to have been one of their main targets. The Greens had something of a slash-and-burn attitude to local flora. Hedges, bushes and even a bowling green, which had been standing for years, were eviscerated. Dutch elm disease ran riot: the council refused to properly treat all of the affected trees, some of which have now been chopped down.

Most perverse was the destruction of a large part of the oldest and longest ‘green wall’ (a vertically built structure intentionally covered by vegetation) in Europe in the spring of 2021, during nesting season for the hundreds of birds who inhabited it. Perhaps as it was established by the Victorians, it was probably a nasty colonialist nature reserve and deserved to die? One specimen of local flora which the Greens did like was weeds, which took over to the point of being a health hazard. Still, if you’ve righteously cracked down on herbicides, who cares if a few old ladies are hospitalised by nasty falls? The council even blamed Brexit for the weeds they had so lovingly nurtured.

In contrast to the disregard shown to the elderly, Brighton’s huge student population was endlessly pandered to by the council, who focussed on expanding student accommodation in the city practically to the exclusion of all other. Students often ride bikes; the justification for slashing the living wall was that it could allow a cycle lane to be built. This wasn’t a surprise: cyclists are the only beasts who have protected status here. Angry men on bicycles are the kings of our seaside urban jungle; it’s a cliche that fellows in flash cars are trying to compensate for inadequacies elsewhere, but a quarter of a century in Brighton has convinced me that this is equally true of grown men who ride huge bikes on pavements. It’s not like there aren’t any enough cycle lanes; in fact, there are so many that they regularly help bring our traffic to a standstill, causing extra congestion and pollution from cars.

Exorbitant parking fees imposed by the council are estimated to have cost us more than £1 million in day-tripper revenue over three years, but gridlock was nevertheless a regular occurrences. Some dunces suggested that this chaos was a sign that Brighton was a successful city. Another of the clowns, councillor Sarah Nield, had to apologise in 2020 for tweeting ‘laughed at queue of cars’ while observing how many freewheeling cyclists were around.

It was the stated aim of some Green councillors in 2020 that the city could be ‘car-free’ within three years. Luckily, the loonies were kicked out this May. The prospect of a crackdown on cars might have been appealing for the student population, but it would have effectively curtailed the movements of the old and the physically disabled. As is usual, it was one rule about transport-induced climate change for us and another for the planet-huggers, as we’ve seen with the globe-trotters of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, whose Instagram feeds often resemble recces for a re-make of Around The World In 80 Days. The leader of the city’s Green council had to apologise for a ‘major failure of judgement’ after being caught flying to a Cop conference in Glasgow on the same day he criticised the government for a ‘lack of action’ over climate change.

Apart from students, there were few people the Greens actually liked having here in Brighton. Those made to feel unwelcome included those who were born here (priced out), the working-class young (ditto), tourists (they planned to close public toilets) or those who preferred the naughty seaside-postcard town before Green Year Zero.

The old saucy Brighton was anathema to these pronoun-ed puritans who even attempted to ban the Christmas Day charity swim for ‘health and safety’ reasons. Why would you move to the louchest city in Britain and attempt to turn it into Gilead-on-Sea?

The list of Green idiocies and inefficiencies goes on forever, but thankfully I’ve got limited space. There was the infamous bin strike described so memorably by resident Lynne Truss:

‘The place turned into Armageddon…a tide of used teabags, eggshells, soiled kitchen paper, banana skins, smelly tin cans, and used sanitary towels advanced in such a determined and menacing manner down nice residential streets, you could almost hear it breathing.’

Somehow we managed to achieve one of the lowest recycling rates in England – 29 per cent whereas the national average is around 45 per cent. The pathetic and pointless British Airways i360 tower, opened in 2016, cost a fortune and is barely used. The decrepit West Pier once stood out; for the past decade it has fitted in perfectly as the city became a ghost of itself. When the Royal Albion Hotel burned down last month, it was found to be full of asbestos, making Brighton literally as well as figuratively toxic at the height of the tourist season.

Now the smoke has cleared and the future looks brighter. The Greens were sentimental sadists when they were in charge: sweet words smeared over actions of cruelty and callousness. A friend who moved to Stockholm told me: ‘The UK Greens seem to use ecology as an excuse to ruin people’s lives while the Swedes make the green thing about enhancing people’s lives.’ She’s right.

Brighton still shows up in national surveys as one of the best places to live; it’s a hopeful city, which has none of the feeling of ‘managed decline’ which other once-thriving cities have. My local heroine is the independent councillor Bridget Fishleigh, who never ceased drawing attention to the way the Greens were running the city into the ground. ‘Like many residents,’ she said, ‘I have high hopes for the new Labour administration – they have fresh ideas and aren’t tied to Labour of the past.’

Council leader, Bella Sankey, appears to be doing all she can to distance her party’s policies from those of the disgraced council; this feels very much like what will happen nationally at election time, when Keir Starmer will put clear water between himself and any Green policies in order to win back the Red Wall. Labour’s leader knows that yapping on about a better future is incompatible with delivering a net-zero one at great expense to an impoverished population.

The only fly in the ointment is the fact that the ghastly Eddie Izzard is planning to stand at the next election as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion – the seat of the country’s only Green MP, Caroline Lucas. Talk about being caught between a frock and a hard place; hasn’t my beautiful, beleaguered, bashed-about city suffered enough? But, short-sighted though it may be, I still wouldn’t live anywhere else.

The sell-out Brighton Fringe show AWFUL PEOPLE by Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven plays at Brighton Pier on the 22nd September

Dominic Cummings savages Sunak

There was a time when Boris backers accused Rishi Sunak of being in cahoots with Dominic Cummings, as part of a plot to bring down the former PM. However, the relationship has certainly cooled since such claims.

In his latest Substack, Cummings accuses Sunak of having no grip on power, no governing plan, no serious polling operation, and no strategy. This is despite Sunak himself having ‘probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic’. Cummings compares Sunak to Gordon Brown, and quotes officials that work with him:

He’d make a great PS [private secretary] or DG [director general], every meeting with him improves some second-order thing a bit, but he isn’t doing the PM’s job, I don’t think he realises this and I don’t think his spads tell him.

Sunak is slammed in particular for failing to stop the boats: ‘The fundamental reason for the boats failure is choices by the PM’s political team and a reluctance by Sunak to face unpleasant reality.’

Cummings also calls Keir Starmer a ‘dud’, but says that ‘Starmer with a Blair-majority really means the civil service running things anyway, so it will be normal-rubbish but hardly revolutionary, and not much different to Tories in charge.’

So what’s the solution? ‘Plough the old Tory party into the earth with salt.’ That, and something Cummings calls ‘The Startup Party’ (although he doesn’t think it should be called that.’ Cummings wants competent, morally authoritative people to build a party that can win the 2028 general election. After that, it would govern for two terms then ‘self-destruct’, so that ‘we’re actually building healthy regeneration into the new approach.’

Oh, and Cummings had more on foreign policy, the area of his thinking that has proved most controversial. He calls for no more Nato expansion, and ‘no war over Taiwan’:

We should be considering where realistic and credible red lines really are — they certainly don’t run through an island visible from China’s shore full of millions of Chinese people with cousins in the PLA. The One China (but peaceful unification) policy was a good one.

Cummings has sent out another bat-signal. Will anyone reply?

All migrants removed from the Bibby Stockholm barge

This week the government has been focusing its energies on small boats crossing the channel, with several new immigration announcements. The government aim was to fill the news vacuum over the summer and put pressure on Labour.

How has Small Boats Week gone so far? Well, today both the Times and Mail led on the story that 100,000 migrants have now reached Britain via small boats since 2018. And now the Bibby Stockholm barge for housing migrants  – the symbol of the government’s tough new approach to small boat crossings – has been evacuated.

According to the Home Office, Legionella bacteria was found on the ship, which therefore had to be emptied ‘as a precautionary measure’. No migrants have reportedly been taken ill.

Readers may be wondering how long it took to arrange the evacuation of the barge – which has been kitted out to hold up to 500 people. Fortunately, the government’s glacial pace means that only 39 migrants had been housed on the boat so far – after several migrants launched legal challenges partly based on their fear of water.

One of Rishi Sunak’s five pledges for the next election is to ‘stop the boats’ – who knew he was talking about the government’s own vessels?

The UK’s immigration impotence

We will never know precisely who Channel migrant number 100,000 was, but we do know he was one of around 700 arrivals brought into Dover on Thursday.

And we can be fairly confident that number 100,000 was indeed a ‘he’, as 85 per cent of the small boat migrants are male compared, for instance, to our authorised Ukrainian refugee scheme in which women have outnumbered men by a ratio of two to one. 

The British state first acknowledged this illicit traffic to be a crisis on 29 December, 2018, when the then home secretary Sajid Javid cut short a family holiday to deal with the arrival of around 200 people by small boat that month. 

By summer 2019, the new PM Boris Johnson felt the issue was sufficiently serious to record a piece to camera designed to create a deterrent effect, in which he pledged to prospective arrivals: ‘We will send you back.’

It is a measure of how the crisis has escalated to note that Johnson was at the time addressing himself to just the second cohort of 1,000 Channel migrants who were then preparing to set out for Blighty. In the ensuing four years we have seen the arrival of 98 further cohorts of 1,000 amid countless ministerial initiatives that were supposed to ‘break the business model of the people traffickers’. And aside from several hundred Albanians, very few have been sent back anywhere. 

The official figures tell a grim story of government impotence. In 2018, there were 299 arrivals, in 2019 there were 1,843, in 2020 there were 8,466, in 2021 there were 28,526, and in 2022 there were 45,755. That left headroom of just 15,111 before the landing yesterday of Mr One-hundred-thousand. 

With peak season for the Channel boats now getting underway, there is little reason to think that 2023’s final figure will be materially different from 2022’s. Rishi Sunak told us in January that he would do whatever was necessary to stop the boats. Whatever that thing might be, he hasn’t done it yet. 

Some 50,000 migrants are currently being accommodated at vast taxpayer expense in hotel rooms, while just a couple of dozen were living on the headline-grabbing Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset, until they were all farcically evacuated this afternoon.

The past week has been full of gimmickry from ministers apparently under instruction to hype the issue of illegal immigration to discomfort the Labour party. Having Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson publicly tell the migrants to ‘f*** off back to France’ would be laughable were it not for the fact that his outburst seems no less likely to succeed than any other step that has been floated. 

Today the idea of ‘pushbacks’ mid-Channel, first aired when Priti Patel was home secretary, is being mooted again. As ministers must know, there is zero chance of this ever happening to overburdened inflatables in the middle of the world’s busiest shipping lane. 

In the absence of an offshore detention capacity or a firm intention to disapply the European human rights framework and the ludicrously outdated 1951 UN Refugee Convention, something close to a de facto right for foreign nationals to enter Britain illegally and live here permanently has arisen. 

The corrosive impact on the social contract and public trust in the political process is now very marked, with Conservative-leaning voters far more exercised by the scandal than Labour-leaning ones. Ministers find themselves running the British public realm rather in the manner of rock festival organisers putting tickets on sale at the same time as declaring that gatecrashers will be welcomed in for nothing. Music fans would surely eschew such a deal, but UK taxpayers do not have the luxury of making a similar choice. 

Establishment voices are right to say that the drastic step of withdrawing from the European Convention of Human Rights and therefore from the jurisdiction of its Strasbourg-based supervisory court would create several political headaches for the UK, including over the Good Friday Agreement and the terms of our Brexit deal with the EU. 

But politics is all about priorities. No headache will be bigger than the issue of how to stop the Channel boats by the time the 200,000^th arrival steps ashore at Dover. On current trends that will happen some time during the autumn of 2025. 

Angus MacNeil expelled from the SNP after bust up with chief whip

Uh oh. Following a rowdy bust up with the SNP’s chief whip Brendan O’Hara, the party establishment has now chosen to expel Angus MacNeil MP. MacNeil, a close ally of former first minister Alex Salmond, was initially suspended after news of the fight broke, which saw him reportedly seethe ‘you’re a small wee man!’ at O’Hara several times before flinging an entire stack of papers at him. He has been sitting as an independent MP ever since. 

In a scathing Twitter post, MacNeil announced that ‘the summer of member expulsion’ has ‘come to pass.’ The decision to expel him from the party was made by a ‘member conduct committee’, the MP tweeted, alongside a kangaroo emoji… Now, whatever could he be trying to suggest?

This isn’t the first time MacNeil has hit out at his now former SNP colleagues over their independence strategy. He released a fiery statement in July that berated the party for its ‘utterly clueless’ approach to independence, raging that ‘the tricks of the last six years of kicking the can down the road have not served Scotland well’. Mr S would go further and say that the last 16 years of the SNP in government haven’t served Scotland particularly well…

MacNeil had stated that he would sit as an independent MP until October at the earliest, at which point he would only rejoin the party if it provided ‘clarity on independence’. Signing off, MacNeil served his party leaders with an ultimatum: ‘I will only seek the SNP whip again if it is clear that the SNP are pursuing independence.’ They’ve made that decision easier for him, at least…

Ecuador is becoming a narco-state

Few political assassinations will have been as predictable as Fernando Villavicencio’s, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate and anti-corruption firebrand gunned down in Quito this week. 

The brutal murder took place in a country that in recent decades has been largely free of serious political violence, notwithstanding the ferocious inter-party struggles that have seen both coups and the persecution and exile of opponents. 

Yet Villavicencio, a 59-year-old former investigative journalist, did not just anticipate his demise – he repeatedly cited the death threats he was receiving from the drug traffickers he vowed to crack down on. And at times, he almost appeared to welcome the danger. 

Just last week, he namechecked the ‘Sinaloa cartel’, the ferocious Mexican criminal organisation that has aligned itself with Ecuadorian street gangs as being the source of one of those threats. 

At the same time, he openly refused to wear a bullet-proof vest, saying he preferred to campaign in a ‘sweaty shirt’, while relying on the goodwill of his supporters for his safety. ‘I don’t need one. You’re a brave people and I’m as brave as you are,’ he told one rally. ‘Let the drug lords come, let the hitmen come.’ 

There can be no doubting his courage, but the candidate may also have been reckless with his own personal safety. Because Villavicencio, who once described himself as a leftist but had more recently positioned himself on the centre-right, had effectively declared war on some of the most violent drug trafficking groups in the world. 

Enabled by corrupt officials, the cocaine gangs have in the last couple of years bathed this South American backwater, once one of the most peaceful countries in the region, in blood.  

There have been horrific prison riots that claimed hundreds of lives and endemic gangland killings across the nation, but in particular around Guayaquil, the sweltering Pacific port through which dozens, possibly hundreds, of tons of cocaine pass each year on the way to street corners from London to Los Angeles. 

‘The fact that they killed him in broad daylight, surrounded by police protection, just shows how the situation has spun out of control,’ says Sebastian Hurtado, president of Quito-based political risk consultancy Prófitas. 

Ecuador actually cultivates minimal quantities of cocaine. But it is hemmed in by the world’s two largest producers, Colombia and Peru, and has become a major transit hub. 

Among his proposals, had he actually become president, Villavicencio wanted to build a new maximum-security prison to completely isolate the gang leaders, who have frequently continued to coordinate their criminal outfits’ operations even while being held in jail. 

And he had a shot, albeit a long one, of pulling it off. Ahead of the 20 August first-round presidential vote, polls showed Villavicencio on around 8 per cent but rising quickly, possibly by enough to overtake the second-placed candidate, Otto Sonnenholzner, on around 15 per cent, and squeeze his way into a run-off against Luisa González, the frontrunner and proxy of Villavicencio’s nemesis, the former left-wing populist president Rafael Correa.

Indeed, it was by confronting Correa, the leader who gave asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to provide a fig leaf for his own sustained assault on critical Ecuadorian journalists, that Villavicencio first shot to national fame a decade ago. 

The reward for that first expose of the brash young president’s alleged corruption was an 18-month jail sentence for Villavicencio for criminal defamation delivered by a court system under Correa’s thumb. 

The journalist initially sought asylum in neighbouring Peru. But he eventually had the last laugh, after Correa was sentenced in 2020 to eight years in jail for graft following another of Villavicencio’s investigations. It is thanks to that pending jail term that the former president remains in exile in Belgium, his wife’s homeland. 

Yet that may not be the end of the story. The political shockwaves from Villavicencio’s slaying will take time to come into focus. It is possible that his killing will strengthen the drug traffickers in the way its perpetrators intended. But it is also feasible that the backlash will involve the comprehensive crackdown on the narco-violence that Villavicencio was campaigning for. 

If that happens, one of the most obvious political losers could be González and, more broadly, Correismo, including any chance of recapturing the judiciary and thus paving the way for a triumphant return of Correa himself. 

But in the meantime, Ecuador is now under a 60-day national state of emergency, with the armed forces on the streets, resembling all too much the ‘narco-state’ that the slain candidate warned of. 

The Andean nation must now confront that harsh new reality without one of its most powerful and eloquent voices for the rule of law and against the bloodletting and rampant corruption spawned by the cocaine trade.

What is the point of Lee Anderson?

Who is the most divisive figure in politics? Last year the Daily Mirror claimed Lee Anderson was ‘the worst man in Britain’. This week the Conservative MP is managing to cause a headache both for Labour and his own party. Anderson is a grassroots favourite who even before he was made deputy chairman of the party was near top of the list when it came to the MPs local associations wanted to speak at their events. When No. 10 gave him the role back in February, the idea was that he would help Rishi Sunak in his appeal to the 2019 coalition – with Anderson a straight-talking red wall MP.

This week there was evidence, too, of how his comments can make life uncomfortable for Labour. His comment that asylum seekers who take issue with being housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge ought to ‘f*** off back to France’ were not directly repeated by ministers but they did allow more mild-mannered Tory politicians such as justice secretary Alex Chalk to say they agreed with the sentiment and indignation at the cost of putting asylum seekers in hotels. Meanwhile, Labour politicians were asked whether they did too. This is uncomfortable territory for Keir Starmer’s party as the Labour leader is trying to tread a careful line of not actually criticising the Tories’ immigration stance on moral grounds – and instead simply on the idea their plans don’t work. Comments like Anderson’s tend to attract indignation from the left.

But Anderson was always an unpredictable hire. Part of what endears him to his colleagues is the fact that he is not a cardboard cut out politician – he says things others don’t. But that includes declaring this week that the government has failed on small boats – which while may be the view of many in the party is not the official line. A Tory MP declaring the Tories have failed is ideal fodder for a Labour election leaflet.

So is Anderson Sunak’s secret weapon or a liability? In No. 10, there remain senior Downing Street aides who take the first view – that he is an important asset for a Prime Minister often accused of being too smooth and at times out of touch. Yet Anderson isn’t the sole attack dog coming into an election year. He is one part of a much wider strategy to get more political and take the fight to Labour.

Labour’s attack ads from the spring were seen in government as a green light to go harder: ‘His strategic mistake was to step in the gutter,’ argues one senior government figure of Starmer. As one No. 10 figure put it in a meeting with colleagues recently: ‘The gloves are off and we are going to run at everything to expose how the country would be worse off under Labour. Boats, crime, energy and more.’ That means attacks on boats as well as a focus on Starmer’s record from his time as a DPP. But these will be coming from not just Anderson but ministers – and also Sunak himself.

Two tips for Ascot’s Shergar Cup meeting

Amid the fun and games that always accompanies the Shergar Cup meeting at Ascot, there is at least one horse that goes to the Berkshire track on a deadly serious mission. Connections of PRYDWEN are hoping he can win the Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup Stayers handicap (tomorrow, 2.10 p.m.) for two reasons.

First, the two-mile contest is worth nearly £40,000, a nice enough pot in itself, but, more importantly, victory would mean the horse incurred a 4lbs penalty for the Sky Bet Ebor Handicap on 26 August. That race is worth a massive £300,000 to the winner and Prydwen is unlikely to make the ‘cut’ off his current rating of 97 whereas he will make the cut with a winning penalty putting him up to a rating of 101.

George Scott’s five-year-old gelding has run some big races this season, including last time out at Newmarket when he was third to the well-handicapped Live Your Dream, another Ebor candidate.

He wouldn’t want the ground to be too soft, but with a couple of largely dry days forecast, the likely ‘good to soft’ going would be fine for him since he won cosily at Haydock last season on that very terrain. Back Prydwen at 8-1 with Paddy Power, Betfair, Sky Bet and Betfred, all paying four places, rather than with other bookies offering slightly higher odds but fewer places.

For those not familiar with the Shergar Cup, named in honour of the ill-fated 1981 Derby winner, it is an annual event that began in 1999. Its rules have been tweaked over the years but now four teams of three jockeys compete for a trophy with points awarded for all of the six races based on the finishing position of the horses. There is a contest for the individual jockey with the most points too.

I am hoping Prydwen’s jockey Declan McDonogh has a big day tomorrow because he is also riding another fancy of mine, DARK JEDI. Tim Easterby’s seven-year-old gelding has, frankly, been very disappointing to date this season, failing to make the frame in five outings.

However, as a result Dark Jedi has now dropped to his lowest rating for two years: a mark of 92. The mile and a half distance of the Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup Challenge handicap (tomorrow 2.45 p.m.) will be perfect for him as will the likely ground.

Dark Jedi is not one to rely on and he may have fallen out of love with racing but 14-1 is too big. Back him each way at this price with William Hill, paying four places.

Finally, in his excellent weekly column in the Weekender newspaper, trainer Ed Walker revealed two days ago that he is reluctant to have entries in the Shergar Cup races because he does not know which jockey he will get for his horses: unlike in normal races, the jockey’s mount in each Shergar Cup race is drawn at random.

So Walker will be delighted that his runner Dark Trooper in the Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup Sprint handicap (tomorrow 4.30 p.m.) will, by chance, be ridden by young Saffie Osborne. The Lambourn handler is a huge admirer of Osborne’s talents and they have teamed up for some big winners, notably with Random Harvest in a Group 3 contest at Ascot a fortnight ago.

Dark Trooper is an improving three-year-old who has won four races this year and I was tempted to put him up as a third bet of the day. However, Dark Trooper is moving up in class tomorrow and had a hard race on heavy ground less than a week ago.

Furthermore, Quinault, chasing a remarkable seven-timer in handicaps, is a worthy favourite in this race and even a rise to a lofty rating of 97 may not stop his winning streak. On balance, I am going to leave this race alone and stick with just the two tips for the day.

I have a couple of strong fancies for York’s Ebor meeting at the end of the month but they are both ground dependent. So, having been caught out on some ante-post bets with the almost endless soft ground conditions throughout the summer, I am going to keep my powder dry for another week to see the weather forecast ahead of this excellent meeting.

2023 flat season running total: – 21.93 points.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

Pending:

1 point each way Prydwen at 8-1 in the Shergar Cup Stayers, paying 1/5^th odds, four places.

1 point each way Dark Jedi at 14-1 in the Shergar Cup Challenge, paying 1/5^th odds, four places.

Settled bets:

1 point each way Royal Scotsman at 17/2 in the 2000 Guineas, 1/5 odds, paying four places. 3^rd. + 0.5 points.

1 point each way Call My Bluff at 4-1 in the Chester Cup, paying six places, 1/5^th odds. 3^rd. – 0.2 points.

1 point each way Safe Voyage at 12-1 in the Victoria Cup, paying seven places, 1/5^th odds. 5^th. + 1.4 points.

1 point each way Popmaster at 6-1 in the Connect It Utility Services Handicap

Unplaced. – 2 points

1 point each way Royal Acclaim at 6-1 in the Temple Stakes. Unplaced. – 2 point.

1 point each way Sprewell at 10-1 for the Derby paying 1/5 odds, five places. 4^th. + 1 point.

1 point each way Arrest at 4-1 for the Derby, paying 1/5 odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Mokaatil at 12-1 for the Epsom Dash, paying 1/5^th odds, seven places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

2 points win Saga at 14-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup. Non Runner. – 2 points.

1 point each way Twilight Calls at 16-1 for the King’s Stand Stakes, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. 4^th but Rule 4 deduction of 15p in the £. + 1.97 points.

2 points win Royal Scotsman at 14-1 for the St James’s Palace Stakes. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Zoffee at 14-1 for the Ascot Stakes, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Chillingham at 22-1 for the Copper Horse Handicap, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places. 4^th. + 3.4 points.

1 point each way Tarrabb at 10-1 for the Kensington Palace Fillies’ Handicap, paying 1/5^th odds, seven places. 3^rd. + 1 point.

1 point each way Point Lynas at 33-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup, paying 1/5 odds, six places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Atrium at 20-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup, paying 1/5 odds, seven places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Circle of Fire at 13/2 for the Queen’s Vase, paying 1/5^th odds, four places. 4^th. + 0.3 points.

2 points win Yibir at 11-1 for the Ascot Gold Cup. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Rhoscolyn at 22-1 for the Buckingham Palace Stakes, paying 1/5^th odds, six places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Physique at 40-1 for the Britannia Stakes, paying 1/4 odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Lezoo at 9-1 for the Commonwealth Cup, paying 1/5th odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Chelsea Green at 12-1 for the Sandringham Stakes, paying 1/5 odds, eight places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

2 points win Pyledriver at 15/2 for the Hardwicke Stakes. 1st but Rule 4 deduction of 30p in the £. + 9.9 points.

1 point each way Apollo One at 16-1 for the Wokingham Stakes, 1/5th odds, paying eight places. 2^nd. + 2.2 points.

1 point each way Zoffee at 20-1 for the Northumberland Plate, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 points each way Adjuvant at 13/2 for the Northumberland Plate, paying 1/5^th odds, six places. 5^th. + 0.3 points.

1 point each way Sprewell at 7-1 for the Irish Derby, paying 1/5 odds, three places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Ouzo for the Coral Challenge at 15/2, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. 2^nd.  + 0.5 points.

1 point each way Onesmoothoperator for the Old Newton Cup at 11-1, paying 1/5^th odds, six places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Sonny Liston at 20-1 for the John Smith’s Cup, paying ¼ odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

Listen: English doctors won’t accept a Scottish pay rise

Dear oh dear. Those pesky junior doctors strike again — literally. The fifth round of industrial action started this morning and will last until 7am on Tuesday. Junior doctors in England are demanding full pay restoration of 35 per cent – which they say accounts for a 26 per cent real terms pay cut plus inflation. 

The co-leader of the BMA junior doctors committee appeared on the Today programme this morning to defend the strikes – and his frustration came over loud and clear on the airwaves. The only people who are perhaps more frustrated, Mr S muses, are the poor patients unable to see their doctors because they’re all on the picket line…

On the show, Dr Rob Laurenson slated the UK government for arranging ‘pointless’ and ‘irrelevant’ meetings about ‘non-pay related issues’. He then turned on them for playing ‘ideological’ games with the BMA. But when quizzed on whether he would urge members to accept a pay deal like that offered in Scotland – where doctors will receive a 12.4 per cent rise this year with inflationary pay rises for the next three – he said no, explaining that:

The governments are very different. [With] the Scottish government, there’s a basis… to have a working relationship to negotiate in the future. The government that [the UK] has today is hellbent on using the rigged independent pay review bodies…

It sounds a little like Laurenson is caught up in a bit of ideological warfare himself. Pot, kettle, black? Pressed on this by Justin Webb, who asked what patients waiting for treatment would make of this ideological position, Laurenson replied:

I think what’s ideological is the government cutting our pay for 15 consecutive years which is driving doctors away. We’re trying to fix a massive workforce crisis. That’s our ideology. To try and actually fix the issues that we have while delivering high-quality care to the people of this country. I think that’s a good ideology to have.

So that would be yes, then. Although Mr S wonders if there is much room for self-awareness here, given delivering ‘high-quality care’ surely involves actually turning up to work…

Listen to the exchange here:

UK economy grows by 0.5% in June – defying expectations

So the economy has defied the predictions of doom once more. The latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the economy grew by 0.5 per cent in June, more than countering a 0.1 per cent fall in May, widely attributed to the extra bank holiday for the coronation.

Over the three months to June the economy grew by 0.2 per cent, following a 0.1 per cent expansion in the first quarter. One of the most promising aspects of today’s figures is that all sectors of the economy grew in June, with production (1.8 per cent) and construction (1.6 per cent) outpacing services (0.2 per cent) for once.

It is hardly fireworks but it does once more call into question the competence of economic forecasters. It is hard to remember that at the beginning of this year many were predicting that the UK would be the only advanced economy to shrink in 2023. 

The IMF, for example, forecast a 0.6 per cent fall, which would have meant a worse performance than even Russia. Instead, it has been some Eurozone economies that have been spluttering.

The German economy flatlined in the last quarter, while the Netherlands and Italy have seen shrinking economies this year. Needless to say, a lot of the reporting of that IMF forecast couldn’t resist throwing in Brexit, even if the IMF hadn’t actually mentioned it. The BBC, for example, duly noted that the IMF report came on the day that ‘marks three years since the UK left the EU.’ Today’s more muted BBC coverage of actual growth figures barely seems to mention Brexit.

None of this, of course, disguises the fact that the UK economy remains sluggish. The economy in June was just a shade larger than it was on the eve of the pandemic. Productivity growth in Britain remains extremely poor, and without improvement it is going to be hard for the economy to grow long-term. The UK, like the whole of Europe, remains in a miserable slough compared with the US economy which grew at an annualised 2.4 per cent in the second quarter – the corresponding, annualised figure for the UK is 1 per cent growth in the 12 months to June.

On the positive side, the economy has succeeded in reaching its pre-pandemic size following the pandemic a little quicker than it did following the 2008/09 financial crisis. It took until August 2012 for GDP to get back to where it had been in April 2008.

There is one other issue which needs to be asked following this month’s GDP figures. Given that many businesses reported that the extra bank holiday in May affected their output, was it an error to have that extra coronation bank holiday? The bank holiday itself, after all, wasn’t even on the day of the coronation, but two days later, on the Monday. Moreover, there had been a bank holiday, May Day, the previous Monday. It meant that Britain lost four Mondays to bank holidays during April and May. Calling a bank holiday might be a popular gesture by the government – but it can have a serious impact on economic growth. 

Europe’s migrant crisis is about to get much worse

The first time Mohamed Bazoum came to the attention of the European media was in the aftermath of the Great Migrant Crisis of 2015. The man who was, until a fortnight ago, the president of Niger, was at that time the minister of the interior.  

It was his responsibility to implement an accord between Niger and the European Union to stem the flow of migrants through his country north towards the Mediterranean coast. The majority of men, women and children who had Europe in their sights passed through the Nigerien city of Agadez, a route used by migrants traversing Africa for centuries. Most did so voluntarily but not all, and young Nigerian women fated for sex work in Europe also transited Niger.   

Described as the ‘gateway from West Africa to Libya’, Agadez was where the people traffickers based their operations, piling migrants into trucks for the 600 miles journey north across the Sahara to Libya.  

Up until 2011 such attempts to reach Europe would have ended unsuccessfully at the Libyan border, but after the West ousted Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 anarchy replaced order in Libya, and the smugglers made hay. In 2010, only 4,450 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean into Italy, a figure that by 2014 had soared to 170,665, peaking two years later at 181,459. It’s estimated that three-quarters passed through Niger en route to the coast. 

The numbers then plummeted, to as few as 14,874 in 2019. This was to a large extent down to the Niger government, which in 2015 enacted Law 36, a zero tolerance approach to people trafficking.  

Bazoum was zealous in implementing the new law, in the process earning the respect and the admiration of Brussels. ‘The Europeans requested us to reduce the number of migrants that were entering Libya,’ he said at the time. ‘Without the law, we didn’t have any way to do that. So, we wrote the law as… a response to the requests of the European Union.’ It is one reason why Bazoum is now described as a ‘ally’ of the West.

However, there were accusations that not all of the EU’s money went into combatting illegal immigration and that some in power in Niger grew rich on the back of Brussels’ largesse.  

The other source of resentment among locals was that migration was big business in Niger, particularly in Agadez. The city has a population of nearly 140,000, and at the height of the migrant crisis of 2015/16, more than half of households were involved in one form or other with the migrant industry. These ranged from the drivers to the hostel owners down to street hawkers selling water and snacks to the migrants.  

Law 36 was therefore not well received in Niger. It may have made Bazoum popular with the EU, and he did win the 2021 election to become the first democratically elected president of Niger since it gained independence from France in 1960, but many Nigeriens were angry at his victory. As the BBC reported in 2021, there were street protests with demonstrators alleging Bazoum had obtained his victory fraudulently. 

As president, Bazoum had maintained his EU-supported hardline approach to illegal immigration. On July 14, just 12 days before he was deposed by the military, Le Monde carried a report on the plight of sub-Saharan migrants attempting to reach the North African coast. The newspaper cited the NGO, Alarm Phone Sahara, which claimed that Algeria had pushed back 11,000 people to Niger between January and April this year. ‘These expulsions are carried out on the basis of an agreement with Niger,’ said Moctar Dan Yayé, an APS spokesperson. ‘Like other Africans, these people are not cared for by Niger…they wander the desert trying to get back to Algeria.’

Nonetheless, nearly 90,000 migrants have made it to Italy this year, only 15,000 fewer than the entire number who arrived in 2022. Not all succeed and in the last week alone there have been four shipwrecks resulting in the loss of at least 131 lives, bringing the total number of dead in the Mediterranean in 2023 to 1,800. 

These tragedies do not act as a deterrent and tens of thousands more migrants will attempt the crossing in the months ahead, each handing over €3,000 to the people smugglers who operate the boats – hoping that they are among the lucky ones to reach Italy. 

Europe fears a surge in numbers following the coup in Niger, and there are reports that the number of migrants arriving in Libya is already on the rise.  

On Monday Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani expressed his concern at the worsening situation in Niger and its likely ramifications. ‘The problem of the new wave of immigrants is already a reality,’ he said. ‘With every day that passes, if no agreement is reached, the situation risks getting worse. If war breaks out in Niger, it will be a catastrophe.’

On Thursday evening the western-backed Ecowas regional bloc, which is comprised of 15 African nations, declared that they are ready to intervene militarily to ‘restore constitutional order’ in Niger. The coup leaders have promised to defend themselves against any outside intervention, and they have the support of Mali and Burkina Faso, both of which have experienced coups in the last two years. In a joint statement the pair warned that an invasion of Niger would constitute a ‘grave violation of international law’, which would ‘have disastrous consequences for the entire region.’

Not just for the entire region. The shockwaves of a war in Niger would be felt in Europe, which was accused by some in Niger in 2016 of ‘putting its southern border in Agadez’ – with the help of Mohamed Bazoum.

With Bazoum gone, so is that border, and the people traffickers know it.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive hasn’t failed

In the last few weeks, words like ‘slow’, ‘grinding’ and even ‘failure’ have been used to describe the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive. The fact that Ukrainian forces have not broken through Russian lines and indeed have only liberated a relatively small amount of Ukraine’s occupied territory after seven weeks (though to be fair, they’ve taken about as much as the Russians were able to seize in seven months), has led some to cast doubt on the course of the counteroffensive. It has been argued that the Ukrainians launched their main offensive in early June, failed, and since then have struggled mightily to deal with Russian defences, particularly dense Russian minefields. 

Actually, within the confines of the last 16 months, with the one exception of the Ukrainian breakthrough in Kharkiv oblast last September, Ukrainian advances against well defended positions have been relatively fast. Compared with the Russian assaults on Bakhmut – a small city which took the Russians four to five months to seize – Ukrainian advances are arguably some of the fastest of the war. 

However, the speed of advance actually tells us very little about both the counteroffensive and how the Ukrainians are waging this campaign.  

What we have seen is a pivot by Ukrainian command, moving away from anything like the Russian campaign at Bakhmut. Instead, they are attempting to create the conditions for a later advance and attempting to keep casualties down. This is a sign of a military that understands what it can and, crucially, what it cannot do. It’s an offensive based on destruction before it becomes an offensive of advance. 

When the Ukrainians ramped up their operations in early June they originally sent relatively small, company sized formations into battle. The most well-known of these probing attacks happened to the south of the village of Mala Tokmachka in the Zaporizhzhia region. The attack involved two companies mixing German-supplied Leopard tanks and US-made Bradley Fighting Vehicles – 20 vehicles in total. Though this Ukrainian probing attack hit stiff Russian resistance, and many vehicles were damaged, Ukraine’s western equipment proved to be more durable – with just three Leopard 2s destroyed beyond repair. An additional 77 Bradley Fighting Vehicles promised by the US for Ukraine in June-July 2023 more than made up for the 49 Bradleys damaged or destroyed by Russia during the same period. 

What the Ukrainians discovered with these probing attacks in June was that breaking the Russian lines at that point would be too costly. Not wanting to continue banging their heads against the wall, as the Russians did in the battle of Bakhmut, the Ukrainians cut back on trying to advance to concentrate on the destruction of Russian artillery/ Multiple Launch Rocket systems, from the guns near to the front lines all the way back to the rear. In military-strategic terms this was the opposite of a failure, but a sign of prudence and understanding. 

Since that moment, the Ukrainians have spent a great deal of effort trying to degrade Russian artillery in a holistic campaign – and there are signs of real successes. The destruction of Russian artillery units over the previous six weeks has been some of the highest in the war, and the Ukrainians have shown the ability to process and react on information faster than Russian forces. When it comes to counter-battery fire – the ability to quicky identify the source of Russian fire and hit that source before it can move – the Ukrainians have particularly shown that they have a speed advantage.  

According to data published by the head of the Ukrainian forces in the Tavria region, Ukraine has destroyed or damaged since June 2023 at least 287 artillery pieces, 23 EW (Electronic Warfare) systems, and 26 Air Défense systems of the Russian Armed Forces in the Melitopol and Berdyansk areas. 

Of course, it is not enough to just target Russian weapons. This campaign against artillery has stretched to a concerted attempt to attack Russian depots, where they keep their large stores of ammunition, and Russian command and control centres. This has been greatly assisted by the range extension recently (and belatedly) offered to Ukraine with the UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles. The Russians had adjusted to the US-supplied HIMARS ammunition by moving their large storage facilities and command centres far enough behind the line that they could not be hit by the Ukrainians. However, with these new missiles, the Ukrainians have been able to attack previously safe facilities, with sometimes devastating results. The Ukrainians successfully targeted Russian artillery warehouses in Rykove (Kherson region), Starokrymske (Crimea), Vilne and Vesele (Crimea). Russia again has started to lose generals as it did at the beginning of the war. First 35^th CAA acting head of staff major general Sergiy Horiachev was killed in a missile strike. Then deputy head of Southern Military District lieutenant general Oleg Tsokov died because of successful missile strike targeting a hotel in Berdyansk, the highest ranking Russian officer killed since 24February 2022. 

In general the Russians have become so infuriated with the success of the Storm Shadow strikes that they have targeted the air base which Ukraine used before February 2022 to house Su-24 bombers (the aircraft that Ukraine is using to launch the storm shadows) with Kinzhal missiles. 

These Ukrainian successes are necessary to prepare for the moment when the army will restart large-scale forward movements. The only way to do this is to make sure that Russian artillery fire is weak enough that Ukrainian artillery fire can dominate the battlefield where it is needed. The Russian general Ihor Popov indirectly admitted the efficiency of the new Ukrainian tactics when he claimed that Russian forces lack the means to wage effective counter-battery strikes. 

These successes will have to continue before the Ukrainians really transition to the next main phase of the counteroffensive, when they will try, for the first time, to make a major combined arms breakthrough involving full brigades. Now, there has been some criticism, in one case particularly from German sources, that the Ukrainians have not been able to put into practice Nato-type combined arms warfare. This is one of the most bizarre charges of the war. Nato forces are designed to go into combat with significant air superiority, well developed and extensively equipped engineering forces, all paving the way for armoured spearheads. The Ukrainians have no such luxury. Indeed, the Russians retain the numerical and technological advantage when it some to fixed wing aircraft. Certainly, Nato combined arms training would not expect to be faced with a situation where the enemy is criss-crossing the battle area with drones, and the enemy has very effective helicopter forces. As such, Ukraine can’t fight a combined-arms battle as widely envisaged before the war. Ukraine will have to devise something new, using artillery supported by drones to create the conditions that previously would have been generated by aircraft. 

This will not be easy, though the Ukrainians will try. And from what we have seen in this campaign so far, they have every chance of having some success.  

The Ukrainians have adapted during the counteroffensive in a sensibly and strategically sound fashion to both limit their casualties and create the conditions for a later advance. They have had to do this with only a limited supply of longer-range weapons, and without air superiority. They have not been slow and the campaign has not failed. It is on the way to achieving strategic success, just in a way that most did not expect. 

Why is Germany riddled with Russian spies? 

Yet another suspected Russian spy has been arrested in Germany – the third such case in recent months. 

The suspect – named only as Thomas H. by the Geman media for legal reasons – is an employee of the department of Germany’s army, the Bundeswehr, responsible for procuring defence technology. 

He is said to have approached the Russian embassy in Berlin and its consulate in Bonn in May and offered to provide secrets connected to his work. The arrest follows similar cases late last year when an agent of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, was arrested and accused of betraying secrets to the Russians, and an officer in the Bundeswehr reserve was put on probation for supplying information to Moscow for years.  

The latest arrest comes hard on the heels of two former heads of the BND, August Hanning and Gerhard Schindler, writing to the Bild newspaper at the weekend complaining that the agency was ‘hobbled and toothless’ because of bureaucratic oversight and interference. The former spymasters revealed that no fewer than seven political and legal committees had to approve and supervise their work, forcing them to rely on information from friendly foreign intelligence agencies rather than their own work. 

This seems to confirm that the arrest of the spies last year came because of a tip-off from an allied agency rather than Germany’s own counter-espionage efforts.  

As we know from the Cold War and the novels of John Le Carré, Germany has long been on the front line of the spy wars and Germany was uniquely vulnerable to spies from the East. In the 1970s Günter Guillaume, an aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt, brought his boss down when he was exposed as a long-term communist spy. The Russians and East Germans trained handsome agents to target lonely and loveless spinster secretaries working for the Bonn government and seduce them into espionage. 

It is not hard to discern why Germany is so prone to penetration by Russian spies: it is yet another legacy of the country’s dark past. The totalitarian experience of Nazi dictatorship so inoculated the country against all aspects of a police state, that suspicion of domestic spy agencies became endemic. 

The country that produced the Gestapo and SS has always had a healthy distrust of spies – hence the excessive checks and balances hampering their own secret agents today. Coupled with this is Germany’s ambivalent relationship with Russia, including German guilt arising from the shadows cast by world war two and the subsequent division of the country until 1989. 

These factors are combining to make Germany a weak link in the western world’s defence against Russian aggression and espionage that has followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The unbearable smugness of Bill Maher

Bill Maher has many fans. But no one is a bigger fan of Bill Maher than Bill Maher. His smugness is as apparent as it is nauseating. That self-satisfied grin, forever etched on his face, gets on my nerves. I’m sure I’m not alone. Twenty years ago, Maher, the human equivalent of Marmite, made his first appearance on HBO. Since then, his show, Real Time with Bill Maher, has grown in popularity – and for good reason. It’s a great show.

Not necessarily because of Maher, but more because of the eclectic guests (one of his very first guests was Ann Coulter) and supremely talented joke writers. You see, Maher is a poor interviewer and an even poorer comic. He is, in many ways, a conversational narcissist who rarely, if ever, lets his guests finish their sentences. He is a contrarian, and, yes, sometimes contrarianism makes for good television. He is confrontational, aggressive, and extremely dogmatic. Again, this can make for good TV.

However, all of this enjoyable watching is so often displaced by his lack of humility. Maher, clearly an intelligent man, wants the world to know just how intelligent he is. This is not a recipe for good comedy. This point was originally made by the late, great Norm MacDonald, a man who knew a thing or two about generating laughs. In fact, if you have time, I would encourage you to check out this YouTube video that sees MacDonald puncture Maher’s obnoxious behaviour. MacDonald emphasised the fact that good comedians must be able to poke fun at themselves, not just members of the audience. Maher obviously never got the memo.

Due to the ongoing writers’ strike, Real Time hasn’t aired for months, But Maher has another project. It’s called Club Random, the comedian’s new podcast. On it, Maher regularly belittles his guests, talks over them, and scolds them mercilessly. Ostensibly, he invites them into his man cave for an intimate discussion. More often than not, these intimate discussions turn into patronising lectures, full of condescension and passive-aggressive remarks.

Take Sharon Osbourne, who recently sat down with Maher. After discussing her battle with cancer, the two discussed wokeness. Specifically, they discussed the fact that an increasing number of once respectable universities are removing the horribly white, horribly male Shakespeare from their curriculums. Osborne heaped praise on the playwright and the many ‘stories’ that he wrote. With a slight chuckle and a wry smile on his face, Maher then proceeded to tell Sharon that Shakespeare never wrote stories; he wrote plays and sonnets. Silly Sharon! This is not how good interviewers behave… or even human beings.

The women’s rights activist Riley Gaines, Maher’s most recent Club Random guest, is a passionate Trump supporter. Maher, on the other hand, is not. In truth, he can’t stand Trump. As soon as Gaines said that she voted for the awful, orange man in 2020, and would vote for him again in 2024, Maher automatically switched into lecture mode, telling the 23-year-old that she really ought to reconsider her political views. When she questioned Biden’s credibility, Maher, yet again, proceeded to put her in her place. There was no attempt to understand Gaines, only to scold.

To my knowledge, only one Club Random guest, Rainn Wilson (Dwight from the American version of The Office) has been brave enough to stand up to Maher. Wilson, clearly fed up with Maher’s constant interjections, asked the comedian to shut up and let him finish his sentence. Maher begrudgingly accepted Wilson’s demand.

When he’s not cutting people off and ridiculing religion, Maher can be found waxing lyrical about weed, and the many ways in which the psychoactive drug has transformed his life – for the better, of course. However, considering Maher is a heavy weed user, and weed users have been shown to possess elevated levels of impulsivity and severe deficits in inhibitory control, perhaps he should reconsider his stance.

It’s not all bad, of course. The sanctimonious sexagenarian does get a lot right. He regularly rallies against wokeness, including the trans craze sweeping the western world. He is also a passionate defender of free speech.

However, the good that Maher does is so often cancelled out by his many rude and irritating qualities. Of all his unattractive attributes, and there are many, his thin skin is perhaps the most notable. The comedian Kyle Dunnigan does a great impression of Maher. It’s spot on. Flawless. Everyone agrees. Well, almost everyone. Not Maher, though. In 2020, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Rogan asked Maher if he had seen Dunnigan’s impression. Maher frowned, criticised Rogan for asking the question, and then insisted that the impression wasn’t funny. It is. The irony of a comedian not being able to take a joke is obviously lost on Maher. Perhaps this is why he never really made it as a stand-up comedian.