Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
Rishi Sunak’s promise to close down the Confucius Institutes in UK universities when he pitched for the Tory leadership sounded like a good idea. Sadly it was also ill thought out. In a liberal democracy it’s difficult just to close down organisations you don’t like by governmental order. His backtracking on that promise this week was therefore
There’s no doubt that the government has the best of intentions when it comes to clearing up the Augean stables of UK higher education: witness its setting up of the Office for Students to protect students’ interests against ever-more monolithic university management, and more recently this year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act aimed at
Last month Michael Gove suggested changing the law in England to allow tourist hotspots to force homeowners to seek planning permission before they can rent out holiday lets. Planning laws aimed at preserving the character of a locality are entirely consistent with conservative principles It didn’t go down well. Some on his own side, including hard hitters like
Claims of financial skulduggery abound, Nicola Sturgeon is politically hors de combat and Humza Yousaf is quickly rebranding the SNP as a party not only of shatteringly incompetent government but also of lost causes, political irrelevance and sheer kookiness. Thinking Scots who don’t fancy the Tories might be forgiven for contemplating a switch of loyalties
Substantial constraints on the freedom of the press tend to accumulate from seemingly small restrictions. Events last week in a court in Antrim in Northern Ireland demonstrate this neatly. A paedophile was caught sending suggestive emails to undercover police posing as prepubescent girls, and went down for 16 months. Who was he? We will never know.
For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders
There is rather more than meets the eye to Emmanuel Macron’s inept visit to Beijing last week. The immediate fallout – Xi’s flat refusal to change tack on Ukraine, and Macron’s subsequent insistence that France was not beholden to the US or for that matter over-concerned with what China might do in Taiwan – looks
It’s often said that the less important the issues at stake, the bitterer the argument about them becomes. This seems to have been more than confirmed in the last few weeks in Devon by the curious case of the argument over wild camping on Dartmoor. The high moor on Dartmoor is an anomaly. Although nearly
If you want to understand the curious attitude of our government towards media freedom, look at two provisions in the draft Media Bill, published yesterday. One is refreshingly liberal; the other curmudgeonly and authoritarian. First, the good news. The Bill reads the last rites over the Leveson Report of 2012. A worrying document embodying lofty
Nobody came well out of the Quran-scuffing incident at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield last month. Following calls from Islamic fundamentalists for severe measures to suppress any insults to Islam, the headmaster of the school concerned largely took their side rather than dismiss the incident as the school triviality it was; the council that employed him was
After the hash the Church of England has made of the issue of same-sex marriage, a group of MPs led by long-standing churchman Ben Bradshaw has hatched a plan to pull the Anglican chestnuts out of the fire. His scheme is undoubtedly well-meaning: unfortunately, it is more likely to push them further in, to be
When Boris Johnson nailed the Tories’ environmental colours to the mast a few years ago, he probably gained votes from a few waverers. Was it worth it? Almost certainly not. The point he missed was that promises of that sort regularly come back to bite the people that make them. The commitment to net zero
In febrile times, politicians tend to have a touching belief in their ability to pass laws and make men good. The well-meaning, but actually slightly sinister, Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill, which went through its committee stage yesterday with full support from Labour and no dissenting voices, is a case in point. The proposed
The last year has not been good for the European Union’s image. The Qatargate scandal rumbles on. So far, apart from various functionaries and hangers-on, three MEPs, including a vice president of the European parliament, and one ex-MEP have been implicated in the scandal. Last week, however, yet another festering sleaze scandal broke, this time
Say it quietly, especially when there’s a Green listening: but there’s one certainty about Net Zero 2050. It won’t happen. As any honest MP will admit in private, it is stymied not only by the need to keep the lights on following the Ukraine energy shortage, but also for another reason: because no democratic majority
Rishi Sunak senses, rightly, that tough talk on the Channel migrant issue will go down well in both middle England and the Red Wall. One can see why. No small country with overstressed social provision should tolerate an annual influx of irregular migrants sufficient to populate a medium-sized town landing openly on its beaches. That
Sadiq Khan has an inveterate desire to show Londoners who is boss: the mayor’s latest wheeze is an expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). Khan is seeking to roll out Ulez to all of London’s boroughs from August – along the leafy lanes of Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire. Aside from ostentatious green
On Sunday, the Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt wrote an open letter to the Bishop of Portsmouth (where her constituency is). In it she called on him to vote to ‘back reform’ and, as demanded by a coterie of radical bishops, change forever the Anglican stance on same-sex marriage. Today the Church of England has partially
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is shaping up as the GOP’s best hope for next year’s US presidential election. Large parts of his popular appeal are his open attack on (now fairly well-established) left-wing infiltration in education and to some extent in commerce, and his expressed intention to make Florida the state ‘where woke goes to die’. Hitherto
University vice-chancellors will find some uncomfortable reading in their New Year in-tray today. Last month the chairman of accountancy giant PwC pointed out that more and more middle-class teenagers are walking away from old-style university studies and embracing degree apprenticeships and other forms of on-the-job learning. Already the number of those taking up degree apprenticeship
