Features

Wednesday

Michael Simmons

Labour must go further and faster in the North Sea

John Healey stood in front of two giant robotic arms this week and promised to ‘make Great Britain Growth Britain again’. The Chancellor also promised, borrowing a catchphrase from his neighbour in No. 10, to deliver ‘good growth in every postcode’. In the North Sea, 150 miles east off the coast of Aberdeen, lies the first big test of this promise. The 6,000-ton Jackdaw extraction platform is ready to start pumping gas from a field three miles below the surface. Twenty years after the Jackdaw field was first successfully prospected, it will, at the stroke of a ministerial pen, finally be allowed to operate.

Natasha Hausdorff

The Israeli settlements lie

There are few phrases in international affairs repeated with greater confidence or subjected to less scrutiny than ‘illegal Israeli settlements’. It appears in UN resolutions, government statements, NGO reports and news bulletins as though it were an established fact. Add the words ‘under international law’ and apparently further discussion becomes unnecessary. The trouble is not just that this is political rhetoric masquerading as law, but that it is in fact contrary to real international law, properly applied. The claim rests upon a series of propositions about Israel’s borders, the legal nature of occupation and the meaning of provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, propositions which have hardened into orthodoxy through repetition.

Gwion Wyn Jones

The death of biblical literacy

We are often told these days, most recently in James Marriott’s much talked about book The New Dark Ages, that the world has a problem with reading. During such an emergency, then, it could be quite invidious to claim that some manifestations of this problem may be more or less bad than others. But it is difficult not to bemoan especially one crisis that cannot be blamed entirely on bloated screen times: the decline of biblical literacy. I have observed this first-hand when teaching history undergraduates at Oxford. These are the brightest and most hard-working young historians in the world. But it is not an uncommon occurrence to be met with blank stares when I mention the prophet Jeremiah or question them on the Exodus narrative.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The fraught world of dinner party presents

‘Oh, why do the middle classes feel they must bring a present?’ Those words were spoken by Lady Charteris when she was the wife of the Provost of Eton and a dinner-party guest arrived clutching a bottle of wine. The scene took place between 1984 and 1992, when Andrew Boggis (who recalled it in a Times obituary addendum) was Master in College. The conventions of dinner-party arrival have changed beyond recognition in the ensuing 40 years. What was seen as a ‘middle-class’, ‘common’ or ‘naff’ act in the late 1980s is now the done thing. To arrive at a friend’s house for lunch or supper without a present for the hostess would seem lazy and mean.

Tali Fraser

Are you ready for Labour’s war on Middle England?

The socioeconomic duty (SED) might not sound sexy but bear with me: this is the tool the Labour party plans to use to ramp up its attack on the middle classes. The SED was described by its Labour ministerial creators in 2009 as ‘socialism in one clause’. It would, they promised, create ‘a new social order’. It was also described as Harman’s Law after Harriet Harman, who introduced it in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s premiership but never got around to putting it into practice. Well, this Labour government is about to finish the job – Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 is go, and it may earn itself a new name: Middle England’s end.

Dean Godson

Can Britain learn from Sweden’s immigration crackdown?

Should Sweden now replace Australia, with its famed points system for immigration control, as the overseas model of choice for the British Right? As Sweden prepares to go to the polls in a desperately close election this Sunday, it is well worth considering what Stockholm has achieved over the past four years – not just on migration, but also in the intimately correlated terrain of gang crime and extremism; in short, what the French call les aspects régaliens, those matters which lie within the exclusive competence of the State. Scandinavia is certainly in vogue.

Sebastian Faulks

Is reading really dead?

I get up early and head to Liverpool Street. Meet Isabelle Ralphs and Amy Batley from Hutchinson Heinemann publishers and we take the train to Colchester, then a taxi to the giant Penguin Random House (PRH) warehouse, where I am to sign 3,000 copies of my new novel, Farewell to Eden. (I have already signed 3,000 loose title pages or ‘tip-ins’ at home.) Dave, the local PRH chief, brings in the wooden pallets full of books on a sort of fork-lift arrangement. Isabelle passes each one in from the left, I sign, and Amy, on the right, makes small piles which Dave shifts onwards and replaces with new piles taken from the pallets. Thus the stacked 10ft-long table in front of me remains ever full. I am the Sisyphus of rural Essex. To clear the table takes seven-and-a-half hours.

John Power

Politicians need to learn from Andrew Tate

When Mel Stride put out a YouTube Short last month, it got zero views. That, surely, is worth repeating: zero views. Stride’s unloved ‘short’ was a poorly cropped clip of a GB News interview, similar to dozens of other clips he had posted on his YouTube channel before being sacked as shadow chancellor. Most of them have fewer than ten views. Stride was born in 1961, so he can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with the latest meta on social media. But most of our MPs have similarly amateurish operations, despite recognising the importance of social media in modern communications.

Wednesday

Patrick Galbraith

How much more can British farmers endure?

Lately, for reasons that are far too baroque to go into, my wife and I have been looking at farm tenancy agreements from 1983. In a way they are deeply dull (all those drains and clauses about fence maintenance) but they are also fascinating in that they reveal how farming has changed. If you were after a few fields for your sheep or cattle, back when Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ was riding high at no. 1, you had to really fork out. Ten pounds an acre, for pretty marginal land, was the going rate, and rent rises year on year were the order of the day. Fast forward 40 years and a lot of grazing is worth almost nothing.

Tim Shipman and James Heale

Inside Reform’s plan to make Britain ‘fall in love with Nigel Farage again’

Emulating Donald Trump may be a strategy with diminishing returns in British politics, but Nigel Farage plans to channel the US President’s time on The Apprentice if he becomes prime minister, telling his cabinet ‘You’re fired!’ if they fail to deliver within 100 days of taking office. In a bid to show voters Reform UK is serious about delivering change, Farage will tell his party conference in Birmingham this week that ministers will be forced to resign, or face being kicked out, if they cannot keep their promises. The pledge will form a centrepiece of Reform’s second annual jamboree, where the party will outline its plans for ‘the first 100 days’ in Downing Street. An aide says Farage will dispense with failing colleagues without qualms: ‘Nigel doesn’t give a fuck.

Cosmo Landesman

The unsaid truth about suicide

Did you know that in the UK September is a month devoted to suicide prevention? And that on the 10th of this month, it’s World Suicide Prevention Day (WSPD)? No, neither did I. And neither did any of my friends. Yet we’re all aware that suicide is a serious problem. Every 90 minutes someone in the UK or Ireland dies that way. It’s the biggest killer of men under 45. And suicides among teenage girls and young women have almost doubled in recent years. We’ve been having these suicide prevention events every September for more than two decades and yet the rates are not going down. Maybe it’s time to challenge what I’d call the suicide prevention consensus.

Matt Ridley

Don’t blame climate change for the Himalayan flash flood

The tragic and terrifying Himalayan flash flood was caused by a chunk of mountain collapsing into a narrow gorge, sending a tsunami of mud and rock that gathered mass as it shot down the steep Trisuli river valley. More than that is not yet clear. Did a breakaway hanging glacier take a rock face with it or was it the other way round? Was there time for the debris to dam the valley and form a lake that burst or did the 60-metre flood of mud come from ice, river water, rock and soil that accumulated in the valley as the tsunami descended? Some people are already certain they know what caused this. Either climate change did it or China did it. Assorted greens rushed to blame global warming with confidence bordering on certainty.

Francis Pike

‘He’s in prison because he’s not corrupt’: Will Britain stand up for Imran Khan?

Imran Khan is dead. At least he may as well be. Last week, the former England cricket captain Michael Atherton stuck his neck out and interviewed Khan’s two sons, Sulaiman, 29, and Kasim, 27, at Lord’s for Sky TV. Showing maturity and restraint, of which their father would be proud, Imran’s sons explained at length how the Pakistan government was orchestrating their father’s murder. The response to the interview was explosive. In protest, the craven Pakistan Cricket Board immediately threatened to withdraw the country’s team from the ongoing Lord’s Test match. They did not follow through. Sulaiman reported that his father, in addition to having a problem with one of his eyes, had ‘rising blood pressure due to isolation and solitary confinement’.

Robert Hardman

After Harald, what’s the future for Norway’s royal family?

Affable, unflappable and imposing (he was a 6ft 2in ex-Olympian), the late King Harald of Norway was also blessed with good luck for much of his life. The first notable dose of good fortune occurred at the age of three, when his mother managed to spirit him and his sisters out of their home country hours before the Nazi invasion – and away to safety in the US. He returned to a nation so devoted to its monarchy that the children of post-war Norway pooled their pocket money to help buy his grandfather, King Haakon, a royal yacht. The Norge remains in service to this day, funded by an uncomplaining nation. Compare that with Britain’s royal family, who had to wave farewell to their yacht Britannia back in 1997 after a long and toxic political squabble.

Melanie McDonagh

Want to get on in society? Read an etiquette guide

A few weeks ago, an Irish Times columnist, Fintan O’Toole, wrote about receiving a copy of a 1930s book of etiquette issued by the Christian Brothers – a religious teaching order once notorious for the liberal use of the strap – called Christian Politeness and Counsels for Youth. He had fun mocking the strictures intended for the benefit of working-class Catholic boys. Indeed, he added his own: ‘Boys subject to physical or sexual abuse by Christian Brothers should remain silent on the subject and avoid at all costs giving scandal.’ Ha ha.

Wednesday

Vanessa Feltz

Piers Morgan, I’m coming for you

I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the bankruptcy court). So when Channel 5’s sparkling Vanessa succumbed to the noxious pestilence imperilling terrestrial TV, I blithely announced a rapid renaissance. I would simply launch a spanking-new show, At Home with Vanessa, on YouTube – a territory already staked out by telly titans Piers Morgan, Ant and Dec and Holly Willoughby. Speedily, I whisked up the notion of converting my living room into a studio, marshalling the punchiest TV peeps I know into a team, conjuring a format from thin air and plunging in.

Michael Gove

Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege

Jolyon Maugham has a point. There is a need for an inquiry in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s tragic death. But, not for the first time, the Good Law Project director has identified the wrong target. It’s not the press that needs to be investigated and held to account. If newspapers and magazines, including this one, err or fail, libel or traduce, then the courts can sanction and readers can desert. We survive, to publish, by public demand. The real focus of inquiry – sustained and detailed – should be Cambridge University and, in particular, its Faculty of Education. They were Professor Arday’s employers. Indeed, more than that, they were his champions and cheerleaders, beckoning the limelight to vaunt his appointment.

Al Carns

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill only serves the IRA

More British military personnel were killed during the Troubles than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. As well as soldiers, innocent members of the public, MPs, police officers and the royal family were all targets. The Good Friday Agreement ended the armed campaign, but the fight to rewrite how the Troubles are remembered has continued. Warfare has become lawfare. When I resigned as armed forces minister in June, defence funding dominated the headlines, but the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill was the other reason I stood down. The Good Friday Agreement was a defining Labour achievement. Mo Mowlam walked into the Maze to talk to people most of the country would not have stomached sharing a room with. Peace required everyone to do things that were politically excruciating.

Eilis O’Hanlon

How Ireland succumbed to ‘radical chic’

When a law student from Co. Kildare was stopped this summer on suspicion of transporting a bomb across the Irish border for use by dissident republicans, her solicitor said she had not been aware of what was in the bag and that she had been ‘manipulated’. Yet the 25-year-old’s arrest highlighted an alarming revival in Irish republicanism – and the role being played by a younger, well-educated, middle-class generation. During the Troubles, much of Ireland mercifully avoided the pull of radicalism. There was always a certain degree of quiet sympathy for the IRA in predictable sections of the media and academia, but popular support for Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican party, in the 26-county Republic remained negligible throughout the worst years of terrorism.

Michael Simmons

Jenny Gilruth was my teacher – the bullying claims don’t surprise me

When I heard that a civil service insider had made bullying allegations against Scotland’s deputy first minister, Jenny Gilruth, I was not surprised. I’ve been at the receiving end of her ire myself. Gilruth taught modern studies – politics mixed with sociology – at my Edinburgh comprehensive school. She had a reputation for being a bit of a meanie and not someone you wanted to disappoint; she was certainly a disciplinarian. Those traits seem to have stayed with her as she climbed Edinburgh’s greasy public-sector pole, leaving teaching after a stint at Education Scotland before becoming an MSP and eventually John Swinney’s deputy.