Features

Thursday

Ross Clark

Miliband’s empty energy promise

Though not quite up there with history’s great political texts, Ed Miliband’s letter this week to the director of the ESO, which runs Britain’s national grid, is a rather important document. It reveals – or confirms – that Labour has committed itself to decarbonising Britain’s electricity system by 2030 without really having any idea of how that can be done. Miliband described this letter as a ‘formal commission… to provide practical advice on achieving clean power’. That is all very well, except shouldn’t Miliband have sought this advice months ago, before pledging to achieve net zero on domestic energy by 2030? This week was supposed to be the big reveal: we would learn how this target – considered unreachable by many – is going to be hit.

Thursday

Jo Knowsley

How big business pushed up vet bills

I was on my way to a Pilates class when I spotted Paul waving at me urgently from across the road at the bus stop. ‘Can you help, Miss,’ he said. ‘It’s Gladys, she’s in a bad way.’ I looked down at his Staffordshire bull terrier and immediately saw what he meant. The 16-year-old dog was trembling, panting and appeared to be struggling to stand. She’d also lost a lot of weight. I’ve known Paul and Gladys for the past eight years, running into them on the street near my home in east London. Paul is not wealthy and has a couple of disabilities. He always calls me Miss. ‘She’s got bad in the past few days,’ he said. ‘She’s not eating, she just paces and can’t lie down. I took her to a vet yesterday. I think it’s time for her to go.

Sebastian Shakespeare

Why is the RHS so obsessed with diversity?

Chekhov had no illusions about horticulture (‘It’s a nice, healthy business to be in, but there are passions and wars raging there too’) but even he might have been bemused by the zealotry of our Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) commissars. Last September I enrolled on an RHS Level 2 Certificate in Practical Horticulture. I was hoping to improve my gardening skills and learn more about the propagation of plants to save me forking out a small fortune at garden centres. Besides, I was tired of relying on my woefully inaccurate plant app to identify rogue forbs on my lawn.

D.J. Taylor

What will become of George Orwell’s archives?

The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the four winds in the wake of a corporate sell-off has stirred predictable fury among Orwell buffs. As in all the best literary rows, the contending roles seemed to be clearly defined from the outset. There were the heroes (Orwell and his many acolytes); there was a principal villain – the publisher Hachette, which had decided to unload its archive, only to find that no single bidder could meet the asking price; there was the agent of their devilry (more about him in a moment); and even some subsidiary baddies, in the shape of a clutch of rare book dealers who are now hard at work flogging off the individual lots.

Richard Bratby

Save our steam engines!

Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not in celebration, but in mourning. It was a tiny mechanical wake for Mamod, the Birmingham firm which has made model steam engines since 1936, and which has announced that it is ceasing production. It’s estimated that more than 2.5 million engines have been sold by the company over the years. As commerce and government push our behaviours down digital channels, older hobbies don’t register When a beloved brand perishes, there’s rarely a single reason.

Owen Matthews

What China wants from Russia

On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’ that would ‘continue for many years’. Russia’s trade with China has more than doubled to $240 billion since the invasion, buoying the Kremlin’s coffers with oil money and substituting goods sanctioned by the West. Moscow and Beijing have also stepped up joint military exercises.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The death of free speech in Britain

In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government. Nine years after its publication, submission seems more imminent on this side of the English Channel. My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the US. Free speech is a much more recent thing in the UK. If it was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s. If free speech in the UK was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s After the recent riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media.

Lisa Haseldine

Is Germany’s far right about to go mainstream?

‘We need to deport, deport, deport!’ Björn Höcke, leader of the Alternative für Deutschland in Thuringia, emphasises each word with a clenched fist. It’s a hot Saturday evening in the small town of Arnstadt and Höcke is launching the AfD’s state election campaign. His branch of the party has been categorised as ‘indisputably far right’ not just by the press but by German domestic intelligence. Nonetheless, it’s leading in the polls ahead of three east German state elections, two of which take place on Sunday. Höcke could well end up ‘Minister President’ of Thuringia.

Thursday

Mitchell Reiss

An American’s love letter to Britain

My wife and I relocated to the UK a few months ago after spending the past 37 years in the United States, and I cannot stop comparing the two countries. I oscillate wildly between my irrational exuberance at America’s superior market efficiencies and my sheer amazement at how orderly and polite you all are. These reactions surprise me, as I am hardly new to these shores. I attended graduate school at Oxford, worked for a while in London, married a beautiful and talented Essex girl (TOWIE indeed), and have consulted for the UK government in Northern Ireland for the past eight years. But now I actually live here, there are so many things that I am seeing with new eyes and deeply appreciate about the UK. Let’s start with the major ones. No guns.

Michael Naughton

Is the CCRC fit to decide on Lucy Letby’s appeal?

Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed? Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice? All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997. Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not commit.

Ross Clark

The myth of Britain’s fleeing non-doms

According to popular imagination, the skies over Britain have been full these past few months of fleets of private jets carrying their non-dom owners to fiscally safer climes. According to your point of view, this has either rid the country of parasites or denied us investment and trickle-down wealth. Two glossy reports pumped out by financial companies in the past month seemed to promote the idea and were immediately leapt upon by those who oppose the abolition of non-dom status. First, there was the UBS Global Wealth Report 2024, which predicted that the number of dollar millionaires living in Britain will plunge by 17 per cent between 2023 and 2028.

Melanie McDonagh

Keep fun out of funerals

There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’ method whereby, with no prayers and no mourners, a funeral director will take your remains from mortuary to crematorium to be burnt without troubling your friends and relations. The other is the ‘celebration’. According to Co-op Funeralcare in its new report, called ‘Go Your Own Way’, no fewer than 68 per cent of people it polled regard funerals as a celebration of life, up from 58 per cent five years ago. Out go prayers, black funeral dress and solemnity; in come Doctor Who themes, glittery coffins and guests dressed in football shirts. Or as the report puts it: ‘Personalisation is key.’ The venues are quirky too.

William Cash

The dark truth about Hollywood assistants

Anew stop has been added to the map of Movie Star Homes and Crime Scenes, on sale at LAX airport: 18038 Blue Sail Drive, Pacific Palisades, the sleek single-storey $6 million ocean-view house where the Friends actor Matthew Perry was found floating in his hot tub last October. His death has revealed something of the dark world of LA’s celebrity staff. Perry’s assistant, two doctors and LA’s ‘Ketamine Queen’ have been charged with supplying the drugs Last week it was reported that Perry’s live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa injected his boss with ketamine before his death. While watching a movie around noon, the actor asked Iwamasa – part-butler, part-nurse and head of shopping (including meds and drugs) – for his third jab of the day.

Luke McShane

The depraved world of chess cheats

Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from Russia, supposedly tried to poison a younger rival at the Dagestan Chess Championship this month. Camera footage seems to show her furtively applying a substance to one side of a chess board before the start of the game. Her opponent later became unwell and a Russian news agency claimed that the substance contained mercury. I first saw the story on one of the many specialist chess news sites. Within 48 hours it was in most national newspapers. Two types of chess stories pop up time and again. First, the ones about child prodigies, which tend towards the formulaic – I know because they used to publish them about me in the 1990s.

Freddy Gray

Can Kamala Harris bluff her way to the White House?

Chicago ‘There are no disasters,’ said Boris Johnson, who was born in America. ‘Only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’ That quote speaks nicely to the story of the Democratic party’s 2024 election campaign. The first televised presidential debate, in Atlanta, Georgia on 27 June, seemed to have been an absolute disaster. President Joe Biden’s clear and present feebleness had been exposed for all the world to see. His opponent, Donald Trump, became the favourite to win back the White House – then, 16 days later, Trump survived an assassination attempt, and his stock rose even higher.

Thursday

Lee Child

Is it time for me to move back to Britain?

I first saw America 50 years ago. I spent the summer of 1974 with my New York girlfriend. Richard Nixon resigned halfway through my trip. Gerald Ford took over. My first visit spanned two administrations. It was a different country then. Income equality in America was better in the 1970s than it is in Norway today. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it was better than anywhere in Scandinavia today. Politics was grubby, but retained a discernible spine. Congress was so appalled by the slush fund which paid the Watergate burglars that it passed tough election finance laws even before Nixon went. Those laws worked. Limits were imposed. Ten years later, Ronald Reagan won his 49-state re-election without holding a single fundraiser. The laws were toughened still further as late as 2002.

Ursula Buchan

What can save Britain’s ash trees?

The next time you drive or walk down a country road, you may well notice that something is not quite right. Look around and you might see that tall ash trees in the verge-side hedgerows are no longer as handsome, their leaves sparse and scattered, even brown and wilting, while naked branches point accusingly to the sky. A disaster is unfolding, which, on the face of it, seems hardly less serious than the one that hit the countryside in the early 1970s, after ‘Dutch’ elm disease was imported in timber from Canada and killed 30 million trees. This time, the victim is the European ash (Fraxinus excelsior). The disaster is plain, even to urban dwellers.

Charlotte Eagar

‘I came here to escape radical Islam’: the asylum seekers who understand the rioters’ fears

Sousou is a 24-year-old Syrian-Palestinian woman who arrived in Britain a few weeks ago in a rubber dinghy from Calais. Her husband was also on the boat, along with 70 other men and women. Sousou was (and is) pregnant and the passengers all nearly drowned – as her aunt had done on a previous crossing attempt. There were too many people on board and the overloaded dinghy began to take in water. Sousou and her husband were rescued by the British coastguard and for a while they felt safe – until the riots began. Now, after things seem to have quietened down, she talks to me from a hotel in south London. ‘I was scared. I was watching it all on the news,’ she says.

Robert Adès

In defence of strict teachers

Labour have become alarmed by the strict, ‘cruel’ approach to discipline in schools and the rise in the number of pupils being excluded. Teachers will need to be more relaxed about ‘bad behaviour’. But though moving the goalposts of acceptable behaviour may reduce the exclusion figures, it is bound to increase the burden of disruptive behaviour on teachers and other pupils. My own experience of teaching tells me that the new guidelines will increase bullying and reduce special needs inclusion, undermine the most disadvantaged families and ultimately increase educational inequality. So why are they doing it?

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

The global fertility crisis is worse than you think

For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high birth rates, Ehrlich predicted: ‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.’ He came up with drastic solutions, including adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilise the population. Ehrlich, like many others, got it wrong. What he needed to worry about was declining birth rates and population collapse. Nearly 60 years on, many predict the world will soon reproduce at less than the replacement rate. But by my calculations, we’re already there. Largely unnoticed, last year was a landmark one in history.