Leading article

On Tuesday, Pope Francis set foot in the United States for the first time in his life. His plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where American presidents depart and arrive on Air Force One. But, according to a Spanish journalist on the papal plane, this was not how Francis had wanted to arrive. He would have preferred to cross over from Tijuana, the grubby Mexican city menaced by drug gangs from which countless migrants slip across the border into California. In other words, if the report is true, the Pope wished to turn his arrival into a political gesture, aligning himself with America’s 11.

That the Queen has lived to become our longest-reigning monarch — a milestone which she will mark quietly with a lunch next Wednesday — is in itself a sign of the golden age of prosperity which has been the second Elizabethan age. Over the 63 years of her reign, life expectancy for women has increased by a dozen years, to 83. The Queen may be remarkable for her age, but she is far from alone in modern Britain for having lived to a great age in good health. A team of 12 is now needed to send out royal telegrams congratulating those of her subjects to celebrate their 100th birthday. To the increase in longevity over the past six decades can be added huge economic and social advancements.

Speaking after the Stafford hospital scandal in 2010, the then newly appointed Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, grandly announced plans for a charter to support whistleblowers. The government, he said, would ‘create an expectation that NHS staff will raise concerns about safety, malpractice and wrongdoing as early as possible’. We now know just how that fine pledge worked out. In 2013 this magazine ran a piece by J. Meirion Thomas, then a cancer specialist at the Royal Marsden hospital in London, about his concerns at how the NHS was being exploited by health tourists. He had tried, he said, to expose an ineligible foreign patient but had as a result been accused of unethical behaviour. Meanwhile, the scale of health tourism in the NHS is becoming clearer by the day.

There was a grim inevitability that the name Edward Heath would one day be trawled up in connection with allegations of sexual abuse of children. As one of our few unmarried prime ministers, Heath always attracted speculation about his sexuality. The public image of a private man wedded to his career, content to spend his spare time playing music and sailing, has long given way to a presumption that he must have been a repressed homosexual. Because of our national obsession with paedophilia, this in turn has all too easily morphed into the suspicion that he had a sexual interest in underage boys. Anyone who tells the police that they were sexually assaulted as a child should be taken seriously, whatever the social and professional status of the alleged abuser.

"Whether it’s in Iraq, Syria, Libya or elsewhere — as Prime Minister, if I believe there is a specific threat to the British people, would I be prepared to authorise action to neutralise that threat? Yes, I would." It is almost two years since David Cameron lost a vote on intervening in the Syrian war and he has barely spoken about foreign affairs since. He is now slowly returning to the subject, making the case for pursuing Islamic State in Syria. The recent murder of 30 British holidaymakers in Tunisia was almost certainly planned in Isis’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. The Prime Minister is making the fairly simple case that the military ought to be able to pursue the enemy. But there is no chance of the RAF ‘neutralising’ the threat.

In his hastily scripted victory speech, David Cameron hit upon a mission that he wanted to define his remaining years in office. ‘I want my party, and I hope the government I would like to lead, to reclaim a mantle that we should never have lost: the mantle of one nation,’ he said. The problem was obvious: how could he reconcile this phrase with the hideous financial decisions that he had to make in office? With having to decimate not just unemployment benefits, but the support given to the millions trapped in low pay? George Osborne started to give his answer with his Budget this week. His main decision was a to introduce a new ‘living wage’ of £7.20 an hour, rising to £9 an hour by 2020.

That democracy is a superior form of government to any other goes without saying. But in order to function, it has to be conducted in such a way and on such a scale as to ensure that the people or their elected representatives are making decisions based on genuine alternatives. With this week’s decision by Lancashire County Council to reject a second application for fracking on a site near Blackpool, something has gone seriously wrong. An important national issue has been allowed to be settled according to purely local concerns.

The campaign to keep Greece in the euro has resulted in five years of groundhog days. The unfortunate country seems to be forever approaching a day of repayments it cannot afford. Ministers and diplomats assemble to thrash out a deal. Meetings collapse in bad temper, and markets sink. Then, at the eleventh hour, a deal is somehow forged. Greece agrees to reforms which seek to cut spending and balance the books in return for billions of pounds of bailout cash. Markets rebound. The money is paid, the debt repayments met. And then all starts to go wrong again. A few months later we are back where we began. Anyone who hoped the election of Greece’s Syriza government in January would break the cycle has been disappointed.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thehighpriestsofhealth/media.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Paul Staines discuss the collapse of the Andy Coulson perjury trail" startat=1402] Listen [/audioplayer]Britain and America, as George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said, are two countries divided by their common language. As of this week they are divided by something else, too: their common interest in the fight against terrorism. While David Cameron’s government has announced an Investigatory Powers Bill to beef up surveillance powers, the US Senate voted to allow the surveillance powers in the Patriot Act to expire. American spies will have replacement powers soon, but ones that do not enable the routine surveillance of citizens.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/michaelgovesfightforjustice/media.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Freddy Gray discuss the march of the Islamic State" startat=1785] Listen [/audioplayer]In recent months, as the country went through a general election, our focus has been on our own domestic debates. Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq has deteriorated significantly. After intense fighting, the jihadist group Isis has now taken the city of Ramadi. They already control Fallujah and Mosul. A growing body of opinion says that something must be done, before the group moves on Baghdad or organises a major terror strike over here. But what? There are plenty of reasons not to take action. Our interventions in Iraq have not been successful, to put it mildly.