Leading article

Joey Barton, the footballer turned manager, may be a controversial figure, but is it really the business of the sports minister, Stuart Andrew, to threaten to silence him on Twitter and Facebook? Andrew this week described Barton’s derisive remarks about female football commentators as ‘dangerous comments that open the floodgates for abuse’. He called upon Ofcom to take action under the new Online Safety Act. The notion of free speech – including the freedom to be offensive – seems increasingly alien to ministerial minds. The Online Safety Act only came into law in October, and politicians already think it’s up to them to regulate who says what online. For 300 years, newspapers vigorously fought off any attempt by the state to suppress freedom of expression.

Yet again we start the year with news that the NHS is facing the worst crisis since its inception. This has a real impact. People who think the health service is in crisis will be less inclined to use it. As we saw over lockdown, this leads to fewer treatable conditions being diagnosed, more ‘excess deaths’ from various causes and a greater healthcare burden for the longer term. It’s a calamity that only worsens. The NHS is forever on the point of disintegration and collapse. Or, in the words of the British Medical Association, the system is under ‘intolerable and unsustainable’ pressure. Why, then, do so many members of the BMA seem to be determined to make matters worse?

The recent United Nations climate summit in Dubai ended up becoming a carnival of gloom. Speakers competed to paint the bleakest outlook for the world. But while it’s right to focus on the challenges that lie ahead, the doomsday narrative risks obscuring all the progress we have made. ‘Records are now being broken so often that we are perhaps becoming immune to what they are really telling us,’ said King Charles in his address to COP28. The King makes a fair point, one that it is worth elaborating on as the year draws to a close. A few weeks ago, for example, it emerged that Britain has become the first G20 country to have halved its carbon emissions. This went entirely unreported – as is often the case with good environmental news – but it is a landmark.

It is seven years since the British public voted by a slim majority to leave the European Union. The idea was to ‘take back control’ by retrieving powers of sovereignty that had been given to Brussels. But there was another part of the equation that was less talked about: the power over law that had been given to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. When the Rwanda scheme was thwarted last year, some argued it was time to pull out of the ECHR. It’s hard to blame Strasbourg now that the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has just thwarted the Rwanda plan. The court’s verdict is a humiliation for Rishi Sunak, who promised to ‘stop the boats’ and to succeed where Boris Johnson had failed.

Human trafficking is a multi-billion-pound global industry. It is fuelled by the desperation of migrants seeking a better life and the cynicism of those who are now adept at identifying and exploiting loopholes in western border controls. One of Germany’s proposals is to explore copying the British model and process asylum applicants elsewhere As ever larger waves of migrants cross the Mediterranean, Rishi Sunak has told European leaders that their efforts at policing illegal migration are ‘not working’ – because there is no shortage of poor people willing to pay smugglers for their ‘barbaric enterprise’. He has raised difficult questions about how the rich discharge their duty to the poor in a world with about 100 million displaced people.

For once, Nick Clegg had a point. At the start of this week’s Artificial Intelligence summit at Bletchley Park, our former deputy prime minister spoke about the need to get priorities right. ‘My slight note of caution,’ he said, is that we ‘don’t allow the need to focus on proximate challenges to be crowded out by speculative, sometimes futuristic predictions’. He’s quite right. The most immediate threat is not the prospect of dysfunctional AI but the power wielded by Mark Zuckerberg, Sir Nick’s boss at Meta, and the extent to which the companies it runs, Facebook and Instagram, control the news. On its own, Facebook has a stunning concentration of power: it’s now the UK’s third biggest news source after BBC1 and ITV, according to Ofcom surveys.

For years the government has appeared to be setting itself up for failure with its promises to crack down on illegal immigration. The plan to process asylum claims in Rwanda was always going to excite immigration lawyers. Sure enough, it remains mired in the legal process. Even if the government wins its case in the Supreme Court, there remains the vast obstacle of the European Court of Human Rights. The promise to ‘stop the boats’ was a hostage to fortune. The boats continue to arrive; it is not possible to patrol every square inch of the English Channel. The discovery of legionella bacteria on the Bibby Stockholm, the barge on which the government is planning to house asylum seekers, seemed at the time to be the final straw for the hapless Home Office.

The Conservatives gather in Manchester this weekend for what may well be their last hurrah as a governing party. Bookmakers are offering odds of 7:1 to anyone bold enough to bet on Rishi Sunak winning the next general election. The Prime Minister himself is in a gambling mood and has started to make some brave and overdue decisions: rethinking HS2 and overhauling net-zero policies. Such decisions bring short-term embarrassment, and were avoided by his predecessors, but they offer long-term dividends. The question is whether this is a wise strategy in the lead-up to an election. Typically, a prime minister makes their big promises in a pre-election year.