PMQs is getting sadder and sadder

At PMQs we saw the next year of politics condensed into a few seconds. Sir Keir Starmer asked the PM why he declined to call an election. ‘My working assumption is that the election will be in the second half of the year,’ said Rishi. So there it is. A date in October rather than January 2025. And he confidently expects to lose which is why he urged Labour’s Dan Carden to ‘chat with his shadow chancellor about her plan to impose £28 billion of tax rises on everyone.’ 

Sir Keir harried the PM on Rwanda which he called ‘a gimmick’ constantly. The g-word, clearly favoured by focus groups, was thrown across the aisle five times, and Rishi offered no substantial defence. Rwanda is a gift-wrapped, triple-layered vote-winner for Labour. First, on funding, second, on timing, third, on efficiency. Sir Keir is free to pluck figures out of thin air when he estimates the budget of the failed deportation scheme. He used to tell us that it cost millions, then tens of million, then hundreds of millions. It keeps ascending, endlessly, like an escalator at an empty departure lounge. If Sir Keir stood up and said that ‘Rwanda costs £350 million a week – let’s spend that on the NHS instead’ no one would bat an eyelid. Today he invented a new figure, ‘£600 million’, which he claimed would remove a mere 300 claimants. ‘The Prime Minister likes to spend a lot on jet-setting but that’s some plane ticket.’ 

Not only is Rwanda a win for Labour but it’s a depressant for the Tories. They might as well believe in flying reindeer as in Rwanda. The first plane that takes off will be full of pensioners who’ve grown old on the Bibby Stockholm. That’s if the air-lift works at all. More likely, teleportation will have been perfected before Rwanda accepts asylum-seekers from Britain. People arriving on boats today should be offered a million pounds each to walk to Rwanda. They’ll get there before the first flight.

At today’s session something unusual happened. Words of value were uttered by the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, who has the distinction of being the most pompous individual to sit in the Commons since John Bercow. Flynn tends to talk about Gaza rather than about Scotland because he’s an internationalist, like his mentors, Christ and Nicola Sturgeon. He’s fixated by the resurgence of Scottish Labour, which threatens his power-base at home, and today he made a joke about neo-Thatcherites on the shadow front bench. Rishi laughed, genuinely snickered and giggled at this, and he answered Flynn with some bland wisecrack about soaring tax-rates in Scotland. But Flynn’s serious point was about Tory and Labour spending plans. ‘They are, in effect, identical,’ he said. ‘And with such continuity on offer, the public are right to be anti-Westminster.’ 

Rishi shrugged aside this alarming and obvious truth. His chipper mood at the despatch box was not just puzzling. It was insulting. Polls predict that’s he about to lead his army to the greatest defeat since the destruction of Carthage and yet he’s all smiles, charm and bonhomie. No problem. That’s what his body language says. Disaster at the election won’t matter to him because his next chapter is already being written. Like any globalist tech boss, he’s steering the firm on a steady-eddy course as his contract winds down. Meanwhile the incoming CEO selects his team, finalises his press releases and picks the new colours for the bean-bags.

With seven months before October, the election’s already over. The Tories are toast and Labour are in. Helicopter for the Sunaks, please. 

There’s an important lesson for politicians in the fall of Leo Varadkar

So farewell, then, Leo Varadkar. The Taoiseach says he is stepping down because he is no longer ‘the best person for that job’. But the reality is that Varadkar found out the hard way that delegating decisions to voters can come back to bite.

Varadkar’s fate was sealed earlier this month when his government suffered a crushing defeat in two referendums. Irish voters were encouraged to back changes to the constitution which would clarify the definition of ‘the Family’ to mean ‘whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships’ and omit a definition of ‘the institution of Marriage’ as a concept ‘on which the Family is founded’. These were solid, progressive, liberal changes, supported by the partners in the coalition government – Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party – as well as many opposition parties, including Sinn Féin (with some reservations), the Labour party, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit. Then the voters weighed in.

The first proposal was rejected by 68 per cent to 32, and the second by 74 per cent to 26. This was not the narrative the political community had anticipated or wanted, nor was it part of Ireland’s seamless upward trajectory towards an open, progressive, liberal society.

This wasn’t the first time Ireland’s leaders have chosen to hand difficult decisions to voters. The Convention on the Constitution of 2012-14 considered a number of changes to the constitution and led to a referendum in 2015 which legalised same-sex marriage. A citizens’ assembly set up in 2016 paved the way for a plebiscite two years later which legalised abortion. These were huge, existential matters of conscience, the passage of which would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Legislators were glad to pass responsibility elsewhere for making such hard choices.

On those previous occasions, Ireland’s politicians, for the most part, liked what they saw: getting voters to do the dirty work seemed to be a good way of dealing with contentious issues. But this ignored the fact that doing so amounted to a fundamental abdication of responsibility. Ireland is a healthy and thriving democracy, and the electorate votes for the Dáil every five years at most (Seanad Éireann, the other chamber of the Oireachtas, is composed by a rather elaborate set of processes but has little ultimate power). Teachtaí Dála (TDs) are sent to Leinster House to exercise their judgement on matters of public importance. Asking the voters to decide on issues like the rewording of the constitution smacks of a desperation to avoid making decisions.

Varadkar has learned a lesson here: the problem with handing power to others is that they may not exercise it in the way you wanted. A method of rolling out progressive change without having to take any responsibility has suddenly rebounded like a boomerang, and the Irish electorate has said no, in emphatic terms.

Varadkar initially took this on the chin. In the aftermath of the referendum defeat, he admitted: ‘It was our responsibility to convince the majority of people to vote ‘Yes’ and we clearly failed to do so’. His subsequent resignation seems to have been an impulsive response. Micheál Martin, his deputy, minister of foreign affairs and defence, and leader of coalition partner Fianna Fáil since 2011, seemingly had no inkling of what was about to happen.

Many lessons will be drawn from Varadkar’s departure. A telling one might be that power, responsibility and accountability must, in the end, all go hand-in-hand. Politicians may shy away from hard decisions, but consequences will sooner or later be felt. Varadkar is only 45 but his political career is over. Other leaders would do well to learn that delegating decisions is not always a wise idea.

Simon Case quits the Garrick Club

Should we expect a flash sale on Garrick Club memberships? The cabinet secretary Simon Case is the second high-profile figure to have quit the exclusive all-male club just hours after earnestly defending his position. The top mandarin follows MI6 chief Richard Moore out the door. The spy chief told his colleagues that he too planned to reform the organisation from within. But something apparently changed overnight that caused those noble ambitions to come apart. Talk about a fast turnaround…

Case’s resignation from the club comes after the UK’s top civil servant attempted to make a compelling case for his membership only, er, yesterday.

‘You’ll forgive the impertinence of the question,’ he was asked at a select committee by former Labour minister Liam Byrne, ‘but can you foster a genuine culture of inclusiveness while being a member of an all-male club, like Garrick? Is that a good signal to send to the machine?’

Chuckling a little uncomfortably, Case replied:

I have to say my position on this one is also clear: if you believe profoundly in reform of an institution, by and large it’s easier to do if you join it to make the change from within, rather than chuck rocks from the outside.

He added:

And by the way, maths is also part of this. Every one person who leaves, who is in favour of fixing this antediluvian position, every one of us that leaves means these institutions don’t change. I think when you want reform you have to participate.

Well, that sentiment didn’t last long. Not even 24 hours had passed before Case abandoned his visionary ways. Perhaps too soon, Mr S would suggest. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day…

The return of Christine Blasey Ford

Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who accused Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, is back in the spotlight. Five-and-a-half years on from her public testimony about her allegations, Ford has released a memoir titled One Way Back. Amazingly, Ford has once again conquered her crippling fear of flying — which delayed the Senate’s investigation into her claims back in 2018 — to promote her book on major television programs.

Blasey Ford first accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her in a confidential letter to the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office. Feinstein kept the letter to herself for weeks until revealing the letter to Democratic colleagues, who urged her to act on the information. At some point, the existence of the letter was leaked to the press — and Ford and her allegation against Kavanaugh were made public and referred to the FBI.

What followed was a political and media circus. Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote was delayed as the Senate sought to bring him and Ford in for competing testimonies. Two additional women accused Kavanaugh of sexual impropriety: Deborah Ramirez said he shoved his penis in her face during a freshman party at Yale, a claim denied by four eyewitnesses and Julie Swetnick, represented by disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, accused Kavanaugh of gang rape before walking back her claims. At the time, I was working as a media and breaking news reporter for a conservative media outlet and was tasked with parsing every detail of Ford’s claims. It quickly became evident that there was a lot about Ford’s story that didn’t make sense.

While the mainstream media ran with Ford’s story without a hint of skepticism (including publishing absurd “evidence” that Kavanaugh was a serial abuser, such as stories about him throwing ice at a bar or throwing up from drinking too much at “beach week”), conservative and independent outlets actually dug into the substance of her claims. (If you’re familiar with the adjudication of Ford’s allegation, feel free to skip the next paragraph.)

There were immediately some issues: Ford either couldn’t remember or changed basic details about the party where she claimed to have been assaulted, such as where it took place, how she got there or how she got home or when it took place (including whether it was on a weeknight or a weekend). The lack of details made Ford’s allegation more difficult to corroborate — and refute! — but she did provide potential witnesses. Ford’s friend Leland Keyser was allegedly her connection to the party in question and is a lifelong liberal who opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation for political reasons. But she said she did not have any confidence in Ford’s story and was distressed by how their mutual friends pressured her to support Ford publicly. Other alleged partygoers, such as P.J. Smyth and Mark Judge, denied that the party ever took place and said they had no recollection of any instance of assault at any of their parties. Ford had told her friends and her therapist that she was assaulted in high school, but had never named Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh, meanwhile, had detailed calendars from the time period that suggested the party Ford referred to never happened.

There was a lot about Ford personally that also didn’t make much sense. She claimed her PTSD from the incident required her to have two exits from any home she lived in, but her house only had one door. She said she had not been able to figure out how to contact one of the supposed witnesses despite him being a public-facing journalist, nor did she know how to contact her senator. She claims to have wanted the claims handled privately despite first going to the Washington Post with them.

Ultimately, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court by two votes. Many conservatives now describe the entire incident as a “radicalizing” moment for them — as they learned just how shamelessly the left would behave to sink a potential threat to their political power. The way they see it, their opponents had latched on to a troubled woman with, at best, an unverifiable allegation to try to destroy the life of an accomplished man, giving him as little time and detail as possible to defend himself. In the process, they succeeded in harming another man: Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s friend, who Ford claims was in the room for the assault. In his book (which hasn’t been greeted with opportunities for high-profile TV bookings or featured reviews in major newspapers) Judge says he faced character assassination, stalking, honeypots and extortion from people desperate to get him to turn on his high-school friend and verify the assault. I interviewed Judge about his experiences in the aftermath of Ford’s accusation, and you can listen to that here. It is disturbing, to say the least. I think Judge is right when he refers to himself as the “Invisible Man” at the heart of the Kavanaugh accusations. 

Ford’s claims against Kavanaugh also took place toward the end #MeToo movement when we were told to “believe all women” who made accusations about sexual misconduct. Every question raised about Ford’s testimony was derided as an attack against all victims and a slight to women everywhere. The idea that we all had to reflexively be on Ford’s side only elevated the righteous anger many had at the way the process was handled by the Democrats and the media. 

Now, Ford is back and telling her story again through her book and on shows like The View. Ford appears to have gotten a “mommy makeover” with some of the money earned from the speaking gigs and donations since her accusation. Stunningly, she claims to have not known until she was talking into the Senate chamber for her 2018 testimony that it would be nationally televised. Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the Federalist and author of Justice on Trial, notes, “In fact, her lawyers had spent a great deal of time negotiating the number and location of the cameras.”

Ford’s fans in the media are still standing by her. The Atlantic described her sparse recollection of the alleged assault as “science”. The View’s Sara Haines ruefully told Ford that “even today, people remain skeptical of your story.” Co-host Joy Behar chided men in the audience for not clapping during Ford’s appearance. 

It’s hard to overstate how much of a watershed moment Kavanaugh’s confirmation process was in modern American political history. It was a death knell for #MeToo movement and a sharp knife in the side of congressional bipartisanship; a divisive public spectacle of epic proportions. It’s bizarre, more than five years later, to see its central figure back for further attention and profit and still heralded by an adoring press as a hero. 

Watch: Lee Anderson’s ‘institutional racism’ takedown

It’s hardly been a week since Lee Anderson defected to the flanks of Reform UK and already the red wall rottweiler is making headlines again. Anderson put Rebecca Knox, chair of Dorset’s fire and rescue authority, on the spot at a Home Affairs Committee meeting today, after she described her own force as ‘institutionally racist’. When Anderson probed what that actually meant, Knox was a little lost for words:

LA: So could you please tell me, councillor, what unfair advantages white people have in your force?

RK: I would hope none… not advantages. Did I hear you…?

LA: Yeah, do they have any advantages?

RK: No.

LA: So then how can you be institutionally racist?

RK: Um… I, uh, sorry, I might have to get back to you.

Oo er. Not a response that instils much confidence. Mr S can imagine her firemen and women aren’t much thrilled.

You can watch the clip here: 

The hubris of Scotland’s lofty Net Zero targets

Scotland’s climate goals are ‘no longer credible’ and there is ‘no comprehensive strategy’ to move away from carbon to Net Zero. That is the noxious assessment issued today by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the statutory body set up in Scotland to advise national and regional government on emissions policies. Underscoring the gap between rhetoric heard and action seen, the committee delivers an almighty verbal skelping to the SNP and its carefully cultivated image as a green government.

Under the SNP’s Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019, ‘the Scottish ministers must ensure that the net Scottish emissions account for the year 2030 is at least 75 per cent lower than the baseline’. The CCC says that ongoing delays to the Scottish government’s climate change plan and ‘further slippage in promised climate policies’ make it unlikely this statutory target will be met. The updated plan was due to be published in November but Holyrood’s Net Zero Secretary Mairi McAllan said she needed more time.

As a result, the committee says, there has been ‘a significant period without sufficient actions or policies to reach the target’ but ‘the required acceleration in emissions reduction in Scotland is now beyond what is credible’. Professor Piers Forster, interim chair of the committee, describes the Scottish government’s ambitions as ‘laudable’ but notes that ‘it isn’t enough to set a target, the government must act’. In addition to calling for the climate change plan to be published ‘urgently’, he points out that a number of risk areas identified by his committee are those ‘with significant policy powers devolved to the Scottish government’. 

The excuses are being pumped out like carbon into the atmosphere. McAllan said: ‘The Climate Change Committee have always been clear that meeting the legislated 2030 target – agreed by parliament on a cross party basis – will be extremely challenging, and may not be feasible. We remain fully committed to meeting our target of net zero emissions by 2045.’ What’s 15 years in the life of the planet?

With McAllan’s effective admission that Scottish ministers will miss their 2030 target, why should we trust them to reach their 2045 goal? The Scottish government failed to meet its 2021 target, the eighth time in 12 years that it has fallen short. The CCC says ‘most key indicators of delivery progress’ are ‘off track’. This is a thoroughly grim report card for the SNP but not half as grim as it is for the Scottish Greens. The Greens have been in coalition with the Nationalists at Holyrood since 2021, when they struck a governing pact that gave them two ministers in the Scottish government – the first time Greens had held ministerial power anywhere in the UK.

Two and a half years later, the Scottish government’s bottle recycling scheme has collapsed, its marine protection policy lies abandoned, a ban on incinerating plastics was backed away from, 47 million cubic metres of sewage was dumped in Scotland’s waterways in 2022. Now the 2030 emissions targets are almost certainly not going to be met.

The failure of the climate targets can be filed alongside the many other examples of Holyrood’s record of delivery falling far short of its lofty promises. One of the consequences of the political halfway house that is devolution – responsibility for some policies but not overall responsibility – is that it incentivises signalling and gesture politics. There is no reason not to promise the Earth when the failure of the Earth to materialise can always be blamed on someone else. This situation is not going to improve until Scotland begins to expect more of its lawmakers and stops settling for easy excuses and constitutional talking points – which, much like our climate targets, are no longer credible.

Jeremy Hunt should listen to James Dyson

All Sir James Dyson wanted was to do what hundreds of business people and lobbyists have done before him: spend a little time with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and have a good old moan – initially about research and development tax relief but then extending to other subjects such as corporation tax, high levels of public spending and – according to reports – the number of diversity managers in the NHS. 

But Jeremy Hunt’s reaction seems to have taken him aback. Apparently exasperated by Dyson’s list of complains at a Downing Street meeting last week, the Chancellor told Dyson that if he didn’t like the government he should seek to become an MP himself.

Is that really how government ministers should treat voters, not least those who create jobs and bring wealth to the country? Somehow, I don’t think Hunt would be impressed if he took back a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner and was told by the retailer: if you don’t like it, why don’t you set up your own company manufacturing them? I can’t imagine, either, Hunt having the guts to be quite so rude to an NHS diversity manager who found himself at a Downing Street event.

As it happens, I think Hunt is doing a good job as Chancellor. His cuts to National Insurance are turning the Conservatives into the party of the workers. Angela Rayner’s desperate reaction – trying to claim that it would mean cuts to pensions or sickness benefits, as if there really was a National Insurance fund into which the receipts are paid – shows just how ruffled Labour is by this. Nor has Dyson always shown himself to be of sound judgement – his failed attempt to sue the Daily Mirror for a piece that accused him of hypocrisy for campaigning for Brexit and then moving his company HQ to Singapore suggests he has a bit of a thin skin.    

Nevertheless, it is surely the Chancellor’s job to listen to the likes of Dyson. If the Conservatives are not going to represent the constituency of wealth-creators then what is the point of them? You can sense growing exasperation with the government on the part of business. Dyson is right that corporation tax, which has just been jacked up from 19 per cent to 25 per cent, is too high (although Labour is not promising to reduce it). Energy prices are also far too high, with UK industry paying four or five times as much per unit as their US counterparts. Just the other week Sir Jim Ratcliffe warned that at this rate Europe will lose its entire chemicals industry within 20 years.

In 2010, David Cameron and George Osborne came to power with one over-riding objective: to reduce government borrowing and rebalance the government’s books. Four fifths of the effort was to come from spending cuts and only one fifth from tax increases. The Liberal Democrat half of the coalition was fully on board. Yet where is the drive to control public spending now? It has been entirely lost. The government isn’t talking about cuts at all, while the public sector is allowed to go on expanding its empires, the NHS’s diversity officers a prime example of what is going wrong.   

We are unlikely to see Dyson in the House of Commons, but unless he can win back the support of Britain’s wealth-creators, Hunt is unlikely to be there for much longer, either.  

China’s threats to Kinmen should be taken seriously

When two Chinese fisherman died last month trying to flee Taiwan’s coastguard, Beijing laid the blame at Taipei’s feet and demanded an apology. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also spied an opportunity to advance its territorial claims.

China has been targeting Kinmen, an island controlled by Taiwan, more aggressively over the past few weeks. The CCP stated that ‘there is no such thing as “prohibited or restricted waters”’ – saying that the waters around the island had been used as traditional fishing grounds by both sides. On the morning of 19 February, four Chinese coast guard vessels patrolled around Kinmen’s restricted waters. Personnel boarded and inspected a Taiwanese tourist boat that had ‘veered slightly of course’.

The next day, a Chinese coast guard boat entered Kinmen’s waters, leaving an hour after Taiwan’s own coast guard dispatched a boat to drive it away. It marked the start of a new, but entirely predictable, norm – when Beijing says a boundary does not exist, it demonstrates it with actions.

A week later, five Chinese ships crossed into the prohibited or restricted waters around Taiwan’s frontline island. Last Friday, China sent another four coast guard vessels into these waters, despite the Taiwanese coast guard, only the day before, answering their calls to help rescue a capsized Chinese fishing vessel. The following day, another four Chinese coast guard vessels had to be expelled from Kinmen’s prohibited waters.

Kinmen is no stranger to a crisis. Referred to as one of ‘those damn little offshore islands’ by Dwight Eisenhower, it sits a few miles from China’s coast – yet remains part of Taiwan. In the 1950s, when it was known to westerners as Quemoy, the islands were the site of two China-US standoffs, both of which could have escalated to global nuclear war. It is perhaps no surprise then that Eisenhower went on to say that ‘sometimes I wish they’d sink’.

Kinmen has come a long way over the past half-century. Tunnels and turrets, once teeming with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces, are tourist attractions. Residents on the island enjoy all the democratic rights enjoyed by citizens in Taiwan-proper.

Beijing’s approach to the offshore island has also changed. Rather than seeing the island’s proximity to China solely as a vulnerability to be exploited, it is now also regarded as an enticing prospect. A chance, for the CCP, to showcase the benefits of integration and exchange, and thus advance its ‘reunification’ agenda. In his 2019 ‘Message to Compatriots in Taiwan’, China’s president Xi Jinping encouraged ‘connectivity wherever necessary’, starting with ‘supplies of water, electricity, gas, and construction of sea-crossing bridges from coastal areas in Fujian province to Kinmen …’ Yet, as recent events show, it is not all sweeteners.

A handful of incidents might not look worthy of much international attention. But this is precisely the point. Grey-zone manoeuvres start with a statement, and then a few, seemingly minor, innovations, that slowly intensify until they become the new normal. Beijing previously proclaimed the median line, the once respected barrier running through the Taiwan Strait, as non-existent and now its fighter jets proceed to repeatedly cross it, heightening the risk for miscalculation.

Taipei clearly wishes to avoid escalation. Following the first incursion, Taiwan’s defence minister Chiu Kuo-cheng stated that the military would not ‘actively intervene’, instead urging that the matter be handled peacefully. Yet China’s opportunism appears unrelenting. Following the latest incursions, a few days ago a spokesperson at Beijing’s Taiwan office insisted, once again, that the patrolling of Kinmen’s waters was ‘legitimate action’. ‘We will absolutely not’, he went on to say, ‘tolerate or condone the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities’ brutal acts…’

Given that the DPP’s Lai Ching-te will shortly begin a four-year term as Taiwan’s president (the third consecutive term for his party), expect Beijing’s phoney fury to continue. While they may not wish to escalate the situation, they want to send a message and will attempt to take advantage if they think they can get away with it.

In response to recent events, the United States has issued a boilerplate call for peace and stability across the Taiwan strait to be maintained and expressed opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo. Others, including the UK government, have been less vocal. Let’s hope that concerns about Beijing’s advances around Kinmen are, at the very least, being raised, by Foreign Office officials behind closed doors. Perhaps, parliamentarians can find out at next week’s, fortuitously timed, adjournment debate on Britain’s cross-strait policy. 

Will Sunak or Starmer ever say anything new at PMQs?

Rishi Sunak will have been grateful to have got through Prime Minister’s Questions today with little criticism – at least from his own side. The session opened with a loyal planted question on the inflation figures, which allowed Sunak to tell the Commons that ‘our plan is working’ and underline that this was the steepest fall since the 1980s. 

Once that was over, the session then descended into a pretty run-of-the-mill grudge match between Sunak and Keir Starmer, with the latter listing things that weren’t working and asking why the Prime Minister wasn’t calling an election. Sunak’s responses contained some minor developments in his attacks on Starmer for defending Hizb ut-Tahrir. Other than that, though, you could have placed this session at any point over the past three months and not been sure what date it was. The same may well prove true for the next three months too.

The Labour leader’s first question ran thus: ‘Violent prisoners released early because the Tories wrecked the criminal justice system. Three and a half thousand small boat arrivals already this year because the Tories lost control of the borders. The NHS struggling to see people because the Tories broke it. Millions paying more for their mortgages, a budget that hit pensioners, a £46 billion hole in his sums. Why is the Prime Minister so scared to call an election?’

Interestingly, Sunak decided to engage with the question, telling the Chamber that ‘as I said in January, my working assumption is that the election will be in the second half of this year’. Perhaps the Prime Minister does not want there to be any purchase for the argument that he is running scared of the polls. It also allowed him to joke that Starmer should be grateful ‘because he’s now actually got time to come up with a plan’. 

Starmer then zoomed in on some of those issues that he had listed initially, including Rwanda, which he asked three questions on. In the first, he and Sunak traded statistics about whether the plan to crack down on illegal immigration was working or not. In the second, Starmer accused Sunak of not believing in the Rwanda policy, adding: ‘He tried to stop funding it but he is now so diminished that his entire focus is stopping his MPs holding the sword of Damocles above his head – literally in the case of the Leader of the House.’ This was a reference to the chatter about Penny Mordaunt replacing Sunak. While the coronation sword bearer herself tried to look solemn on the front bench, chief whip Simon Hart couldn’t contain himself, and sat giggling about the joke for a good while.

Sunak then made a weird accusation against Starmer, which was that ‘if it was up to him, those criminals would still be out on our streets: and the truth is that if he wasn’t the Labour leader, he’d still want to be their lawyer’. It was a reference to the Labour party’s position on illegal migration policy, but it allowed the Labour leader to remind anyone who had briefly forgotten that he had in fact been director of public prosecutions and was in fact responsible for quite a few people being in prison. What Sunak was also trying to remind people of, which he did more clearly in his next answer, was that Starmer had defended Hizb ut-Tahrir and that this meant he wasn’t on the side of the British people.

Sunak clearly thinks that this Hizb it-Tahrir line is working with voters, as he brings it up every week. But it is quite troubling, because it suggests that the Conservatives do not believe that justice can only be properly served when both parties in court have the best representation available to them. Given the impact of legal aid cuts over the past decade, as well as a much longer-standing inequality of arms for many people who find themselves going through inquests or inquiries, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Tories just aren’t bothered about this principle at all. 

Sunak can go off to his non-election campaigning recess feeling less damaged by today’s exchanges than he normally does. And voters can continue to feel entirely in the dark about some of the decisions that will affect them most. It was left to SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn to raise the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ warning that there was a ‘conspiracy of silence’ between the Labour and Conservative parties over the scale of public spending cuts, tax rises or higher borrowing necessary after the next election. Perhaps that’s why Sunak and Starmer have ended up saying the same things to each other for an entire term now.

Does the Bolsonaro indictment show a legal double standard in Brazil?

The “Trump of the Tropics,” former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, was indicted Tuesday for falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination status for his Florida vacation. The indictment is the first faced by the conservative leader, who has already been barred from running for office. More are headed his way, in what he is describing as a lawfare effort spearheaded by President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva.

The indictment was signed by Detective Fábio Alvarez Shor, who says in his report that the former president and his aides “issue[d] their respective [vaccination] certificates and use[d] them to cheat current health restrictions.” Brazil’s supreme court has already seized Bolsonaro’s passport — and he could spend between two and twelve years behind bars if convicted, according to legal analyst Zilan Costa — albeit little precedent exists to determine what penalties may entail.

Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son who serves in the country’s chamber of deputies, told The Spectator last month how he considered the charges against his father to be ludicrous and hypocritical. The Brazilian government was even trying to get Jair Bolsonaro for “getting too close to a whale” while riding a jet ski. The president and his allies have understandably used this particular case to ridicule the close to 600 cases Bolsonaro has accumulated.

These cases include one relating to the January 8, 2023 uprising in the capital, one alleging that he sneaked two sets of Saudi-gifted diamond jewelry into Brazil, preventing them from being incorporated into the country’s public collection, and another promoting the use of chloroquine as a Covid-19 medicine in public addresses, as well as misusing state funds to acquire the medicine while being slow in attaining vaccinations. The most “traditional” of the accusations involves practicing rachadinha while he was a federal deputy, a scheme used by Brazilian politicians in which a cut of the pay for close associates, acting as public employees, is sent back to the politicians.

Eduardo Bolsonaro sees malicious intent and blatant double standards at play. “[Lula’s] Brazil has sustained a scheme of corruption in Cuba and Venezuela, financing public works, like the Port of Mariel in Cuba and Caracas’s metro, with Brazilian public funds, which were almost certainly not supervised,” Bolsonaro claimed to The Spectator at a Center for a Secure Free Society event.

What Bolsonaro described was evidenced in the infamous Odebrecht scandal, which began in 2008. Approximately $349 million in bribes to foreign officials and politcal parties were uncovered then, with Lula’s government implicated in financing the campaigns of his regional allies.

Lula has already spent 580 days in jail, following a conviction in charges of money laundering and corruption in 2017. He was exonerated in 2021, but the leftist leader remains far from a squeaky clean figure. A closer look into his troubles with the law reveal how statute of limitations law and a friendly supreme court helped him run for office again after his release.

Brazil’s judicial functions are characterized by its instância process, in which there are four levels, starting with the lower courts and making it all the way to the supreme federal court. The country’s highest court, where a majority of its ministers were appointed by Lula’s Workers’ Party, has clashed with Bolsonaro for most of his career. Their constitutional interpretations led to dismissing Lula’s charges, based on the fact that he was arrested after conviction at the second level.

If the charges against Bolsonaro succeed, the sums involved still look like petty crime when contrasted with the scandal Lula was mixed up in. The jewelry gifted by Mohammed bin Salman is worth close to $70,000 and the rachadinha case’s alleged transactions are worth $230,000. On the other hand, Lula and Rousseff were embroiled in one of the biggest corporate corruption scandals in history, involving hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes — with almost 100 of them being paid to law-loving Venezuelan officials, as well as to Lula and his party.

Last month, tens of thousands of Brazilians poured into the iconic Paulista Avenue of Jair Bolsonaro’s home state of São Paulo to protest what they consider to be political persecution. With more indictments expected, tensions may escalate further. For his part, the former president appears ready to flex his political muscle.

Leo Varadkar resigns following crushing referendum defeat

The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is to step down as Ireland’s prime minister and as the leader of his party, Fine Gael. In an announcement this lunchtime in Dublin, Varadkar said he would quit as party leader with immediate effect, but stay in the role of Taoiseach until his successor is appointed. Explaining his decision, Varadkar cited ‘personal and political reasons’: ‘After careful consideration and soul searching, I don’t feel I’m the best person for the job anymore’.

Varadkar – who first became Ireland’s Taoiseach in 2017 – went on to say that there is ‘never a right time to stand down’, but no longer felt able to give what is required to do the role justice. When it comes to the ‘right time’, Varadkar’s resignation comes just over a week after suffering a defeat in a double referendum his government held to remove ‘sexist’ language about women’s duties in the household from the Irish constitution.

Varadkar encouraged people to vote to expand the definition of the family beyond married couples. However, there were concerns that the two proposals (known as the family and care amendments) could lead to an increase in immigration through the back door, as well as accidentally leading to protections for polygamous relationships. The double defeat was seen as a blow to Varadkar’s authority – with the government previously confident of victory.

Varadkar, who played a prominent role during the Brexit negotiations, is head of a three-party coalition, so his decision to step down does not necessarily mean there will be an early election, which is due to take place some time before March 2025.

David Lammy’s Thatcher u-turn

As Labour prepares for power, the party’s leading lights are busy u-turning: not least on their views on Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady is Labour’s inspiration du jour, much to the anger of the party’s lefties. First, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones claimed that Thatcher oversaw a decade of ‘national renewal’. Then shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves chose to pitch herself as a modern day Iron Lady at Tuesday’s Mais lecture. And now shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has been busy singing Thatcher’s praises, with Lammy telling Politico that the Tory leader was a ‘visionary leader for the UK’.

But Lammy has not always been keen to talk up the virtues of Mrs T. In fact, many of his previous social media interactions would suggest quite the opposite. In 2019, the Labour MP for Tottenham slammed the first female prime minister, tweeting: ‘Northern industrial areas were decimated by Thatcher.’ He added: ‘The proportion in the country living below the poverty line rose from 13 per cent to 43 per cent.’

Then, in 2021, Lammy compared Thatcher’s decision to end free milk handouts at schools to Johnson’s pandemic education plans, posting a rather scathing message about both Tory leaders on both his Twitter and Facebook accounts…

Only a year ago, Lammy gave a speech to London’s Chatham House in which he told his audience that from ‘growing up poor in Tottenham in Thatcher’s Britain, I know the pain of living through a cost of living crisis.’ Odd, then, that the shadow foreign secretary has demonstrated such a remarkable change of heart over the last few days. Mr S wouldn’t dare to suggest that the upcoming election has anything to do with this epiphany…

The change in Labour’s rhetoric certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of the party’s opponents — at today’s PMQs, SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn made a jibe at Starmer’s ‘born-again Thatcherites’ to much laughter. The latest Labour party x Thatcher crossover comes some months after Sir Keir Starmer declared in the Sunday Telegraph that ‘Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. It was more than a little inconsistent with Starmer’s previous comments about Mrs T, as Steerpike pointed out at the time…

How very curious. While the lady wasn’t for turning, it seems Labour certainly is.

SNP ministers caught up in racism row

Oh dear. As the Conservatives struggle to put the remarks of their biggest donor to bed, the governing party north of the border now has its own racism row to deal with.

This week’s pro-indy ‘Scotonomics’ festival is being co-hosted in Dundee by founder Kairin van Sweeden, a former SNP councillor accused of racism last year. The unenviable speaker line-up also includes two SNP politicians, wellbeing economy secretary Mairi McAllan MSP and energy minister Gillian Martin MSP, who have found themselves in a spot of bother after it emerged who the event host was.

The festival’s founder and former SNP councillor was forced to quit the party last year after she told the Sri Lankan-born Labour councillor Deena Tissera that she was unaware of the bedroom tax as a ‘new Scot’ and suggested that she might not know her British history. Talk about blood and soil nationalism…

‘The innuendo of her comments were that I had just come off the boat and as a new Scot – her words not mine – I am not as Scottish as others [despite] holding a United Kingdom passport,’ raged Tissera in a letter to the First Minister. At the time, Humza Yousaf slammed the comments as ‘unacceptable’, adding van Sweeden’s remarks spoke to ‘the unconscious bias and discrimination that people hold and we all have to challenge ourselves’. Van Sweeden left the SNP and has since referred herself for investigation. 

On van Sweeden’s upcoming event this week, Tissera admitted she was ‘shocked’ ministers would agree to attend, while Scottish Tory Douglas Lumsden said ministers sharing a stage with the host would be ‘effectively condoning’ her comments. McAllan has now withdrawn from the Scotonomics festival, citing ‘diary pressures’ but Martin still plans to make an appearance — despite coming under significant pressure to pull out. So much for progressive politics…

Find van Sweeden’s original comments here:

Chicago doesn’t know what limits are

Chicago residents bristle when you ask them whether they eat deep-dish pizza. ‘Yeah’, they sigh, ‘we might occasionally when someone visiting wants to try it out’. Sigh. ‘We have great thin crust though’. But lots of places have good thin crust. I came to Chicago to try the deep dish.

But deep-dish pizza is stupid. It’s not a pizza, more a dense pie: the sauce sits at the top, and the filling beneath is quicksandy cheese. Sausage meat, jalapeños, chorizo, bacon, red onions and mushrooms are thrown into it and expected to learn how to swim. I got a deep dish on my last day in Chicago and found it wasn’t good. Not for any explicable reason – something like this can’t taste bad — but from my own somewhat pompous sense that God must be against it.

I hope He approves of the Italian beef sandwich, though. What a marvellous thing Chicago has given the world. Roast a load of beef so it shrinks up, then thinly slice it. Chuck it all into a beef broth, where it will sit for hours, stewing and plotting. Put it into a French roll, with hot peppers as well as green ‘sweet’ ones, then dip the whole thing back into the gravy, so it gets ‘wet’. Eat it immediately so the paper it comes in doesn’t become an outer layer.

The sandwich’s ‘Italian’ connection feels amazingly unclear, but Chicago’s Italian immigrant communities claim credit. I ate one at Portillo’s, a restaurant that, in my memory if not in reality, was covered in a dense fog from the condensation. Orders are boisterously shouted at customers (‘number fifty-seven, come get your heaven!’). You can also get an impeccable Chicago-style hot dog there: beef sausage in a poppyseed bun, with mustard, onions, and enormous quantities of pickle. If you ask for ketchup, they throw you into Lake Michigan with two deep dishes tied to your ankles.

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Chicago’s Italian beef has become known in its own right, thanks to The Bear: a TV show that follows Carmy, a Michelin-pedigree chef, who takes over the family Italian beef business after his brother suddenly dies. The Bear has done well, and Italian beef will do, since people now believe that caring about food makes them seem cultured. Don’t believe me? Look at the ceaseless rise of TikToks showing people careering around cities looking for the most hyped food spots. Everyone is invited to ‘join me’ on ‘the hunt’ for the best burger, or cinnamon bun, or Basque cheesecake in the West. Are these people employed?

A pub near me in west London – the Chancellors – started doing good pizzas after lockdown. Then an influencer said they were tasty and now getting inside is a Homeric struggle. People line up for two hours and come from out of town for a single slice of pizza. One day, I saw on the pub’s Instagram that they had sixty ‘walk-ins’ available at 2 p.m. I live nearby, so I got there just after 2. They had sold out. In Chicago, tourists cross half the city not for a museum, but to go to Johnnie’s, the approved Italian beef spot.

It’s tempting to believe that this food craze represents how decadent and hollow society has become, but then I’d also have to accept that I too am decadent and hollow, because I enjoy it too. Food is largely detached from politics, which is why it is so appealing. Italian beef sandwiches will be appearing all over the globe any minute now, and that’s not such a bad thing.

How will they taste, however, when divorced from the mustiness of Portillo’s and displaced from their Chicago context? There’s an aggression to the city’s food. Inside Chicago’s magnificent Peninsula hotel, we are shown the much-praised Chinese restaurant Shanghai Terrace, where Elmo Han serves up wok-fried scallops in black truffle sauce, and dong po pork belly. The chef, the hotel told us, only employs Chinese chefs, because he wants his kitchen to be staffed only by those who grew up ‘eating sticky rice’. Is that a little bit nativist? Maybe, but they just don’t care!

At the restaurant Proxi, we are served some delicious foie gras bao buns. Is that fusion? Or is it a chef thinking: ‘I’m going to put foie gras into a bao bun, because it’s obviously going to work – the soft bun gently hugging that fatty liver – and I literally don’t care about the cultural consequences’. The Italian restaurant Ummo has no qualms whatsoever about air miles. They import sea bass from the Mediterranean, wood-fire it, drench the thing in salsa verde and capers and serve it whole: eyes frozen in death and face still gawping. At Carnitas Urupuan in the Pilsen neighborhood, they only offer three flavors of tacos: potato, potato and chorizo, and pork brain.

This slightly mad spirit was what I liked most about Chicago. I learned more about the city on the architectural river tour. In 1871, a huge portion of the city burned down and 100,000 people were displaced. There was no time for wallowing. The city was put under martial law for two weeks, and just like that, its residents invented the skyscraper. It’s no coincidence that the Burj Khalifa’s architect, Adrian Smith, is Chicago-born, and he is currently trying to better himself with the Jeddah Tower, which will be 600 feet taller.

In 1900, too much disease was coming into Chicago via the river. So they literally reversed the flow of the river. This is a city that puts its middle finger up to limits, and nature, and disaster, and chaotically and aggressively imposes its will on architecture, national politics (it spawned the US’s first black president), music and food. Like lots of second cities, there’s a drive born from resentment that you just wouldn’t find in New York.

When I got back to London, I tried to keep the trip fresh by reading a Chicago novel: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. He famously refers to Chicago as ‘that somber city’ in the opening lines. If anyone in this untamed, unflagging city is somber, they really don’t show it.

Return flights from London Heathrow to Chicago O’Hare start from £486. www.choosechicago.com 

Is Viktor Orbán really anti-Semitic?

Much of the criticism directed at Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s long-serving populist prime minister, is richly deserved. Orbán poses as the bête noire of the EU, despite Hungary being a net recipient of EU largesse. Another source of the opprobrium directed against Orbán is his opposition to aiding Ukraine in its existential war against Russia. This is downright indecent for someone who, as a handsome young political firebrand in 1989, helped to end Soviet control of Hungary. Has Orbán forgotten, now that he is grey-haired and rather porky, what it means to yearn for your country’s freedom and independence? Continued access to cheap Russian gas and oil just isn’t a good enough reason to suck up to the despot in the Kremlin.

But Orbán gets flak for something else, and in that case unjustly: he is not, as has been claimed by his critics, anti-Semitic. This accusation stems, in large part, from his hostility towards the (Jewish) billionaire George Soros. The Hungarian government under Orbán has been accused of using anti-Semitic tropes as part of its criticism of Soros. In 2019, the European Commission accused Orbán’s government of propagating a ‘shocking’ and ‘ludicrous conspiracy theory’, after Hungary launched a poster campaign featuring Soros alongside Jean-Claude Juncker, who was then EU Commission president. It returned to the theme last November, when it launched a poster campaign against Alex Soros, George’s son and the current chair of the Open Society Foundations, with the slogan: ‘Let’s not dance to their tune’. 

Orbán’s opponents say that Soros is singled out because he is Jewish. This isn’t the case. When Orban criticised Soros in 2015, the billionaire responded by clarifying the difference between the two men: ‘(Orban’s) plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.’

Is it not legitimate for Orban to criticise Soros, a man whose views clearly stand in stark contrast to the Hungarian leader’s? Orbán’s supporters argue that Hungary’s president is no anti-Semite, and that his opposition against Soros is ideological. As they see it, Soros is interfering in the internal affairs of his country and should not, as a result, be above criticism; his religion is immaterial. Orbán also insists that his government has a policy of ‘zero tolerance when it comes to anti-Semitism and racism’. 

Orbán, of course, was involved in the establishment of the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest back in 1999, during his first tenure as PM. The following year, he instituted the annual Day of Remembrance for the Hungarian Victims of the Holocaust (on 16 April). Budapest, the city where I was born and where I return often, has a thriving Jewish community of just under 50,000, still centred around the old Jewish quarter. There you can find the largest and grandest synagogue in Europe, now beautifully restored. And the city hosts an annual Jewish Cultural Festival. 

It’s plain to see that Budapest is a friendly capital for Jews. Once, when I was there in September, around the time of Rosh Hashanah, I passed a huge banner on the side of a bridge wishing the Jewish community a happy holiday. Not likely to happen in London or Paris, is it?  

A number of my friends and contacts in Budapest are Jewish, and while I’ve heard them disparage some of Orbán’s policy decisions (lavishing money on new football stadiums, for example, while underfunding hospitals), none has ever accused him of anti-Semitism. The views of my Jewish friend Vera, who has spent her long life in publishing, originally as an editor and latterly as a translator, are fairly typical. ‘Why would he have anything against a community which has always contributed so much to the country, culturally, intellectually, economically?’ she says. ‘I think he really values us.’ 

The real test to how a government values its Jewish community has come in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October massacre of Israelis and the resulting war in Gaza. Vociferous, often threatening pro-Palestinian marches and demonstrations have taken place in many Western cities, with London’s weekly street takeovers among the worst. Jews in London have felt intimidated and unsafe. Pupils at our Jewish schools have been warned not to wear identifiable school uniforms in order to avoid being targeted. What a disgrace in our liberal democracy.   

But what about Hungary, proudly described by Orbán as an ‘illiberal democracy’? When he learned, soon after the massacre, of a planned demonstration called Stand With Gaza to be held in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Budapest, he immediately banned it. ‘Pro-terrorist demonstrations are not allowed in Hungary,’ he announced. On the other hand, the government did approve the display of a giant Israeli flag surrounded by lights in Budapest’s iconic Heroes’ Square.

The truth is, Orbán doesn’t need me to defend him against the charge of anti-Semitism, when he’s got the Chief Rabbi of Budapest, Zoltán Radnóti on side. He has stated publicly that, if Hungarian Jews live in safety and security, it’s thanks to the PM: ‘Because he keeps the borders closed, there are hardly any pro-Palestinian people in Budapest. There is no threat of attacks. It is better here than in, say, Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Stockholm, where it is less safe for Jews. Budapest is an island in Europe, without Muslim fundamentalists.’ Case closed.

Monica Porter was born in Budapest

Inflation drops to its lowest level in two years

Inflation has slowed once again, to 3.4 per cent in the 12 months to February, down from 4 per cent in January. This takes the inflation rate to its lowest level in two and a half years, and keeps inflation on track for the Bank’s target of 2 per cent this spring.

The fall in the headline rate was slightly bigger than expected – economists had forecast 3.5 per cent – driven by a fall in food prices, which slowed from 7 per cent on the year to January to 5 per cent in February. Restaurant and cafe prices also contributed to the falling rate: down to 6 per cent in February, compared to 7.1 per cent the month before. 

All remains on track for inflation to return to the Bank’s target of 2 per cent in April, when Ofgem’s latest energy price cap kicks in and higher energy costs fall out of the data. Some independent forecasters are now expecting the rate to fall below 2 per cent (Capital Economics this morning forecasts 1.7 per cent on the year in April), though it is expected the headline rate will rise again later in the year – albeit nothing like what we’ve seen the past few years.

While today’s update from the Office for National Statistics has delivered good news, don’t expect it to have changed tomorrow’s announcement on interest rates. This most recent slowdown is unlikely to have swayed members of the Monetary Policy Committee to start their slow and steady process of cutting rates just yet. More recent language from the MPC about wanting inflation to return to target for the medium-term means the committee is likely to wait a while longer before cutting its 5.25 per cent base rate.

But the data is moving in the right direction for this decision to come relatively soon – possibly at the MPC’s meeting in May or June. As the inflation rate continues to fall, the Bank will be under more pressure to take action – not least as growth figures remain stagnant. The Bank has already been accused of contributing to Britain’s dip into recession at the end of last year (which is likely over now, but won’t be confirmed for months) and the dismal growth figures predicted for this year. The latest forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility put GDP growth for 2024 at just 0.8 per cent. 

This was indeed the point of raising rates: to curb people’s spending habits and to take heat out of the economy in order to get inflation under control. But plenty of stakeholders now want to see the Bank’s attention turn to rates. This includes the government. 

It’s been a big week of economic news, with the Prime Minister making another pitch to MPs and voters to stick to his economic plan. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered the Mais lecture last night – an opportunity to get deeper insight into her economic thinking and worldview. Ministers will be relieved to have some good economic news to share off the back of Reeves’s many criticisms of the government’s handling of the economy. But there’s no substitute for consumers feeling personally better off: something that has yet to be achieved.

Listen to Kate Andrews, Katy Balls and Max Jeffery discuss the inflation figures on Coffee House Shots:

Five takeaways from Rachel Reeves’s Mais speech

We live in an age of stunts and soundbites so it was refreshing to hear a politician stand up and, for the best part of an hour, explain their political philosophy to an audience savvy enough to shred it. That’s what Labour’s Rachel Reeves did at last night’s Mais lecture. 

She summoned the ghosts of heterodox leftists Karl Polanyi, Joan Robinson and Marie Curie to explain that Britain stands on the brink of a global economic regime change just as big as the one begun in 1979, that the Tories have left us bystanders, and that Labour is the only party that can make it happen. 

Though she didn’t mention Margaret Thatcher by name (and never planned to, I understand) the speech, and the fiscal rules it outlined, has generated ‘Iron Lady’ headlines. But if we look behind these, there are five takeaways that embody the logic of her argument.

1. What’s wrong? Reeves believes the neoliberal economic model is broken. She doesn’t use the word ‘neoliberal’ because it’s left-speak, but that’s what she means: globalisation in its old form is dying and economic strategies framed around expectations of stability won’t work. 

Instead, we’re living in a new age of insecurity driven by geopolitical instability, technological change and the climate crisis. ‘There is no viable growth strategy today,’ she said ‘which does not rest upon resilience for our national economy and security for working people.’ In case it’s not obvious, that is the antithesis of the assumptions behind Blairism.

2. What’s the solution? This was not the first time Reeves has outlined her ‘Securonomics’ strategy, focused on investment-led growth, but it was the most detailed. Labour knows that the high tax take, together with high debt and high debt servicing costs mean there can be no return to ‘borrow-and-spend’ unless the economy achieves sustained growth.

To trigger it, it will use the suite of policies associated with Bidenomics: clear, long-term signals of government intent, accompanied by multi-year Treasury settlements, a planning revolution and regulatory change to encourage pension funds to invest in UK entrepreneurship. It’s been dubbed ‘Bidenomics without the money’ but unfairly: the money that’s fuelling the infrastructure, green energy and semiconductor boom in America is capital, not tax dollars. What’s making it happen is judicious use of incentives, guarantees, loans and subsidies – but above all certainty.

Reeves understands – because it has been explained to her over hundreds of stale croissants – that global businesses need stability. Her jibe at the Tories – five prime ministers, seven chancellors, 12 plans for growth – would have hit less hard if there had been a consistent political economy underpinning Conservatism during these years. 

What Labour is promising is a comprehensive de-risking of investment in priority areas: clean energy, green steel, advanced manufacturing, life sciences and – I would hazard a guess, given its salience in Reeves’ speech – security and defence.

3. What does it mean for fiscal policy? The headline Reeves’s team briefed was that the Bank of England will see both the Monetary Policy Committee and Financial Policy Committee regain their duties to pursue net-zero objectives. But the real zinger concerns the OBR. Reeves effectively offered markets a trade-off. She set out the same broad fiscal rule as the government: debt falling at the end of five years and a deficit moving towards primary balance. She will make it law that any fiscal decision by government will be subject to an independent forecast of its effects by the OBR. But, she said:

‘I will also ask the OBR to report on the long-term impact of capital spending decisions. And as Chancellor I will report on wider measures of public sector assets and liabilities at fiscal events, showing how the health of the public balance sheet is bolstered by good investment decisions.’

Why is this so big? Because the OBR does not currently model the ‘long-term impact of capital spending decisions’. It believes that £1 billion of new capital investment produces £1 billion of growth in the first year, tapering to nothing by year five. Furthermore, since 2019 it has repeatedly expressed scepticism that a sustained programme of public investment can produce a permanent uplift in the UK’s output potential.

Since that is precisely what Reeves plans to do, she is telling the OBR to adopt a new, or at least more analytically diverse, approach to fiscal modelling. And she is signalling that the Treasury will start weighing the assets created by borrowing, alongside the liabilities.

As I say, this is not just a message to the OBR, the Treasury and the Bank. It is a message to investors: if Labour can demonstrate, through professional analysis by these institutions, that investment can drive growth, it can win the argument with fund managers for investment here and meet its own fiscal rules more easily.

4. Will it work? Reeves spent a lot of time detailing the institutional framework she wants to use to make investment-led growth happen: the British Infrastructure Council, a restored Industrial Strategy Council, the National Wealth Fund, ten-year R&D funding cycles for government departments. 

But in the end it will all be about execution. For me, as a believer in this new approach, the question is how Reeves will react to adversity. Say she sweeps away planning rules that block solar farms, pylons and battery installations but the National Grid still drags its feet, and capital doesn’t come fast enough: what then? 

My worry about Labour is that it has convinced itself that de-risking is an easier strategy than borrow-and-spend when – in an economy stripped of dirigiste institutions – it is actually harder and might need more radicalism, not less. Once you’ve faced down the Nimbys and your brand new solar farm is waiting a decade for a grid connection, do you have to nationalise the Grid?

5. What about the workers? Reeves gave a cogent explanation of why employment rights will lie just as centrally to Labour’s project in government as green growth. ‘There is now a wealth of evidence that greater in-work security, better pay, and more autonomy in the workplace have substantial economic benefits’ she said.

That’s why Starmer’s Labour is determined to work in partnership with the unions, and more importantly encourage business to do so. 

I am certain the unions will want more. Indeed, I expect one of Reeves’s early challenges will be the return of wage-push inflation in certain sectors. Not because unions are strong in, for example, advanced manufacturing or civil nuclear, but simply because there are not enough tech graduates and skilled production workers to go around.

But in the end, this is – again – not Blairism. Unions like the GMB, USDAW and Unison have played a central role in shaping Starmerism and, though they’ve had to lose certain cherished policies, getting their main one – employment rights from day one – into the text of the Mais lecture is a marker.

In summary, what we saw last night was a plan. It’s coherent, well founded in economic theory and expresses a clear political philosophy: that social and climate justice have to be delivered in partnership with capital, that capital will need clear long-term incentives, and that the national interest and workers’ interests coincide. 

Reeves has emerged from five years in opposition as a stronger and more coherent political voice, which – given she was refused the job in Starmer’s first shadow cabinet – is an achievement. But now comes the hard part.

How big will Rachel Reeves’s state be?

Every year the Mais lecture, hosted by Bayes Business School, gives its speaker a chance to lay out their vision for the economy. It’s how we knew Rishi Sunak would prioritise fiscal prudence over tax cuts long before he entered Number 10. Last night it was Rachel Reeves’s turn. 

As expected, there were no big policy announcements about what Labour might do in power. But that wasn’t the point of the speech. Reeves formally committed to keeping Jeremy Hunt’s fiscal rule, to get debt falling as a percentage of GDP in a rolling five-year forecast. This development would keep the spending reins tighter than many in her party would like, but on the flip side would allow her to potentially borrow more in other years, adding more to the national debt. 

Reeves also clarified for her business audience exactly what her party means by ‘basic rights from day one’ for workers. This question spiralled for Labour earlier in the year when there seemed to be internal dispute about just how far these rights would extend. According to Reeves’s speech, they would mean ‘protection from unfair dismissal, sick pay, and parental leave. But this will not prevent fair dismissal, and we will ensure that businesses can still operate probationary periods with processes for letting go of new hires.’

That is largely the extent of the announcements. The rest of the hour-long speech was an opportunity to get some insight into how the shadow chancellor thinks – and what she believes creates economic prosperity. Here is what we learned. 

Reeves broke down her lecture into three themes, or ‘imperatives’: stability, investment and reform. The first two areas played heavily into her philosophy of ‘securonomics’, a phrase the shadow chancellor coined last spring in Washington DC, in an attempt to draw a connection between Labour and Joe Biden’s economic strategy of protection and investment. The word has broadly come to be synonymous with a more active state and more capital spending, but last night Reeves went into more detail than she has before about what ‘securonomics’ means in practice. 

For Reeves, it is a hands-on rebalancing between market forces and state control, tipping more power towards the latter. Reeves is presenting the age-old ‘freedom versus security’ debate in economic terms, asking us to give the latter a try. ‘Governments and policymakers are recognising that it is no longer enough, if it ever was, for the state to simply get out of the way, to leave markets to their own devices and correct the occasional negative externality’ she told the City. ‘Recognising that the security and prosperity of working people is integral to the strength, dynamism and legitimacy of a market economy.’ 

This idea of ‘guaranteeing stability’ – that there should be a certain level of economic protection every worker can count on – was emphasised multiple times in her speech. It could almost be described as a ‘too big to fail’ policy, but for the opposite end of the economic spectrum. Reeves was aware her emphasis on security would be seen by some as greater calls for protectionism, insisting there was a fine balance to be drawn. ‘The truth is, in recent years, we have become at once too open – too exposed to global disruption – but also too closed to global trade,’ she said, calling for ‘appropriate balance between openness to global trade and resilience at home’. This is not some radical lurch to left-leaning economics, she insisted, but rather the ‘Washington DC consensus’ that Reeves believes is ‘is in our interest to embrace.’ 

Having just experienced an inflation crisis, which spurred on a wider cost of living crisis, this kind of promise of economic security will no doubt be appealing to voters. But is the kind of security Reeves spoke about last night really achievable?

The shadow chancellor acknowledged the role ‘geopolitical stability’ plays in the health of the UK economy, insisting that the country can ‘no longer indulge complacency’ that external factors will work in favour of getting Britain’s economy growing. But perhaps in quiet acknowledgement that there is only so much a country can do to prepare for global economic shocks no one sees coming, Reeves pivoted towards far more familiar territory: spending money.

This was the ‘investment’ part of Reeves’s vision – one in which capital spending is taken far more seriously and not abandoned for ‘short-term gains’. She had plenty of criticism not just for the Tory party, but for her own party during the Blair-Brown years, for the failure to provide more security through investment. If there were any doubt of Reeves’s commitment to industrial strategy, the shadow chancellor included a big defence of this in her speech, insisting it isn’t about ‘the state picking winners and losers’, but rather ‘working in genuine partnership with business to identify the barriers and opportunities they face.’ By calling on her audience to ‘(accept) that a country the size of Britain cannot excel at everything,’ she also hinted strongly that the government had an important role to play in selecting which industries to focus on. 

Reeves’s argument for a more ‘active state’ (she deliberately tried to distinguish this idea from the ‘big state’) was pitched in a rather curious way: rather than make the case for bigger government, she pointed out that the state was growing whether we like it or not. ‘The reality is we are already stumbling blindfolded into an era of a bigger state, the unavoidable corollary of sticking plaster politics’ – evident from record high levels of taxing and spending. ‘Securonomics advances not the big state but the smart and strategic state’ she said. In other words, you can have Big Toryism or Big Labour running the country – forget a leaner state.

Reeves finished her lecture on ‘reform’, which translated to pro-growth policies, mainly in the form of a planning overhaul. Once again, we heard very positive noises about the party’s plans to overcome what Reeves called ‘the single greatest obstacle to economic success’, promising to put planning reform ‘at the very centre’ of the party’s plans, as well as recommitting to local housing targets scrapped by the Conservatives.

This was easily the most optimistic part of Reeves’s vision, though it notably didn’t gel with the rest of the speech: the shadow chancellor spent the majority of her lecture talking up the merits of a hands-on state, only then to promote supply side reforms that would require a big rollback of government and red tape. The message seemed to be: build up the state to get it out of the way.

The biggest problem for Reeves going into her lecture was how to frame the (now pulled) pledge to funnel £28 billion a year into green investment. This money had become the example of ‘securonomics’ in action. If she wasn’t going to abandon the philosophy, how to explain the abandoned pledge?

Eager to avoid the tough question that her lecture and Labour’s bigger plans stir up – so, how exactly do you pay for all this investment? – Reeves opted for a bit of politicking instead. It was Liz Truss’s mini budget, she claimed, which ‘dramatically changed the fiscal circumstances in which we must operate’, noting that ‘in October 2021, the Bank of England base rate was 0.1 per cent. In little over two years, that has risen to 5.25 per cent,’ taking net debt interest costs to a staggering £82 billion. ‘These changed circumstances,’ she said, ‘explain the decision that Keir Starmer, the shadow cabinet and myself recently reached over the scale of government spending attached to Labour’s Green Prosperity Plan.’

If this was meant to land a blow on the Tories during her City speech, then it did the job. But if it was meant to bolster Labour’s own economic credentials, it did the shadow chancellor no good at all – not least because interest rates were rising worldwide at the time Truss announced her big plans for tax and spend. The mini-Budget had the nasty effect of making matters temporarily worse in Britain than they were elsewhere – as anyone renewing their mortgage in the following months will know – but the effects of the mini-Budget worked their way out of the system long ago.

That leaves Reeves and her party with a difficult conundrum on their hands: they are promising their leadership, and their expansion of the state, will deliver a kind of economic security that can’t be shaken. Yet the past few years have delivered lesson after lesson in just how little is in any one government’s control. Reeves lecture implies ‘securonomics’ will steady the UK economy and allow for far better responses to economic shocks and upsets. Others will be wondering: is the fix for stagnant growth and a weighed-down Whitehall really going to be a bigger state?

Listen to Kate Andrews, Katy Balls and Max Jeffery discuss Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture on Coffee House Shots:

Football is in enough trouble without a ‘regulator’

Unlike David Cameron – who famously got in a muddle about which team he supported – Rishi Sunak is a genuine football fan. But this makes the government’s latest wheeze of introducing a football regulator hard to take. Sunak says the outfit will help to prevent the ‘financial mismanagement’ of ‘unscrupulous owners’. It is, he says, a ‘historic moment for football fans’. Not everyone is convinced.

The Premier League is one of Britain’s most famous exports. Millions of people around the world follow teams like Man City, Arsenal and Liverpool. Its success is because these clubs have been left relatively free to conduct business: snapping up the best players and paying enormous salaries to persuade stars to play in England, rather than rival leagues in Spain or Italy. 

Footballers will go where the money is and while, to quote Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer ‘football is nothing without its fans’, the Premier League is nothing without its players. 

Any attempt to tame this Premier League beast will either fail (there is no end to the resourcefulness/ruthlessness of the clubs); or succeed and create an opportunity for a Premier League 2.0 (most likely in the Middle East) to flourish free of the impositions of pesky regulators spoiling the fun.

This meddling doesn’t only affect the Premier League: the proposed (and yet to be named) independent regulator will have authority over the top five tiers of English football. Its powers will revolve around three core objectives: improving the clubs’ financial sustainability, strengthening financial resilience and protecting English football’s heritage. There will be closer scrutiny of club owners and directors to assess their suitably as custodians of ‘vital community assets’. A licensing system for clubs may be introduced with clubs required to consult their fans on key off-field decisions and strategic direction, a pretty obvious reference to the breakaway super league fiasco of 2021. 

Clearly not all of these aims are bad. The regulator will also be handed powers allowing it to intercede in negotiations on financial distributions between the Premier League and the EFL (English Football League) ensuring a fair settlement is concluded. This is especially important in the wake of a move by some Premier League clubs to walk away from a financial redistribution deal with the EFL, a development which may have accelerated the legislation’s introduction.

But will it work? The Premier League is sceptical:

With our clubs, we have advocated for a proportionate regime that enables us to build on our position as the most widely watched league in the world. Mindful that the future growth of the Premier League is not guaranteed, we remain concerned about any unintended consequences of legislation that could weaken the competitiveness and appeal of English football.

Fans’ groups are divided. Kevin Miles, chief executive of the Football Supporters’ Association, stated that his organisation ‘warmly welcomes the tabling of the Football Governance Bill’ which it sees as an important corrective to the ‘squabbling between the vested interests of the richest club owners.’ Campaign group Fair Game, however, is unconvinced, claiming that ‘at first glance it looks like the bill has missed the target and that they have ‘failed to get assurances that the regulator will have the power to intervene’.

Such responses highlight the problems with any attempt to regulate a sport like football. Regulating sporting markets can help – one thinks of the hugely successful NFL in the United States, whose draft pick rules aim to level the playing field and keep the league competitive – but that can only work where international competition is lacking. This is hardly the case with English football, which faces intense competition, not just from the heritage leagues of continental Europe but the moneyed upstarts of the Saudi Pro League and the American MLS. 

Sunak should listen to the Premier League’s warning of ‘unintended consequences’, before it’s too late.

What my strange old friends taught me

As a young man I sought out the company of much older people in the arts, feeling they had some secret to life, often the same one in different guises, which I wanted, needed to discover. In the let-it-all-hang-out youth culture of the 1990s I felt awash, and the elderly (which to a 20-year-old meant anyone over 60) were also kinder, less threatening, more generous with their time. Two people who influenced me most were Daniel Farson – roistering Soho writer and broadcaster, a kind of modern-day Toby Belch – and Karin Jonzen, a septuagenarian Swedish sculptress with a studio off the King’s Road.

Dan I met by design. I’d read his Soho in the Fifties, a marvellous memoir full of nostalgia about post-war Bohemia. A fan letter led to an ongoing correspondence (this kind of thing happened back then) which in turn became a full-blown friendship. Dan had led a fascinating life – as Picture Post photographer, pioneering 1950s TV star and writer – and was flattered to be asked to reminisce. In his sixties he was still full of bounce, a squat, stocky man with a huge personality and a distinctive appearance: floppy, butter-coloured hair (dyed or a wig?), a tattooed hand from time in the Merchant Navy, a great tub of a stomach which went before him and plummy, growling voice. In Appledore, North Devon, he’d produce a book a year, bashing his words out on an old typewriter, sat before a window overlooking the mudflats and seabirds of the Taw and Torridge estuary. But regularly he’d come to London on a Paddington train, christened by his friends the ‘Farson Express’, to raise hell (the word is apt) on three-day benders, roaring and cannoning from one Soho pub to another. Finally, beaten up by a rent boy or arrested, he’d return to Devon to dab his cuts with iodine, nourish the braincells and prepare himself for the next foray.

His books, to a young reader, were manna. Exuberant and unpretentious – Dan, rarely among writers, claimed to love the activity itself, and you could tell – they were full of black and white photos and stories of a life boldly, even greedily lived. He had known everyone – his book Sacred Monsters recounted meetings with director Joan Littlewood, playwrights John Osborne and Brendan Behan, Salvador Dali and the painter Francis Bacon (Farson was his lifelong sidekick and Boswell). Escapades told of his travels in places like Tasmania, Turkey and postwar Germany, and Limehouse Days of his doomed attempt to run an East End Pub. For a boy like me from Suffolk, this was heady stuff, showing how vast life could be if you only made the effort and were blessed with luck. Of course, there was the drunkenness too, a kind of warning. The kindest of men when sober, Dan was ferocious in his cups, flailing about until he found your weak spots. After one rampaging binge I asked him if he ever felt remorse. ‘Are you joking?’ he roared. ‘One lives in it… But like a lady’s name,’ he added jauntily, ‘it’s never to be mentioned at the bar.’ It’s impossible to imagine a character so contradictory thriving in 2024, which likes its heroes and villains clearly demarcated – a childish banality and the current age’s loss.

Karin Jonzen, a Chelsea bohemian – more docile than the Soho variety – I met through friends, and we got on immediately. Karin was elderly, slowed down by emphysema, going a little deaf, yet in private she’d speak compellingly about a past lived entirely to her own moral code. She’d had numerous lovers, and been, by her own admission, a negligent parent, but still in her seventies had a lust for excitement. Each summer, if her health held up, she’d ride a moped over the Alps to the sound of Mozart’s Requiem: it made her feel, she said, like she was flying between heaven and earth (one friend called her, accurately, a ‘pocket Valkyrie on a Vespa’).

To get the full effect of Karin you’d have to see her in her sculptor’s studio. It was a great high-ceilinged hall on Gunter Grove she’d bought from Julie Christie, a spiral staircase leading to a bedroom upstairs. The studio, painted a shade of flaking kingfisher blue, was stuffed with her sculptures of the human face or body. Set on platforms, lingering in the half light, they seemed almost to float around you and the effect was haunting.

What she gave me was a second education. Karin was steeped in literature and philosophy – Schopenhauer was the favourite and her two volumes of The World as Will and Representation, blue and burgundy respectively, had spines grooved by over-reading and covers spattered in clay. I never read them, but just the look of them together with Karin’s enthusiasm sowed a kind of madness in me. She was also a Russophile, convinced she’d lived there in a previous life. Volumes of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov cluttered the place – all in those faintly religious-looking black Penguin covers which both forbade and tantalised, and when she talked about these writers, with a novice’s freshness, I felt I was being inducted into a priesthood. A Swede, she also introduced me to films like Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander and The Seventh Seal, whose leading actor, Max Von Sydow, had sat for her in her studio, and whose long, ascetic face – that of a friendly mystic – stared benignly down on us in bronze. What was key about Karin – perhaps the life lesson she passed on – was that she’d stuck with depicting the human face and form when other artists were modishly abandoning it. This fidelity had dragged her through periods of terrible poverty and even attempted suicide. Yet she’d ended up back in fashion once more, with clients and money in the bank, surrounded by friends.

The food at her studio was nearly always inedible (‘I’m not domesticated’, she would say), but the vodka flowed freely, there were interesting guests (musicians, painters, Ibsen and Strindberg specialists), and all would be set off by candles, a great row of them in an austere Swedish candelabra, which she would light at the table even over lunch. At parties in December there would be more of them, crackling away Victorian-style on a Christmas tree. They’d vaporise the pine-needles, filling the room with scents as Karin and her old fellow-students from the Slade – they’d known each other five or six decades – sat in the alcove beneath her bedroom, making each other roar with laughter. It was all pure gold, a kind of heightened life you swore you’d always strive for, and heaven knows what or who I would have become had we never met.

Both of them are gone now, and their world with them. What gave me the chutzpah at the age of 20 to befriend such vivid people, older than either of my parents, and badger them with my questions? Deep down I must have agreed instinctively with Dan’s favourite maxim, quoted at the end of one of his books and whose sentiment now, as I get older, I have to force myself to recall: ‘Life is an adventure, waiting to be gained.’