Ménage à trois: Day, by Michael Cunningham, reviewed

Set over the course of the same April day, with morning, afternoon and night ascribed to consecutive years, Michael Cunningham’s Day is built around time’s march towards an inevitable ending. This feeling of being caught up in time and trapped by its onward force is shared by the novel’s small cast of characters. A married couple, Isabel and Dan Byrne, along with Isabel’s brother Robbie, are struggling with their floundering careers, ageing bodies and their place in the world. They are also balancing a painful platonic love triangle, with both Dan and Isabel more in love with Robbie than with each other.

The claustrophobic domesticity of the novel is amplified by its timespan: 2019-21. The pandemic is not overtly mentioned, but the conditions it creates of confinement and stasis intensify the family’s problems. By depicting the Byrnes before, during and after the crisis, Cunningham masterfully conveys the traumas and growing realisations experienced by everybody during Covid.

The feeling of being trapped both by lockdown and more generally by circumstances gives the novel an anxious undertone. Isabel sees herself as ‘paralysed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd, inconsequential incidents’. There’s a sense that each decision made or not made constricts the potential of the future until there’s only one possible outcome. But the brilliance of Cunningham’s prose prevents Day from being an uncomfortable read; it’s simply an uncomfortably relatable one.

The expectations and naivety of youth are contrasted with the quiet domesticity of family life, with characters having to give up on the wild dreams of their past. For Isabel,

the trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment.

A fake Instagram account provides her and Robbie with a break from reality, offering an escape into the beautiful falseness of social media. ‘Plus, Lyla doesn’t exist,’ Robbie points out. ‘Right. Of course she doesn’t,’ Isabel realises. Cunningham’s gentle derision of the Instagrammification of modern life also draws attention to another inherent falseness – that of writing a story at all.

Perhaps, then, Day is a novel about the human instinct to use storytelling as a way to cope. And when the story is told so beautifully, that’s certainly an attractive idea.

The proposed cities of the future look anything but modern

California Forever is an American 21st-century utopian vision, a new city to be built on 60,000 acres of dusty farmland 50 miles outside San Francisco. This latest plan for ‘safe, walkable neighbourhoods’, unveiled late last year and yet to be approved, is financed by Flannery Associates, a consortium of tech venture capitalists led by a former Goldman Sachs trader. Despite its ultra-modern backers, California Forever looks nothing like a modern city. Its promotional material is pure English nostalgia, something close to Metroland, with dreamlike vistas, charming streets, rowing boats, bicycles, sunrises and endless trees. If renderings are to be believed, the future is Blytonesque.

This idyll is the latest expression of a seemingly universal hankering for urban life that looks and feels like country life, rooted in nature and magically free from pollution, noise and chaos. California Forever’s artistic renderings came too late for Des Fitzgerald’s The City of Today is a Dying Thing. But they support his premise that this yearning for ‘green cities’ represents ‘a collective anxiety’ about the near future mixed with sentiment and unfocused nostalgia.

Green cities, Fitzgerald suggests, are often contradictory and an impossible fantasy. They are little more than a salve to the horrors of impending ecological disaster: what the Financial Times journalist Alexandra Heal has called ‘fighting climate change with saplings’. Fitzgerald is a professor of social sciences and medical humanities at University College, Cork. His style is spirited and outspoken, poking fun at the absurdity of received opinion, mad initiatives and confused policies with energy and charm. He writes in the style of pro-urbanists such as John Grindrod and Barnabus Calder, both of whom have drawn general readers into debates about architecture and cities which many would prefer to be left to insiders.

The ‘green cities agenda’ Fitzgerald identifies takes many forms, in urban planning, architecture, art, politics, activism, science, philosophy and mysticism. He finds it all over the world, among eco-capitalists, tech billionaires, aristocrats, libertarians and leftist activists alike. Trees are widely imagined as a way to heal modern urban life, in both a scientific and spiritual sense. He calls this ‘treeification’.

At its most benign it begets fads such as forest bathing and rewilding. In physical form it involves vegetation on buildings, such as Milan’s Bosco Verticale, two residential skyscrapers smothered in hundreds of trees designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri. (Boeri’s latest plan, revealed last month, involves a ‘Biodiversity Ring Garden’ proposed for the sacred, 6th-century Nepalese burial mound containing the relics of the Buddha. It looks like a tree-lined flying saucer.)

Fitzgerald finds plenty of illogical attempts to blend ‘green cities’ with fuel-heavy travel and space exploration – a kind of verdant futurism. Singapore’s Changi airport’s ‘Jewel’, a four-storey indoor forest complete with waterfall, hotel and early check-in facilities, for example. Or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin aerospace scheme to abandon Earth for a ‘wooded simulacrum in outer space’.

Similar dissonance can be found in King Charles’s ideas, Fitzgerald suggests. Car-centric Poundbury is one. So was the ‘strikingly feudal’ Queen’s Green Canopy of 2021, which urged people to plant trees to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, sponsored by McDonald’s and Rentokil among others. Trees are fetishised at endless conferences around the world, for which experts fly in to deliver ‘charming but also oddly evangelical’ talks about greening the modern city – ‘like a weird mix of Silicon Valley and Christian revivalism’.

Fitzgerald’s best passages deal with the most absurd manifestation of the ‘green city’ of all: the Marble Arch Mound – Westminster Council’s panicky, post-pandemic plan to commission the Dutch architects MVRDV to install a temporary hollow hill at Marble Arch to encourage shoppers to return to the West End. The Mound was so pitiful it became a national laughing stock. But Fitzgerald suggests it was a metaphorical success. By revealing the emptiness beneath its structure, it exposed the ‘green city’ as a hollow gesture rather than any serious attempt at ecological change.

Trees are convenient symbols because they are everything to everyone: ‘Nobody’s against trees,’ as Marc Benioff, the Salesforce billionaire behind a plan to plant a trillion of them, has pointed out.

This is an entertaining book. Fitzgerald is refreshingly respectful towards his interviewees, even when he does not share their ardour. It is also sprawling. While he exposes pseudoscience and feeble-minded logic, Fitzgerald never quite nails a central question. Once he has gently mocked his examples, his conclusion – that obsession with greening amounts to suspicion of industrial and urban life and seeks to imply that the 20th century never happened – feels unsatisfactory.

Gestures such as the Mound are self-evidently pointless. But what might policymakers build instead? What would be a serious attempt at ecological urbanism? Are there any? Fitzgerald does not say. In the meantime, California Forever, with its rowing boats, bicycles and soothingly retro illustrations of trees, may be the clearest indication we have.

Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man

If any novelist, playwright or screenwriter of the past 40 years could be called ‘a writer of consequence’, to use the literary agent Andrew Wylie’s term, it would be Hanif Kureishi. While not shifting units on the scale of his near contemporaries Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, Kureishi’s cultural influence – through his explorations of race, class and sexuality in novels such as The Buddha of Suburbia and films like My Beautiful Laundrette – is inestimable. In this first major biography, Ruvani Ranasinha tracks Kureishi’s progress from his birth in Bromley in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother, through his glittering, always provocative career, to the recent accident which rendered him unable to walk or use his hands. It’s a long and challenging read, yet one that fizzes with insight into the tumultuous times in which Kureishi produced his best writing.

Ranasinha’s major coup is her seemingly unrestricted access to Kureishi’s diaries, which allows an extraordinary intimacy with her subject, bringing him into ever sharper focus as the book progresses. From the start, Kureishi fantasises about escaping the violent racism of his youth through writing: ‘I dreamed of being on TV and being called a writer.’ And not just any old writer: ‘I want to win the Nobel Prize,’ he admits, though Ranasinha illustrates how his cast-iron self-belief is undermined by a lifelong inferiority complex bequeathed by the suburban upbringing in which his father mentored him as a creative artist. When he finally finds his subject, his diary records drolly: ‘The Asian community has been for me what dishwashing was for Orwell.’

It is Kureishi’s search for this compelling subject, and a satisfactory form with which to express it, that takes up the first half of the book. Beginning with Borderline, his play for the Royal Court, Ranasinha comments: ‘Kureishi’s plays helped revitalise British drama with new vocabularies and visions of identity in an increasingly cross-ethnic, transnational world.’ This was followed by the remarkable success of his first film, My Beautiful Laundrette, a catalyst for Asian writers, filmmakers, journalists and actors who saw themselves portrayed for the first time as funny, feisty and successful rather than as caricatured victims in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. When Kureishi distilled his experience as a dramatic writer into fiction, the result was his spectacular first novel, the enduringly fresh and funny The Buddha of Suburbia. Here the diaries reveal him as canny in repositioning himself as a literary writer, wanting to create fiction that aspired to match the best pop music – ‘thrilling to youth but also accessible to mum’. In Buddha, he succeeded in dramatising the ‘combustible intersection of the absorbing, colliding social worlds its mixed-race narrator straddles’.

On Kureishi’s subsequent fiction (from The Black Album to the short story collections and the controversial roman-à-clef Intimacy), Ranasinha is adroit at teasing out layers of cultural nuance, as well as parallels between the life and the work. She repeatedly makes connections between the films and novels, particularly the trope of the politically committed woman caught in a relationship with two men. She also adumbrates how Kureishi’s familiar list of influences (Baldwin, Genet, Proust, Roth, Bowie) has shaped his work.

At the same time, the book steers clear of hagiography. An excellent interpreter of the best novels and films, Ranasinha nevertheless judges other works as weak when appropriate. And she’s not afraid to expose Kureishi’s literary vanity, writing that his youthful ‘flattering self-comparisons with the great authors he worshipped persisted into midlife’, while commenting astutely on his private life: ‘His remarkable readiness to own up to his faults is at once inextricably allied to an evasion of personal responsibility.’

Ranasinha also explores how prescient Kureishi was in tracking the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in his film My Son, the Fanatic. He ‘immediately grasped the global implications of the Rushdie affair… Very early on he feared that the fatwa and its aftershock could derail the confidence of multicultural Britain.’ Kureishi observed: ‘The major conflicts… over the next 20 years or so are not going to be between capitalism and communism, but between liberalism and Islam.’

Ultimately, it’s the close reading of the diaries that provides the most illumination, with Ranasinha weaving extracts into an exegesis of the plays, films, essays and stories, while tracking Kureishi’s picaresque progress through the labyrinth of literary London in the 1980s and 1990s to fatherhood and his emergence as a mentor to an entire generation. ‘Not only had he played a pivotal role in inspiring second- and third-generation British Asians to becomes artists, but his early films had also helped create an identifiably British- Asian cultural presence.’

This is a magnificent, meticulous and exhaustive biography, and one worthy of its mercurial subject. Its depictions of a young, gifted author tearing up the literary landscape of the late 20th century are almost unbearably poignant when set alongside Kureishi’s recent Substack dispatches from his hospital bed, in which he describes himself as ‘a broken man with a smashed body’. Ranasinha’s postscript, detailing the accident, at least gives hope for his physical rehabilitation and looks forward to Kureishi’s forthcoming memoir, Shattered, which he is dictating to his sons. Some writers just refuse to be silenced.

Downhill all the way: the decline of the British Empire after 1923

The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a ‘wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations’. It offered ‘the only solution to the great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails, then all else fails.’ Stirring words – and not those of some sentimental Colonel Blimp back in London. They were written by the newspaper’s editor, Manilal A. Desai, a young Nairobi-based lawyer and a prominent figure in the large Indian community in Kenya. But, as Matthew Parker observes in One Fine Day, an ambitious account of the empire at the moment of its territorial zenith on 29 September 1923, Desai’s encomium came with a caveat:

Either the British Empire must admit the equality of its different people… irrespective of the colours of their skins and the place of their birth, or it must abandon its attempt to rule a mixture of people. There can be no half way.

Parker’s narrative begins with the sunrise over Ocean Island, now known as Banaba, in the Pacific. The place was a rich natural source of phosphates, a vital ingredient in the fertilisers needed to realise the agricultural potential of other parts of the empire, most notably Australia and New Zealand. But to access the phosphate, the island’s own fertile soil had to be destroyed. It was, he writes, ‘extractive colonialism at its most literal’. He then follows the sun westward, through Australia, Asia and Africa to Jamaica.

Desai’s words proved prophetic, but the equality they argued for wasn’t necessarily quite what we think it is. Many in his community believed that Kenya should be annexed by India. East Africa, the Aga Khan had written in 1918, was ‘a free field for India’s civilising mission’. The question Desai raised was a good one, nonetheless. Who was the empire for? Did it exist merely to fuel the engines of commerce or did it have a higher purpose?

Some imperialists sincerely believed the latter. Trusteeship was, Parker writes, the ‘big idea’ of the moment: it was Britain’s role to nurture primitive peoples until they were ready to govern themselves. ‘The only salvation for the Malays,’ wrote Sir Hugh Clifford, a long-time colonial official in Malaya, ‘lies in the increase of British influence, and in the consequent spread of modern ideas, progress and civilisation.’ Even Leonard Woolf – an ‘anti-imperialist fanatic’, Beatrice Webb said – thought it out of the question to ‘leave these non-adult races to manage their affairs’.

Education, meanwhile – what Chinua Achebe would call ‘the white man’s knowledge… a collective aspiration of the entire community’ – was one of the grand bargains of imperialism. But was it wise politically? The Malays, another official said, should be taught only ‘the dignity of manual labour, so that they do not all become clerks’. Such a policy, he added, would avoid ‘the trouble which has arisen in India through over-education’. On the Gold Coast, according to its governor, there were too many semi-educated people who ‘knew just enough… to talk loudly about rights and other ridiculous things’.

Inevitably, Parker has had to be selective. He notes, for instance, the outrage felt in the Muslim community in India at the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, the only great Islamic power, after the first world war; but he largely sidesteps the new territories, including Iraq and Palestine, that Britain gained through it. What vindicates his choices is the immediacy of his narrative, which is richly peopled and packed with incident and argument. While the book will be read primarily as a history of empire, it is also necessarily a history of anti-imperialist political organisation – and perhaps political consciousness. The sense one comes back to again and again is not so much of hatred or resentment but of an awakening feeling of betrayal.

Imperialism provokes strong reactions and One Fine Day may not change any minds. It isn’t trying to. But it should open them to the complex political and psychological realities of life under Pax Britannica for both the governed and the governing; and to the swirling currents of ethnic, social and religious identity that too many imperialists failed to understand because they insisted on applying the small, poor frame of what one Indian writer called ‘white-race supremacy’.

The British Empire had been a flexible, mongrel beast, adaptable to circumstance and accommodating of contradiction. But Parker’s book ends on a point not of equipoise but of exhaustion following the emotional and economic trauma of the first world war. Prior to the war, imperialism had been the dominant mode of government for much of the world. Yet with autocratic regimes once again on the rise, our present anti-imperialist moment may also pass. In which case One Fine Day may prove not merely history but a glimpse into our future, too.

Why was the British army so ill-prepared to fight the second world war?

Conflict comes highly recommended. Two former chiefs of the defence staff, Generals David Richards and Nicholas Carter, praise it for identifying key lessons from the past appropriate to the future. A former MoD strategic adviser, Sir Hew Strachan, says it will ‘challenge the professional and enlighten the generalist’. The US marine corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, ‘the warrior monk’, says it is ‘a clear-sighted assessment of war’s future’. And the late Henry Kissinger called it ‘an exceptional book, written by two absolute masters of their profession’.

Kissinger had been General David Petraeus’s champion since the latter’s fall from grace as head of the CIA following the exposure of an affair in Afghanistan with a subordinate officer, the wife of a former officer. As a past national security adviser and secretary of state, he features large in the book. Air and naval endorsements are evidently yet to come.

‘It is important to establish what this book is not,’ say the authors: ‘It is not intended as a comprehensive history of all conflict since 1945’, impossible in a single volume. That said, other than the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air, it seems remarkably comprehensive. But although, the authors maintain, ‘strategic concepts have evolved faster since the second world war than at any comparable period in history’, still the Prussian general and military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz gets prime billing, quoted as early as the fourth paragraph: ‘Warfare [is] politics by other means.’

Clearly the authors know what Clausewitz meant, as evidenced by what follows in the book, but this is not an entirely faithful rendering of ‘Der Krieg ist eine blosse Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln’. The first publication in English (1873) of Clausewitz’s On War, by Colonel James Graham, translated ‘[War is simply a continuation of politics] mit anderen Mitteln’ not as ‘with [the admixture of] other means’, but ‘by other means’, allowing the inference that politics ends where war begins. Nothing could be further from the truth, in ‘rational’ war at least. (There are other types of war, for example those characterised by Anatol Rapoport as ‘cathartic’, and ‘cataclysmic’.) Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France from 1917, reclaimed Clausewitz’s real meaning when he said: ‘La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.’ The apparent paradox was probably meant for impact. Had he said ‘la stratégie’ rather than ‘la guerre’, no one would have batted an eyelid.

The dynamic of the military vs the political in strategy has indeed been a constant in war since at least 1648, and in many ways it is one of the most interesting aspects of Conflict. Thus, perhaps, General Richards says he hopes ‘our leadership will take time to read it’. If pressed for time, our political and military leadership would do well to read the salutary introduction and first chapter, ‘The Death of the Dream of Peace’, and in particular the section on the Korean War, subtitled ‘Getting the big strategic idea right’. General Douglas MacArthur, one of the towering heroes and egos of the second world war, ‘ultimately got the big strategic idea for the conflict wrong, thus failing in the first and most important task of the strategic leader’.

MacArthur’s big idea was that the invading North Korean army could be pushed back and destroyed by superior US firepower, and that if China sent an army into North Korea, he could destroy that too (if necessary with nuclear weapons). That he conducted the war from Japan and rarely visited the Korean peninsula didn’t help. Roberts (presumably) quotes Lord Salisbury: ‘The study of large-scale maps drives men mad.’ Petraeus (presumably) concludes that a commander need not be on the front line, but a commanding general (i.e. the campaign commander) ‘does at least need to be in the same country as the theatre of operations’. Obvious? We didn’t get it right in the Falklands. In the end, say the authors, MacArthur simply couldn’t adjust to the idea of limited war. He was overburdened by experience.

The book’s trajectory is towards Ukraine, and with it the stark warning that war is not linear and in one direction. War can regress. It has in Ukraine, and the West is unready for any similarly prolonged state-on-state conflict. (Incidentally, at least one of the endorsers has in the past publicly questioned the likelihood of future state-on-state conflict.) Petraeus and Roberts do indeed enlighten and provoke thought – as well as disagreement; for as Clausewitz wrote, war is first an affair of ‘primordial violence… a blind, natural force’, and its art lies in the ‘play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam’.

Victory to Defeat is an equally thought-provoking book, if with a narrower, sharper focus: the parlous state into which the British army fell between the wars. Besides being meticulous history, it is in fact a polemic, a ‘cautionary tale for modern Britain’, say the authors. Richard Dannatt, as chief of the general staff (head of the army) in the Blair/Brown years, was notable for speaking his mind. ‘I want an army in five or ten years’ time,’ he said when he took over in 2006. Fourteen years after stepping down, the army is not the one he wanted, nor, he warns, what will be needed. Robert Lyman, a former soldier, is one of the surest, most astute and diligent of military historians writing today. Their analysis of why and how the British army of 1918 – magnificently triumphant in ‘the 100 days’ of mobile warfare that utterly broke the Germans on the Western Front – became the ill-equipped, ill-trained and ill-led expeditionary force chased out of France and Belgium in 1940 is indeed compelling.

The answer isn’t just political purblindness and stinginess. The fault initially lay with the army itself. The predominant feeling in 1919 was ‘back to business as usual’ – the empire, not the continent. No one therefore set about codifying what it was that had delivered victory, and for the Germans defeat. On the other hand, the Germans, with their enforced rump of an army, did precisely the opposite. It was not until 1932 that a formal study was made, but not much came of that either. For a dozen years the general staff had been trying to incorporate this and that lesson somewhat haphazardly into its written doctrine, but against a background of internal and external doctrinal zealotry – particularly regarding ‘mechanicalisation’ – had failed to impose a common understanding throughout the imperially spread army.

Consequently, it proved difficult to prioritise R&D and spending, particularly perilous at a time when the army was taking the scrapings of the barrel. Not only did the army go to France in 1939 without the right equipment (despite the best efforts of Leslie Hore-Belisha, one of the few political heroes of the book), it went without doctrine. It was saved to fight another day only by the remarkable ability of the British to conduct evacuations: Corunna, Gallipoli, Dunkirk (and Kabul in 2021).

The difference today is that while the army may not have the right equipment (and certainly not enough of it), or many men, it does at least have doctrine. And it could probably conduct a creditable evacuation too. But, as Churchill said in 1940, wars are not won by evacuations. Perhaps our leadership, having read the beginning of Conflict, might also read at least the epilogue of this sobering book.

Free breakfasts won’t solve the school truancy crisis

How do you solve a problem like truancy? Lockdowns and school closures may be a distant memory but far too many children are still not regularly attending school. One in five pupils is reported to be ‘persistently’ absent from the classroom, a figure which has barely budged since schools fully reopened in March 2021. It’s up from around one in 10 who persistently missed school before the Covid pandemic. What’s more, the attendance gap between poorer children and their better-off peers is widening.

New polling from the Centre for Social Justice suggests more than one in four parents think Covid has shown it is not essential for children to attend school every day. The think tank argues that the contract between parents and schools has been broken. It is hard to disagree. However, diagnosing a problem is one thing, solving it is quite another. This week both Labour and Conservatives have set out their plans to tackle absenteeism.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan kicked off by announcing 18 new ‘attendance hubs’ intended to ‘enable schools with strong attendance practice to share their approaches’ with similar schools. Sharing best practice seems like a good idea but quite why this requires new structures and branding is not made clear. The upshot is that 32 hub schools will now offer support to 2,000 others – although this equates to fewer than one in ten schools nationwide.

At the same time, a £15 million extension to a mentoring scheme for severely absent pupils has also been announced. According to Keegan, mentors will work with individual children and their families to tackle ‘the factors behind non-attendance, such as bullying or mental health issues, as well as that feeling of just being too far behind’. An advertising campaign has been designed to sit alongside both the hubs and the mentors. School gate pictures carry the strapline ‘moments matter, attendance counts’, some accompanied by a reminder to parents that it is okay to send their child to school with a sore throat or a snotty nose.

Call me a cynic but I am not entirely convinced that a bolshy 15-year-old, who has barely stepped foot in a classroom for the past three years, will ask mum’s permission to stay at home when he has a bit of a cold coming on. The crisis of school absenteeism demands more than adverts, hubs or mentors.

So, what are Labour’s plans? When it comes to rhetoric, Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson at least seems aware of the scale of the problem. Referring to the ‘generational challenge’ facing the country, she has promised to reset the ‘broken relationship between schools and families’. But when it comes to concrete proposals, Labour’s plans are as lacking in ambition as the government’s. Phillipson has promised breakfast clubs and counsellors. These are no doubt nice to have but they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of schools.

Free breakfasts and more sport risks sounding like a weak attempt at bribery. McDonald’s and the local leisure centre no doubt offer better. Some children will need access to counsellors or speech and language support but a weekly therapy session is unlikely to get children up to speed on their maths. More to the point, there is a real risk that schools become an odd combination of food bank, doctor’s surgery and leisure centre. Amid the welfare and service provision, education is hard to find.

Prior to 2020, closing schools was never part of any pandemic response plans. The decision to shut classrooms to all but the most vulnerable children was taken with no apparent assessment of the educational consequences. Teaching was, in the main, reduced to a few worksheets or the odd online quiz. Exams were cancelled and grades given out seemingly at random. And when pupils finally returned to the classroom, there was little concerted effort to make up for what they had missed.

Yet neither Keegan nor Phillipson admit to this failure. As Ellie Lee and Jennie Bristow point out in their new book Parenting Culture Studies, post-lockdown, ‘the problem of the suspension of education has rarely been explicitly addressed.’

In marketing terms, education is a school’s unique selling point. It is not access to breakfast clubs, counsellors or sports that make going to school necessary but access to teachers with specialist subject knowledge they are keen to impart. School is the only place where children can learn things their parents do not know, things that are deemed so important they are worth passing from one generation to the next.

Without this focus on education, we are left with a bizarre push for attendance as an end in itself. Indeed, this is what seems to lie behind Labour’s plans for a national register of children not in mainstream schooling with AI roped in to spot trends in pupils’ absence. But teachers do not need a robot to tell them who is missing from school. Monitoring children with new technology might result in more visits from police or social workers but it is unlikely to instill a love of learning.

Until we can inspire children with a desire to learn and a sense of the importance of knowledge, truancy will remain a problem.

She’s leaving home: Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, reviewed

The narrator of Cathy Sweeney’s first novel has finally cracked. I say ‘finally’ because there have been signs: drinking alone; disliking her daughter, or at least her type; having an affair with her friend’s son; opening a separate bank account in her maiden name when her mother died. But in the beginning we don’t know any of this. We don’t know what she’s doing, and neither does she. It’s an ordinary Tuesday in November when she leaves her comfortable home in the suburbs of Dublin, which she shares with her husband and their two almost-adult children: ‘I grab my handbag and keys, let the front door shut behind me. I have no idea that I will never come back.’

What follows is a taut tale of the protagonist’s journey by car, train, bus and ferry. Time flits between her present movements and future destination (a neglected cottage in Wales), charting her feelings as she tries to make sense of what’s happening in real time and her thoughts weeks and months later. We learn that she’s tired of putting plates in the dishwasher, pairing socks and having predictable sex; that things have been mounting up ‘in drawers, racks, presses… in the back of my mind, in the arteries of my heart’. It’s not that she’s looking for anything more, or planning to bolt. ‘What I want is to be silent. Or else to have a conversation that does not revolve around my husband, my daughter, my son, my dead mother, my job or my house.’

The job? Art teacher, though she wanted to be an artist: ‘The Story of How a Woman Becomes a Teacher and Not an Artist is an old one.’ The husband? Logical rather than emotional. ‘I bored him as much as he bored me.’ Nothing terrible has happened, though, which makes her actions hard to justify: ‘You expect it will be a catastrophe that changes how you see the world, not something as mundane as a bottle of champagne being plonked on a marble island.’

Sweeney’s writing is spare and precise, the protagonist’s every movement observed in slow motion and high definition, which gives the book a cinematic quality (several times I found myself thinking how well it would work as a film). And our narrator knows it: when she thinks back to that November morning, she, too, sees it as a film clip; mid-action, she feels ‘as if there are cameras on me’. It’s clever, taking something that could be entirely ordinary – after all, she could turn back at any minute – and ratcheting up the stakes. This is a deceptively simple story that tugs you along from start to finish.

Milton Friedman – economic visionary or scourge of the world?

The Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor called Milton Friedman one of the two most evil men of the 20th century. (Friedman was in distinguished company.) The ‘scourge’ he inflicted on the world was monetarism, a product of what Kaldor called Friedman’s Big Lie – of which more later. Moral judgments aside, how does Friedman rank in the world of 20th-century economists? By common consent, he stands with Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes at the apex of his profession. All wrestled with the defining problem of their age: the radical economic and political instability of the 1920s and 1930s.

Their responses reflected their national situations. Keynes, economically secure and confident in Britain’s political aristocracy, turned to the state to provide the stability lacking in markets. Hayek, fleeing the hyperinflation of central Europe, saw the state as the cause, not healer, of economic disasters. Friedman, the aspiring son of Jewish immigrants, put his faith in the ‘land of opportunity, in which anything is possible’. Keynes, I think, was the greatest of the three because he invented a new branch of economics – macroeconomics – to explain how markets might fail spontaneously, whereas Friedman and Hayek simply added refinements to the story of how government interference could wreck spontaneously perfect markets.  

Friedman’s genius was to repackage classical economics for conservative political use. His was a ‘creative conservatism’, writes Jennifer Burns, in the ‘first full-length biography of Friedman based upon archival research’. His 1956 essay ‘The Quantity Theory of Money – A Restatement’ is a good example of this. His economic work consisted of a series of fertile restatements of the core ideas of classical economics assembled as artillery against the assault of Keynesians and planners.

He conducted the war with such panache that monetarism has defined the economic policy of the past 40 years, just as Keynesian economics defined that of the previous 40. Like all counter-revolutions, Friedman’s was not a simple going back. He understood that there were new facts on the ground, which is why the doctrine of monetarism with which his name is associated came to define the post-Keynesian, not pre-Keynesian, world. The measure of his success is that whereas after the war the ideas of the right were shaped by the left, after Friedman the ideas of the left were shaped by the right.

In 1976 he won the Nobel prize for his achievements in the ‘field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and stabilisation policy’. As the story of the counter-revolution has been exceptionally well told in Daniel Stedman Jones’s Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (2012), one looks to a new biography of Friedman for added value.

For almost a decade Burns, a history professor at Stanford University, has immersed herself in more than ‘200 paper-stuffed boxes’ of Friedman material, though this treasure trove does not include the letters between Milton and his widow Rose, who had burnt them. Burns’s book is ostentatiously an insider’s job, the inside being Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which houses Friedman’s archive.

Keynes country and even Hayek country are foreign to her. Her prose is serviceable (though too full of acronyms and American slang for my liking) and her economics sound. She adds to our understanding of Friedman’s economics in four ways: by relating his ideas to the circumstances of his life; by highlighting his critique of mainstream methodology; by drawing attention to the coterie of women economists ‘critical to every stage of his career’; and by relating his influence to the global dominance of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. As American power, hard and soft, replaced Britain’s, so Friedman’s ideas replaced Keynes’s. Burns offers a history of ideas situated in a peculiarly American milieu.

The British Labour politician Denis Healey once called Friedman ‘a Jewish leprechaun’ – a reference to both his ethnicity and his height (5ft). Burns shows how these traits shaped Friedman’s pugnacious style and university career. They gave him the chutzpah to challenge his elders, and pushed his university life westwards. When his academic career started in the early 1930s, East Coast Ivy League universities still shielded themselves from clever Jews by not appointing them to faculty positions. Chicago, being more meritocratic, was more hospitable. From 1934 it became Friedman’s academic base, where till the 1970s he ‘schlumped around in ill-fitting suits… a short Jewish guy who talked too fast’.

Jewish émigrés from Tsarist and Nazi persecutions greatly influenced the development of 20th-century American economics in two different directions. On the one hand, they saw a land of unlimited opportunity; on the other, precious protection against tyranny. Friedman fell into the first, conservative camp. He was attracted by the chance American life afforded to anyone of ability and enterprise to rise to the top, not by its guarantees of human and political rights. On the other side, for economists like Paul Samuelson, one huge attraction of an American Keynesianism was that it promised policy antidotes to European fascism and communism. For Friedman, economic freedom was sufficient antidote.

He soon fell under the spell of what Burns calls ‘Chicago price theory’, and its main expositor, Frank Knight. This intransigent version of traditional microeconomics held that all social problems would yield to competitive prices. Knight’s special contribution was to hook the defence of the price system    to uncertainty. The willingness to act despite uncertainty was the source and justification of profit. Chicago’s social and cultural isolation from the East Coast universities gave its price doctrine an extremist character. Burns emphasises its religious hold on all those who passed through the sacred portals of Room 7, where Knight held court, supported by the praetorian guard of Henry Simons and Aaron Director, the brother of Rose Director, whom Friedman married in 1935.

Burns sees Room 7 as the seedbed of modern conservative economics. The aim of turning society into an auction market would give Friedman’s life its political direction. He and Rose had their writing paper embossed with an elementary supply and demand diagram representing the perfect equilibrium not just of a single market but of market society. In 1951, Jacob Viner talked of a ‘Chicago School’ engaged in an organised battle for laissez-faire and the ‘quantity theory of money’ vs ‘imperfect competition theorising and Keynesianism’.

Chicago price theory might be the ‘untouchable core of economics’, but more than its passionate iteration was needed in the early 1930s as the United States led the world into the greatest economic depression in modern times. Unlike the Hayekians, who saw the depression as nature’s way of liquidating unsound investments, Chicago professors urged ‘generous federal expenditures’ to check severe depression and deflation. This was admittedly ambulance work. The deeper problem was to explain how the emergency had arisen and prevent recurrences of the same disease. The quantity theory of money provided Chicago with the answer, and at the same time its answer to Keynes.

Keynes had posited insufficient aggregate spending power as the cause of economic slump, and ‘autonomous expenditure’ by government as the preventative and cure. It was natural enough for Friedman, a brilliant young scholar in search of an identity, to join battle with the Master. His course may have been set when his mentor, Arthur Burns, suggested he study the role of money in business cycles, and assigned a young statistician, Anna Schwartz, to the project. Monetary theory, then a backwater, gave Friedman his niche, and then his fame. He quickly understood that the quantity theory of money could provide both an explanation of economic instability and an inoculation against the fiscal activism advocated by the Keynesians.

In their massive A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Friedman and Schwartz showed people’s demand for money (or velocity of circulation) to have been remarkably stable over time. The main periods of economic instability coincided with, and were caused by, erratic movements in the supply of money. This was especially true of the great depression. In his famous address to the American Economic Association in 1967 Friedman said:

The quantity of money in the United States fell by one third in the course of the contraction [of 1929-33]. And it fell not because there were no willing borrowers… It fell because the Federal Reserve System forced or permitted a sharp reduction in the monetary base.

This is where Kaldor’s assertion of the Big Lie comes in. Kaldor pointed out that Friedman’s own published data in A Monetary History showed a continued increase in the monetary base (high-powered money) between 1930 and 1933, together with a steep contraction of ‘broad money’, which includes bank credit. In other words, it was the shortage of borrowers not the shortage of money which had caused the decline in bank lending. Money passively reflected the state of confidence, as Keynes had claimed. There was much subsequent argument about Friedman’s data, and the problem of causation between money, prices and real activity remains unresolved.

Friedman wrote in 1982:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

It was the stagflation of the 1970s, not the great depression, which brought monetarism to power by seeming to offer a double confirmation that erratic money causes an erratic economy.

Just as the depression of the 1930s was caused by the Federal Reserve Board printing too little money, so the inflation of the 1970s was caused by the Fed printing too much, at the behest of a government committed to an unrealistic level of full employment. Once more Friedman took on the Keynesians, who this time had no explanation for the simultaneous explosion of unemployment and inflation. Against their contention that the inflation was a ‘cost-push’ phenomenon caused by overpowerful trade unions, Friedman insisted that inflation was ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’. He developed his theory of ‘adaptive expectations’ to show the futility of governments trying to push unemployment below its ‘natural rate’ – the rate which would prevail if prices were stable.  All that would do would be to stoke inflation without reducing unemployment.

The need was for a policy rule, enforced by an independent central bank, to stop governments from inflating the money supply. Stable money meant stable prices. Stable prices meant stable business expectations, and stable business expectations meant a stable economy. The only planning of capitalism was the planning of money: everything else would thrive unplanned.

Monetarism was Friedman’s main contribution to economic theory and policy. He pioneered other initiatives supportive of market-based conservatism: the ‘permanent income hypothesis’ which suggested that economies were more cyclically stable than Keynes had supposed; ‘helicopter money’ in the form of a negative income tax to provide welfare for the poor without a state bureaucracy to administer it. Floating exchange rates, to replace the collapsed Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, was a further extension of Chicago price theory. 

His economics was also conservative in method. Running through the book, but difficult to summarise, is the story of his battles against the strong current of American institutionalism which stood for a ‘realistic’ economics. Like Keynes and Hayek, Friedman defended ‘unrealism of assumptions’ as the only way of making safe generalisations in economics. The test of a good theory is whether it produces good results, not on whether it mimics reality. In 1945 he got fiercely embroiled with the Cowles Commission for Economic Research, newly housed in Chicago University and funded by a wealthy investor, to develop a science of picking stocks. Friedman attacked its belief that good enough market simulations would open the way for the omniscient planner, making actual markets superfluous. He stood apart from the rational expectations revolution developed by his Chicago disciple Robert Lucas for exactly this reason: if the future was ergodic (i.e. probabilistic) there would be no need for markets.

Friedman died in 2006, aged 94. It would have been good to know how he would have explained the banking collapse of 2007-8, and the efforts of his admirer Ben Bernanke to avoid the mistakes of the Fed of 1930, both of which suggested that something more than money supply was involved in the good functioning of economies. Burns is sympathetic to Friedman; but to understand all does not mean to forgive all. Among his ‘blind spots and imperfections’ were his negative attitude to human rights, his lovefest with Barry Goldwater, his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and his engagement with the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s.

Burns argues that Friedman didn’t so much endorse Pinochet as attack his predecessor as threatening to bring left-wing totalitarianism to Chile. The economic market was more democratic than the political market. She recognises that this view became increasingly ‘unfashionable’ in the dawning era of human rights, defined by sanctions, boycotts, and de-investments, through which activists ‘found power in purity’. Nor could the ‘land of opportunity’ of which Friedman wrote so lovingly as a youngster have survived the culture wars which erupted in his last years.’ The Last Conservative’ sounds right. 

The travails of Britain’s first Labour government

Once the working classes were allowed to vote it was inevitable that sooner or later they would elect a government which reflected their interests. That moment came with the appointment, in January 1924, of the first Labour government.   

The circumstances could hardly have been less auspicious. There had been three general elections in as many years. No party had an overall majority. Labour, with 191 seats, was not even the largest, with the result that, throughout its short life, the government was entirely dependent on the goodwill of the Liberals, which soon ran out. With a couple of junior exceptions during the wartime coalition, no Labour MP had any experience of government. In the House of Lords, which, apart from the bishops and the law lords, was entirely hereditary, the party had virtually no support. It was, according to a witness at the time, ‘an untried body of men travelling in an unknown land surrounded by enemies’.

The immediate problem, and it was the subject of much newspaper interest, was what the Labour ministers would wear when being sworn in as privy counsellors by the King. Visits to the palace required top hats and tails, which were beyond the means of all but a handful of grandees. The King obligingly relaxed the dress code.

In the main, the new government was composed of men of humble origins. Many had left school at 12, and one had worked from the age of nine. The prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, although he soon adapted to the warm embrace of the establishment, was the illegitimate son of an agricultural worker. Philip Snowden, the chancellor of the exchequer, was the son of weavers. The home secretary, Arthur Henderson, was the illegitimate son of a domestic servant. The health secretary, John Wheatley, was one of eight children who grew up in a cottage without drainage or running water. And so on. They owed their secondary education, such as it was, to the trade unions and Methodism.  

There were exceptions. The education secretary, Sir Charles Trevelyan, came from a family of Liberal gentry, owners of a large estate in Northumberland. Perhaps the grandest member of the new government was Viscount Haldane, who had served as lord chancellor in a Liberal government and who, in the absence of a suitably qualified Labour man, gamely agreed to resume office. He proved to be the source of much useful advice to the fledgling government. In the absence of any credible candidate for foreign secretary, MacDonald decided to combine the job with the office of prime minister, adding greatly to his already considerable workload.

Many of the issues faced will be familiar today. The press, with the exception of the Daily Herald, were wholly hostile.   Expectations among Labour supporters were unrealistically high. The promise of a wealth tax (‘a capital levy’) was swiftly jettisoned; likewise home rule for Scotland. The state of the public finances left limited room for manoeuvre over tax and spending. Almost from the outset the government came under attack from left and right. In Northern Ireland, Unionists were boycotting the boundary commission set up to demarcate the border between north and south.   There was a scandal over the discovery that Sir Alexander Grant, a businessman friend of MacDonald’s, had given him the use of a Daimler and a large loan.

Despite all this, there were achievements: improvements in unemployment benefits, an increase in agricultural wages, a reduction of the national debt, a programme of urgently needed social housing building and the expansion of secondary education. It was far from being the revolution that many Labour supporters had demanded and their opponents feared, but as David Torrance writes in The Wild Men: ‘Many governments with substantial majorities and fuller parliamentary terms have delivered less.’

The main problem was recognition of Bolshevik Russia, which also involved the promise of a large loan, leading to MacDonald’s defeat in the Commons on a motion of no confidence in October. The Russian revolution and the murder of the Tsar and his family were still fresh in the public memory and many, not least the King, were unhappy at the prospect of normalising relations with the new regime. The final straw was the publication in the Daily Mail, four days before the autumn election, of the Zinoviev letter, purporting to be from the president of the Communist International, encouraging Labour members to engage in seditious activities – later revealed to be a forgery. Even so, Labour increased its share of the popular vote by more than a million.

Torrance tells an absorbing, meticulous and balanced story through the eyes of the main players, using a wide range of sources, some of which have not been seen before. The Royal archives, in particular, shed light on the fascinating relationship between MacDonald and George V. As the historian Peter Hennessy says: ‘In the nick of time, as its centenary approaches, David Torrance has rescued the first Labour government from the lay-by of British political history.’

A Century of Labour treads more familiar ground, taking the story from 1924 to the present. Jon Cruddas is a member of that relatively rare species, an active politician who is also an intellectual. He sets out to assess the party’s performance in and out of office with reference to unresolved tensions between the ideological and intellectual strands at its core. 

Labour does best, he observes, when it seeks to combine these various traditions. But when pragmatism (he calls it ‘utility’) takes precedence over human rights or the pursuit of social justice, the party tends to fall apart. Witness the Iraq debacle, which arguably (although Cruddas does not quite say this) led directly to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

Although Cruddas is essentially a Labour loyalist he is not particularly enamoured of the current leader:

It is difficult to identify the purpose of a future Starmer government – what he seeks to accomplish beyond achieving office. Labour appears content for the coming election to amount to a referendum on the performance of the governing Conservatives rather than a choice between competing visions of politics and justice.

Where will that lead in the long term? We shall see.

Why everyone is worried about Hezbollah

Hezbollah has escalated attacks against Israel in the last few days. The Iran-backed Lebanese militant organisation started firing missiles into Israel when the war against Hamas started last October. In the three months since, it has kept attacks limited in order to avoid an escalation into a full-scale war, but the situation is highly volatile.

Since the Israeli assassination of senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut a week ago, tensions have been rising. Hezbollah’s attacks have intensified further this week, following the killing of top commander Wissam Tawil. Tawil commanded Hezbollah’s elite Radwan fighting forces based close to the border with Israel. Today Israel killed two more Hezbollah commanders: one headed the organisation’s aerial forces in south Lebanon. Israel’s airforce and artillery have also attacked Hezbollah infrastructure.

Hezbollah forces have used drones equipped with explosives and missiles to attack strategic Israeli military targets. In one of the strikes, Hezbollah successfully hit an Israeli military command centre, but otherwise achievements have been limited.

Despite the recent escalation, Hezbollah prefers to avoid a full-scale war against Israel. Attacks on both sides have so far been limited and calculated. The organisation’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has made it clear earlier in the war that Hamas’s attack was done without coordination with Hezbollah, and although the organisation supports Hamas, they consider the war a Palestinian matter. 

With vast American forces in the region, and due to Israel’s heavy handed response to the attack against it on 7 October, Hezbollah would rather not engage in a war that will damage the considerable force it has managed to build over the years. Iran also wants to avoid war and uses its proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – to attack Israel.

Things are more complicated on the Israeli side. On the one hand, Hezbollah poses a greater risk to Israel than Hamas does. The Lebanese group is better trained and has substantially greater capabilities. It’s also believed that Hezbollah have been building an underground array of tunnels similar or even greater to that of Hamas. When the war started Israel evacuated tens of thousands of Israeli civilians living close to the borer with Lebanon. Despite living as refugees in temporary housing for the past three months, many refuse to return to their homes until the threat from Hezbollah is reduced significantly.

The US, along with France and several Arab nations, has been engaged with negotiations with Hezbollah in order to find a solution that will contain the war. Some of the proposed solutions include a withdrawal of Hezbollah forces away from the border and keeping them behind the Litany River in south Lebanon.

This alone wouldn’t be enough to ensure that Hezbollah doesn’t pose a threat. Its missiles can hit anywhere in Israel and those can still be fired from deep inside Lebanon. However, the further away the missiles are fired from, the more time Israelis have to find life-saving shelters. Although the missile threat is serious, the threat of an attack is similar to the one carried out by Hamas; infiltration of thousands of terrorists into Israeli towns, resulting in the killing, rape, torture and abduction of civilians, is an even greater risk and one that Israel cannot accept. 

To prevent Israel from initiating a full war against Hezbollah, it won’t be enough for Hezbollah to agree to move away from the border. There would have to be assurances that the area between the border and the Litani river is demilitarised. Israel would also want to see the tunnels destroyed.

When Israel kept a security force in this area between 1985 and 2000, UN forces located in the region had little or no effect on the actions of Hezbollah. It’s doubtful that peacekeeping forces will be able to stand up to Hezbollah’s heavily armed militants. Israel would need strong assurances that Hezbollah will be kept far enough from its border to significantly reduce its threat. This will require a presence of some form of effective military force able to deter Hezbollah and ready to fight them if necessary.

Despite the risk, the timing for another full-scale war is inconvenient for Israel. Three months of intense fighting in Gaza have taken their toll on the army and the economy. Fighting a second, and much more challenging front will not be impossible, but it will be very difficult and may limit achievements in Gaza. Israel would also need continued American support, which is not granted in case of war in Lebanon.

Israel’s decades-long experience fighting against Hezbollah adds to its reluctance with engage in another war. Although the IDF has superior capabilities, the 2006 war ended in a disappointing draw, after which Hezbollah became considerably stronger. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on a visit to the Middle East. One of his main goals is to stop an escalation into a full-scale war in Lebanon that may involve other regional forces, cause a devastating humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, and may require broader American military intervention. If Blinken manages to do the near-impossible and find a solution that will satisfy Israel’s security needs, it’s likely that a war will be avoided – at least for now.

Labour plan to find lockdown’s ‘ghost children’ will rile the Tories

Bridget Phillipson spent the morning setting out what she will prioritise in the Department for Education if Labour wins the election. The shadow education secretary parked her party’s tanks on the Tories’ lawn by giving a speech at the Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank co-founded by Iain Duncan Smith. She follows the shadow work and pensions secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, who also delivered a keynote speech on out-of-work benefits at the CSJ. Phillipson kicked off her address by praising Michael Gove for championing high expectations and standards during his time in the education brief – something that, she said, was no longer the case.

Labour MPs giving speeches at the CSJ will rile the Tories. But the bigger headache for Rishi Sunak is the issue Phillipson has chosen to champion: the ‘ghost children’ created by lockdown. She spoke first about the problems children had suffered in the classroom since the pandemic but then moved on to the even bigger issue – the children who are not there at all.

‘However excellent our teachers, however well-evidenced their approaches, however thoughtful our school leaders, they can’t teach children who aren’t there,’ she said. ‘We have a crisis of attendance in our schools and today that is the single biggest barrier to success for our children.’

She mentioned a school in Hastings where more than 47 per cent of the children were persistently absent in 2021/2022. It’s now well established that one of the consequences of lockdown, which saw children spend months out of the classroom, is the historically high levels of absence that have followed since in-class teaching returned. In 2019, just over 60,000 pupils were defined as ‘severely absent’. This rose by 134 per cent, to 140,000 last year, according to the CSJ.

In order to tackle this, Phillipson says a Labour government would legislate for a compulsory national register of home-schooled children as part of a package aimed at increasing attendance. Higher levels of mental health support and universal free breakfast clubs are also in the mix. This register would provide much clearer information about where the ‘ghost children’ are.

Under the proposed plans, councils would have a legal duty to keep a register of all children who are not in school, while parents would have to provide information about the education their child is receiving at home. At the moment, there are very few checks on children withdrawn from the state school system – with no mandatory inspections at home.

The problem for the Tories is that the register isn’t a particularly new idea. Instead, it is meant to be one of their policies. A compulsory national register of home-schooled children was in the 2022 Schools Bill – before the legislation was scrapped. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has said that the register remains a priority. But with the clock ticking in an election year, without action it may well fall to Labour to try to enact plans to which the Tories only paid lip service.

Paula Vennells has lost her CBE. That’s not enough

Paula Vennells has announced she will hand back her CBE with immediate effect, meaning the former Post Office boss now suffers the pain of a slightly shorter name as a consequence of the wrongful conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters.

A petition demanding that she be stripped of the honour had reached 1.2 million signatures, and Rishi Sunak had let it be known that he was very supportive of the Honours Committee looking into whether she should lose the gong. So it was only a matter of time – and Vennells has clearly decided to cut the drama short on this at least. 

Vennells and Ed Davey are the current lightning rods for a political debate that should have raged a good while ago. It is natural that people look for scapegoats as a way of channelling their anger about a scandal. But what is more productive is questioning how executives were able to cover up problems with the IT system that made innocent sub postmasters appear to have their fingers in the till. How was it that ministers were so ready to believe the big dogs? How was it that the justice system failed those who were wrongly accused?

So often the rotten thing in these scandals is the incentives for acting in certain ways. All the incentives for Post Office management pointed towards pretending nothing was going wrong. Those incentives haven’t changed that much: is losing a gong really the worst thing that should happen when one of the victims who was jailed was pregnant, and when a number of others have died or committed suicide before seeing justice? 

We see bad incentives in all institutions. The health service is one where it is less painful to cover up or justify a mistake than it is to be open about what happened and try to learn from it. In politics, the incentives are often geared towards whatever the big media issue of the day is, which is why we are suddenly seeing a frenzy of activity over the Post Office when no facts have changed in the past few weeks other than that more people know about the lives ruined years ago. We don’t have many long-term consequences for executives, whether in organisations like the Post Office or NHS, or indeed in government. And that means that human nature will lead people down the easiest paths, even if they cause terrible long term damage for those with less power than the recipients of CBEs. 

Why has Xi Jinping purged his senior commanders?

The Chinese Communist party will no doubt throw a militarised tantrum should Saturday’s election in Taiwan be won by Lai Ching-te, the more independence-minded of the candidates. Yet behind these histrionics lies an army in turmoil, with a purge of top generals raising serious doubts as to whether it is up to the task of fighting a war. 

The CCP has spent billions of dollars expanding and modernising its armed forces at a pace rarely seen in peacetime, with the aim of creating a cutting edge force. But the money thrown at the generals and their hunger to acquire shiny new kit has fuelled increasingly deep-seated corruption in its rapacious ranks. According to US intelligence assessments, Xi observed that some of the People Liberation Army Rocket Force’s missiles were filled with water instead of fuel and silos in western China had lids that could not properly open. The Rocket Force oversees China’s land-based missiles, including nuclear weapons, and would play a key role in any battle for Taiwan. The US assessments, reported by Bloomberg, suggest that military corruption is so extensive that President Xi Jinping is less likely to contemplate major military action over the coming years than had been assumed.

Shortly before new year, nine senior officers were ousted from the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, a move that typically precedes more serious action. Three were former commanders or vice commanders of the Rocket Force, one a former Air Force chief and another a Navy commander responsible for the South China Sea, where the CCP is aggressively asserting extensive territorial claims. Four were in charge of procuring equipment. Three of those purged were members of the Central Military Commission, the country’s top military decision-making body, which is chaired by Xi. 

Their removal follows the disappearance early last summer of Li Yuchao, the last Rocket Force commander and his deputy. Defence Minister Li Shangfu also vanished without explanation last August after just six months in the job. During his last public appearance, at a security forum in Beijing, Li said the world was entering a period of ‘instability’ – though that would seem to apply more aptly to the top echelons of the PLA. These are likely to be just the more visible tip of a purge that goes far deeper and broader. 

Inevitably most attention has been on the Rocket Force, the most secretive and sensitive branch of China’s military. ‘The strategic nuclear force is what China relies on as the bottom line of its national security, and the last resort on Taiwan,’ according to Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington DC-based thinktank. ‘It will take some time for China to clean up the mess and restore confidence in the Rocket Force’s competence and trustworthiness.’

When Xi came to power in 2012, he pledged to clean up the PLA, which ran a business empire so big that preparing for war appeared to play second fiddle to money-making. The PLA is also a party organisation, which means its loyalty is supposed to be first and foremost to the CCP, enforced through a system of political commissars, which Xi sought to bolster. It is a system that has been criticised for undermining military professionalism, and in spite (or possibly because of) Xi’s efforts, the graft only seems to have got worse. Many among those now being purged are his own hand-picked officials, including defence minister Li, which will inevitably be seen as an indictment of Xi’s abilities and judgement. That said, suggestions that it is all down to graft should be treated with caution. ‘Corruption’ is a catch-all used by the party as a cloak for all manner of misdemeanours, real or imagined, and is frequently a veil for the purge of political opponents. 

Speculation has inevitably centred on whether the purged commanders leaked military information at a time when China is undertaking a substantial expansion of its nuclear arsenal, making the Rocket Force of special interest to Western intelligence agencies. CIA Director William Burns said that rebuilding human spy networks in China is a top priority after they were compromised and ruthlessly dismantled more than a decade ago. Between 2010 and 2012 dozens of CIA sources were reportedly killed or disappeared after Beijing cracked the systems used by the agency to communicate with them. ‘We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods,’ Burns told the Aspen Security Forum last year.

The broader espionage theory was boosted by last year’s disappearance of Xi’s hand-picked foreign minister Qin Gang, amid rumours that Qin, a former ambassador to America had fathered a child with his mistress, a TV presenter, who also vanished. There have been suggestions that Qin or his Cambridge-educated mistress were compromised by western intelligence agencies, and that the CCP moved against Qin after being tipped off by Moscow. 

Such rumours are impossible to confirm, but there has in recent months been a level of paranoia in China that is intense even by the standards of the CCP. A new anti-espionage law defines spying so broadly that it would seem to cover just about anything the party chooses. The Ministry of State Security (MSS), responsible for both espionage abroad and counterintelligence at home, has urged citizens to snoop on friends and neighbours, looking out for suspicious behaviour. In July, officials in the southwestern city Chengdu blocked Tesla cars from areas Xi was visiting out of fear that the cars, brimming with sensors and cameras, could be used for espionage or sabotage. Teslas had earlier been barred from military complexes and housing compounds. This week, the MSS claimed British intelligence services had used the head of a foreign consultancy to spy on the country. This followed the arrest last year of two Chinese nationals for allegedly spying for the CIA. With the UK and US accusing Beijing of unprecedented levels of espionage, the new Cold War is fast beginning to echo the last one against the Soviet Union.

In addition to the ousted military officers, China’s new year purge included three senior leaders at defence equipment firms, expelled from the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top political advisory body to the CCP. They included Wu Yansheng, chairmanof China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, who has won national awards for his contribution to the space sector. The company makes tactical missile systems. The promotion of contractors from China’s military industrial complex to influential political roles has accelerated over recent months, part of the Xi’s effort to enhance ‘military-civil fusion’ – a policy of harnessing technology from the nominally private sector for the benefit of the military. It could well be that these dismissals are specifically related to corruption at the Rocket Force, but ‘military-civil fusion’ is of particular interest to America’s spies and is a key reason why the US is restricting sales of advanced technology to China.

In a new year statement, the PLA’s official newspaper pledged to wage a ‘war on graft’ this year, suggesting more purges are on the way. With one eye on how pervasive corruption has undermined Russia’s bungled water effort in Ukraine, President Xi must surely realise that the sorry state of the PLA undermines his new year pledge that Taiwan would ‘surely be unified’ with China. On the eve of a democratic election in Taiwan that would never be allowed in China, Xi’s main instrument for achieving his aim appears anything but combat-ready, more paper dragon than people’s army, stumbling along to the tune of deep-seated graft.

Can Macron’s ‘Brutus’ PM stop Le Pen?

Emmanuel Macron has begun the new year by replacing one Socialist prime minister with another. Out goes Elisabeth Borne and in comes Gabriel Attal, who at 34 is almost half as young as his 62-year-old predecessor. Macron hopes that Attal will provide his ailing presidency with some youthful vigour after the disastrous 20 months of Borne’s premiership. The arch technocrat wasn’t Macron’s first pick for the choice of PM in May 2022, but the left-wing members of his party made it known that his first choice, Catherine Vautrin, was unacceptable on account of her conservatism. So Borne got the job, but proved inadequate and uninspiring.  

As Le Figaro put it, her government was ‘chaotic, abrasive and sometimes explosive’, and she herself earned the nickname ‘Madame 49.3’. This was on account of the number of times she forced through unpopular bills by using clause 49.3 of the constitution, which permits government to push through legislation without putting it to a parliamentary vote. Borne resorted to this undemocratic measure 23 times in 20 months; few are sorry to see her go. 

Will Attal change the dangerous drift of the Macron administration? Le Figaro thinks not: ‘Changing one face at the top does nothing to change the overall picture,’ they remarked. This scepticism is shared by many on the left. Interviewed on television on Monday night before Borne’s successor had been named, the MEP Raphaël Glucksmann joked that he already knew who it was: ‘It’s Emmanuel Macron! And the foreign minister will also be Emmanuel Macron, as will the defence minister and the culture minister’. 

Attal is Macron’s fourth PM is under seven years. The first, Edouard Philippe, was dismissed in 2020 because he had become too popular for Macron’s taste; next was the spectacularly dull Jean Castex, who lasted 22 months and then came Borne.

Philippe is expected to run for the 2027 presidency and so is the equally ambitious Attal. He was profiled by a current affairs magazine in October and described as Macron’s ‘Brutus’; evidently the president believes he has his measure.

At 34, Attal is the youngest prime minister in the 66 years of the Fifth Republic and also the first openly homosexual premier. Unlike the bloodless Borne, Attal is comfortable in front of a camera and is a polished communicator. A consultant by profession, he comes from wealthy bourgeois stock in the south of Paris and was educated at elite establishments. He gained his first significant political experience working as an advisor for the socialist government of François Hollande, and was an early defector to Macron’s En Marche! in 2017.

In July last year, Attal was appointed minister of education and he displayed tenacity and boldness during his short tenure; first, there was the Abaya Islamic dress controversy and, a few weeks later, a schoolteacher in Arras was murdered in the playground by an Islamist.

Islamic extremism is just one of the pressing issues facing Attal. The economy, immigration and insecurity are also hefty files in his in-tray. On Monday, the official crime figures for 2023 were released; they made for grim reading. Violent assaults and crimes of a sexual nature are soaring.

This is just one of several reasons why Marine Le Pen’s National Rally are riding high in the polls. Macron wants Attal to rein in the right but there is a growing feeling in France that Le Pen’s party are unstoppable. Attal has youth on his side, but he hasn’t got time. 

Joey Barton doesn’t know anything about women in sport 

Joey Barton – the Pied Piper of disaffected football fans – has had a busy week. He began by comparing female football commentators to Fred and Rose West, the serial killers who murdered 12 young women. He then went on to imply that female commentators had slept their way to the top.

It would be unwise to take Barton too seriously. It’s long been the chosen road of the deeply insecure man to attack confident women. I’ve worked in sport all my life. And throughout it I’ve faced opposition from the small-minded, although never from the stars themselves or the people who matter. It’s always the man in the county blazer with his many chins resting on a grubby collar who mutters about the good ol’ days when women clutched frying pans instead of microphones. 

So, if Joey Barton thinks he’s a lone crusader against the tyranny of women in sport, he’s not. He’s a throwback to a rather dim past. When I became the editor of Rugby World magazine in the mid-90s, the news was met with booing in the Houses of Parliament. When I joined the Times as rugby editor, readers rang the paper to say they would never read it again. This was before I’d written a word.   

I became the first woman since the 1970s to watch a football match in Iran when I travelled out there to report on a match for the Times. The ban on women was lifted for one game, and I was spat at in the streets and elbowed into the gutter. All this was before Barton got his first professional contract. 

Women working in male-dominated fields have waded through this sort of excrement throughout their careers. I remember going to interview female boxers in underground gyms because it was illegal for them to box until 1998. How crazy that sounds now. 

Female football writers and commentators have had more abuse than most over the years. Then came the big revolution; the England women’s football team grabbed the hearts of the nation, and suddenly, women and girls across the country had a team of heroes to support. I have friends who never watched football until the women began easing through the Euros. Then they were hooked.

The thing that men like Joey Barton appear to forget is that women aren’t a minority group; they make up most of the population, so it cannot have been a surprise to anyone that Mary Earps won Sports Personality of the Year. Barton objected, of course. But the key factor is that Earps won because it was a public vote. She won because she’s popular, people like her, they love what she stands for, and they admire the confidence, commitment and sheer guts it takes to rise to the top of a sport that shunned women for so long. 

Now women who watched the glorious antics of the Lionesses have started to watch the men’s game as well because the women’s club game receives very little mainstream coverage. It means that audiences across football are changing. The evolution has been coming for a while, but it has been accelerated by the interest in the Lionesses. 

That women are involved in men’s football is not new. But what is new is that the roles of women in football have become more customer-facing. You now see women on screen, hear them and of course have a right to comment on them. What you don’t have a right to do is compare them to two of the worst serial killers the country has ever known – just because they are female. 

The fundamental point underlying Barton’s arguments is that women shouldn’t comment on men’s football because they know nothing about it. But I would suggest that Barton knows nothing about women in sport. He knows nothing about the battles these women have fought, nothing about the abuse they have received along the way, the lack of facilities, the lack of support. He knows nothing about how hard they have worked to be taken seriously. Yet he chooses to hurl vile abuse at them all the same. 

The problem he must come to terms with is that while he and his band of lunatic followers waste their time throwing insults that are becoming wilder and more bizarre by the day, the very women they are hurling them at are working harder, gaining more experience and continuing to weave their way into the fabric of the sport they love. And there’s nothing that Barton can do about it.

Judge Judy endorses Nikki Haley

Reality TV heavyweight “Judge Judy” Sheindlin endorsed Nikki Haley for president on Tuesday.

“I’m proud to endorse Nikki Haley because she is whip smart, has executive credentials and was a superb governor,” Sheindlin said. “She has international gravitas as ambassador to the United Nations. She is principled, measured and has that elusive quality of real common sense. I truly think she can restore America and believe she is the future of this great nation.”

Haley is undoubtedly excited to have the support of her own reality-TV star to leverage against Donald Trump’s Apprentice fame. “Judge Judy is a no-nonsense lady who has earned the respect of millions of Americans from her courtroom by being thoughtful, fair and honest,” Haley said in a press release. “I’m honored to have her support.” 

But Haley’s latest endorsement may not be enough to tip her over the edge in the New Hampshire primary. According to a recent poll from the Boston Globe, the former United Nation’s ambassador is losing steam in the early-voting state. Haley was polling at 29 percent last month, but has since dropped to 20 percent in January, twenty points behind Donald Trump. According to CNN’s latest poll, however, Haley is lagging just seven points behind Trump. 

Despite her recent gaffes about the cause of the Civil War and growing up with “black friends,” Cockburn doesn’t suspect New Hampshire will sour on Haley anytime soon: she has a newfound affinity for the Granite State and recently told New Hampshire Republicans that they “correct” the results from the Iowa primaries. Haley later clarified that she didn’t intend to shade Iowa and only meant that every state has its own personality.

Haley has gained enough traction to draw Trump’s attacks. Last week, the former president began running ads against Haley for the first time in New Hampshire. Along with the MAGA super PAC, he has spent $4.5 million on anti-Haley commercials.

“President Trump has long said he’d train his sights on whomever is number two in the race,” Jason Miller, a Trump advisor, said. “Rob DeSanctimonious is approaching single digits everywhere and his campaign is on life support, which means it’s Nikki Haley’s turn in the barrel.”

How long will the GOP keep going to Iowa and New Hampshire?

Not enough people are asking a pretty obvious question: will 2024 be the last cycle where Iowa and New Hampshire are the first states in the nation to vote on the presidential nomination? Democrats have already ditched them. The decision by party leaders to move away from the Iowa-New Hampshire schedule for the first caucus and first primary in the nation was motivated by a recognition that the two states no longer represent the populations at the center of their current coalition. In other words: there are too many white people in these places. So South Carolina is now their first real state that counts, at least for this cycle — but probably for the foreseeable future, as Democrats shift toward their coalition of black Americans, single women and college-educated suburbanites. 

The two parties tend to emulate each other when it comes to schedules, but Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t as non-representative for Republicans as they are for Democrats. That said, the unique aspect that makes this a real possibility is the level of personal vindictiveness that resides well within the capacity of the frontrunner. If New Hampshire, for instance, were to reject Donald Trump in favor of Nikki Haley, it is hard to believe that he would not exert his considerable strength over the Republican National Committee to take away the state’s first in the nation status as punishment for their sin. And if you don’t believe he’s that petty, well, I don’t think you know the man.

As I note in my latest Fox News podcast, the history of these two states as leading the determinative primary process for both parties is a lot younger than you might think, dating back only to the 1970s. There’s no particular reason Republicans should invest so much weight in two states that have, in the past thirty years, selected just two candidates who eventually became presidents. And for a GOP coalition that, similarly to Democrats, has shifted dramatically in the past ten years, it makes a lot more sense to have states earlier in the process that offer more opportunities for this remade electorate to weigh in. The fact that people like Bob Vander Plaats and Chris Sununu will matter far less in such a shifted process, well, that’s just a bonus.

The shifts don’t need to be dramatic, and they could easily stay within the regions in question. A state like Wisconsin is more critical for a general election than a state like Iowa — and a state like North Carolina is more indicative of the kind of electorate a GOP candidate needs to meet than a state like South Carolina. But winning a state like New Hampshire — with a mere 1.3 million people who together elected two Democratic senators, two Democratic House members, out of a population that is 93 percent white and, according to Gallup, the least religious in the country — is just not representative of where the Republican Party is, where it is going, or where it wants to go.

Perhaps Republicans will hold on to tradition, even a relatively short one, and stick to Iowa and New Hampshire for the next few cycles. But it’s really only a question of when the party shifts, not if. These states are not growing, and they are not filled with the types of voters Republicans need to win on a national level to take back the White House.

Why no one in Japan is talking about the Fujitsu Post Office scandal

‘They are a national disgrace.’ That was the response of a Japanese friend when I asked for her opinion on Fujitsu, the Japanese company at the heart of the recent UK Post Office IT scandal. But her answer was not in any way coloured by the company’s involvement in the affair (they supplied the dodgy software), of which she knew absolutely nothing. But then why should she? There has not been a single news item in the Japanese media. And ITVx is not yet available in Asia.

The Japan Times, for example, found space yesterday for a piece on the ‘world’s oldest pyramid’ in Indonesia (which may in fact not be) and a piece on the viability of the Panama Canal. But there was none for a major international scandal that could see one of Japan’s corporate titans humiliated on the world stage and forced to pay millions in compensation.

When I brought my friend up to speed on what appears to have happened in the UK she wasn’t in the least surprised. Her assessment had been based on Fujitsu’s domestic track record.

In 2002, Fujitsu was involved in a story related to faulty ATMs that resulted in 2.5 million delayed debits. Then, in 2020, Fujitsu software supporting the operations of the Tokyo stock exchange failed causing the loss of a full day’s trading. The company’s president Takahito Tokita apologised profusely and took a 50 per cent pay cut for four months.

There was more contrition last June when 123 municipalities had to suspend the operation of a Fujitsu-based system to issue residence cards to holders of the country’s ‘My Number’ ID card. This followed a serious problem the previous month when machines in convenience stores issuing municipal certificates malfunctioned. The June problems were eventually blamed on those from May not being properly fixed.

You might then have expected some interest in the UK story from the Japanese media. But not a bit of it: as with the recent sexual abuse story concerning one of Japan’s most influential impresarios Johnny Kitagawa, it was left to the international press, and particularly (credit where credit is due) the BBC to do some digging.

In an article from the BBC website, several former Fujitsu employees commented on the dysfunctional culture at the company. Apparently, Fujitsu is extremely reluctant to hire full-time high-quality software technicians for short-term projects. Instead, it relies on low-paid operatives in outsourced companies with the inevitable erratic and inconsistent results.

The BBC cites Satoshi Nakajima who worked at NTT (Japan’s premier telecommunications company) before becoming a foundational member of Microsoft. Satoshi characterises Fujitsu as a zombie company staggering on thanks to its close relationship with the government. The cozy relationship ensures its continual profitability despite the ossified company culture and inadequate tech capabilities.

Cynicism abounds here as to that relationship and especially how the company was chosen to handle the massive My Number project. In 2015, Japan Press Weekly reported that firms selected for the project, including Fujitsu, had made donations to the Liberal Democrat party totally 240 million yen (approximately £1.3 million) over the previous five years. Fujitsu was responsible for 60 million yen (£330,000) of this according to the article.

Whether that made a difference or not is unknown, but it plays into the idea of the cozy back-scratching relationship between the corporate world and government officials. For example: it has long been the tacitly accepted practice for retiring officials from government agencies and ministries to receive richly remunerated jobs at major companies – for services rendered. It even has a rather poetic name ‘amakudari’ (descent from heaven).

Companies like Fujitsu offer especially soft landings. In 1997, the deputy governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) Fukui Toshihiko resigned after a bribery scandal involving senior officials at the bank. He settled nicely at a Fujitsu research institute, where he allegedly made a fortune, before ascending back to heaven and governorship of the BOJ in 2003.

But does cronyism (the media is an essential part of the system) entirely explain the lack of interest? Absolutely no one it seems, including a former company president, who had worked at the firm for four decades and answered ‘Horizon? What’s Horizon?’ when asked about the story by the BBC, seems to have any knowledge of or interest in the story unfolding in the UK.

Politics Professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University Koichi Nakano acknowledges the closeness of Fujitsu to the government but puts more blame on the media and to an extent, the public. ‘In general, Japanese media is timid in holding the government to account but even worse when it comes to investigating corporate wrongdoing, unless it affects the Japanese customers directly. There is only so much foreign news, and the incentive for informing the blissfully ignorant Japanese public about a foreign scandal that would only antagonise an important sponsor just isn’t there,’ he told me.

And there we have it: as someone once said, the first step in understanding something is wanting to understand it. That desire, in the case of the Post Office IT scandal, has recently been awoken and energised in the UK. It still appears to be lacking in Japan.

Police are in a muddle over transgender strip searches

Have you ever been strip searched? I have. The date it happened – 7 September 2020 – is etched on my mind. That morning, as part of a security sweep on HMP Wandsworth’s H Wing, a group of male and female officers ‘span’ my cell. With the door closed, the women left, and one of the officers asked me to remove my vest, then shorts, then boxers. Next, they asked me to squat, while one of the men bent down and shone a torch at my anus. I felt vulnerable. My knees shook. When he said: ‘Sorry mate, I promise you this is worse for me than it is for you’, I felt a little better. I think I even laughed. But if a woman had been present I would have felt far more humiliated.

Fortunately the law is clear about how such searches should take place. Section 55 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) says: ‘A constable may not carry out an intimate search of a person of the opposite sex’. But are some forces allowing transgender officers to carry out searches of prisoners of the opposite sex? A worrying report – State Sanctioned Sexual Assault – by the Women’s Rights Network (WRN), suggests, at the very least, that police are confused on this issue.

The report highlights a policy paper approved by the National Police Chiefs’ Council in December 2021, which called for the ‘adoption of a consistent searching policy for transgender officers and staff across forces nationally’. The paper said that ‘once a transgender colleague has transitioned, they will search persons of the same gender as their own lived gender.’ This, it said, would remove any ‘potential employment barrier for transgender individuals to consider the Police Service as an
employer of choice for transgender individuals.’ But what about the rights of prisoners?

Someone under arrest is very conscious of their powerlessness. In such circumstances, would a vulnerable person feel able to speak up if they were uncomfortable being searched by someone of the opposite sex? The coercive pressure to comply may be overwhelming.

The report claims that, at the time of the December 2021 meeting, 11 police forces were permitting searching on the basis of ‘lived gender’, and a further seven permitted officers who held a Gender Recognition Certificate to ‘search on the basis of their lived gender’. This muddle was clearly unsustainable, but so is the outcome decided by the police chiefs: to possibly allow trans police officers to search people of a different sex.

By late 2022, when the WRN’s Freedom of Information requests were answered, the situation was worse: 35 out of 47 police forces had implemented or were implementing this new policy. The Women’s Rights Network (WRN) said that those responses revealed ‘a lack of consultation with any women’s groups’ and ‘willingness to disregard legislation that opposite-sex searching is likely to be unlawful’. In the year or so since, there is no sign that the police have seen sense.

Imagine you’re a vulnerable woman who’s just been arrested. Around half of women prisoners have been the victims of sexual assault, and the rate for those arrested is likely to be similar. For such women, being searched by a male police officer – and being told that if they refuse or object on the grounds of the officer’s sex they may face further sanction under hate crime legislation – is likely to be intensely distressing.

The police, as with many other organisations, are in a mess when it comes to the gender debate. Indeed, the confusion cuts both ways: for some time, people who’ve been arrested and are facing an intimate search have been able to ask for a search to be carried out by an officer of their self-identified gender. Might this risk compelling officers to conduct opposite sex searches – a situation which could mean they are breaking the law as set out under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. What kind of country allows this situation to happen? What kind of country allows the police to act in this way? Not a country where the rules of law, or of basic decency matter.

The real reason people are flocking to red states

It’s no secret that Americans are moving from blue states to red ones. According to recently released Census Bureau data, the five with the largest population loss to other states between July 2022 and July 2023 were California (-338,371), then New York (-216,778), Illinois (-83,839), New Jersey (-44,666), Massachusetts (-39,149) and Maryland (-30,905). The five states with the largest overall increases during the same period were Texas (473,453), Florida (365,205), Georgia (116,077), South Carolina (90,600) and Tennessee (77,512).

The most frequently cited reason for this ongoing blue-to-red migration is taxes — or, more correctly, the opportunity to pay less and fewer of them. When American Enterprise Institute researcher Mark Perry compared the top ten states people were leaving in 2021 with the top ten they were moving to, the former had an average maximum income tax rate of 8 percent, while the places they were heading for had an average rate of just 3.8 percent. Even when it comes to gas taxes, drivers in red states pay significantly less than those on blue roads.

Job opportunity is also a strong red state lure. Of the seventeen fastest-hiring states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fourteen went for Trump in the last election. And of the three that went for Biden, two — Georgia and Nevada — are really more purple than blue. On the other hand, all ten of the slowest-hiring states voted for Biden.    

And although it tends to be mentioned less frequently than either taxes or jobs, housing affordability is clearly a third reason why people are leaving blue jurisdictions. Indeed, the median home price in the ten states currently gaining the most people averages 23 percent less than in the ten states losing the most.

Personal income may remain higher in more liberal parts of the country, but home ownership is now greater in red states, because buying a residence not only costs less but annual price increases average half as much. According to Foundation Title, 67.9 percent of households in Republican-leaning states are homeowners, compared to 63.5 percent in Democrat areas.

But as impressive as all these red state plusses are from the perspective of a would-be resident, they do not give us much insight into why they are even possible. After all, Republican governments presumably have the same obligation to fund their state colleges and universities, operate public transportation, maintain critical infrastructure and provide the many other social services that blue state governments do. How, then, can red legislatures fulfill these responsibilities while keeping individual tax rates low, offering the financial incentives needed to keep jobs-producing businesses and foregoing the kinds of regulatory levies which inflate the cost of home construction?

Blue states will claim that their red counterparts are not nearly as efficient as they seem but are in fact heavily subsidized by Democrat taxpayers. This argument, taken as gospel by many in the media, is based on the supposed unfairness of what is technically known as the federal “balance of payment” ratio — that is, the difference between what Washington collects in taxes from a given state and the amount that same state gets back in federal funding for various national programs.

In 2019, for example (the last year with data undistorted by Covid spending), red Texas got back $1.09 for every dollar its citizens sent to DC while blue California received only 97 cents. To blue state politicians, such variations are proof that the supposed red state advantage is really an accounting illusion, nothing short of a Democrat bailout made possible by an unfair distribution of public money.

Yet stepping back from conveniently selected state-on-state comparisons, this blue defense quickly falls apart. In the first place, several red states, including North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Nebraska consistently receive less money from the federal treasury than they contribute. At the same time, blue New Mexico, Maine, and Hawaii get back $3.11, $2.12, and $1.98 respectively for every federal tax dollar collected.

More importantly, as ALEC Center for State Fiscal Reform legislative manager Skip Estes has noted, the ability of Congress to print money means that the vast majority of states, red and blue, consistently send less to Washington than they get. In fact, only ten states have negative balance of payment ratios. Democrat politicians may try to portray red state governments as welfare cheats, unable to survive without blue state charity, but the numbers clearly contradict that analogy.

The other blue explanation for the relatively low cost of red government is that Republican legislatures skimp on social services, providing poor and middle-class families with an inferior quality of life. Progressive journalist William Kleinknecht has even accused Florida, Texas and other red states of deliberately starving their K-12 education systems, local hospitals, pollution control agencies and other programs, just so they can lure new businesses and wealthy residents with the promise of low or no income taxes. He claims that GOP controlled statehouses across the country have “had dire results for ordinary citizens,” a development which “has largely escaped the lens of the national media.”

Yet when it comes to the services that voters themselves most value, it is the blue states which appear to be falling short. A tally of independent studies by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Steven Malanga shows that “on the core tasks that people think government should do — building roads and bridges, running airports and transit systems, or otherwise spending tax dollars well — high-tax [blue] states rank low, despite enormous financial resources.” Similarly, in its most recent annual ranking of  “the Ten US States with the Best Infrastructure,” CNBC put only one blue state (Minnesota at number ten) and one swing state (Nevada at number eight) on its list.

Of course, red state politicians have their own explanation for how they are able to keep taxes low, attract jobs producing businesses and offer more affordable housing than blue policymakers: they simply use the limited revenues they do collect far more efficiently and effectively than a Democrat-run government would. Perhaps not the most surprising answer from the right side of the aisle, but is it true?

To find out, the finance company WalletHub recently used twenty-nine metrics to measure the quality of healthcare, safety, education, construction and environmental services in all fifty states. WalletHub researchers then compared each state’s overall services score to the total taxes paid per capita, so that states could be ranked according to where Americans get the best return in public services for the taxes they pay. States were determined to be red or blue according to how they voted in the 2020 presidential election.

As it turned out, red states scored an average rank of 21.52, compared to the average blue rank of 29.48 (The lower the number, the more residents get for their money.) Once more, three states with some of the lowest overall taxes (Florida, Texas and Wyoming) were in the top ten, while three with some of the highest (California, Connecticut, and New York) sank to the bottom ten.

If nothing else, these results suggest an interest split in GOP governance. While Republicans at the national level always seem to have trouble delivering on campaign promises to “trim bureaucratic waste” and make government “operate more like a business,” their state and local counterparts actually do a pretty good job of it.

The WalletHub study also offers some hope to residents of blue states who fear that their economic problems may be too mysterious or complex ever to be solved. It shows that what really makes any region prosperous is the determination of its politicians to do the best they can with a modest revenue stream..