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Can German cars survive Donald Trump?
In 2003, Donald Trump took delivery of a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a $450,000 German supercar that blended precision engineering with Formula 1 bravado. Photographed grinning over its bodywork in Manhattan, he looked every bit the unabashed playboy flaunting a new toy. Two decades on, he’s threatening to hammer the very firm that built it – and Germany’s car industry as a whole – with a 25 per cent tariff on European auto imports.
Germany’s post-Cold War boom was built on a single assumption: that ever-deeper globalisation was here to stay. As we explore in our book Broken Republik and its German sibling Totally Kaputt?, the country’s carmakers made an all-in bet on the so-called End of History. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the eastward expansion of the EU, they surged forward on a tide of open borders, cheap energy, and liberal trade rules. Made in Germany vehicles – engineered to perfection and exported at scale – became global icons. But the world they were built for is crumbling.
Trump’s proposed tariffs could wipe out billions in revenue and a quarter of future profits at firms like Porsche and Mercedes-Benz. Signature models like the 911 and S-Class are suddenly vulnerable in their most important market. And if the EU retaliates, German-built cars produced in America for export back to Europe – including BMW’s South Carolina SUVs – could be caught in the crossfire. The delicate geometry of globalisation is coming undone, and for export-dependent Germany, there’s no Plan B.
An S-Class sedan, gliding through the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, was built, unsurprisingly, in Sindelfingen – a long-time stronghold of Mercedes manufacturing just outside Stuttgart. But Germany doesn’t just export cars to America – it builds them there too. That gleaming BMW X6 under the glass roof of BMW Welt in Munich? Not Bavarian, but made in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and shipped back across the Atlantic. A Mercedes GLE crossing a Shanghai intersection? Built not in Stuttgart, but in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This global ballet of production – optimised for efficiency, not borders – is under siege.
And Germany’s car giants have few options. Trump’s push to bring advanced manufacturing back to the US leaves them stranded. In the short term, they can raise prices and hope Americans will pay for the Made in Germany chassis stamp. If not, they must either take a profit hit or cede market share, in the worst case both will happen. The long-term alternative – shifting more production stateside – is costly and unravels decades of finely tuned logistics. Every option is a retreat from the system they perfected.
At Porsche, the situation is already dire. Profits are slumping due to high costs and sluggish pricing, partly due to a price war in China. It’s now worth less than half its peak value after Volkswagen’s crown jewel was partially listed on the Frankfurt exchange in 2022. It’s cutting 1,900 jobs as part of a plan to revive margins, which were once the envy of the industry. Volkswagen itself has threatened factory closures, and BMW and Mercedes are also enacting cost reductions. Battling with Chinese competition and a structural shift away from combustion engines, Trump’s tariffs could not come at a worse time.
For Germany, the trouble of its automakers isn’t just about an economic pillar weakening. It gnaws at a key aspect of postwar identity. The industry employs over 780,000 people, with entire regions built around it. Streets and squares bear the names of automotive pioneers such as Rudolf Diesel and Carl Benz. The motorway network, with its famous limit-free stretches, is a symbol of national pride, immortalised by Kraftwerk’s ode to fun, fun, fun on the Autobahn. After the shame of the Nazi era, cars transported a more peaceful message about the German Volk. One commentator even controversially summed it up by saying the Mercedes-Benz star had replaced the swastika as the national symbol.
So Germany’s auto woes cut deep and reflect profound fissures in the economic model. Shielded by American security and fuelled by Russian gas, the former Exportweltmeister honed industrial efficiency to a fine art. But now, with Ukraine at war, China flexing its industrial might, and protectionism resurgent, that model looks dangerously outdated.
The signs have been visible for years. Dieselgate destroyed the moral high ground of German engineering. Volkswagen and Mercedes were exposed for using software to cheat emissions tests. The cost ran into the tens of billions, but the reputational damage was worse. The 2015 scandal marked the beginning of the end of Germany’s postwar self-image: competent, honest, unassailable.
The industry’s struggles haven’t stopped. Coddled by the German government, the automakers were slow to pivot electric cars and looked at the transition as a powertrain issue rather than an overhaul in the entire idea of what a car is. It struggled for years with over-the-air updates that Tesla and Chinese rivals had long mastered. Too slow moving and stuck in a tradition of horsepower and handling to adapt to tech-style development, German carmakers struggled to keep pace.
Amid all this upheaval, there was the trusted US market. Americans still liked big powerful cars and were willing to pay for them. High-margin gas guzzlers and premium badge appeal kept sales and profits buoyant. But even US consumers have their limits, if a German badge suddenly costs 25 per cent more.
Economic anxiety in Germany has already propelled the far-right AfD to replace the centre-left Social Democrats as the dominant working-class party. And amid the political convulsions of a massive spending package, the nationalist party is nipping at the heels of the centre-right CDU. Germany’s once-reliable postwar political duopoly is crumbling and a more volatile era is emerging.
Trump’s tariffs are just part of the reckoning
The deeper malaise lies in the global retreat from the liberal order that once powered Germany’s economic engine. As Chancellor Olaf Scholz toured the country in late 2024, trying to revive his reputation after years of economic stagnation and political gridlock, he was met with frustration that cut across party lines. Disillusionment with the status quo was palpable, as voters questioned whether Germany’s leaders still had the vision – or the tools – to chart a course through mounting global headwinds.
The 23 February election confirmed the growing disillusionment. A third of voters backed parties outside the mainstream. The Social Democrats and Christian Democrats are struggling to cobble together a centrist alliance that offers little in the way of new ideas. Similar ‘Grand Coalitions’ backed three out of Angela Merkel’s four terms in an era when problems like aging infrastructure and an inadequate energy system were allowed to fester.
Merkel was known as the ‘auto chancellor’ for her accommodative stance toward the industry. She had long given lip service to electric vehicles, but never backed that up with policy that would have prodded the manufacturers to innovate. She allowed Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW to develop dangerous dependencies on state-owned companies in China, operating under the assumption that German engineering excellence would always have an advantage.
Those assumptions have proven to be naive, and Germany is beginning to pay the price. Trump’s tariffs are just part of the reckoning. It’s not that Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes are disappearing, but their dominance is no longer assured. And the same goes for Germany itself—unless both the nation and its flagship industry embrace bold innovation and reinvention. The road ahead is uncertain, but if Germany is to lead once more, it must rediscover the spirit that made it great. The future belongs to those who push forward—Vorsprung durch Technik.
Recollections of a 1980s indie kid
It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours.
The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile indie fan in the suburbs of Chicago and cycling 20 miles to get this record that autumn. I could just get the 85 bus from Chorlton.
The events of 40 years ago have been in my thoughts because of a recently released compilation album, Sensitive, curated, as they say these days, by music writer Pete Paphides, and featuring bands from a scene now largely forgotten. The best known you probably remember: Primal Scream, Orange Juice, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Wedding Present. Others, who were ubiquitous on the college gig scene, you probably don’t: the Pastels, the Bodines, Biff Bang Pow! Some I’m not sure I had heard of even at the time: the Sea Urchins, the Field Mice, the Nivens.
To complicate matters, the June Brides don’t feature on Paphides’ album, though some members did appear at its launch party. Perhaps this is a licensing issue as, unusually, that album isn’t on Spotify either; or maybe it’s because, with their added brass, the June Brides weren’t typical of the genre. But they were my favourites from that scene, along with two other bands, the Loft and the Weather Prophets, who were in my mind one because they were fronted by the same singer, Pete Astor. And his two tracks on Sensitive have become my early spring 2025 earworms. This is particularly apposite because another of his Weather Prophets tunes was actually called ‘Worm in my Brain’. Astor also gives us ‘Why Does the Rain?’, which continues ‘always seem to fall on me…’ – a question so perfectly, drippily indie that a generation later Travis posed it again with slightly modified phrasing, ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’, and had a global hit. Another example of rain falling on Astor perhaps.
These bands came at the very tail-end of post-punk new wave and were a small counterpoint to that mid-1980s mainstream Brit explosion of everything from Dire Straits to the Stock Aitken Waterman acts such as Kylie and Rick Astley. And it was only small because, unlike new wave proper, they rarely troubled the charts. Paphides opts for the catch-all term Sensitive (from a song title from those softly spoken Field Mice) to characterise the scene. At the time, the school of indie 1985-6 was more often described as ‘fey’. Both terms are fair. It was, looking back, strange that we could, say, read Camus or be conversant with punk but were too shy to talk to someone sitting next to us in the Poly canteen.
Our diffidence was in danger of making us good for nothing. As Morrissey put it: ‘I’ve never had a job because I’m too shy.’ Paphides reports that, at that launch party, James Roberts of those Sea Urchins, prior to singing ‘Pristine Christine’, announced: ‘I was an awkward 17-year-old when I wrote this. And now I’m an awkward 56 year-old about to sing this.’ Later this shyness or awkwardness deepened to the point that the bands could not apparently look their audience in the eye – earning the next wave of indie bands the nickname ‘shoegazers’. Although Miki Berenyi from Lush would subsequently challenge this: ‘We weren’t staring at our shoes, we were looking at our pedals.’
Listening to all these bands again for the first time in years, the thing that strikes me as most extraordinary is how little they owe to the Beatles. Instead the sound comes more from fusing the three-chord riffs of the Velvet Underground with the tone of those American Phil Spector-produced girl groups of the early 1970s, and then anglicising it – or, in the case of Orange Juice and the Jesus and Mary Chain, caledonianising it.
Visually the bands and their audience also looked less to the mop-top Beatles than their sometime American copyists, the Byrds, with their longer hair – ‘domeheads’ as an early Creation Records compilation described the style. And just as the sound was a British take on 1960s America, so was the look: we wore vintage suede jackets or zip-up monochrome jackets like James Dean in Rebel and imported worn-in, or often worn-out, Levi’s 501s. And – incredibly – no one wore trainers. Well maybe the odd pair of high-top soft canvas Converse – but most would be wearing monkey boots or crepe sole brothel creepers from Robot. Nike or Adidas were unthinkable: you’d look like you were doing sport.
Just as the sound was a British take on 1960s America, so was the look: we wore zip-up monochrome jackets like James Dean in Rebel and imported worn-in, or worn-out, Levi’s 501s
If it wasn’t drippy stuff about rain, the lyrical idiom was often about honey, candy or other sweet things. Just that autumn we had Candy Apple Grey from Hüsker Dü – from the counterpart American scene – and ‘Just Like Honey’, ‘Some Candy Talking’ and Psychocandy from the Jesus and Mary Chain, who, briefly, felt like the biggest band ever (if your main media source was the NME). This tendency was so entrenched that it was even parodied, by Pop Will Eat Itself, with the lyric: ‘What’s so fucking good? What’s so fucking good about candy?’ I can tell them what was so good about it: it was because Lou Reed had made it cool, in ‘Candy Says’. In this context the implication was that we were talking about drugs rather than actual sweeties.
But ultimately candy is an Americanism and even if hugely influenced by America, this was entirely a British movement – hence the 1990s Britpop band Cornershop whose name, as well as evoking British-Asian heritage, was also perhaps an assertion that Britain was about ‘sweet shops’ rather than ‘candy stores’. On this sweet shop theme, another obscure Sensitive band is called Dolly Mixture.
The high-water mark of the scene was the NME cassette-only compilation C86, named for the year of its release. You had to send off a coupon and a cheque, which I did, and the tape came by post a week later. But in capturing the scene, as this compilation did, it also heralded its imminent end.
This was for several reasons. First, the heavier and darker Jesus and Mary Chain came along and took the style to its logical conclusion – and after that the rest sounded not so much fey as feeble. Then things happened in America which had the same effect but even more so: their indie strain evolved from Hüsker Dü via Pixies to Nirvana and ‘grunge’ which exploded here and drowned out quieter indigenous indie.
The final coffin nail came from dance music. In 1985, the decade-long disco boom had come to an end and nightclubs were in an interregnum lull with no real momentum. You’d get a bit of James Brown, or Prince or Cameo, whatever. But there was no scene as such. However by 1987 there was a new style coming, heralded by S’Express and the first house records from Chicago. That soon led to the rave scene which simply exploded, in Manchester as much as anywhere. Some indie kids, such as Primal Scream, the Beloved, Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, were able to adapt to this. But by 1990-1 you were either ‘all bound for Mu Mu Land’ or you were stuffed.
So almost all the Sensitive bands were history, a dead branch of musical evolution like previous generations’ skiffle bands or power pop. And today the scene is almost completely forgotten except by music historians like Paphides, and nostalgists like me. The Britpop of the mid-1990s which eventually followed would look elsewhere for its inspiration: to the Beatles and all that, not to three chords, candy and old Levi’s.
That year, 1985, was exactly as close in time to the second world war as it is to today. Unsurprisingly much has changed. Astor is now a university lecturer. June Brides frontman Phil Wilson became a civil servant with HMRC. The Poly is now Manchester Metropolitan University. The £17-a-week rent is a distant memory, as are 45p pints.
The absence of the June Brides from Spotify eventually drove me to seek out my vinyl copy for the first time in many years. As I took it from the sleeve a piece of paper fell out. It was a hand-written setlist from that evening in September 1985 which I had ripped from where it was taped to an amp at the end of the gig and then stored inside the record until forgotten. It was like receiving a postcard from my much younger self.
The Golden Triangle’s Sin City is a nightmarish place
A rickety boat took me across the murky, brown waters of the mighty Mekong River from Chiang Saen in Thailand, with its giant golden Buddha perched on the hillside, to the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in supposedly communist Laos. But the SEZ is neither particularly communist, nor even really a part of Laos.
‘Tonight is boom-boom night,’ he said. ‘You can do anything you want with a girl for 500 yuan (£50)’
‘This is not Laos, this is China,’ an Indian migrant worker told me. The Laotian authorities’ presence here is minimal. The Chinese yuan, emblazoned with the image of Chairman Mao, is the currency of choice.
While parts of Laos still resemble Vietnam as portrayed in old war movies – rice paddies, bamboo houses on stilts, limestone karst mountains – here the architecture can be generously described as ‘eclectic’. Standing tall over the city-like complex is the gilded tower of the Kings Roman Casino and hotel. Laying directly opposite is a canal, with a Disney Palace version of Venice on one side, and a Chinatown on the other – a bizarre juxtaposition, perhaps, but it sure looks pretty lit up at night.
The Golden Triangle – the triple-frontier between Myanmar, northern Thailand and Laos – has historically been home to opium warlords. While they’re still very much there, it’s been a while since this part of the world has hosted such a blatant criminal colony.
The Golden Triangle SEZ is a sinister Sin City. At the heart of it is an alleged Chinese crime lord named Zhao Wei. In 2007, Zhao negotiated a 99-year lease over the land with the Laotian government. It proved to be a wise investment. Gambling is illegal in mainland China and several years ago a clampdown to clean up the casino industry on the island of Macao (long-known as the Chinese Las Vegas) sent punters scurrying to the new gaming havens scattered throughout Southeast Asia. By then, Zhao, a Macao casino tycoon himself, had carved out his Laotian enclave, catering to an almost exclusively Chinese clientele.
The security inside the opulent hotel confiscated my laptop for ‘safekeeping’, something that in all my travels around the world had never happened before. Outside the main strip, the streets were largely deserted, aside from a handful of migrant workers, South Asians, Africans and Burmese. Blank storefronts revealed empty façades. It’s obvious much was still under construction.
As I wandered the streets, a group of Indians waved me over to a bar. ‘You are from Russia?’ one of them asked me. I was born in Leningrad.
‘I can tell from your face; I was in Dubai for five years. A lot of Russian girls are working here too, as models. The customers think they’re chatting to the model, but actually they’re talking to me. I am so good, once a customer complained to me that he got cheated by another girl – and I am another scammer, but he trusts me!’
It’s an incredibly frank admission to someone you’ve just met, as if he’d merely told me he worked in accounting. But that goes to show how safe he feels here. My new friend worked at a scam centre, one of those IT startups that specialises in relieving hapless victims of the contents of their online wallets. Pulling out his phone, he showed me a dozen or so different Facebook and Instagram profiles, all under different names. Pretending to be a beautiful young lady, he dupes marks into dodgy crypto investments, a scheme known as ‘pig-butchering’. Fellow fraudsters in his WhatsApp group brag about pulling in $10,000-$15,000 (£8,000 to £12,000) at a time. Move over, Nigerian princes, there’s a new game in town.
There’s no shortage of horror stories of foreigners being kidnapped and forced to work in these scam centres, trapped in nightmarish conditions. In fact, it forms the basis for the blockbuster Chinese movie No More Bets. But this Indian and his friends are seemingly here willingly. For them, it’s only a job. ‘We are just here for work,’ he said. ‘We make some money and we go home.’
Pretending to be a beautiful young lady, he dupes marks into dodgy crypto investments
That being said, fraud is not the only seedy industry here. ‘Tonight’s our night off. Tonight’s boom-boom night,’ added another Indian. ‘You can do anything you want with a girl for 500 yuan (£50).’
Women’s rights groups say hundreds of young, poor and naïve Laotian women have been lured to the SEZ with promises of easy money chatting up clients at the casino. Yet when they can’t meet their sales quotas, they soon find themselves in debt which they must pay off any way they can. I spotted several spa parlours, nearly all staffed by scantily-clad young ladies presumably offering more than a massage. Hotel rooms at the King’s Roman come with a pack of condoms included.
Then there’s narcotics. Nearby Myanmar is now the world’s leading exporter of illicit opium, which is then refined into heroin. It is also a major source of crystal meth, ketamine and fentanyl produced in secret jungle laboratories, which are dispatched worldwide by Chinese triad syndicates. Special Economic Zones enjoy certain tax perks and duty-free storage which are designed to stimulate trade. But their loose oversight allows smugglers to take advantage of weak inspections and co-ordination between customs agencies to use them as transhipment point and disguise a shipment’s real origin. Large drug busts have been linked to the Golden Triangle SEZ.
Some of the profits no doubt end up in the casinos. On a visit in 2023, Crisis Group observers witnessed duffel bags full of cash being passed around openly on the casino floor at the Kings Roman. In 2018, Zhao Wei was namechecked by the US government over a litany of alleged misdeeds including narcotics, child prostitution and wildlife trafficking (the businessman strenuously denies the accusations). But it doesn’t look like his kingdom’s going anywhere. Last year, Zhao was officially honoured by the Laotian government for his work in developing the impoverished nation.
It’s worth remembering that Las Vegas, too, was just a small town in the middle of the desert until the 1940s, when Bugsy Siegel and other New York mobsters had a vision of transforming it into a casino mecca. For decades, Vegas was run by the Mafia until they were eventually pushed out by corporations. Could the Kings Roman, too, one day go legit?
Why are police targeting a school WhatsApp group?
The heavy-handed conduct of the police these days often provokes accusations of ‘Orwellian’ behaviour – and with good reason. There has been a litany of reports in recent years of people being investigated and cautioned for remarks, often made in private, that have been adjudged ‘offensive’ or ‘hurtful’. In the eyes of many, we now have a de facto thought police in this country, with their disproportionate response to people’s sentiments and words indeed warranting comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Hertfordshire Police sent six uniformed officers to arrest a couple after their child’s school objected to their emails
The latest news, that Hertfordshire Police sent six uniformed officers to arrest a couple after their child’s school objected to their emails and ‘disparaging’ comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group, will do nothing to allay these fears. The couple were put in a cell for eight hours and questioned on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications. Hertfordshire Police told the Times that the number of officers was needed to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address. After a five-week investigation, the pair have been told there will be no further action.
This episode epitomises not merely the entrenchment and normalising of the surveillance of people’s words, but the assumption that feelings and emotions are a police matter. The couple had been accused of ‘casting aspersions’ on the chair of governors, which the school claimed had become upsetting. Such language is often deemed sufficient to merit police intervention now.
As made apparent in the aftermath to the Southport riots of last year, and in the controversy following the police visitation of Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, saying ‘offensive’ or ‘hurtful’ things is today accorded the status of utmost gravity by society and state alike. If we do have a thought police, we also have a feelings police.
The thoughts and sentiments of individuals first became a matter for the state in 1998 with the Crime and Disorder Act, which introduced racially and religiously aggravated laws, or, in common parlance, hate crimes. A hate crime is defined as any ‘criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’. In other words, crimes are deemed to be so on the basis of a subjective perception of the inner mental activity of others.
It is only logical that in the years since this definition was introduced, years in which we have witnessed a society increasingly become governed by emotion, and seen the associated proliferation of the language of ‘stress’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘trauma’, that feelings should have become police concern.
The word ‘intervention’ has moved from the language of psychotherapy and 12-step groups to become, literally, an act routinely carried out by the forces of law and order. Where once only shrinks offered ‘counselling’ to deal with traumatic episodes, this is also now in the remit of the police.
The inordinate importance ascribed to actions or words likely to cause ‘offence’ is inextricably linked to our oversensitivity in regards to race, but it is entwined, too, with our oversensitivity in general.
The belief that words can be as harmful as actions not only resulted in the establishment of hate-crimes, but, in 2014, to the introduction of ‘non-crime hate incidents’, to record actions or speech ‘perceived’ to demonstrate hostility to group, but which didn’t meet the threshold of criminality.
Being nasty or hurtful, or just bad-mannered, in effect became a state concern. Evidently, it is a priority. Up to 13,200 ‘hate incidents’ were reported in the 12 months leading up to June last year year. This seeming shift from prioritising physical crimes, such as burglary or shoplifting, towards policing words and opinions, has alarmed campaigners for free speech in particular and infuriated an already exasperated public in general.
This story in Hertfordshire is only the most egregious example of hurt feelings becoming a state concern. This week the Equality and Human Rights Commission said that new rules laid out in the current Employment Right Bill, requiring companies to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment of staff by third parties, were too broad-brushed. This reflects a concern that this proposed legislation could allow employees, in pubs for example, taking legal action for overhearing conversations that they might find ‘offensive’.
This week, an NHS nurse in Surrey was disciplined after accidentally addressing a transgender paedophile as ‘Mr’. That nurse’s experience was consequent of the now widely-accepted understanding that some words are irreparably ‘hurtful’ and ‘damaging’. Their usage, even when there is no malicious intent – such as in perceived ‘microggressions’, or in the use of such archaic words as ‘coloured’ – might land those who utter them in trouble, or in the clink.
The behaviour of Hertfordshire is shocking, but not surprising. Such a heavy-handed response may seem disproportionate, but it’s in keeping with the disproportionate gravity the law now assigns to feelings in general.
Amanda Spielman’s peerage is richly deserved
Amanda Spielman, former Ofsted chief inspector, is set to become a Conservative peer. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is elevating Spielman – who served as head of Ofsted between 2017 and 2023 – to the House of Lords for her outstanding record in improving school standards.
Spielman’s peerage is richly deserved. She helped ensure that Tory education reforms, which saw the share of children in Good or Outstanding schools rise from 66 per cent to 86 per cent between 2010 and 2018, were maintained.
Throughout her tenure, Spielman’s enduring focus was on the curriculum. Too often, as she outlined early in her time at Ofsted, teachers were leaving pupils ‘with a hollowed out and flimsy understanding’. Spielman wanted schools to return to first principles: to focus on what they wanted to achieve and what the basic requirements of this were.
To put this into place, Spielman spearheaded a new education inspection framework that shifted the focus from abstract metrics to a closer assessment of the concrete substance of education, curriculum breadth, and teacher involvement. Despite the Covid pandemic – which saw her term extended two years to allow her to oversee the new regime’s rollout – standards continued to rise.
As well as promoting a knowledge-rich curriculum, Spielman also applied her tenaciousness to often-overlooked areas, such as children being failed by poor-quality home-schooling, and whether religious schools were not preparing their pupils properly for Britain in the 21st century. A mathematician by background, she was resolutely data-led.
Since leaving the role, Spielman has criticised Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson for dismantling school freedoms and her closeness to the education unions. Despite ‘little evidence that micro-managing individual school improvement from the centre of government is effective’, she argues, Phillipson’s policies aim to ‘cut the autonomy of schools…right back’ despite it clearly being ‘a contributor to system success’.
As Badenoch ‘wants serious people who know how things work so they can make a real contribution to the House of Lords’, as one senior Tory put it to me, Spielman’s elevation is a no-brainer. She ‘is a brilliant thinker with a wealth of knowledge’. She ‘will be a huge asset to Parliament’.
Yet her elevation is likely to be controversial. Throughout her tenure, Spielman found herself a target for union criticism. Her appointment was opposed on the grounds that she lacked experience – despite her being a founding member of the successful Ark Schools multi-academy trust, and having served as Head of Ofqual, the exams regulator, for five years.
Sadly, the last year of Spielman’s tenure was overshadowed by the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry. Perry killed herself while waiting for an Ofsted report downgrading her school from outstanding to inadequate. Education unions called for inspections to be halted, which Spielman rejected. A coroner’s inquest ruled the inspection played a role in Perry’s death.
But this appalling tragedy should not overshadow Spielman’s long record of public service. It should not be weaponised by those with a long-standing opposition desire to see inspections watered down. Avoiding tough conversation cannot be put ahead of improving our schools. Yet one fears Phillipson is doing exactly that by replacing Ofsted’s one-word judgements with a nebulous new ‘report-card’.
In opposing Labour’s regressive agenda, Spielman is showing the same unwavering commitment to improving our schools that has defined her career for two decades. Her elevation to the Lords is not only a boon for a Conservative party low on talent, but a long-overdue recognition of a determined public servant, and a victory for anyone who wants England’s schools to be the best in the world.
Why Vladimir Putin is afraid of sea cucumbers
Vladivostok, the ‘ruler of the East’, is preparing to celebrate the 165th anniversary of its founding. City Day, as they call it in the capital of Russia’s Far East, will see week-long celebrations, including sailing regattas, street performances and an enormous firework display. The naval base, home to Russia’s Pacific Fleet, usually gets in on the act too, commemorating the arrival on 2 July 1860 of the first military vessel to seize control from its Chinese inhabitants. Many of those inhabitants stayed in the Far East, at least at first, though mass deportations to China increased after the Soviets seized power in 1917 – an egregious example of ethnic cleansing, well before that term came into more common usage, by Russian rulers who treated the Chinese with contempt.
The Chinese border is now some 45 kilometres down the road, and beyond that Russia’s celebrations strike a raw nerve among nationalists who play an increasingly large role in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and who dream of restoring the borders of Qing Dynasty China. For them, Vladivostok will always be Haishenwai, its original Chinese name. That translates as Sea Cucumber Bay, so named because of its abundance of these slug-like creatures, a delicacy in China.
The Russian seizure of Sea Cucumber Bay, 18 years after China ceded Hong Kong to Britain, was only one part of Tsarist Russia’s plundering of land from the crumbling Qing Dynasty. Under a series of 19th century treaties – Aigun (1858), Peking (1860) and Tarbagatai (1864) – China ceded 1.5 million square kilometres to Russia, including a vast tract of territory north of the Amur River and in the Far East bordering the Sea of Japan. That represented more than a tenth of Chinese land at the time.
The CCP makes a big thing of China’s ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of rapacious foreigners who forced ‘unequal treaties’ on Beijing, and presents itself as a redemptive power, restoring China’s place in the world. Yet Russia was by far the most rapacious of them all. In theory at least, the border dispute is settled, but in the nationalist mindset, the loss of territory to Russia ranks alongside the ceding of Hong Kong as a cause of grievance. Chinese school textbooks still show the area, as well as large swathes of central Asia, as being part of historic Chinese lands, with Russia identified as one of the offenders who inflicted ‘humiliation’ on China.
Two years ago the CCP decreed that all Chinese maps should show the Chinese names for Vladivostok and seven other far-eastern cities. Maps are important for the CCP and each year it publishers a ‘standard map’, updated to include Beijing’s ever-extending and increasingly spurious territorial claims – from the Himalayas to the South China Sea. Neighbours see it as a sinister measure of Beijing’s imperialist threat, but to the party it is a sacred document, a badge of legitimacy, encapsulating its historic grievances and its growing ambition. It must be faithfully reproduced in school textbooks and in government and corporate handouts and plastered to the walls of workplaces and classrooms.
Xi Jinping and Vladmir Putin have similar world views. Putin has his Russkiy Mir (Russian World), his imperial ambition to restore control over areas of historic Russian influence, and used to justify the Ukrainian war. Xi has his China Dream, a similarly imperialist endeavour, with Taiwan as its most immediate target. Yet for all the talk of ‘without limits’ partnership, these are clashing imperialisms – the small detail of 1.5m square kilometres of Qing land and of course Sea Cucumber Bay.
There is fear in Russia that Beijing will transform its economic dominance into political control
These historic animosities, the decades long freeze in relations prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, punctuated by military clashes in the 1960s along their 4,300-kilometre-long border, encourages those in the Trump administration who believe that Russia can be somehow ‘peeled away’ from China. ‘Having to do whatever China says they need to do because of their dependence on them – I don’t think that’s a good outcome for Russia,’ said Secretary of State Marco Rubio in an interview with Breitbart News.
Others close to Trump have described his grand geopolitical aim in cosying up to Putin as trying to pull off a ‘reverse Nixon’, sacrificing Ukraine in a bid to drive a wedge between China and Russia in the same manner that President Richard Nixon’s famous 1972 trip to China was aimed at undermining the Soviet Union and creating distance between Beijing and Moscow.
This is almost certainly delusional, and the blow to American credibility would be costly in multiple other ways. The Soviet Union and China at the time of the Nixon visit had no relations, with the Sino-Soviet split still in full force; their border was heavily fortified, and the two communist giants loathed each other. Today’s relations between China and Russia is a marriage of convenience, and Russia is the junior partner. There is fear in Russia that Beijing will someday transform its economic dominance into political control, and the Russian Far East, where the population is continuing to shrink, will simply be subsumed by a voracious China. But for the moment their interests are too closely aligned. They increasingly define their relationship in terms of opposition to Western democracies – and to the US in particular. China is keeping Russia’s economy afloat, underwriting its aggression, and Beijing is mostly getting what it needs from Russia without having to further modify that standard map. It can afford to ignore the fireworks in Haishenwai. At least for the moment.
Give holiday home owners a break
If you have had your eye on a bungalow along the Devon coast, a cottage in the New Forest, or a tastefully painted terrace in one of the sea-facing villages in Norfolk, this could be your moment. Many holiday home owners are choosing to sell up to avoid a hike on council taxes. From next week, local authorities will be allowed to charge double the normal rate for second home owners. Average bills are set to rise from £2,280 to £4,560.
This crackdown is likely to be popular. After all, who has sympathy with those who own two homes, when many young people are struggling to get on to the housing ladder? Despite the temptation, we should resist joining in the cheering: instead of declaring war on second home owners, why don’t we encourage people to own holiday homes? After all, the UK has very few of them.
The reality is that, for all the concern that communities are being hollowed out by second home owners, the UK has remarkably few holiday homes. They account for just 3 per cent of the British housing stock, compared to 10 per cent in France, where a country retreat is completely normal for many, not just for the very wealthy. In Norway, as many as a quarter of homes are second properties, while in Sweden, 54 per cent of the population either has a second home themselves or has access to one through their family.
People like to moan about holiday home owners, but they can be blind to the benefits that they bring to communities. With their owners’ constant redecorations, and their enthusiasm for a ‘not exactly value-for-money’ farmer’s market over the local Lidl, second home owners bring lots of cash into areas that might otherwise have very little spending power. Perhaps most importantly, we shouldn’t forget that having a second home adds much to the quality of life of those fortunate enough to afford it.
So, spare a thought for second home owners as councils hit them where it hurts. After all, we mustn’t forget that going after these home owners is an odd target. We would think it strange to have a ‘war’ on people who owned a second pair of shoes, or a second TV, or a second anything else for that matter. So why are homes any different? Of course, it is legitimate to worry that people owning two homes might make buying a property tougher for local people. But if we wanted to fix that issue then – let’s all take a deep breath at this outlandish suggestion – we could try building a few more houses instead. That way, there would be enough for everyone.
Instead of building, the government has picked an easy target. Locals will say a crackdown is overdue. The ‘weekend crowds’ price ordinary people out of the market, they argue, forcing up prices in pubs and restaurants, and leaving places feeling soulless and empty from Monday to Thursday. There is perhaps some truth in those complaints. But if you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere idyllic, then you can hardly complain when others want to move in too.
In Britain, we not only live in homes that are very overpriced, and typically very small, by most international standards, we also don’t have anywhere to escape to. So instead of trying to tax second homes out of existence, perhaps we should try something more radical: we could encourage them instead.
Doing so would unleash a wave of growth, ‘level up’ the country, and add enjoyment to many people’s lives. It is hard to see what exactly would be so terrible about that. Give holiday home owners a break!
Is Britain braced for the Russian threat from the north?
War in Ukraine, and the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, is forcing Europeans to prioritise defence. Keir Starmer has slashed Britain’s aid budget to pay for an increase in defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2027. But how should the UK use that uplift in order to keep itself safe?
The challenge posed by the Northern Fleet is – alongside Norway – essentially the UK’s problem to deal with
Many of the core assumptions which have underpinned British strategy for decades are being called into question. Amid the discussions centred on what a ‘Nato first’ policy for the UK looks like, there is growing consensus that Britain requires improved air and missile defences.
The missile capabilities of adversaries have grown considerably over the last decade, with Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran expanding their existing arsenals and developing new hypersonic and ballistic missiles. The most pressing of these threats to the UK rhymes with history; that of Russia’s Northern Fleet, a familiar foe from the Cold War. This danger in the north, emerging from the Barent and Norwegian Seas, should matter more to London than the threat of air and land launched missiles from beyond Nato’s Eastern Flank (especially now that Finland and Sweden have joined Nato) – although these cannot be ignored.
Moscow has partially-mobilised its economy for the war effort in Ukraine, and has stolen a march on European Nato in the race to rearm. However, the Russian army has lost vast amounts of manpower and equipment (including over 12,000 Armoured Combat Vehicles). Despite this, a large and experienced infantry army, backed by an array of strike weapons (which Russia had proved it can reconstitute at impressive speed) is not a threat to be sniffed at.
As a leading, and nuclear-armed, power in the alliance, the UK should play a role in supporting Nato’s eastern flank. British forces should continue to make vital contributions to bolstering the capabilities of Nato’s eastern flank forces; after all the trick to benefiting from a ‘buffer’ is to reinforce its ability to continue existing.
Yet there is no such buffer to distract the efforts of the Russian Northern Fleet. While the Russian army and air force will be dealt with by a collective effort, the challenge posed by the Northern Fleet is – alongside Norway – essentially the UK’s problem to deal with.
The Russian Northern Fleet is a far cry from its Soviet predecessor (possessing around 25 nuclear powered attack submarines today compared to almost 90 in 1980). But this is of little consolation. The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) and missile defences of the British mainland have been allowed to atrophy; for example when the Cold War ended, Royal Navy had at its disposal 38 frigates and was in part aided by the fact the US navy had 97 frigates – those figures today are eight and zero.
The Russian fleet is also modernising. A number of new submarines and surface ships have entered service, all capable of carrying a large number of missiles. The Northern Fleet, in total, can carry up to 800 land attack missiles (although, of course, the entire fleet would not be able to be put to sea at one time).
The need for improved Integrated Air and Missile Defences (IAMD) in Britain has, as a result, increased significantly. But given the expense of sophisticated IAMD, pressing needs across other capability areas, and wider fiscal pressures, the UK’s approach to IAMD must be tailored towards the most significant dangers; prioritise the most important infrastructure to defend; and be flexible enough to adapt to emerging threats. This means the defence of the Home Islands must take priority – as they host the military and defence industry infrastructure without which the British armed forces cannot operate.
IAMD does not work in isolation; the ability to push back or destroy launch platforms is another key component of keeping Britain safe. If the UK were to reinvigorate its military posture (a joint effort between the branches is needed) in the high-north, the need to invest in IAMD is much reduced. If the UK can keep the Russian fleet bottled up in the Barents Sea with a forward defence of the Svalbard-Tromso gap (as opposed to the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap), interceptor aircraft and missile batteries in Britain will be faced with far fewer missiles.
Britain must also prioritise ballistic missile defences (an area it has long underinvested in) and anti-drone weaponry. Our country also needs a far more integrated command and control system capable of working between the branches of the armed forces and with allies being foremost amongst these.
There is no need for an ‘iron dome’ for the UK, or a ‘golden dome’ which the US is pursuing (Britain’s own nuclear weapons are its protection against nuclear attack). But there should be a sense of urgency in improving Britain’s ability to defend itself and its forces against missile attacks. The ability to destroy the launch platforms and intercept the missiles of Russia’s Northern Fleet is by no means the only threat, but it is the one which should be prioritised.
The tragedy of Myanmar
Myanmar, or Burma as it used to be known, has experienced far more than its fair share of tragedy over the past 75 years or more. The death and destruction caused by yesterday’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake is the latest in a litany of suffering which this beautiful but benighted South-East Asian nation has endured.
I have visited the areas close to the epicentre of the earthquake many times in the past. I have been in Sagaing, Mandalay and the capital, Naypyidaw. The scenes of the devastation there are heartbreaking, because they are scenes of devastation affecting places and people I know well.
Roads, bridges and buildings have been destroyed in a poverty-stricken and conflict-ridden country with poor infrastructure
The exact death toll is unknown, not least because independent media and civil society are so repressed and the country closed off to outsiders by the ruling military junta. But it can be assumed that hundreds, probably thousands, of people have been killed.
Roads, bridges and buildings have been destroyed in a poverty-stricken and conflict-ridden country with poor infrastructure. The 1,000-bed hospital in the capital, Naypyidaw, has been declared a ‘mass casualty area’. Doctors and nurses are struggling to cope with the numbers of injured lining up. With the damage to infrastructure, the ability of the wounded to reach hospitals, or for relief teams to reach the wounded, is severely hampered.
It is a sign of the severity of the disaster that Myanmar’s illegal military regime has appealed to the international community for aid and declared a state of emergency. ‘We want the international community to give humanitarian aid as soon as possible,’ junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun told AFP.
The junta has a long and well-documented history of refusing or blocking humanitarian aid, or weaponising it. When Cyclone Nargis – the second deadliest named cyclone of all time – hit Myanmar in 2008, the military dictatorship at the time initially declined international aid. It took persistent high-level diplomacy by the UN Secretary General at the time, Ban Ki-moon, combined with international pressure, to get relief into the country.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the military hoarded supplies of oxygen, masks and vaccines for themselves, attacked medical facilities, arrested doctors and denied ordinary people basic medical care. In the aftermath of Cyclone Mocha in 2023, and Typhoon Yagi last month, it was a similar story.
On top of this, the regime – which seized power in a coup in February 2021, overthrowing the democratically-elected civilian government led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi – has been waging war on its people. A relentless campaign of air strikes and ground attacks by the military on villages across much of the country, targeting civilians among the ethnic nationalities and pro-democracy resistance, has resulted in the displacement of over 3.5 million people. The regime blocks access to most of the affected areas of the country for international aid agencies.
In recent months, the United Nations and the World Food Programme have been warning of an intensifying humanitarian crisis, with several million people facing famine and 15.2 million – almost a third of the population – plunged into food insecurity.
Indeed, Myanmar’s military is expert at causing humanitarian catastrophe, not responding to it. It is a regime responsible for mass atrocity crimes – including the genocide of the Rohingyas and crimes against humanity and war crimes against the country’s other ethnic groups. Its past track record in handling humanitarian emergencies has been disastrous.
So the junta’s appeal for help should be taken seriously. Given our colonial history with Myanmar, the United Kingdom has a responsibility to lead the response. The United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and the European Union (EU) must all play their part. Despite recent cuts in overseas aid budgets by the United Kingdom and the United States, this is an emergency. We must all step up.
But in so doing, our governments must insist that the junta end all restrictions on aid organisations and aid workers, and allow them unhindered access to all affected areas of the country. They must ensure that people in areas outside the regime’s control also receive the aid they need. Governments and agencies must understand that the military is only in control of less than a quarter of the country’s territory, while the rest of the country is either disputed, or under the control of ethnic and pro-democracy resistance groups. There are multiple administrations in the country, reflecting the resistance to the junta.
It is vital that international aid is channelled through local aid agencies along the country’s borders, with significant experience in cross-border delivery, and that aid that is delivered through agencies working within the country is not misappropriated, stolen or blocked by the junta.
India was the first country to offer assistance to Myanmar, and that is very welcome. But to truly help the people of Myanmar, India should end its economic, political and military support for the regime. Weapons provided to the junta have killed many more civilians than this earthquake, and so a global arms embargo must be properly implemented. It is time to cut the lifelines to the illegal junta and provide a lifeline to the people.
For too long, Myanmar’s plight has been ignored and forgotten. For too long, over 20,000 political prisoners – including the democratically-elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi – have been left to rot in jail. For too long, the world has turned a blind eye to the unfolding humanitarian and human rights crisis in Myanmar.
Yesterday’s tragedy puts Myanmar back in the international spotlight. It is time for the international community to act, both to help the victims of this disaster, and to address the chronic injustices in the country, and hold the perpetrators accountable. The people of Myanmar deserve better.
Benedict Rogers is a human rights activist and writer, and author of three books on Myanmar. He has visited Myanmar and its borders more than fifty times, and is the co-founder and deputy chair of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission
Stonewall’s game is up
Stonewall’s boss Simon Blake has vowed to fight for a ban on conversion practices that includes ‘every member of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans community’. The Stonewall CEO told the Guardian: ‘It’s really important that a conversion practices bill covers all practices designed to try to change or correct somebody’s sexual or gender identity.’ Warm words. But why should gay people trust an organisation that destroyed its reputation in the quest to promote transgender rights?
Bullying and coercing lesbians or gay men to become heterosexual, in the name of therapy, is a human rights violation and is obviously unacceptable. However, including ‘trans’ in this proposed ban, as Stonewall is suggesting, is bonkers. Stonewall appears to be making the same mistake that it has repeated over the last few years: pretending that gay and lesbian people are the same as transgender people, when they are not.
One of Stonewall’s co-founders, Spectator columnist Matthew Parris, accused the charity back in 2021 of being ‘cornered into an extremist stance’. He’s right – and I’m sceptical that Stonewall has learned its lesson. If Blake’s words about the gender debate are anything to go on, it seems unlikely:
‘It’s absolutely right that Stonewall became trans inclusive in 2015,’ he insisted. The Stonewall boss, who took up the job last year, admitted there has been ‘huge division’ on the issue of gender, but insisted that Stonewall had always navigated ‘incredibly well’ through contentious topics. Really?
The truth is that Stonewall’s game is up; it’s time for the charity to fold. More than a decade ago, in 2013, I described Stonewall’s version of the gay rights movement as ‘operating like an elderly claret-soaked Tory making his way to the bedpan in the corner of the room: bloated, smug and plodding’.
Little did I realise how much worse things could get. In 2014, one of the first things then-CEO Ruth Hunt changed was the charity’s focus on same-sex attraction in favour of gender identity. Under her watch. In response to a 2018 petition asking Stonewall to acknowledge there was a conflict around transgender rights and sex-based women’s rights, she wrote: ‘We do not and will not acknowledge this. Doing so would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others. We will always debate issues that enable us to further equality but what we will not do is debate trans people’s right to exist.’
In 2020, Nancy Kelley replaced Hunt as Stonewall CEO. Under her watch, Stonewall continued to turn a blind eye to lesbians in favour of those with penises. Stonewall even brought out an entire report on asexuality in the UK, spending time, money and energy that would have been better invested elsewhere looking at the oppression of people who would prefer a cup of tea to a roll in the hay.
Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights
Stonewall’s shifting mission might lead you to think that lesbians and gay men in Britain are fine because we can legally marry and raise children in same-sex relationships. But nothing could be further from the truth. Legislation and societal attitudes have never been so far apart, and lesbians – arguably thanks to Stonewall – are being hounded out of our own dating networks, social events and even jobs.
Stonewall was never much help in guiding employers and institutions on how to support lesbian or gay employees. The charity’s Diversity Champion Scheme seemed more focused at times on upholding gender ideology than properly helping gay and lesbians in the workplace.
I talk to young lesbians on a regular basis, having interviewed dozens of them for my forthcoming book. Even those sympathetic to gender ideology tell me the same story: they are branded as transphobic if they refer to themselves as lesbians. Instead, they are told to say ‘queer’ or ‘non-binary’. This erase of the word ‘lesbian’ is not in spite of Stonewall’s existence, it is because of Stonewall.
Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights. The LGB Alliance was set up in 2019 to fill the gap left by Stonewall after it drank the gender kool aid. It’s time to let a new organisation take over. Stonewall must be consigned to history.
How ‘best friend parenting’ leads to spoilt kids
Young people are unwilling to go to school. They are unwilling to go to the office. And they are unwilling to go to war for this country. Is this about Generation Z being born with a natural predisposition to laziness and solipsism – or is it about parents who want to be their child’s best friend?
Best friend parenting is problematic parenting
Increasingly, mothers and fathers are adopting a dangerous approach to raising their children: ‘best friend parenting’. This involves dodging conflict at all costs, with parents ensuring their child stays in their comfort zone even if this risks school and the office becoming optional extras in young people’s lives. Although no one would want to send their child to a war zone, statistics show an alarming lack of patriotic spirit among our youngsters just as the winds of war begin to blow in earnest. When you’ve been raised to have everything your own way, self-sacrifice – let alone laying down your life for your countrymen – is simply inconceivable.
‘I am my child’s BFF’ translates into Mum and Dad being unwilling to set boundaries, impose curfews or bans. To be clear, no one would wish to revert to a ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ attitude to child-rearing: the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill makes smacking children illegal as well as unacceptable.
But I have spoken to family liaison officers (FLO) who regularly show up at absent pupils’ homes to bring recalcitrant students to school – while parents stand by, not lifting a finger. I have seen the parents of a three-year-old who refused to get into their car squat beside their toddler, and start coaxing her: ‘Darling will you agree to go in the car so that we can go out for tea? Ah, OK. What can I do to make it nicer for you? Oh, dear, what is it you don’t like about the car?’ As I dared whisper a disapproving ‘Oh, come on!’, the father turned on me: ‘No, don’t you understand we can’t betray her trust! We have to get her to actively agree.’
‘In the absence of appropriate boundaries, parenting becomes a process of being hostage to fortune,’ Julian Tomkins, a child psychotherapist warns. You bet: tyrannical toddlers and tyrannical teens will keep you on tenterhooks, deciding what they do, when they do it, and with whom.
We don’t need the show Adolescence to show that this can be a recipe for disaster. Whether they are sliding down Andrew Tate-shaped rabbit holes online or boosting knife-crime figures, children today too often experience the dark side of life. Sir Gareth Southgate may argue against the lack of male role models, but compare this, for example, with the inter-war years. As Virginia Nicholson’s excellent book, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, reminds us, the first world war caused a scarcity of men across the country and the continent. Yet valour and industry did not die a death in those years. Young people still believed in school and work as a means of self-improvement; and patriotism, verging on nationalism, was alive and well.
The parents of that generation encouraged this philosophy of life. Think of the tough love showered upon children in coal mining families, as DH Lawrence depicts in Sons and Lovers: there’s no pretence that parents are buddies. Children learnt authority and aspiration, not how to dodge discomfort.
Today, though, parents prefer to be their child’s pal rather than mentor. They go in for ‘gentle parenting’ that aims to never ruffle the little one’s feathers; it presents them with mother and father not as role models but as best friends.
Wishing to be their child’s BFF means parents allow their offspring to call them by their first name rather than ‘daddy’ or ‘mummy’. It means parents who smoke weed with their teens. It means parents foregoing any ‘unpleasantness’, from toilet training (let the teachers deal with this daily conflict) to school attendance (let the FLO come and coax them out of their room).
‘Respect for parental authority and, by extension, potentially respect for any authority be it teachers, carers and other adults becomes negated,’ Tomkins explains. ‘If you then try to apply a boundary, you risk sparking real resentment.’ That may mean sulks and tantrums in the youngest child, but far, far more dangerous outbursts from teenagers who feel slighted, as in Adolescence, or just intolerant, as in the murderers of Brianna Ghey.
Best friend parenting is problematic parenting. It is bad news for children – and for the rest of us.
How I rank my friends
I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and comfort to life but are not essential. You can abandon an acquaintance without much compunction. But good friends nurture the heart and soul and are therefore vital. Kindred spirits? By them you know you’re not alone, not mad, not a terrible person and, amazingly, that you’re loved.
I think back to childhood when the need for a best friend was absolutely paramount. I suppose it’s an early version of wanting a mate. Finding and keeping a best friend was mostly very difficult, sometimes traumatic. I remember being drawn to a girl called Penelope, mainly for her name and her glossy, ribboned bunches. She was way outside my league, possessing shine and polish I could never emulate. Then there was Dottie. Dottie was podgy and earnest, had a crush on a sixth-former and tried to woo me with biblical picture cards, each with a gospel message.
Even if you got it right – found a match, someone simpatico – a best friend could be stolen (you’d be discarded), could go off with an Other or be so popular that you’d fade into a dull nobody. My teenage best friend – let’s call her Jan – was ahead of me. Her’s was a precocious puberty. She was sexy, blonde, and had terrific legs which now saddled the back of many a boy’s motorbike. And as if that wasn’t enough, she had a baby sister and a dad who was a sea captain. (You can love and envy of your best friend – it goes with the territory.) I think I only managed to keep Jan as my best friend by falling in unrequited love with a boy from the grammar school, so at least we had something to talk about and she could advise. Perhaps giving advice can be the cement of a friendship. Mine with Jan lasted until I married – she was a bridesmaid – then we went our separate ways, though Christmas cards survived. I suspect in the early days of marriage, friendships aren’t quite so important (one is busy turning a lover into a friend), so it’s a time when many teen friendships fail. Thinking of Jan makes me realise that physical attraction plays quite a large part in friendship, even though one would like to think that it didn’t.
I met my first kindred spirit when I was in my late twenties and 50 years later that bond of kinship is still there. Actually, Becky (not her real name) recognised me. Recognition is key in the finding of kindred spirits. Becky taught me how. It’s something one’s antennae learn to pick up on. I have a number of very good friends but only one other kindred spirit. A lucky find, late in life.
Of course, I’ve been talking of female friendships. It’s long been recognised that women are better at friendship than men. Or is it simply that the nature of those friendships is different? Does male friendship depend on a shared sport? Do you have to play golf, fish or climb a mountain? Do female friendships depend on morning coffee, or afternoon tea, or most importantly, a baby? I suspect that the difference between male and female friendships has to do with intimacy.
Just occasionally the thing works as a foursome – with sexual attraction somehow always being latent
I do have male friends, though somehow they are mainly literary and exist more on paper than in person. My best male friend was the poet William Scammell, who died in 2000. We wrote to each other for years and met irregularly – but importantly – in each other’s homes. Perhaps poetry in some way opens the door to intimacy. Both my kindred spirits have – indulge me – poetic souls.
Even trickier than a friendship between a man and a woman is the friendship of couples. You know the score: the men bond but the women don’t. Or vice versa. Just occasionally the thing works as a foursome – with sexual attraction somehow always being latent.
Mostly, one allows friends all manner of faults, wrongdoings, bad manners or behaviours unacceptable in non-friends. Only twice in my life have I broken a friendship and done so without explanation – although the explanation was that the friendship had become unbearable to me. In both cases a line had been crossed, a very personal offence taken that was more to do with an intolerance in me than any moral misdemeanour on the friend’s side.
Recently, it happened again. After spending an hour with this now-excommunicated friend, I had the deeply visceral feeling that I never wanted to see her again. The reason didn’t and doesn’t matter; the feeling was so strong as to be an aversion. I think it would be impossible to tell her and I don’t intend to try. I shall just be unavailable often enough for her to get the message. Awful. Cowardly. Unkind. I know.
The ‘Hey Duggee’ gender-neutral row is a storm in a teacup
Hey Duggee, the children’s TV show, beloved by preschoolers and parents alike, has come under fire for introducing a gender-neutral raccoon.
In the award-winning Cbeebies show, Duggee is a cartoon dog who runs a clubhouse for young animals known as the ‘squirrels’. In each episode, the squirrels earn a badge (and a hug) by learning about something new.
In ‘The Sibling Badge’ episode, one squirrel, Roly, finds out he will be gaining a baby brother or sister, prompting Duggee to teach the squirrels all about siblings.
In a scene to help explain, the squirrels meet various animals and their siblings. After being introduced, via the voiceover, to ‘Arlo and his siblings’ and ‘Lucy and her sibling’, they then meet raccoon, Wren, and ‘their siblings’, prompting accusations of an attempt to introduce non-binary pronouns into the show.
Parents have complained, and it has been called ‘inappropriate’. The BBC denied that the character was ‘non-binary’, A researcher from campaign group Transgender Trend, Shelley Charlesworth, said: ‘Its target audience is still learning to speak and this only confuses…There is no way that a child of three to five can understand non-binary they/them pronouns, and using these neo-pronouns takes no account of child development.’ She accuses the BBC, who produces the programme along with Studio AKA, of breaking its impartiality code.
All of this seems a suitably bonkers response for a show whose regular characters include a giant roller-skating ostrich with a Scottish accent, named Hennie, a wonderfully camp crab couple called John and Nigel, and a French ‘artiste’ mouse suffering from a permanent case of ennui.
In reality, the raccoon moment in question amounts to a two-second cutaway and is a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. Raccoon Wren is not being introduced as a new character. In fact, this particular episode first aired last year, and I don’t believe Wren has returned since (as mother to a four-year-old and 23-month-old, I am a regular Duggee viewer).
A BBC spokesperson said, ‘Wren the racoon is not a non-binary character.’ And a BBC source said that the use of ‘their’ was merely to ‘avoid the repetition of his and her’.
Much as I loathe any attempt to force identity politics and ‘worthiness’ into children’s books, shows and entertainment – ‘Antiracist Baby’, I’m looking at you – I do think this time we need to give the show the benefit of the doubt.
There are so many other examples of insidious attempts to insert ideologically and politically charged themes into children’s entertainment, which absolutely should be opposed. Just look at the now ubiquitous and highly inappropriate initiative Drag Queen Story Hour, appearing at a library near you. And just last month, the BBC was criticised for celebrating two American drag queens as ‘inspirational mums’ on their CBeebies site.
Meanwhile, browse any bookshelf in the children’s sections of bookshops or libraries, and you’re sure to come across a whole host of worthy tomes on climate change, gender swapping and being kind, always at the cost of a good storyline that can hold a child’s attention. At one of my local soft-play cafes, we can’t read any of the books on offer, which include ‘Dear Greenpeace’ and ‘It’s great to be kind’ because the storylines are so incredibly tedious that my children physically shut the book two pages in.
Hey Duggee has no such problems when it comes to holding the interest of young children. Duggee’s clubhouse is world where anything can happen and where children are introduced to the truly limitless possibilities of an imagination. In “The Carrot Badge”, the squirrels help hippy bunnies celebrate the “carrot solstice” at “Carrot-henge”; in “The Cheese Badge” they all don hazmat suits to hunt down the world’s stinkiest cheese, which has gone awol; and there’s even an attempt to unravel the mystery of the universe itself, as things get metaphysical in “The Why badge”, with squirrel Betty asking “why are we here?”.
My feeling is, let’s save our parental ire for the situations that really warrant it and not target a show that so obviously has children’s joy and imagination at its heart.
As the ultimate test for “The Sibling Badge”, I got my four-year-old son to watch it with me. “Did you like it? What did it make you think about?” I asked at the end. “It made me think about having another baby sister,” was the rather worrying reply. More fool me for asking.
Why did I bother getting a job?
It was an ominous start to the day of Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement, when she had to rush out messy, last minute changes to Labour’s package of welfare reforms. To unhappy Labour MPs, this confirmed their belief that the policy is Treasury bean-counting masquerading as reform.
They’re not wrong. The current trajectory was unsustainable. We were on track to spend £1 in every £4 of income tax on health and disability benefits by 2030, according to the Policy Exchange think tank. Tightening the qualifying criteria for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and more frequent reassessments are clearly sensible and necessary. But looking at where the government has failed to reform, such as by raising the age you can first claim PIP to 18 and making it a conditional benefit for the under 30s, reinforces the belief that they are not motivated by the strong moral case for change.
When I was leaving school, the two most common options were university or gap year (often followed by university). As my parents banned me from spending six months traipsing around South East Asia (preposterous, I thought, although I fully agree now), I went straight to university and then an internship at a think tank where I started on £18,000 a year.
Now, however, it appears a third option is emerging. On Instagram last week, I came across a video of a teenager bragging about how they got a brand new car paid for by the government, simply by claiming to have ADHD. Putting aside the very serious question as to why the algorithm thinks I’m interested in committing benefit fraud, it doesn’t take much digging to find a wide range of ‘sickfluencers’ on Instagram and TikTok, providing guides on how to game the system and gain access to not just cash but other benefits like taxpayer funded ‘noise cancelling headphones’ (Angela Rayner, take note).
A quick look at the eligibility criteria for benefits reveals why these videos are so popular. A single renter in London making claims for health-related Universal Credit (UC) and PIP can get nearly £2,500 a month. With two children, that shoots up to over £4,000 a month, which is roughly what someone on £65,000 a year takes home after tax. While important for those genuinely unable to work, for those gaming the system, it’s just easy money.
Some of these DWP payments are well above the average salary in the UK of £37,000. It’s more than what we pay nurses, teachers, or soldiers. Compared to the £18,000 a year I started off on, I can see the appeal for young people. But herein lies the issue: this isn’t just about the public finances, it’s about the life changing opportunities those who go down this route are deprived of.
Living on £18,000 a year in London is painful, but the value of that first job is not just monetary. That first step into the world of work is a defining experience, opening your eyes to the world, building confidence and accelerating the transition to maturity and independence. Unhappy Labour MPs should remember that those exploiting the system stand the most to gain from being diverted away from this path of dependency.
Trump’s toxic mineral deal for Ukraine
Donald Trump’s latest scheme to exploit Ukraine is gaining momentum. Kyiv has been handed a rewritten, 58-page minerals deal, which obliges Ukraine to repay every cent of US military and humanitarian aid it has received since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Washington is also demanding control over half of Ukraine’s income from its natural resources, including oil and gas. The deal is indefinite: Ukraine cannot break or amend it without US approval. What does Ukraine get in return? Absolutely nothing.
Trump is pushing for the deal to be signed next week, but even if Volodymyr Zelensky is forced to agree to the terms, it would be very unlikely to be ratified by Ukraine’s parliament. The current draft would leave Ukraine owing the US at least $120 billion. It would set a dangerous precedent, too, opening Ukraine up to the possibility of other countries demanding repayments for aid.
Under the deal, the Ukrainian government would be obliged to convert half of its income from its minerals, gas, oil and even railway infrastructure into US dollars and transfer them abroad. Any delay would result in financial penalties. The US would install a supervisory board to control this so-called ‘joint investment fund’, with past US aid being its only contribution.
The proposed supervisory board would consist of five members: three Americans and two Ukrainians, and any decision would have to be approved by a majority. Washington would have full veto power and could choose whether or not to reinvest the profits into Ukraine at its own discretion. The US would also receive annual royalties at a 4 per cent premium before Ukraine gets anything.
Washington would also gain first-refusal rights for all future investments in Ukraine’s natural resources and infrastructure. Only if US investors decline a proposal could Ukraine offer the deal to others. However, even then, Kyiv would be forced to share confidential details of their negotiations with US officials. Ukraine would be legally banned from offering better terms to other investors for a year after America has passed on a project.
Companies extracting Ukraine’s critical minerals would be barred from selling to buyers Washington deems ‘strategic competitors’. Given Trump’s trade war with Europe, there’s a strong chance the EU could fall into that bracket. It would close the door to Ukraine’s future EU membership that Ukrainians so keenly aspire to.
The bad news doesn’t end there. Zelensky can’t say no, for fear of risking another fight with Trump. Ukraine is still reeling from the pair’s fallout in the Oval Office and desperately needs the US on side for negotiations with Russia. The only option Kyiv has is to stall the agreement. Zelensky’s team is preparing a counteroffer – one that doesn’t undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty. Trump had previously softened some of the most exploitative terms in the first draft of the minerals deal a month ago. Ukrainians are hoping that he will do so again – or that Trump scraps the deal himself.
Why Prevent’s boss had to go
The head of the Prevent counter-terrorism programme, Michael Stewart, is to carry the can for failures exposed by the Southport attack last year. Stewart’s role has been in question for some time, following revelations that Prevent failed to stop Axel Rudakubana murdering three girls at a dance class in Merseyside last July.
Rudakubana was first referred to Prevent in 2019, when he was just 13
A ‘Prevent learning review’ after the attack revealed a damning catalogue of basic failures. It found that counterterrorism police missed several chances to stop the killer, and that Prevent ‘prematurely’ dismissed the threat posed by Rudakubana on each of the three occasions he was flagged to the programme.
Rudakubana was first referred to Prevent in 2019, when he was just 13-years-old, after a teacher became concerned he was using the internet to research mass school shootings. He was referred again in February 2021, when he was 14; and finally in April 2021. The review concluded that too much focus was placed on the absence of a distinct ideology, and that officials had not shown the level of professional curiosity expected. The findings revealed that officers misspelt Rudakubana’s name on his second and third referrals. This may have led to the premature closure of his case, because investigators were not able to see his previous referrals on the system.
But this wasn’t the end of the embarrassment. It was subsequently revealed that the review into the failings itself contained significant inaccuracies, as well as contradictions and discrepancies. This posed fresh questions and doubts about Prevent’s record-keeping. Asked about why such discrepancies had occurred, the Home Office offered the justification that the speed at which the learning review had been carried out was to blame. This is a risible line of defence. Lord Carlile of Berriew, the UK’s former independent reviewer of terrorism, was quick to point out that it was simply ‘inexcusable’ for public services such as Prevent not to get the basics right. Such cases can be a matter of life and death, so there can be no scope for mistakes.
Stewart has been in the firing line for some time. Fingers were pointed in his direction over a controversial internal Home Office review of extremism that concluded that claims of two-tier policing were an extreme right-wing narrative.
The investigation was commissioned by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, in the wake of public unrest that followed the Southport murders.
The review claimed that right-wing extremists “frequently exploit” the grooming gangs scandal to promote anti-Muslim sentiment. It proposed sweeping changes to the way extremism is dealt with, saying it should no longer be based on specific ideologies, such as Islamism or the far-right but ‘on behaviours and activity of concern’. When the findings were leaked in January, ministers rushed to make public that they had rejected the report’s recommendations. Such an open ministerial disavowal tells its own story. It was only a matter of time before Stewart would be given his marching orders.
Few will shed a tear at his departure, but the problems of Prevent go much deeper than one individual. The scheme is aimed at stopping terrorism and radicalisation, as well as safeguarding communities from threats, but it has been dogged by controversy from its inception more than two decades ago.
It isn’t just in the Southport case that Prevent has been found wanting. The learning review into the murder of the MP, Sir David Amess, was published just last month. It found that Amess’s killer, Ali Harbi Ali, was also flagged to the counterterrorism scheme, but that his case was dismissed too swiftly. It also revealed that record-keeping errors led to a breakdown in communications between Prevent officers and the police, and that signs of Ali’s possible radicalisation were missed. In essence, a repeat of the same broad failings identified in the Southport case.
No one can be in any doubt that Prevent cannot continue in its present form. Its internal system of checks on threats is not robust enough. Review after review has identified failings and deficiencies. The government says a new framework for tackling extremism and hateful ideologies is in the pipeline. Ministers need to get their skates on, if horrors such as the one that took place in Southport, are to be prevented.
The flight of the millionaires will impoverish Britain
Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal is considering leaving the UK because of the Labour government’s abolition of the ‘non-dom’ tax regime. This confirms that Keir Starmer’s politics of envy is successfully destroying the British economy.
Mittal would join tens of thousands of millionaires and billionaires – British and foreign – who have already abandoned Britain to avoid paying even more tax: all of them ranked among the 1 per cent of British residents, contributing 29 per cent of all the taxes raised by HMRC.
These tax exiles had been willing to pay fair taxes, but many baulked at Starmer’s decision not only to tax their offshore income but also their foreign-based pensions and trusts. Worse, Starmer’s increase of capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes and now the threat of a confiscatory wealth tax is the final straw. Some estimate that more than 100,000 millionaires are planning to flee Britain. Tax lawyers and accountants describe themselves as overwhelmed by rich clients anxious to leave Britain completely by the end of the month to deny HMRC any more money.
Truly, Britain is entering a dark age, reminiscent of the grim 1970s when Harold Wilson’s socialist economy sparked a self-destructive brain drain.
All of those wealthy taxpayers have an enviable choice of destinations welcoming the super-rich. A few choose the traditional tax havens in Switzerland and Monaco, but many more head to Italy, Portugal and Greece. All have enticed the British with low levels of tax in return for bringing their wealth. Florence is packed with Brits. Dubai, a long-term favourite for tax exiles, has already attracted thousands of British subjects.
The financial loss to Britain is colossal. Not only does the UK lose the income taxes the rich always paid, but the country also misses out on their expenditure in London and the resulting VAT. Restaurants, shops, home designers, car showrooms, taxis and so much more, all lose the millionaires’ daily spending. Lawyers, accountants and other professionals who serviced their businesses will also all be out of pocket. Offices and homes suddenly stand empty. Worst of all, theatres and galleries that relied on the super-rich’s philanthropy find their begging bowls empty.
London is already, on some nights, a ghost city. Thanks to a disinterested mayor and Labour councils uninterested in culture, the capital’s nightlife has been decimated. Nightclub takings are down, music bars and pubs are closing, and the best chefs have followed the rich to foreign cities.
Who would start a business in Britain when threatened with high taxes and the draconian trade union-designed Employment Bill? Entrepreneurs, the heartbeat of vibrant Britain and the source of wealth creation, are welcomed in Europe and elsewhere. Why should they stay in Britain to be slaughtered by hard-left socialists?
Read the Guardian or listen to radio chat shows and you’ll hear the Polly Toynbees of the world cheering the exodus of those unwilling to lose even more of their wealth. But no one ever asks those, like Labour MP Clive Lewis, who demand wealth taxes, how much more tax he and his supporters are personally prepared to pay to compensate for the loss of income from the exiles.
Nor, in the aftermath of Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement, did BBC journalists and Sky properly question her emergency budget by asking about the disastrous collapse of business confidence since Labour’s election win. Instead, the BBC focused on Labour’s plans to reduce welfare benefits. Whenever their supporters are asked how benefits would be financed with dwindling tax income, they reply: ‘More taxes on the rich.’ But the rich have voted with their feet. Predictably, they are abandoning the madness of socialist confiscation.
The immediate cause of the problem lies in the Labour party’s complete ignorance of business – and hatred of ‘profits’ among Labour ministers. Starmer’s cabinet lacks ministers who have actually been employed by a commercial enterprise to earn a profit. Our Chancellor, ‘Rachel from Accounts’, doesn’t understand aspiring profit-makers. And our Business Secretary – who is not even a solicitor – made a fool of himself lecturing Amazon on how to run a business.
Truly, we are heading towards a new dark age without any hope of finding a saviour.
Who is actually running the Catholic Church?
This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Holy Smoke podcast with Damian Thompson, which you can find at the bottom of this page:
It’s emerged that [Pope Francis is] going to be kept in isolation on the second floor of Santa Marta for at least two months, in what is, in effect, a hospital suite. It seems that even his top officials, such as the Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, currently fulfilling as many of Francis’s duties as possible in order to look like the next pope, will have only limited access to him. Apparently, everything will be filtered through the Pope’s Argentinian private secretary, Father Juan Cruz – now arguably the most powerful person in the Vatican next to the Pope.
It’s true, admittedly, that during his illness, Francis has continued to issue documents. For example, he signed – or was persuaded to sign, or reportedly signed – a decree extending the synodal process and Anglican style exchange of platitudes dominated by woke activists. The next session, in 2028, won’t be the current model of a synod of bishops, accompanied by a minority of lay social justice warriors. It’ll be an ecclesial assembly, something unknown to canon law, and look very obviously a Trojan horse for women’s ordination and gay blessings, subjects that Pope Francis strangely declared to be outside the remit of Synod participants.
And note that I qualified the reference to Francis signing documents in hospital on Tuesday. This week we learned from The Pillar the new Archbishop of Detroit had to be installed without the customary papal bull of appointment because, according to none other than the US nuncio, Francis was too unwell to sign it. Which raises the question being asked by lots of people: How, when he was even more ill at the beginning of March, was he well enough to sign a complicated document setting up a new fundraising body to stop the Vatican haemorrhaging funds?
Listen to the full episode here:
DC mayor booed by Nats and Phillies fans
Hill Country bye-bye-Q
Cockburn wishes farewell to karaoke mainstay and watches baseball fans fight
DC is evolving. Cockburn honored the memory of Hill Country Barbecue Karaoke on Wednesday night, ahead of the downtown hotspot closing its doors for good today. No tickets were available at the door and the line snaked throughout the restaurant as Hill staffers, hacks and college students pored in for one last singalong.
The live band whipped through staples such as “Mr. Brightside,” “Redneck Woman” and “Before He Cheats” (twice). A number of veterans also took to the stage: one former host told the crowd that he’d had his first kiss with his now-wife upstairs. A silver-haired gent took to the stage with a walking stick and offered a beautiful rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
For DC denizens mourning the loss of live karaoke, Cockburn can confirm that the band will play on, a block away at Penn Social. Reportedly moving into the lot vacated by Hill Country: a Washington chapter of Pubkey, the sceney New York cryptocurrency bar. The regulars are not too pleased about that development: “FUCK bitcoin,” a besuited Hill staffer yelled into the mic after finishing his song, to whoops from the crowd.
Some things never change though: Cockburn was present for Opening Day at Nationals Park as his beloved Washington Nationals took on the Philadelphia Phillies. The ballpark is one of the top spots to hobnob and mingle with politicos: take Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents the City of Brotherly Love, and brought his staff along for the 4 p.m. game.
The East Coast cities were united in one blissful moment before the first inning, coming together to loudly boo Mayor Muriel Bowser when she spoke. Only turncoat Bryce Harper received a worse reaction. The harmony didn’t last, however: Cockburn witnessed three altercations in his section as the game progressed and the Phillies put the home team to the sword, scoring four runs in the tenth inning to win 7-3. Yes, the Phillies fans started all three.
On our radar
NEXT THING SHE’S WEARING MY ROLEX Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sported a $50,000 Rolex on her tour of a prison containing deported immigrants in El Salvador.
US-EH? One in five Americans would like their state to join Canada according to a Leger poll this week.
GRAVE CONCERN Representative Sylvester Turner tweeted a new profile picture for Opening Day – despite dying three weeks ago.
Inking feeling
Hegseth’s tattoos under the microscope, again
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is embroiled in another controversy this week – one that doesn’t involve encrypted messaging of maybe-confidential-maybe-not information for a change.
During a visit to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, Hegseth did some exercises with the Navy SEALs stationed there and blasted out photos of himself doing what appear to be burpees. On full display in the pictures – alongside the egotism – are Hegseth’s many tattoos, one of which is the Arabic word “كافر,” or “kafir,” which translates to “infidel.”
The media is up in arms over the bicep tattoo, which is in close proximity to an inking that says “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it.” Hegseth has caught heat for wearing his beliefs on his sleeve before; Crisis magazine reported in November 2024 that Hegseth “was accused of being an ‘insider threat’” for his Deus Vult tattoo because it allegedly invokes white supremacy dating to the crusades.
In response to the revelation of Hegseth’s kafir ink, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said:
Tattooing the Arabic word kafir – which essentially refers to a person who knowingly conceals or denies fundamental, divine truths – on his body is a sign of both anti-Muslim hostility and personal insecurity.
No dogs allowed
SLOTUS skips husky race on Greenland trip
Second Lady Usha Vance has not been in the limelight much since she and her husband took up residence at the Naval Observatory. That all changed last week with the announcement that she was set to visit Greenland, the current Danish autonomous territory and possible future 51st state. In a video announcement, SLOTUS said she was “particularly thrilled to visit during your national dogsled race.” If the idea of Usha’s visit was to soften the American foreign policy approach to the Atlantic island, it backfired: there were protests in the capital Nuuk and vigorous denunciations from Greenlandic politicians.
In response, the US has tweaked Usha’s itinerary: she left early this morning, joined by her husband Vice President J.D. Vance and third wheel National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, America’s best texter. And the focus of the trip is now more defense than culture: they’ll visit the Pituffik Space Base and skip the dogsleds. Hopefully the Vances manage to keep Waltz on a tight leash…
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Reform’s ‘think tank’ isn’t serious
Donors of the Reform party are considering creating a partisan think tank in the American style. These plans are subject to change, but it is not looking good. Many Reform backers, it seems, see the proposed institution, named provisionally as ‘Resolute 1850’, as a way to attract American money. Someone like Elon Musk hands over hundreds of millions of dollars to organisations supportive of the Republican party and Donald Trump but remains legally unconnected to them. Reform donors hope that a similar body could be made in Britain. It would attract money that political parties legally cannot gather, from people who might have problems, as Musk appears to do, with Reform’s own leadership, including Nigel Farage.
A new think tank is not itself a bad idea. Britain’s politics could certainly use a good one. Observers might think there are enough of them: they pop up like mushrooms, in little rings. Some concentrate on defence and foreign affairs like Chatham House and Rusi. Others are economics-focused like the Adam Smith Institute and the IEA.
But many are shallow campaign groups, most of them for the Labour party, designed to workshop policy externally. They exist to give the Labour leader of the day, or factions within the party, the ability to say, ‘I read the report with interest and am eagerly considering its recommendations.’ What is often lacking is real thinking – the thing think tanks are supposed to be about.
I worked in a think tank myself (in the European team of the New Lines Institute, a Washington institution). We were small by American standards. Many other think tanks, famous ones like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, have immense reserves of cash and staff. Everything is bigger in America, and that includes staff numbers and budgets. Britain could do, in theory, with some of the same.
But think tanks are only useful if they can do real thinking. This does not appear to be on the Reform agenda. The indications so far suggest it won’t be interested in seriously examining the roots of Britain’s dying economy – its insane housing shortage; its chronic dependency on borrowing; its incessant importing of low-skill, low-wage labour; the growing population of working age people who are not even looking for employment; the crushing ratio of retirees to workers; its inept public services; the illegality of a lot of economic activity and the smothering of the rest beneath tribunals and regulation; the mission creep which has made the Supreme Court and the Net Zero Act the ultimate arbiters of all economic policy; the growing disorder on Britain’s streets.
Reform might notionally gesture towards such things. But the presentation reported on by the Financial Times indicated that the think tank’s first campaign, planned for 2026, could be ‘countering housebuilding’. At a time when Britain has some of the highest rents in the world. When the average Brit must borrow ten times their wage to buy an average home. This is madness.
Knee-jerk nonsense like this would be research in name only, designed to propagate the party’s delusional boomer worldview, one in which housebuilding and ‘net zero’ energy generation are bigger public bugbears than cratering GDP per capita, crime, a lack of prison places and the collapse in birthrates.
Some think tanks, one of them amusingly already called Reform, have done a lot of good work of late on Britain’s economic stagnation. The ‘Foundations’ project, written up by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman, was intellectually clear and its message was stark. It was widely read in Westminster and its authors visited Downing Street earlier this month. If Labour really wants to grow the economy, it will listen to them.
This is the kind of work that a new think tank of the right ought to do. But ‘Resolute 1850’ does not seem to have that kind of work in mind. Instead, the plan seems to be to raise cash for some men born long ago, who are running out of time – and who have no interest in addressing the things that will doom the country when it is inherited by their children.