John Power

John Power

John Power is The Spectator’s assistant content editor.

Monday

John Power

Three key flaws in Starmer’s immigration crackdown

Sir Keir Starmer wants you to believe he’s serious about bringing immigration down. Faced with the political threat of Reform and growing anger over record levels of both illegal and legal migration, Labour has finally begun to talk the talk. But ‘Restoring Control Over the Immigration System’, the white paper in which the government details its borders crackdown, is flawed. The threat to the border doesn’t always arrive in rubber dinghies. Sometimes it comes buried on page 76 of a white paper For all the tough-sounding language about control and fairness, the document is shot through with proposals that quietly liberalise the system and could incentivise more illegal immigration.

Thursday

John Power

How to bring down Britain’s power grid

At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London. Homes lost power. Transport services ground to a halt. It came in the same week as outages across Spain and Portugal and just a few weeks after a fire at another substation caused Heathrow airport to shut down. We also know that the British government is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. All of this raises an important question: how resilient would the British state be in the face of a determined effort to cripple its power grid? The blunt answer is: not very. David Betz, at King’s College London, has long warned that Britain’s national infrastructure is dangerously vulnerable to simple tools such as hammers and hacksaws.