Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Politicians are lining up to condemn the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Activists are warning us that this is the start of a fresh assault on abortion rights in Britain. What starts in the core spreads to the periphery; a new wave of pro-life policies will soon be here. What’s less clear is where this wave is meant to come from, given that every major British party is opposed to the Supreme Court decision. Once again, Westminster politics has mistaken Britain for America. The Conservative party may be in hoc to a blonde tousle-haired populist, but it isn’t quietly stacking the judiciary with pro-life justices in order to ban abortion.

Last week, Boris Johnson’s ethics advisor - a role that must sit alongside Vlad the Impaler’s anger management therapist in the annals of doomed job descriptions - resigned. Downing Street so far hasn’t commented on whether Lord Geidt will be replaced, with a spokesman saying only that Johnson will ‘take time’ to consider the decision. Well, here’s a hint: you don’t respond to the failure of a chocolate teapot by buying a second one. And while you’re at it, scrap the Ministerial Code too. For all the Westminster rigmarole currently focused on them, neither of these institutions is particularly old. The Ministerial Code dates back to 1997 and Tony Blair’s election landslide, the ethics advisor to 2006.

Oxford is a city that makes you proud to be British: its beautiful dreaming spires attract tourists and the cleverest students from across the world. But is there something darker lurking beneath the glorious architecture? Some Oxford students think so.  'Uncomfortable Oxford' is a student-run company which, for £13, takes you on a tour of the city centre. It promised to raise difficult questions about the university and society. 'Through unique walking tours, we generate discussions about racial inequality, gender and class discrimination, and legacies of empire,' its website says. The group met outside Carfax Tower, the last remnant of a church standing at the centre of Oxford.

On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man was released on bail. The Home Office released a statement which said that ‘preventing immigration enforcement teams from doing their job is unacceptable.’ This was accompanied by the universally understood but officially unstated caveat: not that we’d prevent you from preventing officers doing their job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Why is an ice cream brand lecturing Britain on the morality of its immigration policy? Ben and Jerry’s, otherwise known for flogging overpriced junk food, has weighed in on the government’s new policy of sending mostly single men dodging Britain’s border control to Rwanda. The plan is 'cruel and morally bankrupt', 'racist and abhorrent', according to the ice cream company, which says sending people 'to a country they’ve never been to, and have no connection with' could 'put people’s lives at risk'. Setting aside the source of these allegations, let’s evaluate these statements.

What planet do our politicians live on? Labour’s video memorialising George Floyd, and pledging radical change to education and justice policies to combat the sort of 'structural racism' that led to his death, suggests which country. All this time I’ve believed I live in Britain, when in fact we’re all living in America.  What other explanation could there be for a party pledging to radically reshape the nation based on events in Minneapolis two years ago? Why else would British politicians like David Lammy line up to say 'he could have been me'? If we didn’t live in America, comparing a Harvard-educated London lawyer to a man living in a city on the other side of an ocean based on little more than the colour of their skin seems facile.

Pigs may fly, Hell may freeze over, and a month may pass without a Conservative MP revealing the moral decay at the core of the party. Yesterday, former MP Imran Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. In Westminster, meanwhile, rumours circulated that a senior MP had sexually assaulted colleagues. Yet another member was bailed after being arrested in a rape investigation. These stories shouldn’t be confused with the unnamed Conservative MP who was arrested over rape allegations in 2020 before the investigation was dropped or the former government whip Charlie Elphicke who was jailed for sexual assault in 2020.

The leak of a draft Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has sparked a furious reaction in Britain. Yet for all the backlash in British political circles, the reality is that the proposed shake-up of abortion laws in the United States doesn't really matter here. Our nominally conservative-leaning parliament just voted to make abortion easier, and the issue is nowhere near as salient for the British right as it is in the US. Those who are furiously denouncing the ruling are wading into an issue that will have little to no impact on their own lives. Yet there is something significant for Brits to take from this furious debate: we're lucky that we live under the rule of law rather than the rule of lawyers. How much longer will this be the case?

If there’s one quality that defines Elon Musk other than his entrepreneurship, it’s his ability to drive his detractors mad. From this perspective, his attempt to buy Twitter is his greatest success yet. With Twitter poised to accept a buyout today, we can expect more entertainment on this front. We can also expect a significant improvement to the social network. Musk's motivations are twofold. Firstly, he is a passionate believer in free speech, a quality he views as sorely lacking on the platform. A commitment to enabling unfettered conversation would make it a far more interesting place to be. Secondly, and relatedly, he thinks he can run it better than the current management. Given his track record disrupting other industries, it would be a brave man who bets against him.

It’s an odd accusation to levy at Boris Johnson’s government, but the Conservative party feels grey. Flights of fancy suggesting a bridge to Northern Ireland or – a thought to make 19th century Royal Navy strategists shudder – to France have given way to a carousel of scandals and disappointments. The former is cheap or cruel; the latter marked mostly by their predictability. This week confirmed a suspicion I’ve held for a while; the Conservative party, being neither meaningfully socially conservative nor particularly interested in using an 80 seat majority, exists for the sole purpose of keeping Labour out of office.